https://www.quora.com/Is-Darwinism-like-communism/answer/Jim-Farmelant
I think it would make more sense to ask whether Darwinism is like Marx's materialist conception of history, since one can indeed draw some analogies between Darwinism and historical materialism. As the British sociologist, Alan Carling, once expressed it in the abstract for his paper, Analytical Marxism and Historical Materialism: The Debate on Social Evolution, Science and Society 57 (1):31 - 65 (1993) https://www.jstor.org/stable/40404639 "Darwinian evolutionary theory marries a genetic account of the origin of species to a selectionist account of their subsequent fate. The Marxian theory of history is analogous: class struggle provides an account of the origins of new regimes of production and selection pressures explain their subsequent history. The theory is technologically determinist, but there are three distinct doctrines ascribing primacy in different ways to the technological forces of production over the social relations of production. Natural Primacy is probably true but of limited relevance to the debate about historical process. Intentional Primacy, as advocated by G. A. Cohen, is untenable. Competitive Primacy is a genuinely evolutionary doctrine that may even be true." In Carling's version of historical materialism, different modes of production are seen as existing in competition both with one another and with nature. The system that can foster the development of the forces of production at a given historical moment is the one likely to prevail in the struggle for survival between rival regimes of production. In this scheme, class struggle figures into it because it is class struggles that generate new variations in the social relations of production, upon which social selection can operate. Carling's version of historical materialism is obviously closely patterned after Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. Carling applies this conception of historical materialism to the understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. He follows economic historian, Robert Brenner, in emphasizing the importance of the class struggle between feudal landlords and peasants and he follows Brenner in seeing feudalism as a system that was characterized by a demographic boom-bust cycle. For Carling, the class struggle between peasants and lords was the motor by which new relations of production were generated. These struggles had three types of possible outcomes. Either the lords would win out as happened in Poland and Russia, thereby guaranteeing the survival of serfdom and other aspects of feudalism well into the modern era, or, the peasants would win out as happened in France which resulted in an agriculture of small peasant proprietors which failed to revolutionize the forces of production, or, such struggles could end in a kind of standoff in which serfdom was abolished and the peasants became formally free but which led to the development of a capitalist agriculture as happened in England. In Carling's view, it just so happened that this particular set of social relations of production was the sort that could foster the development of the productive forces far beyond what feudalism could do. For Carling, this conception synthesizes the insights of Maurice Dobb and Brenner with the "Smithianism" of Paul Sweezy and Immanuel Wallerstein. Carling also addresses the issue of why capitalism developed in the West and not in the East. In his view, which again follows Brenner, feudalism by virtue of its political and economic decentralization was peculiarly hospitable to the evolution of new social relations of production within its midst in a way that was not characteristic of Asiatic societies especially China where there was strong centralized political control and bureaucratic domination. References Alan Carling, The Proof of the Pudding: Reason and Value in Social Evolution Political Studies Association https://web.archive.org/web/20040406110626/http://www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/marxism/carling.htm David Laibman, Intro to April 2006 issue of Science and Society. http://www.scienceandsociety.com/editorial_apr06.html Paul Nolan, Why G. A. Cohen Can't Appeal to Charles Darwin to Help Him Defend Karl Marx (But Why Others Can) . https://www.jstor.org/stable/40404313?seq=1 Paul Nolan, A Darwinian Historical Materialism.https://www.quora.com/Is-Darwinism-like-communism/answer/Jim-Farmelant http://link-springer-com-443.webvpn.fjmu.edu.cn/chapter/10.1057/9781403919977_4 Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5369): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5369 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79571929/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
