"We Are Both"

In Chapter 18 of his 1798 book “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, English scholar Thomas Malthus wrote:

“The savage would slumber forever under his tree unless he were roused from his torpor by the cravings of hunger or the pinching of cold and the exertions that he makes to avoid these evils, by procuring food and building himself a covering, are the exercises which from and keep in motion his faculties, which otherwise would sink into listless inactivity… The Supreme Being has ordained that the Earth shall not produce food in great quantities until much preparatory labor and ingenuity had been exercise upon its surface…. In order to rouse man into action and form his mind to reason.”

78 years later, on page 120 of his May 28, 1876 autobiography “Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Character”, English naturalist Charles Darwin recalled:

“In October 1838 that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variation would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of new species.”

The concept that Darwin is describing is what English anthropologist; biologist and sociologist Herbert Spencer would later term in Volume 1 Chapter 3: “The Evolution of Life” of his 1864 “Principles of Biology” as “survival of the fittest”.

21 years after the period Darwin describes, in Chapter 3: “Struggle for Existence” of his November 24, 1859 book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, he wrote:

“As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species or with the individuals of distinct species or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”

Darwin concluded his book “On the Origin of Species” by writing:

“Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”

Three years after Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published, in a June 18, 1862 letter to his fellow German philosopher, social scientist and political theorist Friederich Engels, Karl Marx damns Darwin with faint praise:

“I’m amused that Darwin, at whom I’ve been taking another look, should say that he also applies the Malthusian theory to plants and animals, as though in Malthus’s case the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals but only—with its geometric progression—to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, inventions and Malthusian struggle for existence. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omens…in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.”

Marx, the author of the February 1848 “The Communist Manifesto” was a revolutionary socialist. The American Heritage Dictionary of Cultural Literacy defines socialism as “An economic system in which production and distribution of good are controlled substantially by the government rather than by private enterprise and in which cooperation rather than competition guides economic activity.” The Collins English Dictionary elaborates that socialism is “characterized by production for use rather than profit, by equality of individual wealth, by the absence of competitive economic activity and usually by government determination of investment, process and production levels.”

Whilst Marx was correct that, in his “Origin of Species” Darwin focused primarily on competition ^[3] as being the primary driving force behind evolution, in the more than a century and a half since Darwin’s book was published, scientists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have increasingly discovered the importance of cooperation ^[1] in the forms of coevolution, coexistence and symbiosis ^[2][5]. From Marx’s perspective, by projecting the infrastructure of his own capitalist society onto the animal kingdom, what Darwin was doing was implying that capitalism such as that found in his native England was the natural state not only of humans but also of all animals and indeed all life. As a revolutionary, challenging the status quo, Marx objected to this as it rendered his movement to make his society communist at the very least quixotic if not futile.

The reality is, of course, that the world seldom if ever operates in such concrete black and white terms. Darwin’s analysis of the animal and plant kingdoms of life displaying a competition for survival reminiscent of the one Malthus described in humans was accurate. But so, as it turns out, was Marx’s belief that cooperation must be just as much a part of the natural world as is competition.

Just as Darwin took the theories Malthus developed for human society and applied them to the natural world, so too can we take this lesson of the natural world and apply it back to human society. Just as nature does not operate in black and white terms, neither does society. The reason why neither Darwin nor Marx was either entirely right nor entirely wrong in their respective perspectives on life is the same reason why neither capitalism nor socialism are an accurate way of describing the most efficacious organization of a socioeconomic system. Just like, as scientists are discovering, the natural world functions through a mixture of equal parts competition and cooperation, so too are the most prosperous and successful socioeconomic systems in the world likewise mixtures of elements taken from both capitalism and socialism.

In his April 5, 2005 book “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century”, Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that “Communism was a great system for making people equally poor—in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.” That is to say, unfettered capitalism often referred to as “vulture capitalism”, results in extreme income inequality and a vast wealth gap between the wealthiest and the poorest. By eliminating private property, as Marx strove to do, wealth inequity is abolished…along with wealth itself…for everyone.

This demonstrates the challenge that is presented by the task of attempting to categorize the phenomenon of socioeconomic globalization as being either a positive or a negative. It is both and it is neither simultaneously. The capitalistic elements of economic globalization can and do lead to drastic wealth gaps between developed first world and underdeveloped third world countries. However, the more distributive or redistributive elements lead to countries that would not have been otherwise being exposed to liberal progressive ideals such as the freedom of expression and leading them out of the oppressive sociopolitical, often theocratic religious institutions that had heretofore retarded their intellectual achievement and societal scientific progress towards joining the post-Enlightenment scientific revolution information age. Each of these has textbook examples in relatively recent history. For the capitalism of economic globalization leading to the systematic and systemic institutionalized exploitation by wealthy countries of the underdeveloped third world, the most obvious case in point is that of the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade from the relatively undeveloped continent of Africa to the Imperialistic kingdoms of Western Europe and their overseas colonies in the Americas. More recently, however, on the other hand, for globalization opening up heretofore closed parts of the world to joining the free world in the information age, perhaps the most transformative instrument of globalization in the known recorded history of civilization is the world wide internet.

The natural world is not wholly, as English journalist Rudyard Kipling described it in his 1894 story “The Jungle Book”: “Red in tooth and claw”, as Darwin portrayed it in his “Origin of Species”. Nor is it, however, as Marx may have wanted, an egalitarian paradise based upon foundations of fundamental universal equality and cooperation. Likewise, socioeconomic globalization is not purely the great equalizer that the Internet and the foundation of organizations such as the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may make it appear. Neither, though, is it necessarily the great Satan, perpetrator and perpetuator of any and all economic inequalities and iniquities suffered by people of the underdeveloped world.
Nature is both.

Globalization is both.

1. Gatti, Roberto. “Cooperation, Not Struggle for Survival, Drives Evolution”. Tomsk State University. May 12, 2016: http://en.tsu.ru/news/cooperation-not-struggle-for-survival-drives-evolution/
2. Pollack, Jordan and Watson, Richard. “How Symbiosis Can Guide Evolution”. Brandeis University. 1999: http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/papers/ecal_hsge.pdf
3. Singer, Emily. “Competition May Not Be the Driving Force of Species Diversity After All”. WIRED Magazine. March 18, 2014: https://www.wired.com/2014/03/bird-evolution/
4. Wilson, Edward. “Groups Are the Driving Force of Human Evolution”. Rice University. April 6, 2012: http://news.rice.edu/2012/04/06/groups-are-the-driving-force-of-human-evolution-wilson-says/
5. Zook, Douglas. “Symbiosis as a Driving Force of Evolution”. American Association for the Advancement of Science. February 2013: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267541999_Symbiosis_as_a_Driving_Force_of_Evolution