Economics and Adaptation

By abstracting bartering individuals from any preconditions, including any preceding concept of 'self-interest', Smith establishes 'Economics' as an autonomous discipline. By setting those bartering individuals in the context of ongoing class relations, Marx reinforces that autonomy by supplying it with a 'History', which he occasionally violates with implicit Moral judgments concerning the treatment of workers as commodities. So, by locating that narrative in a more comprehensive Natural History, Darwinism recovers possible preconditions for Economics, thereby challenging its purported autonomy. In particular, the immediate precondition of Smith's barterers, occasionally alluded to by Marx, is their interaction with environing Nature, which Darwinism represents as an instance of adaptive behavior, spanning both breathing and extracting subterranean ore. From that perspective, Economics is a phase of Human Adaptation, with its variations to be evaluated according the criteria of the latter.