Re: on evolution again

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

George wrote:

>Charles Brown insists on our thinking about historical transformations from
>one mode of production to the next as a form of "evolution." my problem is
>with the analogy between the natural and social world this demands. it seems
>to me that this form of reflection traps us in a reduction of the social to
>the natural. what about the role of agency in this process. one could argue
>that the process of natural selection lacks what we would call "agency." it
>is a process without a subject, as Althusser might put it. human history is
>a process with many subjects. this is why I object to his formulation.

*****   For instance, the important question of the relation of man
to nature (Bruno [Bauer] goes so far as to speak of "the antitheses
in nature and history" (p. 110), as though these were two separate
"things" and man did not always have before him an historical nature
and a natural history) out of which all the "unfathomably lofty
works" on "substance" and "self-consciousness" were born, crumbles of
itself when we understand that the celebrated "unity of man with
nature" has always existed in industry and has existed in varying
forms in every epoch according to the lesser or greater development
of industry, just like the "struggle" of man with nature, right up to
the development of his productive powers on a corresponding basis.
Industry and commerce, production and the exchange of the necessities
of life, themselves determine distribution, the structure of the
different social classes and are, in turn, determined by it as to the
mode in which they are carried on; and so it happens that in
Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories and machines,
where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and weaving-rooms were
to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he finds only pasture lands
and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would have found nothing
but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists.  Feuerbach speaks
in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions
secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and
chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and
commerce?  Even this pure natural science is provided with an aim, as
with its material, only through trade and industry, through the
sensuous activity of men.  So much is this activity, this unceasing
sensuous labour and creation, this production, the basis of the whole
sensuous world as it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a
year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural
world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and his
own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing.  Of
course, in all this the priority of external nature remains
unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men
produced by generatio aequivoca; [Spontaneous generation. - Ed.] but
this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to
be distinct from nature.  For that matter, nature, the nature that
preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which
Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere
(except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin)
and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach.   (_The German
Ideology_)   *****

It is clear that Marx & Engels do not subscribe to the opposition
between "nature" & "society" erected by the Social Contract
theorists, left-Hegelians, environmentalists, etc.; nor do they
reduce the "social" to the "natural" (which presupposes the
opposition between "nature" and "society").

Engels put it this way:

*****   Active social forces work exactly like natural forces:
blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand,
and reckon with them.  But when once we understand them, when once we
grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only
upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by
means of them to reach our own ends....The difference is as that
between the destructive force of electricity in the lightening of the
storm, and the electricity under command in the telegraph and the
voltaic arc.  (_Socialism: Utopian and Scientific_)   *****

Engels again:

*****   With the seizing of the means of production by society
production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the
mastery of the product over the producer.  Anarchy in social
production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation.  The
struggle for individual existence disappears.  Then for the first
time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of
the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of
existence into really human ones.  The whole sphere of the conditions
of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now
comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time
becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become
master of his own social organisation.  The laws of his own social
action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature
foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full
understanding, and so mastered by him.  Man's own social
organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by
nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action.
The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history
pass under the control of man himself.  Only from that time will man
himself, with full consciousness, make his own history -- only from
that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the
main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by
him.  It is the humanity's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the
kingdom of freedom.   (_Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution
in Science_)   *****

And here's Marx:

*****   And finally, the division of labour offers us the first
example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is,
as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common
interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but
naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to
him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him....This
fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves
produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control,
thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is
one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.
(_The German Ideology_)   *****

In Marx's & Engels's later works, the word "natural" is best
understood to mean "spontaneously grown, not consciously determined,
etc," in contradiction to the commonsense (& therefore ideological)
understanding of "nature" as eternal, unchanging "essence" beneath
the artificial "appearance."  In other words, for Marx & Engels, the
main contrast to be drawn is "natural (= unintended = unfree)" and
"intended (= free)."

Yoshie