Saturday, August 9, 2014

Evolutionary (Science-Directed) Socialism : Part-I by Bhagwat Prasad Rath

              Science is scaling new heights. New problems are threatening our existence. Nature is our master. We have to learn from it. So, instead of repeating parrot- like what earlier great thinkers wrote about socialism, we must subject all thoughts to ruthless criticism. Kisen Patnaik, a leading Lohia socialist thinker, with profound sadness, lamented the poverty of thought at the world level. Einstein is one of our path- finders.
             He wrote the seminal essay ‘Why Socialism?’  Einstein Wrote, ‘But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future’

           Thorstein Veblen wrote that the four predatory institutions that dominate our societies are ‘rulers, warriors, men of religion and sports men’ C. Wright Mills, a great socialist of America adds more twentieth century predatory institutions to the list of Thorstein Veblen. They are ‘media – moguls, film- stars and film- makers’. Thorstein Veblen says that these institutions indulge in ‘crack- pot realism’ and wallow in the slough of conspicuous consumption. C. Wright Mills agrees with him. To –day’s most powerful predatory institution is that of finance – dictators. Can we dream of a society free from these predatory institutions?

           The world is divided into different groups of humanity who are constantly warring with each other. As Tagore said, ‘the world has been divided into fragments by narrow domestic walls’. Psychologists like Erich Fromm think that insane people are powerful in all most all predatory institutions.

          The greatest living intellectual of the present world, Noam Chomsky, says, “In the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grand children.”

          Harvard professor Robert Stevens accuses the government representatives in the IPCC panel (Inter- governmental panel on climate change) of deleting 75% of the report prepared by scientists. That Governments are subservient to the profit-crazy corporations is no secret. Next to climate change, the other grave issue that bedevils human future is the preparation for war by the states, particularly the rich ones. The US tops the list of world warmongers. The greatest danger comes from the existence of nuclear weapons
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         Like Kisen Patnaik, P. M. Sweezy, a great Marxist thinker, is worried about the poverty of thought. After the collapse of communist societies in the world, P.M. Sweezy, in his essay ‘A Crisis in Marxist thought’ (The book is ‘Post-Revolutionary Society’) wrote that Marx’s idea was ‘…. It (The Communist Society) would be a classless society, a stateless society and a society of genuine and not merely formal or legal equality among nationalities, races, sexes, and individuals …… These goals would certainly be very long term in nature and might never be fully achieved…… Certainly they establish guidelines and rough measuring rods. Only a society genuinely dedicated to these goals and shaping its practices accordingly can be considered socialist in the Marxian meaning of the term.

          Now, as I have already indicated, the generally accepted Marxian interpretation of modern history leads us to expect that capitalism will be overthrown by proletarian revolutions, and that these revolutions will establish socialist societies. The theory, in fact, is so taken for granted as a reliable clue to what is happening in the world that every society which originates in a proletarian (or proletarian-led) revolution is automatically assumed to be and identified as a socialist society.

             And this is where the anomalies begin. None of these “socialist” societies behave as Marx-and I think. Most Marxists up until quite recently-thought they would. They have not eliminated classes except in a purely verbal sense; and……. they have not attempted to follow a course which could have the long-run effect of eliminating classes. The state has not disappeared; no one could expect it to, except in a still distant future; but on the contrary, it has become more and more the central and dominant institution of society. Each interprets proletarian internationalism to mean support of its own interests and policies as interpreted by it self. They go to war not only in self defense but to impose their will on other countries, even ones that are also assumed to be socialist. The result has been a deep crisis in Marxian theory…… the trouble with the Marxist hypothesis is that it quickly leads to many anomalies”.

                  Sweezy calls Marxism ‘….a magnificent and scientific creation far superior to anything achieved by bourgeois science…” Kunh in his epoch-shaking book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolution’ says that science develops through a series of revolutions, each rejecting much that has gone before and starting on new foundations. His key concept is that of the paradigm- shift which means a new way of looking at reality. The capitalist, the socialist and the welfare societies are all at the predatory phase. All nurse predatory institutions, led by ‘crack-pot realists’ as pointed out by Thorstein Veblen. Evidently humanity is nurturing the death- wish and rushing headlong into colossal disasters. When did we come to such a doom – spelling precipice?

                 To quote Marx ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Preface to the Critique of Political Economy). Fifty thousand years back humanity made the wrong choice in the mode of production. The society of gatherers was mainly dependent on females collecting food material (80% of the food consumed by the family) from nature. The society was peaceful and contented.

               50,000 years ago, the mode of production changed from gathering fruits and roots to that of killing animals (even big ones) because of the efficiency of the killer tools invented in that period. As Marx said, this change brought about a change in consciousness. The social, political and intellectual life processes changed completely. The egalitarian society where men and women enjoyed equal rights gave way to the society of male- hunters dominating society. Labour lost its pre-eminent position in society. Instead of labour, the capacity to kill became the most respectable value in society. Thus started the first great exploitation, men exploiting women sexually and also in the field of labour when hunters turned into warriors. Women facilitated this process initially by preferring meat diet to fruit and root diet and choosing hunters to peaceful caring and sharing people as sexual partners. The chiefs of warrior society became kings and men imagined a super- natural king of kings whom they called God. Thus religions had their birth. The non-labouring leisure classes of rulers, warriors, men of religions and sports men cultivating physical fitness for becoming better warriors came into prominence. Thorstein Veblen’s book ‘The Theory of the leisure class’ refers to these classes as the important members of the predatory society that dominate the modern world. Not only economic science but all most all our systems of knowledge are not free from the predatory consciousness.


                   Capitalism is destroying society. Socialism is the only way out. What sort of socialism do we need? Man is a product of nature and society. Our knowledge of nature and society is always expanding. We have to take account of the latest discoveries in science. Does nature have a purpose in creating man? In the animal world, man alone developed the capacity to control the violent tendencies of his amygdale through his pre-frontal cortex. This shows a direction tendency from violence to non-violence. There is also the existence of mirror neurons in human brain alone. Mirror neurons are there in the brain of the chimpanzee. But they are much less in quantity. Mirror neurons are the nurses of empathy. This also shows a direction tendency towards solidarity (MAITRI) with all living beings.

                Brian Goodwin is a biologist, professor of biology at the Open University outside London. Erode. He wrote, …… ‘The metaphors I use are related to emergence and creativity and the concept of the creative cosmos. Evolution is an aspect of this creativity. The central metaphor I feel emerging in the new biology is all connected with creativity. You see, in genetic reductionism Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness par excellence. Genes are not themselves creative but function within the context of the organism, which is.
                 Whitehead’s phrase for evolution is “the creative advance into novelty’. This dance of creation is a never-ending dance that goes nowhere but is simply expressing itself’…….

               ‘Darwinism stresses conflict and competition; that does’t square with the evidence. A lot of organisms that survive are in no sense superior to those that have gone extinct. It’s not a question of being “better than”, It’s simply a matter of finding a place where you can be yourself. That’s what evolution is about. That’s why you can see it as a dance. It’s not going any where, it’s simply exploring a space of possibilities………

               There’s still struggle in the sense that if you’re going to be creative you have to believe in you ideas and struggle for them. Every single species has a struggle. But because there is as much co-operation among species as there is competition, the struggle is to express your being, your nature. These are metaphors whereby science can begin to connect with the arts: people, being creative and playing. There’s nothing trivial about play. Play is the most fundamental of all human activities and culture can be seen as play.

                  There’s too much work in our culture, and there’s too much accumulation of goods. The whole capitalist trip is an awful treadmill that’s extremely destructive. It needs to be balanced out. This is why indigenous cultures are beginning to be recognized for their valuesbecause they were not accumulating goods; they were living in harmony. They were expressing their own natures as cultures. Nature and culture then come together.……”

                   FRANCISCO VARELA is a biologist, director of research at the centre National de Recherché Scientifique, and professor of cognitive science and epistemology at the Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris. He wrote, “I guess I’ve had only one question all my life. Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it does not cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is a key and eternal question.”

                A great scientist, Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, “In a sense human genes have surrendered their primacy in human evolution to an entirely new non-biological or super organic agent, culture.”

              Scientists at the world level are engaged in a controversy regarding the subject of socio-biology. EO Wilson, a prize-winner socio-biologist, thinks that the science of biology can provide the way to solve the problems of humanity. Scientists opposing him are led by Gould and Lewontin.

             A scientist writes, “….including Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin… formed ‘The Sociobiology Study Group, noting… that theories that attempted to establish a biological foundation to social behaviour provided an ‘important basis… for the eugenic policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany”.

               American and European thinkers and scholars as well as thinkers and scholars of other countries influenced by them have missed the true path for humanity fixed by nature. The controversy regarding socio- biology among two groups of scientists illustrates this position.

               Einstein throws doubt on the systems of knowledge that are prevalent in the present predatory society. Both the groups supporting and opposing socio-biology become irrelevant in a non-predatory society though it can not be denied that the Marxist thinkers have a lofty aim.

               The phenomenon of emergence all ways leads to the creation of a new entity devoid of the qualities and characteristics of the constituting elements. The creation of man is an emergent phenomenon and can not be under stood by studying the genes alone. Genetic determinism is discredited but the role of science can not be denied in under standing humanity. Human societies took different shapes in different climes and different countries. Science was the greatest gift of nature to humanity and the only community, non-predatory in nature, used science (‘Science and Society in Ancient India’ by D. P. Chatterji) to reach great heights of world Maitri (SOLIDARITY) can not be ignored in the name of natural fallacy. The unique nature of ‘emergent’ man (‘woman’ is a more truthful word) in pre-Vedic India has not been studied properly by scholars.

                Has nature any purpose in creating man? All most all the leading scholars deny the role of ‘purpose’ in creation. Scientist Brian Goodwin uses the words ‘play’ and ‘dance’. In India, we have a better word. That word is ‘Lila’. Creation is nature’s ‘Lila’ and covers both the words ‘play’ and ‘dance’. The purpose of nature is that its ‘Lila’ does not come to a stop at any time. If any creature destroys other creatures by becoming omni-potent, nature’s ‘Lila’ can not go on. ‘Lila’ is a spontaneous process and can go on when all elements flourish and vanish spontaneously. Any type of violence will disturb ‘Lila’. Nature uses male nature of the carnivores (tigers, lions and other such creatures) to check their population. Carnivores destroy their own progeny. This goes against the conceptions of the survival of the fittest and the selfish gene (Richard Dawkins).

               Prof. Robin Dunbar and his colleagues give priority to social evolution before the brain development of the human species. According to them the bigger brain is the gift of nature to the animal whose range of Maitri (solidarity) extends to bigger circles of the same species.

 Bhagwat Prasad Rath,
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