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Thomas More wrote:
palaeontologists (yes!) of ancient Greece and Rome, who examined dinosaur and other prehistoric fossils and bones.
More astonishing. Hominids (yes!) were also fascinated by fossils — enigmatically put: fossils cared for fossils.
University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (Accession no. 1916.82/Record 2) was discovered at Tofts, Norfolk, in 1911 (Handaxe knapped around a fossil shell
Cambridge conservatively dates the handaxe to 100,000–10,000 years ago (Homo neanderthalis or sapiens). The Nasher Sculpture Centre, Texas, (First sculpture: Handaxe to figure stone) ambitiously dates it to 500,000–300,000 (Homo heidelbergensis or antecessor).
The Paleolithic brain might be considered to be inferior to our own. Yet it may be salutary to take into account (1) this functional product of the Paleolithic mind — this aesthetically crafted handaxe — strongly appeals to our modern mind and sensibilities, and (2) this careful craftsman/woman may very well have possessed a bigger brain than we do.
* * *
Darwinian selection for smaller individual brains, like our own, is at last understood in evolutionary terms through lessons drawn from the domestication of foxes — the transformation of distrusting selfish hierarchical larger-brained foxes, over tens of generations of breeding for sociability, into trusting friendly smaller-brained grown-up puppies (see “Humankind” by Rutger Bregman, recommended despite his misgivings over socialism and support for capitalism).
The mystery of our sociability, first recognised as a major problem for his theory natural selection by Darwin himself, is now solved. Homo sapiens “domesticated itself” into grown-up hominid children by, in evolutionary terms, trading off gynaecologically-dangerous increasing brain-size (and presumably greater individual brain-power) for gynaecologically-safer smaller brain-size.
The apparent individual disadvantage of smaller brain-size is totally over-compensated for by the advantage of a cultural brain-size that is distributed over the social group, an advantage that, in evolutionary terms, arises from friendliness — member-to-member trust and the certainty of being able to rely upon the help and cooperation of one’s neighbours.
Evolutionarily, Homo sapiens is a trusting cooperative species, distinguished from the rest by being selected for social intelligence, unlike our surviving Ape cousins who were selected — just as we once were prior to our self-domestication — for devious Machiavellian intelligence.
Machiavellian intelligence favors individual cunning over social cooperation, and builds an unbridgeable barrier of distrust that stifles social cooperation. Its supersession is what separates us from the Apes.
Trust is the indispensable foundation for evolving social communication and the concomitant social intelligence we all share and draw upon — these practices are our species’s defining characteristic — confirming what Marx wrote in “Capital” Vol. 1 that “we are above all social animals”.
* * *
Returning to our Paleolithic knapper. It is impossible to believe that he did not knew precisely what he was crafting, in a process that unconsciously passes on to us a glimpse into his Paleolithic mindset.
Because he preserved a Cretaceous fossil in a functional tool — even if his import is not ours and his species is not our own —the social power of both our evolutionarily selected curious minds links us across the eons.
Peter Doherty on the availability of 60 million shots of a COVID-19 vaccine from the UK, perhaps by September, and on its projected efficacy.
“For those over 60, the vaccine may not be a complete fix.”
“Elderly people do not make good immune responses to something they have never seen before,” he says. “If we could vaccinate all the young people up to age 60, then we would massively increase herd immunity.”
* * *
Despite their similar colonial histories, Australian Aboriginal communities and some US Indigenous communities face almost opposite COVID-19 epidemiological situations.
Through rapid Australian state government intervention (strict border closures, extensive testing, lockdown and distancing rules) the global pandemic has largely bypassed the Australian states where Aboriginal communities predominantly live, so much so that Peter Doherty can surmise
“It would be wonderful if we pretty much stamped [the virus] out. South Australia looks pretty clean, Western Australia, Northern Territory all look pretty clean, so some states may have pretty much got rid of the virus.”
South Australia — one new-case for the past three weeks. Western Australia — two new-cases for the past fortnight. Northern Territory — zero new-cases for the past month. Queensland — single digit new-cases for the past month.
On the other hand, the social condition of many Aboriginal communities, like that of the US communities, poses a scarcely tractable problem for capitalism.
Dave,
For a critique of their case, see Bret and Heather – 11th Dark Horse Podcast
Interesting for their non-Marxian, but approximate, comments on scientific method.
Correction. The link to the article “Vaccine Development is a Case of Market Failure” is broken. It should read https://www.smh.com.au/national/vaccine-development-is-a-case-of-market-failure-here-s-why-20200413-p54jez.html
ALB:
Anybody know who this Professor Doherty is? He seems to know the score:
Peter Doherty is an admirable old fellow, who received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for describing a mechanism by which your body fights off viral infection.
In brief, he described how your body’s ‘killer’ cells recognise and attack your body’s virus-infected cells and zap them.
The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity is named after him.
The Doherty Institute, way back in January, were the first to grow the novel corona virus “having the real virus means we now have the ability to actually validate and verify all test methods, and compare their sensitivities and specificities – it will be a game changer for diagnosis”.
In ALB’s quote, Peter Doherty is saying no more than the unalloyed truth about the inadequacy of capitalist funding of medical research from a cooperative scientist’s clear recognition of the need for scientific cooperation.
You can read Peter Doherty’s delightful new weekly journalism Setting it Straight — at nearly 80 years, he modestly calls himself a “junior” journalist. In short time, you’ll learn more about virology (and have its terminology clarified) than elsewhere. Try first dipping into the historical article Pustules, Poxes and World Immunisation Week.
(1) Exponential growth and epidemics
Note the innocuous appearance at the start of the epidemic.
For naysayers. It took just 2 rabbits—at the start of the spread—to overrun a continent. ‘Innocuous‘ linguistically relates to ‘inoculation‘, which for COVID-19 is many, many, months off!)
(2) How serious is corona virus (COVID-19)
Termiting our Hostility Clause
Assertion
‘We should build on whatever ideas we have in common…’
Comment
There is only one idea worth sharing in common—that is our Object.
At present no one else shares it nor aims for it. Rather the rest aim for something other than and antagonistic toward our Object. Their ideas stand in direct opposition to ours.
As their ideas aim for something else, they are useless for us.
We have no ideas in common with those who won’t share our Object.
Assertion
‘…workers who share a vision of a stateless society’
Comment
A vision of a stateless society covers the fondest desires of the latest self-styled libertarian conservatives.
The social state is a superstructural consequence of class ownership and control of the social means of life. Under capitalist class ownership and control of the social means of life, the vision of a stateless society remains just that—a vision, an anti-socialist fantasy.
A stateless society is only meaningful in the context of our achieved Object.
We harbour no vision of a stateless society in common with those who won’t share our Object.
Assertion
‘…based on the uncompromised principles of socialism’
Comment
Please explain which uncompromised principles of socialism if not our Object and D of P?
Assertion
‘If the ranks of the revolutionary movement can be swelled on the basis of principled unity it would be wrong for anyone to delay the process…’
Comment
Please explain which principles we should have unity with if not our Object and D of P?
* * *
In the wetlands of Kakadu you find massive termite mounds that are aligned—polarized, you might call them—parallel to lines of Earth longitude within a degree or two, pointing like compass needles to the Earth’s celestial poles.
The other species of termites in the drylands build wondrously baroque columnar palaces, but their’s do not face broadside to the morning and afternoon sun, and they lack a definite common axis of North–South orientation.
Both these eusocial cooperative mound-builders share much in common, but only one species invariably aligns them in the same direction.
From our pamphlet ‘whats wrong with using parliament’
Assertion
“[The socialist majority] does need to organise politically so as to be able to win control of political power.”
Comment
This assertion is a necessarily incomplete re-statement of Clauses 6, 7 and 8 of our D of P—our defining political stance.
Addendum
“[The socialist majority] also needs to organise economically to take over and keep production going immediately after the winning of political control.”
Comment
This truism is well taken for now, but it will probably be gratuitous advice to those about to install a social organisation that is consciously based upon common ownership and democratic control of the social means for producing use-values (not capital).
However, you propose this truism-for-now in support of a flexible alternative to Clauses 6, 7 and 8 of our D of P for-the-future, suitable for different so-called ‘political realities’.
* * *
All societies survive by their social organisation for producing and consuming use-values. No society can escape this nature-imposed necessity, despite fictional fantasy to the contrary.
How then do capitalist societies apparently survive by their social organisation for producing and distributing capital?
Clearly they can’t be subverting the nature-imposed compulsion to produce and consume use-values. Instead they have hijacked it, parasitically.
This apparent subversion of natural necessity
- is conditional upon private capitalist-class ownership and control of the social means for producing capital (not use-values) and
- has been transformed into the social necessity for a capitalist society to produce and distribute capital according to the inherent capitalist laws discovered by Marx—independent of any ‘political reality’.
No capitalist society, whether under ‘UK and other western bourgeois democracies’ or ‘dictatorships and theocracies’ can escape capital’s compulsion to produce and distribute capital (not use-values).
This remains our century-old case against so-called ‘communism’ that was based upon class ownership and control of the social means of production, despite leftist economic and political fantasy to the contrary.
Should you advocate this addendum as justification, within a social organisation still based upon private capitalist-class ownership and control of the social means of production, for a workable hybrid that somehow escapes the social compulsion to produce capital and to distribute it according to capital’s inherent laws as a flexible alternative to Clauses 6, 7 and 8, you turn everything that we know about capitalist society and necessity into fantasy.
Question
Are you saying our D of P is universal for all places and all times?
Answer
Yes. Under world-capitalist rule there is only one place. Likewise, when the hour strikes to expropriate the world capitalist class, there will be essentially only one—universal—time.
This is what our D of P was crafted for.
Question
That the process of the implementation of socialism cannot vary depending on the social and political realities workers will face as class consciousness grows?
Answer
There is only one social and political reality faced by workers and that is their common recognition that they have been robbed of their common means of social life.
Clauses 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of our D of P lay out the problem. Clauses 6, 7 and 8 lay out the solution, namely our Object.
Question
Although they weren’t socialist revolution but could be called social revolutions, the collapse of the former Soviet Unions satellites was a lot less conquering the political system but more de-legitimising them, no longer recognising them and it was not through any organised political parties but by peoples power.
Answer
So-called “people’s power”—which the document correctly glorifies as ‘not just a myth’—was, in the case of the collapse of the Soviet Union, essentially the prevailing capitalist consciousness that their social organisation for producing and distributing capital had failed the capitalist survival test.
A social organisation for producing and distributing capital more able to meet that test has been installed.
Assertion
So, yes, my definition of a socialist movement is elastic.
Response
In physics, elasticity starts out varying proportionally under pressure, but then the elastic object distorts and snaps, and ultimately is no longer recognisable as its former self.
alanjjohnston: “I have indicated that it has been we who are flexible in our parliamentary political action approach, not declaring it to be suited for every situation”
Really?
- In what way are our Clauses 6, 7 and 8 flexible for achieving world socialism?
- In what situations are our Clauses 6, 7 and 8 unsuitable for achieving world socialism?
Thanks Matthew for doing that.
And thanks so much for pointing me to the wikisource, digitised and validated, Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
ALB: “Can we use that in the Socialist Standard”?
Of course, with these corrections/modifications:
- Insert “Part IV” before “Volume 3”
- Replace “Lothar Mayer” by “Lothar Meyer”
- Replace the final sentence by
Postscript
I excerpted the contents of Marx’s science notebooks from a paper by MEGA scholars Somnath Ghosh and Pradip Baksi http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/26/173.html
LBird: “And Engels got his notions of ‘science’ from Robert Owens [sic] (a well-documented autocrat, who wanted to help workers, not be under their control), and overlaid Marx’s core ideas of ‘democracy’, ‘social production’ and ‘critique’, with an elite ‘science’ which studied eternal matter to produce a final ‘Truth’.”
I will defer consideration of LBird’s problematic claim about Robert Owen’s notions of ‘science’ and consider here only the incontrovertible evidence for where Engels got the content, rather than the notions, of his science.
Engels
Engels studied mathematical physics in many sources, including the classic 18th century “Traite de dynamique” by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (co-publisher with Denis Diderot of the great French Encyclopédie).
However, his primary modern source for mathematical physics was the Feynman lecture course of his day, the celebrated 19th century “Treatise on Natural Philosophy” by Thomson and Tait (popularly known as “T&T”).
Engels’s primary modern source for chemistry was the celebrated “Treatise on Chemistry” by Roscoe and Schorlemmer. Readers familiar with the Marx-Engels correspondence will have met organic chemist Carl Schorlemmer as a Marx/Engels comrade-in-exile from ’48 and their trusted scientific consultant.
The two “Treatises” that Engels primarily studied happened to be the standard university textbooks from mid century right up to the First World War.
Marx
LBird assures us that Marx took no interest in the progress of natural science.
Why then did chemistry professor Carl Schorlemmer and evolutionary biologist Ray Lankester attend the private funeral gathering of nine persons to mourn the passing of an obscure economic scientist whom Engels eulogized as “the best hated and most calumniated man of his times”?
The new/forthcoming “Marx Engels Collected Works MEGA(2)” Volume 31 [not yet translated into English] lets us glimpse the extent to which Marx took an active interest in the progress of natural science.
Marx’s Chemistry Notebooks (1877-83)
Notebook 1. On the Atomic Theory
- atomistic principle as propounded by John Dalton
- related stoichiometric laws of chemical combination of elements
- determination of atomic and molecular weights of elements and compounds—J. L. Gay-Lussac; L. R. A. C. Avogadro; ‘vapour density’ and ‘molecular weight’, etc.
Notebook 2. Tabular summaries of inorganic and organic chemistry
Notebook 3. Tables of chemistry
Notebooks 4 & 5. Tables of inorganic and organic chemistry
Notebook 6. Formulae of organic chemistry
Marx’s Tabular Summaries/Tables include
Inorganic Chemistry Tables
- Non-metals and metals
- Periodic system of Lothar Meyer (independent discoverer of the Periodic Table but ceded precedence to Mendeleev)
- Quantitative valency
- Oxides, hydroxides, acids and salts, etc.
Organic Chemistry Tables
- Paraffins, carbohydrates, aromatic compounds, alkaloids, uric acid, carbonyl and sulfocarbonyl compounds, etheric and anhydride substances, ammonia and derivatives, organic acids, etc.
Studies in electromagnetism: Edouard Hospitalier
- Power sources: Voltaic piles, Galvanic batteries
- Electric current: Ohm’s law
- Physical Units: electrical current, voltage, resistance, etc.
Marx’s Notebook Sources include
- Chemistry: Lothar Mayer, Henry Roscoe, Carl Schorlemmer, Friedrich Kekule
- Modern chemistry: Marx attended August Hoffmann’s lecture course at the Royal College of Chemistry, London
- Agricultural Chemistry: Justus Liebig
- Physiological Chemistry: Wilhelm Kuhne
- Human Physiology: Ludimarr Hermann; Johannes Ranke
- Physics: Benjamin Witzschel
- Geology: Joseph Jukes
Forthcoming natural scientific materials (perhaps now published) include Marx’s notes and excerpts on Physics, History of Technology, Geology, Soil Science, History of Agricultural Plants, Agricultural Chemistry, Physiology of Plants, of Animals and of Human Beings, parts of Mathematics and on the interrelationships of the Natural Sciences and Philosophy. One day we will discover just what the mature Marx actually wrote about the latter.
Atoms
LBird assures us with his customary air of authority that (1) Engels thought only in terms of atoms while (2) Marx never thought in terms of atoms.
Re (1). In fact Engels adopted a field (non-atomic) approach to electricity (of course, the electron had yet to be discovered, but so too had quantum electrodynamic field theory).
Re (2). To deprive Marx of atomic theory is to ignore his Ph D dissertation on Epicurus. Marx famously defended Epicurus’s statistical atomic “swerve” (a Greek pre-echo of quantum indeterminism) for allowing free will to arise within a primarily deterministic atomic world.
* * *
I will return to Robert Owen on another occasion.
“Modern Socialism” by R. C. K. Ensor (Harper, London: 1910) gives you access to some key Party platforms, speeches, documents etc. The book is now out of copyright and was digitised (photographically) by Microsoft in 2007.
The book is available on-line from the University of Pennsylvania:
You can download it in PDF format:
It includes the objects and programs of the
- Social Democratic Federation,
- Independent Labour Party,
- Fabian Society
For comparison, it includes the object and programs for continental parties: the German, Austrian and Belgian Social Democratic Parties; the French Socialist Party.
It is a pitiable spectacle indeed to compare what these self-styled “socialist” parties claimed to have stood for then and what their descendant parties claim to stand for now against the forever-current Oject and Declaration of Principles of the World Socialist Parties (SPGB, etc.) we stood for then and stand for now.
