As Marx set out, basing himself on the work of Scottish farmer and agronomist, James Anderson, in fact, the land continued to be able to not only feed the growing population, but to increase output much faster than such population growth. The means of doing that was the application of capital and technology. For all the claims about finite natural resources running out, of peak oil, and so on, which have been repeated ad nauseam, since at least as far back as the 1970's, the predicted exhaustion has repeatedly failed to materialise at the due date, as reliably as the similar failure of the predicted End of Days.
Ricardo, basing himself on Malthus population theory, used it as the basis of his theory of the falling rate of profit. As the land could not keep up with population, Ricardo said, food and other agricultural prices would rise. Higher food prices would cause wages to rise and so profits to fall, hence the falling rate of profit. Again, as Marx set out, because the premise of rising food prices was wrong, the conclusion was also wrong.
Malthus, like modern Malthusians and catastrophists, refused to accept that capitalism, driven by competition, and the search for profit, is always led to seek to raise productivity by utilising science and technology, and to remove obstacles such as shortages or resources and labour by such means. Darwin, in applying his theory to all of Nature, including Man, makes a similar mistake, because he fails to take into account that, unlike other animals, Man is not just a consumer, but also a producer. Man does not simply consume from a fixed stock provided by Nature, but engages with Nature in expanding the stock, and by using technology, and accumulating and developing its means of production does so with ever greater facility. Indeed, it is this drive to raise productivity, based on The Law of Value, that drives forward the evolution of human social organisms.
Duhring, by contrast, claims that Darwin's theory, rather than applying to all of Nature, only applies to “the realm of the brutes to the extent that they get their food by devouring their prey.” (p 87) On this basis, Darwin's theory is reduced to a crude “survival of the fittest” which, unfortunately, Darwin himself lent credence to, in his later years, providing material for the eugenicists and social-Darwinists, whose ideas were, in turn, used by ethno-nationalists as the foundation of the ideas, for example, of the Nazis, Zionists, White Nationalists etc., to justify the creation of exclusivist, ethnically pure nation states.
As Engels sets out, however, Darwin never excluded from his theory the whole of Nature. The idea that it deals only with predator and prey is false, a construction of Duhring. Duhring accuses Darwin of being captive to the ideas of the animal breeder, the same ideas that, also, formed the basis of Eugenics. From this, of course, flows Duhring's conception of nature bringing about these changes by conscious will. The plant and animal breeder brings about changes in the given species by deliberately promoting certain desired characteristics to arrive at a specific end.
No comments:
Post a Comment