The Virus of Marxism

A lot of people - ex-Marxists - talk about having caught 'the virus of Marxism' in their youth. They always seem less clear as to how they recovered from their complaint.

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Marx thought that the selfishness and egotism so obvious in the people around him were the product of capitalist relations of production. Under communism selflessness would be the norm, the benevolence of a society of abundance.

This is an empirical claim, yet one which Marxists are strangely unwilling to explore. Everything we know about human beings suggests such a prospect is false. There are strata of society which are currently very well off. The pages of 'Hello' magazine suggest that saintliness does not come naturally. Why not? They're not all evil oppressors.

We know from biology that (for good genetic reasons) most animals are either in it for themselves or at most for their close kin. It's considered noteworthy that some evidence has been uncovered for reciprocal altruism in chimpanzees.

Humans exhibit adaptations for living in large groups*, and for symbol-mediated cooperation: loyalty to causes, countries and empires (provided such causes sufficiently align with personal self-interest of course). Despite much effort however, in-group/out-group tribalism has never been close to eradication. It's a bit airy-fairy to blame those famed (and reified) 'capitalist relations of production' for that historical universal.

Rich societies in a state of formal peace fragment into tribes which pick intense fights on secondary issues, spearheaded by young males. Who'd have thought it? (Apart from evolutionary psychologists).

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Where does this leave the Marxist project? A clue can be found in the extreme unwillingness of Marxist theoreticians to engage with these issues. Their uneasiness is palpable: such research is neither acceptable nor refutable - a sheepish turning away of the head changes the subject.

Mediated of course by the social relations of production and exchange, it's new tech which opens the door to historical progress. The future presents as a branching tree: genomic experimentation in humans combined with social-agency in robots (cf replicants).

It's really hard to predict how things will turn out: there are many scenarios. Why suppose that Marx and Lenin tediously had the future nailed down more than a century ago?

The thing which scares Marxist intellectuals is that if humans can't make a collectivised society work - and they can't - then we seem to be stuck with capitalism indefinitely. That does seem a bit of a capitulation to bourgeois ideology. But private ownership of the means of production has a lot more flexibility than historical observers had imagined. Those dark satanic mills so graphically denounced in Capital Vol 1 have long since vanished in the west. Capitalism keeps getting richer (on trend) and more capable, with ever greater reserves. Its own dynamic will in the end utterly transform it .. I suspect.

Why is capitalism so bad, anyway?

We shouldn't ask the question this way. It's not the job of science to take sides on ethical questions. Marxists above all should not be appealing to platonic ethical absolutes. Yet they err in seeking ethical judgements about capitalism only in social relations.

If human beings didn't have a human, biological nature, if they didn't care whether they ate or starved, lived or died, then who could complain about social formations since the dawn of time where such 'bad' outcomes were the norm?

Of course, human beings very much subscribe (for obvious biological reasons) to something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

In Marx's day (and Lenin's too in Russia) capitalism was bootstrapping itself through primitive accumulation. It was a brutal time and every one of Maslow's levels was violated for the newly-emergent working class. The communists were vitriolic in their anger and hatred against capitalism - the new bourgeoisie were certainly not starving in their mansions.

But as Stalin showed in the 1930s, forced accumulation is inherently a brutal business.

A richer contemporary capitalism is less polar, more stratified. Large segments of the population - proletarian in that they own no means of production and need to sell their labour power to survive - find themselves not badly paid and doing socially-necessary work of deep intrinsic interest. They may well attain all of Maslow's levels in their occupations.

Marxists like to say that capitalism is irrational, not being centrally planned. This is a rather pejorative way of describing a decentralised economy composed of discrete, competing companies each trying to maximise its own profit. Companies may be legal persons, but in a dog-eat-dog capitalist economy their psychologies are psychopathic.

Still, self-centeredness is a common feature in natural ecosystems: we observed above that generalised altruism is rare to non-existent. Though corporates-gone-bad are a staple of dystopian fiction, in a healthy capitalist state there exist legal mechanisms to ensure rule-based behaviour, recognising that social-responsibility is not intrinsic to the capitalist firm.

Bad corporate behaviour is  often contested - see any newspaper.

The Marxist economist will then turn to crisis theory as evidence of capitalist inefficiency. The dynamics are not disputed (except by bourgeois equilibrium economists!) but given the inability to predict future demand, competitive overshoots will happen and in modern times the effects of downturns are somewhat mitigated.

It is claimed that capitalism has an inherent alienation, anomie caused by the fundamental deception of capitalism, that ordinary folks' efforts only serve to produce more profits for the bourgeoisie. We're all in it together, suckers! When things are going well, and capitalist corporations are achieving great outcomes (in construction, healthcare, new technologies) things don't seem that discordant. It's hard to identify "the Man" who sits in his top hat chortling at the efforts of his deceived minions.

Capitalism certainly has an ideology of 'atomism': the free individual contracting with an employer. But once in work, nothing much gets accomplished without the team .. and teamwork is pretty core to human nature. Outside of work there are associations in plenty for those who want them - even revolutionary communist parties.

We're down to the bottom line. In a class society, the rich and powerful tend to get their own way. What did you expect?

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* Less aggression and more self-control, but varies with population group.

Getting capitalism to work successfully is the most difficult task humanity has ever set itself. Success correlates with national IQ, as Professor Garett Jones describes in his book "Hive Mind".

From "Hive Mind" by Garett Jones

Existence is rather important

Consider the ontological argument:

"The ontological argument attempts to prove God’s existence through abstract reasoning alone. The argument is entirely a priori, i.e. it involves no empirical evidence at all. Rather, the argument begins with an explication of the concept of God, and seeks to demonstrate that God exists on the basis of that concept alone.
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All forms of the argument make some association between three concepts: the concepts of God, of perfection, and of existence. Very roughly, they state that perfection is a part of the concept of God, and that perfection entails existence, and so that the concept of God entails God’s existence.
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The ontological argument was first formulated in the eleventh century by St Anselm in his Proslogium, Chapter 2. Anselm was a Benedictine monk, Archbishop of Canterbury, and one of the great medieval philosopher-theologians. Anselm’s ontological argument rests on the identification of God as “that than which no greater can be conceived”. Once it is understood that God is that than which no greater can be conceived, Anselm suggests, it becomes evident that God must exist."

The usual rebuttal, due to Kant, is that "existence is not a predicate".

There is a biological analogue: that the zoological properties of a species are predicated upon that species actually existing. An animal's behaviour is such as to ensure the continuing existence and successful reproduction of its genes: in the jargon, its inclusive fitness.

I think about this every time I hear some clever-stupid contortions in moral philosophy.

Take Peter Singer's observations that we would all help a drowning child in a pool before our very eyes - even at the cost of ruining our maybe-expensive clothes. Yet there are people in similar dire circumstances across the planet but out of our view, right now. We should therefore make similar material and effortful sacrifices for them too.

But, unless we are very gullible, we don't much (don't get me started on virtue signalling). So there's a moral deficit to explain and counter - if you're a moral philosopher of that persuasion.

The proximate reason we help the drowning child in front of our very eyes* is that we feel a strong emotional reaction, that of empathy, which drives us to action. And the causal reason we experience that emotion is that we have mirror neurons in our brains which emulate the child's fear and panic.

Let us progress. The ultimate reason for the evolution of empathy (and its enforcer, guilt) via the apparatus of mirror neurons was to facilitate reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruism allows cooperation with non-kin across time and space to mutual advantage and can therefore be subject to positive selection (Robert L. Trivers).

We have a term for the network of those with whom we can work to the benefit of our mutual inclusive fitness: family and friends. The outer limit to the number of people you can do deals with has been quoted as around 150. Beyond that, people are just an anonymous mass.

When E. M. Forster made his over-quoted remark “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” he was capturing the essentially fictive notions of 'fatherland' (and indeed ethnicity) as objects of spontaneous emotional attachment. **

Politicians, religious leaders and ethnic spokespeople have to work hard to create feelings of mass emotional solidarity, ("Brothers and Sisters ...!", "Friends ...!"), misusing the language of small-group bonding. Sometimes they are right to do so, as there are indeed inclusive fitness benefits to some social organisations of scale. And sometimes they are just conning people and reducing their life chances (cults such as scientology come to mind).

Giving away your material goods to people with whom you can never hope to have any reciprocal relations of advantage is plainly a case of the latter. Which is why, (except for the most gullible who invite their extinction from the gene pool), people tend not to do it.

The argument above is related to this issue:

... the “problem of human ultra-sociality“: from an evolutionary point of view, how was it possible for the human species to go from living in small foraging bands of close relatives in the Palaeolithic to the global network of billions of anonymously interacting strangers that we see today ?

To read more, refer to this current post from Pseudoerasmus.

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* We should note the perverse power of television in making the whole world appear as 'in front of our very eyes' and thus further scamming our emotions. Expect things to get worse in the coming days of virtual reality.

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** Suppose that in a foreign and dangerous land you happen to meet a fellow country person. You might well feel a warm feeling of anticipatory camaraderie, as did those merchant seamen who, captured by the enemy, were rescued by sailors who were strangers to them with the cheery words "The navy's here!". Plainly a shared culture and heritage can make it more likely that there is a basis for future reciprocal altruism - prosocial dispositions may facilitate such an outcome.

"The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" - Robert L. Trivers

Way too many people still waste everyone's time by falsely averring that the existence of altruism is a challenge and a puzzle to evolutionists. I re-read Robert Trivers classic paper: "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" and share with you the following observations.

1. This is a model of how to write a paradigm-changing paper. It's an easy read, conceptually clear and comprehensive. You owe it to yourself to click on the link and give it a try.


2. In a sense, it's a statement of the blindingly obvious, particularly when Trivers discusses human altruism and the psychological mechanisms underlying it (friendship, dislike, gratitude, moralistic aggression, sympathy). It is, however, a testament to the systematic confusion and obfuscation of prior intellectual elites that Trivers had to restate and reframe the obvious to clear away an edifice of tendentious, muddle-headed thinking. On second thoughts, you may delete the word 'prior' above: an evolutionist's work is truly never done.


3. Trivers suggested that the arms race between altruists and cheaters (doves vs. hawks if you like) is so complex, with strategies and counter-strategies and counter-counter-strategies, that it may have been a major driver for human-level intelligence. I'm not sure this intriguing idea has really been explored to date.

Trivers' first case study- 'Altruistic Behaviour in Cleaning Symbioses' - carefully removes issues of kin-selection and inclusive fitness by considering between-species altruism. He then considers the puzzling case of bird alarm calls (which seem to put the calling bird in special danger) and shows that a bird warning non-kin still has a selective advantage over the cheating non-warner. Finally we get to the human condition, where his apparently commonplace observations are subtly situated within a carefully-argued evolutionary framework.

Going forwards, there has to be scope for a genetic level of analysis based on GWAS research. Is altruism normally distributed (many genes of small effect)? Is there evidence of multi-modal distributions based on distinct evolutionarily stable strategies (crudely, sociopaths vs. the prosocial)?

For evidence that people's natural instincts and inclinations do not naturally align with Darwinian thinking, review these comments at West Hunter.