Friday, June 5, 2015

Dialectical Materialism and Evolution

One theme of Marxism is that Capitalism is inherently unjust, to be corrected by the collectivization of the means of production. An independent theme is that human affairs are the expression of an historical process governed by Dialectical Materialism, one episode of which is the transition from Capitalism to Socialism. But, that grounding of the transition is undermined by Evolutionism, according to which, human history is only one phase of a much longer natural history. For, as 'Social Darwinists' show, the application of the principle of 'survival of the fittest' to human history restores Capitalism to its privileged status in human society. So, in the absence of a Dialectical Materialist concept of Natural History, of which human History is a special phase, Marxism might benefit from jettisoning the historical theme entirely.

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