Darwin on the left

I've been meandering lately though some musings on the relationship between human evolution and social life. Some recent posts have looked at how Darwin's ideas were received and celebrated on the political right. A look at how Darwin was received on the left seems to be in order now.

One lefty contemporary of Darwin's who eagerly received his ideas was none other than Karl Marx, who saw some similarities between the former's ideas his own materialist theory of history. He wrote in a letter to another radical leader that

Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history.

Marx was also amused to find that Darwin projected the workings of capitalism onto nature:

It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening-up of new markets, 'inventions,' and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence.'

(Marx had snarky things to say about everybody.)

It seems, though, that Marx believed that once people became human, social relations of labor and interaction (including especially economic relations) were the decisive factor. In the "Theses on Feuerbach," he wrote that

the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

His sidekick Friedrich Engels followed suit in viewing humans as uniquely developing through conscious production, which he believed "makes impossible any immediate transference of the laws of life in animal societies to human ones."

This basic denial of human nature was to become a dogma of the communist movement, with disastrous consequences.

RIGHT WING BACKLASH? This writer doesn't think so.

"THE WAR ON ARITHMETIC." Paul Krugman was not impressed with the "Pledge to America."

SIX MONTHS DOWN. Here's a look at what health care reform means, with a special focus on primary care. And here's is coverage of a press conference on the same from the Gazette and WV Public Radio.

A NOD TO THE BOSS. This book excerpt celebrates Bruce Springsteen.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Radical minds

It would be hard to think of two people more different than Henry David Thoreau and Karl Marx, but the transcendentalist and the red exile sounded alike in their critique of early capitalism.

Particularly in his early writings, the young Marx denounced the alienation of the workers and their degradation in an industrial system that reduced the individual worker to "an appendage to the machine." The hyper-individualist Henry picked up on the same theme, noting in Walden that

lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

He also noted that

the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer

This rant about social inequality from Walden could go toe to toe with those in the Communist Manifesto:

The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world.

I'm not sure what he thought could be done about it, given his distaste for collective action, but at least he saw it. It's also interesting that he almost accidentally gave the world a blueprint for nonviolent action in his essay on civil disobedience.

YOUR GOOD DEED FOR THE DAY would be to call your US senators and urge them to pass HB 4213 with an amendment to extend COBRA benefits and help states avoid layoffs and cuts to services by extending the federal Medicaid match for another six months. The bill would extend key provisions of the recovery act, including jobless benefits. Families USA has provided a toll free number: 888-340-6521.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, the public supports continuing the benefits mentioned above.

MYOPIA. Economist Dean Baker takes another swipe at deficit hawks. If they win, he argues, the recession and accompanying unemployment are likely to linger.

SPIDER GIRL FIGHTS can be deadly.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The first rebel

Ouch! That had to hurt. A 17th century painting of Prometheus by Jacob Jordaens, courtesy of wikipedia.

Welcome to Goat Rope's latest series on Everything You Always Wanted to Know (or not) about Greek Tragedy. If you want to skip this part, you can scroll down for links and comments about current events. If, on the other hand, you are a budding or a seasoned classics dork, please click on earlier posts.

Aeschylus was the earliest tragedian whose works survive. Out of dozens and dozens of his plays, only seven survive, which is a real tragedy. Included among his surviving works is the only intact trilogy, the Orestes cycle, which includes the Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and the Eumenides.

I'm going to start a survey of his work with Prometheus Bound, the first and unfortunately only remaining work of a trilogy on the Titan who rebelled against Zeus to help humanity and paid a terrible price.

This is a deep myth, one that predates Aeschylus by centuries and has continued to inspire art and thought for thousands of years afterward. But it was Aeschylus' version that made the biggest impression.

Later generations of religious and political radicals would seize on the Titan who stole the fire of the gods and gave it to helpless humans as the founder of their line.

The English poet Percy Shelley, the archetypal romantic rebel, wrote a revolutionary play in 1820 called Prometheus Unbound. His widow Mary Shelley would subtitle her novel Frankenstein as The Modern Prometheus (although the analogy doesn't quite seem to work).

Another rebel, the young Karl Marx, in his doctoral dissertation on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature called Prometheus "the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar."

Herman Melville in Moby-Dick compared Captain Ahab to Prometheus:

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

And, while we're at it, the rebellious composer Franz Liszt composed a work in his honor.

All of which is to say, this story has legs. More to come...

CHEW ON THIS. From Democracy Now, here's an interview with Michael Pollan on the politics of food.

CAP AND TRADE. Here's Paul Krugman on current climate change proposals.

UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT. West Virginia's recently privatized workers compensation system is messing with people again. This looks like it could be a nice little fight.

THE UNION PREMIUM. Yet another study shows that unionized workers get a better deal.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED