Warning: existential topics and eugenics and death and destruction and opinions you may disagree with
Two years ago I was a sophomore in college, now I’m graduating. I’m majoring in legal history and I get my diploma in less than a month. Very exciting. Planning on going to law school the fall after next.
But with all formalities out of the way, what have I learned in the two years of me being a communist, but a quiet one?
A lot. A lot.
I think I’m on the cusp of realizing something big, and I understand it will sound ridiculous to a lot of people here. But at least take into consideration that I’ve identified as a Marxist for 5-6 years now. I’m not new to this.
It’s all because of last semester, I took a class called “Darwinism in Science and Society.” I took the class to hopefully learn more on the eugenics movement of the early 20th century and to learn more about social Darwinism.
And boy did I learn. I learned and realized something horrible.
The materialism we use for our theories is outdated. It sounds ridiculous, but bear with me.
Prior to Darwin publishing Origin of Species, science was not science. It was not what we consider to be science today. That sounds reasonable, doctors were using mercury and cocaine to cure people. But it wasn’t science for the reason you think. It was not our science because there was no way to possible conceive the idea that something came into existence without a divine creator making it possible. Think Montesquieu. Lyell. Prominent early evolutionist thinkers. They had the idea that animals changed over time, but what drove change? There was no way humans could be related to apes, right? Europe at this time was obsessed with gorillas. We were so similar. That’s why Europe loved them.
When you have no idea what drives change, you think it was purposefully changed. God made the dinosaurs, killed them off, made mammals and reptiles and took a step back and they changed. Each step of the way it was intentionally done. But Darwin changed everything. With the idea of natural selection, that the quest to survive was what drove evolution. Mutations that helped a creature survive repopulated and shared these traits, and all the animals that did not have the traits would inevitably die out.
For the first time, religion and science were wholly separate. But the idea of materialism, the idea of a physical world not governed by a God, existed before and after Darwin. Aristotle. Ancient Greece, we know this.
But even then, when it came down to the fundamentals, it was hard to explain change without resorting to creationism in some way. The idea that change is voluntary. That’s what old materialism is. The idea that we can step in and change nature. That something will force things to change due to the nature of being the force that will change things.
Marx, at first, did not accept Darwinism. He at first rejected it because it he believed that it was the projection of capitalist thought onto nature, conformation bias. Essentially he believed Darwin was doing what people who believe they are Sigmas do to wolves. They project their perception of a natural hierarchy onto nature, the wolves, when wolves do not have a hierarchy.
But someone would change things. Darwin was special in that he never delved deep into how the theory of natural selection applied to humans. Sure, he wrote one pamphlet, but it was just as “ehh…idk??” as everything else he published about humans. Darwin was an abolitionist and has been one of the only white historical figures I’ve read who picked up on how racism operated. He understood that it was a misinterpretation of nature, a purposeful perversion of nature to conform to one’s ego. So he was never enthusiastic to apply natural selection to humans.
But one guy was! His name is Herbert Spencer! He’s the one who coined “survival of the fittest.” Darwin later adopted the term, but never applied it to humanity in the way Spencer did. Spencer created the idea of social evolution.
And in this idea of social revolution he took a step backwards. He abandoned Darwin’s materialist thinking and held onto old materialism. That massive change can be voluntary, that the forces of change will cause change by being the force that causes change.
Marx was not a white supremacist like Spencer was. Marx was not a eugenicist like Spencer was. Marx was optimistic while Spencer was nihilistic. But Spencer, being the one who created the idea of social evolution, misinterpreted evolution. Nothing we say and do is of free will, we are all nature. As studies show, our acts of “free will” occur after neurons fire in the parts of the brain that is associated with your act of “free will.” Energy sparked in one direction and that’s what caused you to “randomly raise your arm up as an act of free will.” Trippy, I know. That drove me into a week long existential crisis.
Spencer created the idea that we can drive social evolution by weeding off those who “pollute” our population. That’s eugenics 101. Marx adopted the idea that we can drive social evolution by weeding off those who “pollute” our population…wait…what?
Yeah. Spencer’s idea of the “pollutant” were people who weren’t white, criminals, mentally ill people. Marx’s idea of the “pollutant” was the bourgeoisie.
And this is not me being “yass I love the bourgeoisie yasss.” That’s like saying that because I disagree with Spencer, I love criminals. Doesn’t work that way.
So regardless, both ideas function on the idea that voluntary acts to weed out the bad in our society, will cause society to evolve in one way or another. For Spencer it was to be more civilized, for Marx it was to be socialist.
Marx praised Spencer in Spencer’s early years. He wrote letters to him, he gave him copies of Kapital. That fact is devastating.
But this explains a lot. It explains why we keep having idol worship. Because these agents of change is the vanguard party, it’s the leaders of revolution who “voluntarily” decided to change the world. We crowd around them like how we crowded around God for all explanations on how things work. We read their theories, we listen to their speeches, we display their bodies, we mourn them like they are distant relatives we never got to meet.
And that’s the jist of what I’ve learned these past two years, but this is the most devastating. It personally explains to me why so many movements aren’t kicking off. Everyone is trying to be Lenin or Mao. But a Lenin or a Mao doesn’t just come into being because they wanted to be Lenin or Mao. Like materialist determinism says, the material conditions have to be ripe for change. But the material conditions aren’t acting in free will. You can’t make things ripe for change. You can’t force social evolution. For change to occur, the weak ones unable to survive in the current conditions will die. And as intelligent beings, we react to their deaths. The black moth against black bark doesn’t give a shit about the white moth who got spotted. The mother bird who discovers a defect in her child will knock the bird out of the nest and make it fall to its death. But we have the capability for complex empathy. So we think that we can force change.
I hope I’m wrong.
And if I’m wrong, that means we’re missing something. A scientific clue, the future agent of change. We won’t fully understand what caused change until we’re in the future.
Anyways…reading list time!!
- On the Origin of Species, Darwin
- Darwin and the General Reader, Alvar Ellegård
- The Origins of the Modern World (2nd Edition), Robert Marks
- Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860-1946, Mike Hawkins
- Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought, Robert Bannister
- Marx. Lenin. Stalin. Mao. Read all them. I don’t need to list them all, right?
- I’ve read a bunch of documentary collections of U.S labor history. They’re hard to come by, so if you’re genuinely curious just look up US labor, documentary collection. You’ll likely find the one I read, it’s just very hard to come by and I snagged the only one that was a reasonable price. All of what I wrote was a synthesis of all the things I’ve read about in those books. The stuff about moths and birds was from high school science class in the evolution unit. They’re super simple examples.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading even if you think I’m stupid!! I can’t really call myself a Marxist materialist because of what I’ve learned, so I just call myself a communist scientific determinist. Totes not a mouthful.
