Dave B
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I think I would like to say that I agree in spirit with Robbo, as I often seem to to. I think when it come to orthodox Marxist theory from the early 20th century the ‘non political’ idea or purely materialist idea or whatever was; Eg Lenin Let capitalism rip as that would provide the technological potential for abundance and populate the world with dispossessed wage workers and get rid of reactionary petty bourgeoisie simple commodity producers and the ‘middle class’, aristocracy of labour, with little shop keeper ideology like Margaret Thatcher etc etc. People like ex Reaganite Paul Craig Roberts is constantly moaning on about the demise of the American middle class ‘wage levels’. The capitalist class have their own equalising version of ‘from each according to natural ability and to each according to need’ which is get as much work out of everyone as possible and pay them the same. And homogenise all the workers, the nirvana being when doctors are remunerated at the same ‘low’ level as refuse workers and the guy that cleans your pool. That is perhaps a bit of an idealised albeit I think shared perspective from both the capitalist class and high Marxist theory. I think Marxist theory like Hegelianism is mostly about trend analysis or extrapolation? I am a pure scientist so extrapolation is mostly bonkers for us but we are familiar with the utility of the concept, a bit. Or seeing what direction society is moving in and crystal ball gazing? The validity of the method in general can perhaps be looked at in terms of dystopian fiction like NSA electronic survielannce, Orwell’s 1984 and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? I think when it comes to consciousness, in the early 20th century or late 19th or whatever, our Marxists thought mostly that consciousness was some sort of amalgam of feudal throwbacks, simple commodity petty bourgeois property rights and intellectually challenged straw sucking redneck Hillbillies. Lenin in analysing it called it intellectual ‘torpor’ and that the industrial working classes economic conditions provided, they hoped, the potential material base for a mass autodidactic renaissance of enlightenment. I think maybe it did happen in Europe, and according to Chomksy in NW USA, from circa 1880 -1920 when the capitalist class took their eye off the ball when it came to thought control. All the seminal capitalists intellectual works on that were done post 1920’s. I do think we have a new revolution as regards that, which is the internet.
On the Mises type argument we have I believe the following. “The charge that sways juries and offends public sensitivities … is that greedy corporations sacrifice human lives to increase their profits. Is this charge true? Of course it is. But this isn’t a criticism of corporations; rather it is a reflection of the proper functioning of a market economy. Corporations routinely sacrifice the lives of some of their customers to increase profits, and we are all better off because they do. That’s right, we are lucky to live in an economy that allows corporations to increase profits by intentionally selling products less safe than could be produced. The desirability of sacrificing lives for profits may not be as comforting as milk, cookies and a bedtime story, but it follows directly from a reality we cannot wish away.” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/charles_kochs_disturbing_high_school_economics_20160602 Now some might think this sounds more like; Friedrich Nietzsche CHAPTER IX (What is Noble?) Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;–but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1886/beyond-good-evil/ch09.htm But no it isn’t as we see when the argument is played out. By saving money on cheaper, less safe cars, one can spend more money on other more life enhancing things like good health insurance when the brakes fail. And thus it is up to the consumer to rationally decide on the marginal utility of the one over the other. I suppose the ‘external costs’ of being knocked off your bike with a car with bad brakes can be covered by the no win no fee free market ambulance chasers. So everything is ok in the end. Nietzsche didn’t like socialist much and perhaps Anarchist less; depending on whether being called a rabble or Christian is worse. I think he thought of socialists as Leninist and Blanquist really and on that I think he had something interesting to say re vanguardism that resonated with me anyway. And ‘anarchists’ would for him fit in more neatly with libertarian communism and us I suppose. So take it on the chin; we are the ancestors of early Christianity. THE ANTICHRIST by Friedrich Nietzsche Published 1895 Translation by H.L. Mencken Published 1920 Page 57 Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence— who make him envious and teach him revenge…. Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of“equal” rights…. What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.— The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry…. De-railing the thread now. I suspect that there was a literally Genre from the 18th century onwards of allegorical and metaphoric irony. It was used quite frequently in the politically repressive Stalinist bloc as part of the culture of ‘comedy’. As far as the 19th century Germans of a Hegelian disposition were concerned, more famous for their humour than the French like Rousseau, taking the complete opposite ‘critical’ position, whatever that was, was considered creative and therefore good. Actually the ‘content’ of Socratic dialectics and dialectics. I think Karl got a bit pissed of with that with his anti Bauer ‘criticising criticism’? Don’t worry it is not that much high brow bollocks if you can understand playing devils advocate. I think I have learned loads in the past by putting a capitalist, von mises hat on arguing with my other avatar self and realising when I was getting into trouble, further down the line, and over what before my avatar was. I think Stirner was a complete joker! Stirner who asked what was wrong with having recreational sex with your mother in 1842; which is a bit over the top today. According to his wife suffered from erectile dysfunction after he opened the bathroom door and saw her naked getting out of the bath. It is a field day for the Freudians and ‘archetypal’ Jungians; Stirner, the European Bête Noir, taught Greek in a young ladies finishing school. Greek and Roman mythology is replete with unsuspecting males accidentally discovering female idols in various undressed states when bathing, eg Daphne which never turned out well. Sorry, got fed up with Marx and I am reading Ovid now and the planet nine stuff.
there another link here, there is still quite some squabbling about dates within that school and resistance from more traditional interpretations which it challenges. the Dating: pre-or post-Toba can be quite central to the debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans
I think these two points are really important. The inherited advantages which help us survive in competition with other species. The inherited advantages which help us survive in competition with other humans. So lets take them and analyse them using the standard Darwinian model mixed with archaeological evidence and with the more recent sensational mitochondrial and y chromosome DNA analysis. What we do know from the archaeological evidence of modern humans from circa 100,000 years ago onwards is that we know little. But that is actually important because what it means is that we were for much of that period as rare as hens teeth and probably living in widely scattered bands that rarely came into contact with each other. The main or only Darwinian challenge for any animal in that situation is to survive in competition with other species and (new) environments through co-operating with members of the group. Not robbing someone else’s recently caught woolly mammoth. What we also do know now from two separate sets of data, mitochondrial and y chromosome DNA analysis, is that about 100,000 years ago modern humans started to migrate north from southwest Africa reaching the Gulp of Aden and the Red Sea about 70,000 years ago? when the Sarah belt was known to be wetter and greener and the sea levels quite a bit lower. About ‘4000’ of them managed to cross the Red Sea perhaps sand bank hopping on rafts to an area now under water on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula that probably then had an environment like Sri Lanka now. That, as one theory I think goes, 1000 year migration was then cut off by the warming of the climate desertification and rising sea levels. They then moved north through Iraq and into the Caucasus. Before spreading out into Europe etc and east towards the Bering Straits. Then a group of between ‘17 and 24’ individuals (calculated from the DNA data) it is assumed crossed over somehow the Bering straights maybe 20,000 years ago? Before they were themselves probably later cut off by other climatic events for sometime. That group went on to populate the whole of the American continent. Dates and numbers vary a bit between the two separate sets of data as it depends on different interpretation on the rate of mutations on the male y chromosome and female mitochondrial DNA. The thing is still moving but I believe that the female mitochondrial DNA analysis set seems to tie in better with what is known about climate etc. I went to a lecture in Manchesterabout 5 years ago by one of the people who did most of the mitochondrial research and I asked him a question about the numbers involved etc and he said that there were most likely ball park numbers but most likely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_DNA_haplogroup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve But what should be clear is that this was unlikely to have been achieved by 4,000 bickering humans fighting each other over territory. Thus from another just randomly selected perspective from the first page of a google search?; The eruption of a super volcano, MountToba, in Sumatra 70,000 years ago may have led to a 'nuclear winter', followed by a 1,000-year ice age This sort of event would have put immense pressure on humans. It may be that humans were only able to survive these extreme conditions through cooperating with each other. This may have led to the formation of close family groups or tribes and the development of some of the modern human behaviours we are familiar with today, such as cooperation. Between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago another wave of humans migrated out of Africa. These humans are likely to have been ‘modern’ in terms of their appearance and behaviour. Due to their newly cooperative behaviour they were more successful at surviving and covered the whole world in a relatively short period of time. As they migrated they would have encountered earlier, primitive humans, eventually replacing them. Genetically, the six billion people of today’s world vary very little from these earlier Homo sapiens that ventured out of Africa. http://www.yourgenome.org/stories/evolution-of-modern-humans Actually the knew something odd had happened in human history in 1980’s from basic analysis of mitochrondrial DNA. What they suspected then was that there had been in the past some sort of catastophic event in human history that had reduced the world non Africahuman population down to several thousands. The lowering of the cost of DNA analysis and better techniques along number crunching computers has enabled this scientific interpretation.
Hi Adam I think that was my point when I mentioned the fillip to social ensemblies. However there is, you would think, a pretty important analytical differences or the way you think about it. As in the Marxist model behaviour is mediated through acquired culture and consciousness of one type or another and or ‘rational thought’. The problem these geneticist in general have is that for decades they have been scoffing at Lamarkism. In fact Lamarkism is held up, even in the general scientific community, as a classic seminal example of dingbat science. Just like the SPGB used to be the Marxist laughing stock for saying Russiawas state capitalist under Lenin I still remember it from my A’ level biology text books and as the star pupil of the class, I also remember arguing with my teacher about it and the black peppered moth thing. I wasn’t a Christian by the way. This epigentics thing is a bombshell; equivalent to the quantum mechanics thing in the early 1900’s. Except the chemists and physicists have got more balls and took that on the chin after the Copenhagenconference thing. Unlike the Dawkins like biologist who responded first by sacking the first researchers from their posts. I think when it comes to behaviour in general the way people think about is incorrect. [ I suspect that I am beginning to understand Wittgenstein of Manchester university better when it comes to language prejudicing thought or philosophy- he was substituted for Karl Marx in the monty python Greeks versus the Germans in the philosophers football cup final. And Karl was correct Socrates was offside!] Instinctive behaviour is a reaction to a stimulus or a response to something in the environment. However in higher animals or humans I would say that we don’t just mindlessly react to stimuli. We first assess and appraise, perhaps incorrectly, the ‘something in the environment’ and that can potentially become an albeit modified stimuli to which we can, in part, instinctively react. Uhh? So assuming for the moment cooperative social instincts with an element of group or for that matter class content. Another group of anti social bastards, are bayoneting babies in Belgiumor chucking them out of incubators in Kuwait etc. [ You could argue rationally and egotistically that well that is nothing to do with me really but they could come here next and I need to nip that thing in the bud now.] However there is another social instinct ‘altruistic punisher theory’ that anyone who is perceived to start to behave anti socially (to other ego’s) is going to get there arse kicked even if it means me taking a bullet in the process. [Which is different I think to a sense of insult and indignation to cultural precepts like cartoons of Mohammed, questioning the sexual activity of your sister or taking the piss out of Newcastle United. That kind of thing can be very interesting but does require another kind of, albeit related I think, analysis.] Social instinct ‘altruistic punisher theory’ actually quite unexpectedly dropped out of the Hamilton tit for tat computer programme game theory experiments when the computer programmes were allowed to observe the other computer programmes football matches or contests. [It was just like a football league, each ‘team’ or computer programme in a league of I think it was of about 30 played each other. Success was measured by how many goals you scored. When two cooperating teams went onto the field the score was 120 all. But you just needed two in the league to get it that precept going. The co-operators like Liverpool,would first go onto the pitch and invite the opposing team to kick the ball in the back of their net, and give them a chance to get the idea by letting them do it again and again. But gobshite ‘defector’ teams, like Sunderland, would be bastards and try and stop them scoring goals. Newcastlewould observe and learn from this and break their legs when they went up against Sunderland and would have a high scoring match when they met Liverpool. It is not as trivial as it sounds and the ‘algorithm’ was logically laid out.] There is lots of horrid negativity about this following kind of thing. Thus when we come to obnoxious human and chimp behaviour is there something communistically ‘positive’ about it? There is an obvious I think propensity to persecute people who don’t ‘conform’, and an instinctive desire to want to conform, and ‘stress’ when you don’t etc. There have obviously been several classic ‘psychology’ experiments on this. But is the desire to conform an expression or form of a co-operative instinct? [This ‘manifestation’ or ‘Hegelian’ form and content thing is great I think now that I think I understand it] When we had the filet mignon eating and hoarding Deleonists on the forum we were all happily queuing up to send them, in socialism, to Coventry and talking enthusiastically about social revenge and not inviting to our cocktail parties etc. If you are going to shit on another group dehumanise them first, or throw them outside the category of us, and turn them into ‘another’. The three essential philosophical paradigms or options from which all flows are; I and the me The we and the us. And the us and the them
I think things have been moving on quite fast re ‘epigenetics’ over the last 15 years. It cautiously and heretically stuck its head above the parapet as I said, recently, circa 15 years ago, in the relatively safe area of microbes. But it then steered well clear of behaviour in higher animals. Some recent research has been done on rat behaviour. So they have one set of male rats or whatever in a horrid stressed environment or whatever, and another set who have access to Sky rat porn TV, season tickets for Newcastle United Games and lots of food and Brown Ale etc. Male rats is important here. Because they wank them both off and take the sperm and inseminate a control group of just general female rats, like you do. Then they compare the ‘behaviour’ of the progeny of the male stressed rats to that of the male happy rats. The attraction of this experiment is that there would appear to be no possibility of a contactless isolated wanked off male rats, happy or not, passing on a cultural essembly of social relations from the father to son etc. But what appeared to happen, and it was apparently sensationally experimentally reproduced, was that the stressed male parent rats ‘produced’ , subjectively, ‘neurotic psychopathic offspring’. Whilst the other lot were chilled out rat like hippies in comparison.
I think we did epigenetics on this forum not all that long ago. An analysis of the general 19thcentury debate is a bit problematic due to the inevitable inclusion and transference of 20thcentury and thus anachronistic DNA gene theory back into it. The ‘content’ of Lamarkism is; …the ideathat an organismcan pass on characteristics that it has acquired during its lifetime to its offspring… The content of modern Epigentics, or the form it takes now is; ….Epigenetics is the study, in the field of genetics, of cellular and physiological phenotypic trait variations that are caused by external or environmental factors that switch genes on and off and affect how cells read genes… It is splitting hairs a bit I think to say that these two idea are irreconcilable or don’t share a common thread, root or content. There is a false and anachronistic idea, based on pedantry, put that Darwin ‘radically’ overturned Lamarkism. Whilst Darwin had his own speculative version or form of lamarkism and epigenetics which he so happened to call a ‘pangenesis theory’. Thus; …Darwin's pangenesis theory was criticised for its Lamarckian premise that parents could pass on traits acquiredin their lifetime…. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangenesis So to cut the crap and debate the matter as it stands now. The environment ‘affects’ the genes of an organism ‘that are already there’; and an organism somehow, by some feedback system, can activate or reactivate or switch on genetic instructions from its library and switch off others. Actually this modern idea is much more radical and sensational than boring Engels like Lamarkism. I mean it is ‘bad enough’ that using my thumb alot would make me have children with good thumbs; but it is even ‘worse’, surely? that I could genetically and phenotypically develop a better thumb in a lifetime. You would think it was a less radical idea that we inherit our own genes in various states of switched on or off-ness? This was first allegedly noticed quite recently in microbes as you might expect in fast breeders. Where they seemed to develop fantastic new and integrated metabolic tricks in a surprisingly short time. i was up to speed anyway as i discussed that with bob malone on the old forum 10 years ago. In a way you could think of it is a kind of ironic fillip to the ensemble of social relations theory. star trek did a variation of it as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)
No doubt Chris enjoyed Rosa playing out the allegorical part of JC before Pontius pilate “Are you Frau Rosa Luxemburg?” Capt. Waldemar Pabst asked when she arrived at his office upstairs.“You decide for yourself,” she answered.“According to the photograph, you must be,” he said.“If you say so,” she said softly. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44723.htm eg Luke 23. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+23&version=NIV Something that was on her mind then with the crucify thing, and; ……….Only the working class, through its own activity, can make the word flesh…… https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm Making the word flesh is from the opening chapter of John. Rosa LuxemburgSocialism and The Churches(1905) Part Two The Social-Democrats want to bring about the state of “communism”; that is chiefly what the clergy have against them. First of all, it is striking to notice that the priests of today who fight against “Communism” condemn in reality first Christian Apostles. For these latter were nothing else than ardent communists.The Christian religion developed, as is well known, in ancient Rome, in the period of the decline of the Empire, which was formerly rich and powerful, comprising the countries which today are Italyand Spain, part of France, part of Turkey, Palestineand other territories. The state of Romeat the time of the birth of Jesus Christ much resembled that of Czarist Russia. On one side there lived a handful of rich people in idleness, enjoying luxury and every pleasure; on the other side was an enormous mass of people rotting in poverty; above all, a despotic government, resting on violence and corruption, exerted a vile oppression. The whole Roman Empire was plunged into complete disorder, ringed round by threatening external foes; the unbridled soldiery in power practised its cruelties on the wretched populace; the countryside was deserted, the land lay waste; the cities, and especially Rome, the capital, were filled with the poverty stricken who raised their eyes, full of hate, to the palaces of the rich; the people were without bread, without shelter, without clothing, without hope, and without the possibility of emerging from their poverty. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/misc/socialism-churches.htm
there is another toxoplasmosis on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8
I think that the utility theory of value was first layed out by Jevons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stanley_Jevons I think the utility theory as a model system works were stuff can’t be reproduced, or produced (eg bottles of beer and coats rescued from a shipwreck on a desert island.) Or when the hows , whys and where do ‘commodities’ come from is overlooked or not investigated. Which you might expect from and with a bourgeois bias. To say that products are labour is a tautology not a political forced hypothesis. The labour theory of value drops out first as an objective human material reality in simple commodity production; as Rubin wrapped up in a paragraph somewhere. Based on jealousy and envy of applied effort. Thus I, with my self employed bourgeois limitations, am not going to put up with exchanging 40 hours of my effort for 20 hours of somebody else’s effort. If a maker of blue suede shoes is getting the same amount of stuff for 20 hours of work as I am getting for 40 hours of effort producing goose eggs; then I am in the wrong game. I will re skill, sell up my goose herding capital and go into the blue suede shoe making lark and sell and undercut the other blue suede shoe maker. Or increase supply and decrease demand, a process that will continue until the differential in income versus reward is eroded. An analogous thing goes on in the labour market today. We sell our labour power which is still a commodity even in wage labour; the fact that it is discounted further back is neither here nor there for the moment. These superman gobshite £50 per hour computer programmers (blue suede shoe makers) from the 1990’s and for that matter Harry Enfield ‘loads of money’ plasterers were laughing. Our ‘goose herders’, since then, from Minsk to Mumbai have moved in to establish more of a market equilibrium in the price of effort with the commodity of programming labour power. In the old simple commodity producing days the limitations were just start up capital, and re-skilling. When the ratio of means of production and value of labour power were low; or in other words if you were reasonably frugal you could save up enough to buy yourself a handloom or whatever everything worked ok Today one cannot decide that Joe the domestic plumber stuff is for suckers and the big money is to made in making cars or pharmaceuticals as for that you need loads of dosh to start off with. Simple commodity production (the self employed) persists in spheres of economic production where start up capital is low. But the capitalist class, with the dosh, still play the same basic game as the blue suede shoe maker and goose egg producers. Except it is not their own labour power that they are jealous/envious of, but the labour power that they buy.
1933: Zionists sign a deal with Hitler – The Transfer Agreement The Transfer Agreement – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32941.htm
It is better and more sensible I suspect to look at variable capital, real wages just as the cash consumption living fund of the working class what they actually get paid. Actually the workers get quite a chunk of that taken away from them again, circa 25%?; when the spend as they inevitably do. So, or whatever, a worker produces 60 hours worth of product. The capitalist state, for the sake of argument take 10 hours as ‘income tax’. Their direct employer takes 10 hours, as the more obvious profit. The workers get paid in cash 40 hours equivalent, with which they can buy back 30 hours of stuff. Eg. Value added taxb110.717.1 % Other indirect taxes Fuel duties26.84.1 %Tobacco duties9.91.5 %Alcohol duties10.41.6 %Betting and gaming duties2.30.4 % www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn09.pdf Ignoring the smoke and mirrors. I think the formal, Marx’s, theoretical position is that taxes, in as much as that they are only used to fund and administer the state running of capitalism eg the judiciary, police armed forces and any general paraphernalia for the circulation of capital etc has to come out of surplus value. And wages, formally and theoretically, fund the reproduction and maintenance of the workers labour power. The ‘problem’ is that ‘taxes’ fund the state and the state has taken on in part as well the role of ‘the reproduction and maintenance of the workers labour power’ through national healthcare systems and in some places the ‘public education’ in others. There was a bit of a wobbly idea in the early part of 19thKapital from which Karl moved swiftly on. That it was the economic self perpetuating ‘responsibility’ to ‘the system’ for skilled and educated workers to hive [fund] off a proportion of their higher wages to reproduce the next generation of skilled more productive workers. Skilled more productive workers produce more stuff than actually they need to reproduce their own personal labour power. As is quite obvious, in errant irresponsible feckless males, who despite Calvinistic Ideology, abandon their economic responsibilities to their progeny and the fruit of their loins etc. Say. I think the ‘problem’ for the capitalists was initially institutionalised with the education/ skilling or reproduction of the labour power hive [fund] being taken out of control of the independent [skilled] working class. Tapped out in taxation for ‘free’ meritocratic education. Which was a much ‘better’ system, for them, because skilled workers can like to spend more time in the pub playing the horses; and potential real talent in the less well off work force can be left untapped and unexploited. It was the genius of the ‘English’ comprehensive education system. Now 18 year old’s, or whatever, are offered as a 50K loan, of someone else’s capital, for a education, as an investment; as with a machine and new more potential productive technology . [ As a digression what hurts? –we get creamed again with rent, interest payments on mortgages, student loans etc; which gobbles up well over 50% of many workers ‘nominal’ wages. ]
There was another really interesting programme of TV the other night re extra terrestrials and the Drake equation etc. What was relevant to ourselves as Marxist and materialists with an interest in ‘socialism or barbarism’ and history repeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce etc is the Fermi paradox and the ‘great silence’. As food for thought if nothing else. And the term L; or the life time of intelligent technological societies that would have the ability to communicate or generate electronic noise. Eg. If L is given a value as low as say 200 years then one might only expect maybe 10 or so ET societies which means a quite possible 0. Thus Fermi paradox resolved! ie Another theory is that with intelligence comes destruction. The time between being able to make contact and the self destruction of the species is short. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/science-environment-11982757 Or in other words if the present system of capitalism persists what chances do we have of making it to say 2150? It is quite remarkable I think that ‘level headed’ scientists cold bloody and rationally contemplated the self destruction of 'supposedly'? essentially un re-formable ‘progressive’ TINA capitalism, by around say 2150. And not only that materialistically trans-solar system, and universally projected from our system onto other ‘intelligent’ societies.
It is quite common in several ape species when things kick off amongst the group for the males to pick up any infant ape handy; but as I understood it was for protection of the cowards, or not wanting to get drawn in to general fracas, like the proverbial diving under the table in a pub fight. The protecting the baby syndrome does in another context perhaps seem to enter into human culture as well; eg Kuwaiti-first Iraq war babies in incubators, Belgium babies on bayonets and they did it again recently with Assad barrel bombing maternity wards etc. Although I don’t think we can or should compare most of our evolution to apes. What we do know is that we evolved out of a very rare and thinly scattered species of co-operative groups struggling against the environment and not other groups or even space. For instance the archaeological/chemistry stuff that has come out of the Stonehenge recently indicates that people from all over Britain were congregating there for a Glastonbury style, bring your own pigs, festival; not to knock shit out of each other. Isotopic data on animal bones found on the site indicate that it came from all over the UK and as far north as Scotland. The general war ideology has and still does infect archaeological analysis, eg the imperial Saxon invasion trashing the indigenous Romano- Celts. That now looks like bollocks as well and scientific facts seem to suggest that it was more of a ‘cultural’ invasion with the indigenous population switching away from hierarchal Romano- British economic system- ruling classes to the then more communistic like Germanic system of primitive communism. Taking a very reductionist non chimp Darwinian perspective wars between social and herd animals are very rare; ants are they only ones that do it, occasionally, in the way we would 'understand' it. Most violence is over sexual competition which is sometimes sorted out by who does the best ‘moon dance’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o42C6ajjqWg There does seem to be a general correlation to increased size of the male over the default size of the female re the natural battling for male sexual access etc. The ‘natural’ difference between size of the sexes in humans alone would seem to indicate that ie aggression, was not an important part sexual selection. There are some interesting examples with the birds eg Emu’s? were the males raise and look after the young and the women fight over the men. There are some ducks that do it as well.
I think there is some evidence and discussion etc that consuming sugar rich foods triggers the release of natural pleasure producing “opiates” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorphins eg http://www.livestrong.com/article/493981-eating-induced-endorphins/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3161588 http://www.three-peaks.net/annette/Processed-Sugar.htm Resulting from withdrawal and addiction reactions etc. But blaming everything on capitalism. If you believe it the quick cheap availability of the food type may only be part of the problem as compulsive consumption as with drug taking, alcohol etc may be just a reaction or ‘self medicating’ response to general social levels of stress which would be the more direct cause of the problem? I think the continuous consumption of sugary foods or snacking, just from an observation of behaviour perspective, looks like the response to stress. From an insiders perspective, I get access to some of the ‘soft drinks’ industry insider documents on this; their complaint is that they have decided to pick on the drinks industry whilst ignoring the bigger culprit with the sugar tax on soft drinks. Whilst the bigger culprits are biscuits, chocolates and cakes etc. Where I work there are about 3 shared offices and every day there is a buffet of such voluntarily supplied material laid out for communal free access snack food. With a from each according to pay and to each according to need. Transiting workers are welcome to sample the product. Factory produced juice and drinks are free on site anyway or if you want to take stuff home they sell date coded error and under weights to staff for 10p a litre. But the cakes etc remain the most popular. Introducing the sugar tax is supposed I think to dissuade consumption using the price mechanism and to encourage the industry to increase the use of artificial sweeteners as a substitute. There maybe some 'merit' in this despite some safety concerns over artificial sweeteners. There are a range of potential more expensive candidates for more natural ‘artificial’ sweeteners which have been priced out for further development. For the capitalist class in general there is the increasing cost of healthcare due to obesity and diabetes etc. I don’t have biscuits and cakes in the house because I can’t control myself if they are there and can scoff a couple of packets in an hour if they are and the more I eat the more I want. But I don’t glug litres of juice all day at Willy Wonkers juice factory. Anyway now we have it when it costs the ruling class ; ‘stop them eating cakes’ And ‘chocolate is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2015/no-1335-november-2015/pathfinders-after-sugar-rush
