 |
| 2-April-2026 |
We need a collective discussion about “what the hell can we do to get out of the catastrophe that is growing all around us?”, my friend and comrade Bob Myers wrote on this blog (27 March), in a book review. Of course, I agree.
But I think that, to set the terms of such a discussion, we need to do better than what Bob proposes.
 |
| A Zapatista meeting in 1996. Photo by Julian Stallabrass / wikimedia commons |
Specifically, first, I think that our generation, which set out to try to challenge capital and resist hierarchy half a century or more ago, can convey our experience less one-sidedly.
Second, we can offer a more accurate characterisation of the crisis between humanity and our natural surroundings.
Third, and perhaps most important, in developing our understanding of the gathering catastrophe, we can not only learn from the experience of social movements but also assimilate what science has learned about the world.
On the first point, Bob writes of our attempts to find ways to challenge capitalism:
All around the world, “anti-capitalist” activists are busy trying to galvanise the masses into action. But after more than a century of such activity, the goal seems further away than ever.
The genocide in Gaza shocked millions of people worldwide and certainly has further undermined the authority of all those who uphold the present “civilisation”, but no-one was able to turn this popular horror into anything that practically made any difference to the plight of the Palestinians. We marched, we protested, got arrested and the slaughter went on – and still goes on – relentlessly.
Yes, the slaughter goes on. And yes, the horror expressed on the streets of rich countries makes little difference to the killings in Gaza and the West Bank. But surely people who have been trying to change things for as long as Bob and I have (I dislike the word “activist”) can come up with a more convincing retrospective.
Before the century-plus of activity that Bob points to, there were genocides such as Belgium’s in Congo, and Turkey’s of Armenians. These were covered up from most people. The perpetrators remained unpunished. In contrast, today, we all know about the genocide in Gaza, and despite the best efforts of the world’s most powerful governments, millions of people have been moved to protest against it. The lie that they are motivated by “anti semitism” has been confounded.
Countries that for much of the last century were in the grip of extractive dictatorships – I am thinking of South Africa and Brazil – are leading international legal action against Israel. The US-Israeli relationship, key to the international order for the last half century, is creaking. It may not break; it may produce fresh horrors. But it will not remain the same.
Again, none of this lessens Palestinians’ suffering. My answer to Bob’s picture of catastrophe is not to pretend that there isn’t one. My answer to his view that “the goal seems further away than ever” is not to claim it is closer (although it may be that “the goal” needs clearer definition). But I think we need to get on top of history, to recognise it as an ever-shifting combination of catastrophe, confrontation and resistance.
I agree with Howard Zinn:
If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
Further on in his review, Bob writes about the long process during which capitalist social relations emerged in predominantly feudal societies, culminating in the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. He asks:
How does this past reality chime with our present situation? We have no areas of socialised production, no places where people can form new relations, new cultures based on collective productive activity. Capitalism, with all the power of technology, seeks to suppress and destroy even the most marginal attempts to create other ways of living.
All this is too one-sided, in my view. Right through the century-plus during which, according to Bob, “anti-capitalist” activists tried to galvanise masses into action but ended up further than ever from their goal, there were numerous large-scale attempts to bring into being “areas of socialised production” and “places where people can form new relations”. They should be soberly assessed, not written off.
The Russian revolutions of 1917, and the attempt to create a “workers’ state” that followed, failed to defeat hierarchy and exploitation in the way many participants had hoped. (I spent a few years writing a book about why.) But that does not mean it had no purpose. Nor were millions of people in a range of revolutionary situations through the twentieth century put off by that experience from trying to live differently.
Movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the semi-state formations in Rojava aspired to that explicitly. As for the statist “socialism” of e.g. Cuba or Vietnam, we don’t have to share any illusions in its economic and social character to recognise the liberatory potential of the struggles that produced it.
The workers’ rebellions in Europe after the second world war fell well short of overthrowing capitalism, but led to changes that took capital decades to reverse – and, relevant to this conversation, brought into being the world in which Bob, and I, and tens of thousands of others, connected with radical ideas.
The manifold movements that did not articulate their goal as post-capitalist must also be accounted for, to understand their limitations and potentials: feminism and the changes it has wrought; the struggles for democracy across Latin America, east Asia and elsewhere; the “Arab spring”; battles against racism and for civil rights across the rich world; the struggle for Dalit rights in India.
To recognise what these movements achieved, and failed to achieve, is not to downplay the scale of the catastrophe twenty-first century capitalism is inflicting on humanity. In some ways it makes it appear all the more alarming, because it points up the limits of humanity’s ability to resist. But the younger people now trying to challenge capitalism and its evils deserve more from our generation than outbursts of pessimism.
I think Bob is right that we have no areas of socialised production or cultures based on collective activity. It is hard, and to my mind long has been, to envisage how collectivist and communist relations between people can grow at scale in a society dominated by capital.
But I see no justification for Bob’s assertion that “the social disintegration taking place all around us is going to continue and accelerate”. How can you be so sure?
My second point is about the character of the rupture between humanity, organised hierarchically, and nature. Bob writes:
From the earliest hierarchical societies right through to today, this form of human organisation continually tends to consume resources at a quicker rate than the environment can reproduce it.
The word “tends” is doing a lot of work here. I think the damaging impacts on the natural world by forms of human economic activity have unfolded in more chaotic, complicated ways than Bob suggests. It is difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle impacts that result from humans living socially, and those that can be attributed to hierarchy.
I think that “consumption of resources” is an unhelpful framework for judging. And I doubt the arithmetical computation referred to (“quicker rate”) has much meaning.
Bob takes us through the history of hierarchical societies as set out in Roy Ratcliffe’s book, and concludes:
We, one of the most recently evolved life forms, are exhausting the resources needed for existence and changing the environmental parameters within which life is possible.
Of course I agree that human economic activity is “changing the environmental parameters within which life is possible”. Global heating and the destruction of biodiversity are the most alarming manifestations of this. The “planetary boundaries” project presents perhaps the best available overview. But this is not the same as saying that humanity is “exhausting the resources needed for existence”.
For a start, nature is not just “resources”, not in any socialist understanding of humanity’s place in it. And the issue of what “resources” are needed is socially and politically formed. Take oil, for example: right-wing commentators warn that oil resources will run out, whereas it’s clear that the amount of atmosphere in to which greenhouse gases can be pumped is running out much more quickly.
What’s more, there is little doubt that humanity, if its economic activity got anywhere near to being organised rationally, could take from its natural surroundings the means of its existence, while pulling back from inflicting irreversible damage.
It is the anarchic, materials-hungry expansion of capitalist production, driven at an even more frenzied pace in the twenty-first century, that is pushing at limits – not human consumption per se.
I am not quibbling about words. The claim that “resource depletion” is pushing society unilaterally towards disaster is central to the misconceived idea of “social collapse”, popularised by Jared Diamond and challenged by other anthropologists.
In 2018-19, with the emergence of new, potentially radical environmentalist movements in rich countries (e.g. Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion), one-sided – and in my view, essentially reactionary – stories of “collapse” were recycled, tending to disarm people politically and drive them away from anti-capitalist perspectives.
I am not suggesting that Bob cares for this type of reactionary doomism. But his sweeping generalisations do us no favours. We need a coherent understanding of capital’s reckless rampage against the natural world, and that means being accurate.
This brings me to my third quarrel with Bob, about how we develop our knowledge of humanity’s relationship with nature.
He writes that:
even while life forms continually changed over time, there was always a balance between the nutritional intake of one life form and the rate at which the supply of that nourishment was itself reproduced.
This “balance”, in his view, was the prequel and counterpoint to the “resource depletion” now underway. I don’t think this is right, either.
Surely that balance was and is constantly interrupted, by processes that cause life forms to multiply, to need more nourishment than is immediately available, and in some cases to die out as a result. That is how I (no biologist or natural historian) understand one aspect of the theory of evolution.
Charles Darwin wrote, in a section entitled “Complex relations of all animals and plants to each other in the struggle for existence”:
Bob is no help here. In his telling, Darwin was:
Wrong, wrong and wrong. The “balance” and the “struggle for survival”, in Darwin’s understanding at least, were two sides of the same coin.
The “survival of the fittest”, in Darwin’s presentation – the competition for nutrition between and within species, which forms the background to the processes of adaptation and natural selection – is quite different from its presentation by Thomas Huxley, and then by others who exaggerated the element of direct conflict and applied it to society (“social Darwinism”). And different again from its life as an element of ruling-class ideology from that day to this.
What’s more, arguments have been raging around Darwin’s share of responsibility for “social Darwinism” for a century and a half already. Socialist and left-leaning biologists and natural historians have played their part, and their years of work on this deserve our attention. One of them, Stephen Jay Gould, wrote in 1988:
Gould was reviewing an argument in 1909 between the writer Lev Tolstoy and the anarchist naturalist Petr Kropotkin. Tolstoy railed against those who saw the “struggle for existence” as a moral imperative, and held Darwin responsible; Kropotkin argued that this struggle often resolved itself as mutual aid, both among animals and humans.
Surely that balance was and is constantly interrupted, by processes that cause life forms to multiply, to need more nourishment than is immediately available, and in some cases to die out as a result. That is how I (no biologist or natural historian) understand one aspect of the theory of evolution.
Charles Darwin wrote, in a section entitled “Complex relations of all animals and plants to each other in the struggle for existence”:
Battle within battle must be continually recurring with varying success; and yet in the long run the forces are so nicely balanced that the face of nature remains for long periods of time uniform, though assuredly the merest trifle would give the victory to one organic being over another. Nevertheless, so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel whe we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of forms of life!” (from The Origin of Species, chapter 3).
Bob is no help here. In his telling, Darwin was:
Very much a man of his class, the privileged non-working elite, and of his time – with Britain laying hold to a third of the world’s resources. So we get Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” – a notion thoroughly in accord with an elite man in an elite nation.
Darwin saw all life forms battling to survive against all others. However, in his book, Roy [Ratcliffe] outlines the real history of the evolution of all life forms is the story of interdependence. And crucially there was always a “balance”.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. The “balance” and the “struggle for survival”, in Darwin’s understanding at least, were two sides of the same coin.
The “survival of the fittest”, in Darwin’s presentation – the competition for nutrition between and within species, which forms the background to the processes of adaptation and natural selection – is quite different from its presentation by Thomas Huxley, and then by others who exaggerated the element of direct conflict and applied it to society (“social Darwinism”). And different again from its life as an element of ruling-class ideology from that day to this.
What’s more, arguments have been raging around Darwin’s share of responsibility for “social Darwinism” for a century and a half already. Socialist and left-leaning biologists and natural historians have played their part, and their years of work on this deserve our attention. One of them, Stephen Jay Gould, wrote in 1988:
Darwin’s “struggle for existence” is an abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement about a bloody battle. Reproductive success, the criterion of natural selection, works in many modes: victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis and mutual aid may also secure success in other times and contexts.
Gould was reviewing an argument in 1909 between the writer Lev Tolstoy and the anarchist naturalist Petr Kropotkin. Tolstoy railed against those who saw the “struggle for existence” as a moral imperative, and held Darwin responsible; Kropotkin argued that this struggle often resolved itself as mutual aid, both among animals and humans.
 |
| Stephen Jay Gould at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1980s, next to a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen that inspired him at the age of five to become a paleontologist |
Gould wrote that, when re-reading Kropotkin’s writings, he had found that his research, conducted in nineteenth-century Russia where the low population density of all species meant that animals were more likely to be battling against harsh environmental conditions than against each other, lent credence to his optimistic view of the “struggle for existence”. (If you enjoy Gould’s witty dissection of difficult arguments as much as I do, this one is also worth reading about social Darwinism.)
What does all this matter now? In my view, firstly, because the fearsome dangers of global heating and other breakdowns in human-nature relations should encourage us to think again about how Darwin’s understanding of natural history, and Karl Marx’s understanding of human history, might be synthesised.
This is the subject of Joel Wainwright’s book The End: Marx, Darwin and the natural history of the climate crisis, published in November last year. He argues that Marx was much more strongly influenced by reading Darwin than many Marxists have allowed; that elements of natural history run through Marx’s analysis of the origins of capital and its expansion, in ways that excessively “economistic” readings of Marx have failed to recognise; and that a re-reading of Marx with this in mind can help us to formulate an understanding of the grave crisis capital has brought us into, from a perspective aspiring to supercede capitalism.
Wainwright is clear that Darwin was, in his political and social views, a social Darwinist, and that he “applied his theory to political economy to justify class inequality” (The End, page 79). But he believes, nevertheless, that socialist thinking must assimilate the scientific achievements of Darwin, Alfred Wallace and subsequent natural historians, if it is to confront the crisis we face now. I agree.
What Darwin said also matters, because it is under sustained attack by the most reactionary anti-human forces. Just look at the battle raging in the US between teachers and an alliance of creationists and “intelligent design” advocates. This goes alongside the monstrous assault on climate science that has intensified under Trump’s second administration.
In this world, we need a serious, thought-out appreciation of Darwin, as we do of all science. We need to treat thinkers who have grappled with this – Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Stephen Jay Gould, all the many others – as our predecessors in a collective endeavour.
Bracketing Darwin with social Darwinism, and dismissing him as “a man of his class, the privileged non-working elite”, will not do.
