1. One noteworthy aspect of Darwinian historical materialism is that it attempts to draw together, and hopefully synthesize, both Darwinian and Marxian elements.
The Marxian emphasis upon production and the Darwinian emphasis upon reproduction have usually been seen as the bases for rival explanatory strategies in attempting to explain the long-term trends and large-scale patterns of human history and society. In my view, however, production and reproduction play different explanatory roles in, respectively, historical materialism and natural selection. Once this is understood, and once production and reproduction are placed within the explanatory structure I am suggesting, they can be seen as complementary rather than as competing factors in historical explanation.
The Marxian element of Darwinian historical materialism lies in its emphasis upon productive development as explaining the extent, rate and direction of social change. Marxian historical materialism claims (and Darwinian historical materialism agrees) that those traits that enhance levels of production, given the existing productive circumstances, will tend to spread. So the existing productive circumstances explain which traits will enhance levels of production, and these traits will tend to replace traits that no longer enhance levels of production so effectively in the prevailing circumstances. (Though productive circumstances, and therefore historical trajectories, varied from region to region.)
But this claim leaves unanswered the question of how the production-enhancing traits spread. In other words, it lacks a mechanism for the adaptive explanations that it suggests.
To illustrate this, consider an analogous formulation of the theory of natural selection: natural selection claims that those inherited traits that enhance reproduction, given the existing relationship between the organisms and their environment, will tend to spread. So the existing relationship between the organisms and their environment explains which traits will enhance levels of reproduction, and those traits will tend to replace traits that no longer enhance reproduction so effectively in the prevailing circumstances.
If we ask how the reproduction-enhancing traits spread, the answer is obvious: inherited traits that enhance reproduction spread through, and therefore because of, their effect on reproduction.
(I am here ignoring the complication that natural selection focuses upon differential survival as well as differential reproduction (Sober, 1984, 38-46), and am subsuming the former under the latter.)
Take an obvious example. The varying relationships between different groups of Galapagos finches and their different environments (especially the relationships between their particular feeding habits and the available foodstuffs) explains which beak variants will tend to enhance reproductive success, and differential reproductive success between finches with varying beak forms explains how those variants tend to spread within those groups (Ruse, 1982, 115-24).
So, in natural selection, the relationship between the organisms and their environment (particularly, perhaps, the organisms’ mode of extracting resources from their environment) explains which inherited traits will enhance their reproductive success, and differential reproductive success explains how those traits will spread.
In historical materialism, however, traits that enhance production cannot spread simply through, and therefore because of, their effect on production. Unlike enhanced reproduction, enhanced production does not, of itself, increase the representation of the production-enhancing traits in a (human) population.
So Darwinian historical materialism becomes Darwinian by adding the mechanism of differential reproductive success, arguing that those variations that enhance production (in the given productive circumstances) spread because they thereby enhance reproductive success. This, of course, assumes that differences in reproductive success are largely explained by differences in (what we could call) ‘productive success’, so more productive groups can generally support more people per unit area than less productive groups.
Production and reproduction play quite different explanatory roles here. Production explains which traits will enhance reproduction, and reproduction explains how those traits spread. To be a little more precise, productive circumstances (including productively-relevant features of the environment) explain which traits will tend to enhance production, and therefore enhance reproductive success, and differential reproductive success explains how those traits spread.
(Some Marxian historical materialists will object at this point that historical materialism does have a mechanism for replacing social structures that inhibit productive development with social structures that enhance productive development: revolution, brought about by class struggle. I am sceptical about this proposal, and I discuss some problems with it in section 4 below.)
2. Human beings, however, can spread cultural traits independently of reproduction and, historically, conquest has been an important way of doing this. So Darwinian historical materialism sees differential military success as another important selective mechanism underpinning tendencies to directional change in human history (directional change in both productive power and military power).
The connection between production and military power is, of course, crucial here. The argument is that more productive groups can reproduce more warriors, can better equip them, train them, and supply them, and can continue to do this for longer, than less productive groups. More productive groups will, therefore, tend to be more militarily successful than less productive groups. (And sometimes groups can enjoy greater reproductive success because of greater military success.)
Of course, groups/societies can emulate other groups/societies without being conquered by them. But this ‘diffusion’ of cultural traits is likely to be historically significant only to the extent that it involves the emulation/adoption of (productively, reproductively or militarily) more successful traits. Which traits these are is rarely, if ever, obvious; and if diffusion involved the emulation/adoption of less successful traits, then the societies concerned would be less likely to prosper, and the traits less likely to spread. So even significant diffusion does not eliminate the importance of the ‘blind’ selective processes of differential reproductive and/or military success, at the very least in making clearer which traits are worth emulating/adopting. And the threat of conquest (or even partial conquest) might add some necessary urgency to the need to change, thereby making it more likely that the opposition of powerful vested interests can be overcome.
Differential reproductive and/or military success, then, will lead to the spread of those traits that, given the existing character of production, enhance levels of productive power. So the existing character of production explains which traits will enhance productive power, and thereby enhance reproductive and/or military success; and differential reproductive and/or military success explain how those traits spread.
3. Like natural selection, Darwinian historical materialism claims that the process of change begins with small-scale variations (between groups/societies). However, unlike Darwinian natural selection, in which genetically-based traits are physically transmitted in the process of reproduction, for Darwinian historical materialism this variation involves cultural traits that are behaviourally transmitted.
Following from this stress upon small-scale variation, the theory emphasizes gradual (though not necessarily peaceful) historical change. So, whatever the conceptual distinctions, historically there is no clear dividing line between complex, sedentary hunter-gatherers and proto-horticulturalists, or between complex chiefdoms and proto-states.
The theory does not, however, preclude rapid historical change (any more than natural selection precludes periods of relatively rapid evolutionary change). Indeed, the larger populations that the process leads to can generate more innovations than smaller populations (although these would still be ‘random’ with respect to long-term directional change), and denser population should allow these innovations to spread more quickly, so historical change should accelerate over the long term. And it is because of long previous histories of gradual change, at rates and in ways that varied from region to region and from continent to continent, that societies at very different levels of productive development, reproductive fitness and military power (such as Europeans and native Americans or native Australians) eventually confront each other. Such confrontations can then lead to relatively rapid historical change in particular regions or continents.
4. In emphasizing gradual change via the mechanisms of differential reproductive and/or military success, Darwinian historical materialism differs from Marxian historical materialism, in which the existing social structure fetters or inhibits productive development, and revolution brought about by class struggle is the means by which a new social structure that enhances productive development is established.
One obvious way of understanding this Marxian conception is to see it as a form of rational choice mechanism for historical materialism. Such a mechanism would suppose that, standardly, enough people would be knowledgeable and rational enough to identify, have the (self) interest to prefer, and be willing enough to rebel in order to install, those social structures that enhance production in the given productive circumstances.
I am sceptical about how robust a mechanism this is likely to be. Even in the highly unlikely event that all of these conditions are met, I suspect that the unpredictable and unintended consequences that arise out of the conflicts and compromises of revolutions are unlikely to reliably establish a social structure that is an improvement (in terms of its effect on productive development) over the old regime. Moreover, whether or not the social and political structures established by revolution did represent an adaptive improvement, the resulting regime would still have to survive in the external selection process of reproductive and military competition with other polities.
This last observation prompts the suggestion that revolution could, though, be a source of random social variation. In this scenario, revolution could break out against an ancien regime riven with problems (perhaps brought about by its failure in military struggles against more productively successful powers). The chaos of the revolution might happen to result in the installation of a new regime that is more conducive to productive development. But it is perhaps equally likely that the chaos gives birth to a new regime that is no more (or even less) conducive to productive development than the old regime. In this latter case, continuing economic problems, social conflict and revolutions are perhaps likely. This picture of revolution as a generator of random social variation perhaps bears some resemblance to the histories of France in the 18th and 19th (and even 20th) centuries, of China in the 19th and 20th centuries, or even of Russia in the 20th century. (See Bertram (1990) and Carling (1991, 1993) for discussion of similar approaches.)
My second suggestion (for a role that revolution could play in a Darwinian historical materialism) is that revolution could be subsumed within the mechanisms of differential reproductive and/or military success, because it is possible that revolution could play a selective role between different social forms.
For example, a manufacturing-mercantile mode of production could develop within the interstices of, or at least within the same polity as, an agrarian society. As this mode of production develops, and becomes productively (and so reproductively and/or militarily) more powerful, then conflicts could develop between the landed agrarian interests and the manufacturing-mercantile interests over the overall forms of social and political structures. If the manufacturing-mercantile interests were sufficiently powerful (productively, reproductively, militarily), these conflicts could lead to the revolutionary overthrow of the old regime and the installation of a regime friendlier to the development of the manufacturing-mercantile mode of production.
This, of course, seems to be close to the classical Marxian conception of ‘bourgeois revolution’ that is applied, with various modifications, to the 17th century English Revolution and even the 19th century US Civil War. But for Darwinian historical materialism this would be a case of a productively (and therefore reproductively and/or militarily) more powerful group triumphing over a less productively powerful group, whatever the various motivations and ideologies involved.
A slightly different variant of this same conception would be one in which such a manufacturing-mercantile mode of production develops as a colony of a larger imperial power, and eventually rebels against the restriction placed upon it by the colonial power. This example, suitably modified in each case, perhaps applies to the 16th-17th centuries Dutch Revolt and the 18th century American War of Independence.
Just like the other scenarios discussed above, this scenario also needs to take account of the inter-societal reproductive and military competition that will be the arbiter of success or failure here.
And, because the outcomes are the product of military conflict involving innumerable different and conflicting motivations, and leading to innumerable unintended consequences, rather than of a straightforwardly rational decision-making process, these scenarios presuppose no more than a minimal degree of rational choice. So these scenarios of revolutions as generators of ‘random’ social variation, or as one form of selection, are very different to a view of revolutions as the standard, more or less rational way of overthrowing a production-fettering social structure and replacing it with a social structure known to be production-enhancing.
Which of these is closest to classical Marxism is not an issue that concerns me much. Marx refers to ‘the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict [between ‘the material productive forces of society’ and ‘the existing relations of production’] and fight it out’. This does not seem to suggest a very high degree of rationality in the revolutionary process, and I think that such scepticism is appropriate. On the other hand, Marxists, while emphasizing intra-polity conflict, seem to largely ignore the role of inter-polity conflict when they describe the fundamental explanatory structure of historical materialism, and I think that this is a quite crucial error.
5. Marxian historical materialism has traditionally been seen as providing support for revolutionary politics of the sort (once) favoured by (at least some) Marxists. But these shifts from class struggle/revolution to differential reproductive and/or military success, and from ‘catastrophism’ to gradualism, mean that Darwinian historical materialism provides no such support for revolutionary politics.
This does not, on the other hand, entail that Darwinian historical materialism precludes revolutionary politics in favour of another kind of politics. I am suspicious of too close a connection being drawn between theories of history and any contemporary politics. This is not because basing one’s politics upon a theory of history would violate an is/ought distinction (or was/ought distinction, perhaps). It is because I think that history and the politics of any particular period operate in different time scales, and that history is not fractal: the long-term is not simply a macro recapitulation of the short-term; and the short-term is not simply a micro version of the long-term. I think that there is a crucial disjunct between the two.
Darwinian historical materialism claims that differential reproductive and military success give rise to persistent tendencies to productive development and to production-enhancing social change. But that macro-historical claim does not preclude enormous amounts of variation around those large-scale and long-term trends and patterns. Indeed, Darwinian historical materialism relies upon this small-scale variation, variation that is then ‘sifted’ by the selective processes of differential reproductive and military success, giving rise to large-scale and long-term historical phenomena (just as natural selection relies for its continuing operation upon variation around the large-scale and long-term evolutionary phenomena that natural selection itself has produced). So Darwinian historical materialism expects considerable micro variation around the macro-historical trends and patterns that differential reproductive and military success give rise to. For people living in any particular historical period, this micro variation will probably be seen as overwhelmingly more important than any macro trends and patterns. Their politics will therefore, entirely appropriately, involve focusing upon these ‘micro’ issues. And while some of this micro variation may be (partly) explicable in terms of a theory of long-term historical development, much of it may not be, and will almost certainly not be predictable by such a theory.
(This variation can be thought of as ‘random’ variation. But ‘random’, in this context, does not mean ‘inexplicable in terms of the theory’. It means, instead, that the variations do not occur because they would enhance production, reproduction, or military power.)
Darwinian historical materialism is intended to apply primarily to the explanation of macro-historical phenomena. Indeed, many historians (Marxian and non-Marxian) who are interested in macro-historical topics already focus on the connections between production and/or reproduction and/or warfare.
So, when a historian of international relations gives his account of the changing fortunes of the ‘great powers’ the subtitle Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (Kennedy, 1988), or when two economic historians entitle their history of trade and warfare over the last millennium Power and Plenty (Findlay and O’Rourke, 2007), or when an economic historian calls his classic study of population history The Economic History of World Population (Cipolla, 1978), or when an archaeologist develops a ‘social development index’ linking energy capture, information technology, military power, and social complexity over several millennia (Morris, 2010; 2013), they are focusing upon the issues that Darwinian historical materialism regards as central to macro-historical explanation. Of course, these scholars may only focus upon two of the three (for me) crucial phenomena, and they may not connect them together into a general model of historical change, but they are working in the same conceptual territory as Darwinian historical materialism.
6. Given the large amounts of variation around macro-historical phenomena, then, Darwinian historical materialism has decreasing explanatory purchase to the extent that the focus of historical inquiry changes to smaller stretches of time and space. But less explanatory purchase does not mean no explanatory purchase when it comes to explaining historical phenomena below the macro-historical level of centuries or millennia. Darwinian historical materialism can adopt and adapt the categories used by historians in order to supplement its own conceptual apparatus. Insofar as these categories are compatible with the general orientation of Darwinian historical materialism, and they are supported by evidence, there is no reason why Darwinian historical materialism cannot use them. But as attention shifts even further towards micro-historical topics, and is decreasingly guided by any explicit theoretical perspectives, then Darwinian historical materialism may be relevant simply in explaining the context within which micro-historical events occur. So Darwinian historical materialism would suggest that purely micro-historical analyses or narratives can be enriched when set against a background that can be explained by Darwinian historical materialism.
(In this context, something that does perhaps distinguish Darwinian historical materialism from historiography with more of a micro-historical focus is similar to that which distinguishes Darwinian evolutionary biology from an atheoretical naturalism. Both theories seek to explain macro phenomena in their respective objects of study, but also to connect the macro with the micro in ways that do not violate the differences between them. Micro phenomena provide variation that selection of one sort or another sifts, eventually giving rise to macro phenomena; and macro phenomena provide the context within which micro-level variation occurs.)
Take the history of the 20th century as an example. The main events of this century are well known: the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism, the rise of Fascism, the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust, the spread of Communism and the Cold War, the Chinese Revolution, the decline of the colonial empires, the break up of the Communist bloc and of the Soviet Union, and the replacement of Communism by various kinds of capitalist states.
But these events took place within a context that was the result of a long historical process of rising production, population and military power, and the development of increasingly complex societies that helped to bring about these trends (and thereby spread). By the beginning of the 20th century, the habitable parts of the world were largely covered by centralised state-level societies, with unprecedentedly dense and growing populations, supported by unprecedentedly high levels of production. The populations of these societies were divided by marked inequalities in economic and political power, both within and between genders. These inequalities had developed over millennia primarily as ways of intensifying and enhancing production. Many of the ethnic hierarchies that also characterised these societies were the results of previous expansions of more productive societies at the expense of less productive societies. Elites attempted to stabilise these divided societies using nationalist and religious ideologies as much as possible, supplemented by concessions and/or coercion when necessary.
These states were also, of course, involved in military competition with each other. Some of these competing states had been able, through initially small productive advantages, to use their resulting military power to build global empires. By 1900, most of the rest of the world was either within these empires, or within the ‘spheres of influence’ of the imperial states. This imperialism had allowed these societies to export some of their own growing populations, displacing indigenous peoples to the extent that it was advantageous, or merely subjugating and exploiting them to the extent that that was advantageous. Their increasingly dominant position within the world economy had helped these more productively developed states to industrialize, and had also allowed them to undermine the manufacturing economies of other regions, and these processes had further widened the production gap between themselves and the rest of the world. As these states industrialized, their armed forces had developed increasingly industrialized forms of warfare that they inflicted upon others (and would soon inflict upon each other).
Darwinian historical materialism can certainly explain the macro-historical processes that created this context within which the events of the 20th century unfolded. Thus it can contribute to explaining the events themselves. But Darwinian historical materialism could not have predicted any of these particular events. None of them happened because they enhanced production, reproduction or military power for any of the states involved. Some of them may have had such effects, and they may even have been intended to have those effects by the agents who brought them about. But we cannot explain the remote effects of events such as these by the intentions of the relevant agents. Given the immense complexity of these events, and the millions of conflicting motivations and behaviours involved, any congruence between the intentions of some of the agents and the eventual effects of their actions is better viewed as an accident (happy for some, and tragic for others).
So Darwinian historical materialism could not have predicted the main events of the 20th century, though it could help to explain them after the fact. It is not, of course, the primary aim of Darwinian historical materialism to explain, still less to predict, specific events.
But that is not the end of the matter. The 20th century ended as it began, with the extensive and intensive growth of industrial capitalism across the world. As far as long-term historical change was concerned, it is almost as if the intervening history, from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 to the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991, had never happened.
Alien observers who left earth in 1900 and only returned in 2000 would have noticed this spread of capitalism, along with massive changes in productive technology, population, and military power. Other than these, perhaps the only other major developments that would have struck them would have been the (virtual) disappearance of the colonial empires, the (re)drawing of national boundaries, the movement of peoples across the world (many from the colonies to the old colonial powers), and the spread of political democracy. They would have no inkling of most of the major events of the 20th century unless they came across references to them.
As their starship took off in 1900, these aliens could perhaps have predicted that, over the next 100 years, there would be considerable (industrialized) warfare between these industrializing states given the diminishing possibilities of expanding their colonies or spheres of influence without coming into conflict with each other. If they were equipped with the insights of Darwinian historical materialism, these aliens could also have predicted that the more productive (coalitions of) states would probably be victorious in those conflicts. But there would be no reason to predict any of the specific events mentioned above on the basis of the theory of history. They could not have known which states would fight on which side in these wars, the nature of the states that would fight them, or how these different kinds of states would initially emerge.
But Darwinian historical materialism could have predicted the growth of production, population and military power, and it could also have predicted that capitalism would have continued to spread as long as no rival system enhanced levels of production more.
7. The above sets out the conceptual logic of the shift from Marxian to Darwinian historical materialism, but it does not show the sequencing of my own shift from the former to the latter.
I began convinced by my reading of history of the truth of (what I then took to be) the basic historical materialist claim that productive development was the explanatory core of human history, that the major social changes in human history were explained by the development of productive techniques. (Though I had no coherent idea as to how these explanatory claims could be elaborated.)
I also felt strongly that historical materialism was, precisely, a materialism, that it saw human history and society as irrevocably emplaced within the natural world. I thought, to paraphrase (I think) Trotsky, that to understand the (changing) relationships between people, we must first understand the (changing) relationships between people and (the rest of) the natural world, particularly as expressed in the activity of production.
I did not find much that was materialist in this sense in the work of those who explicitly espoused historical materialism. But that changed around 1980 when I came across the works of the philosopher G. A. Cohen (1978) and the anthropologist Marvin Harris (1979).
(See also The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, by anthropologists Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle (2000), which adopts a materialist perspective similar to that of Harris.)
I was impressed with Jerry Cohen’s analytical rigour in explicating and defending historical materialism, and also with the scope of Marvin Harris’s ‘cultural materialism’. But my concurrent readings in evolutionary biology and natural selection (Darwin himself, Dawkins, Gould, Ruse, Sober, and so on) left me disappointed that neither Cohen nor Harris founded historical/cultural materialism upon Darwinian natural selection. Moreover, neither of them suggested a mechanism for their explanatory claims that struck me as both robust and empirically well-supported. I became convinced that Darwinian natural selection could supply such a mechanism.
My first published attempt to synthesize historical materialism and natural selection was a short pamphlet, Natural Selection and Historical Materialism (1993). It established the synthesis by arguing that more productive groups would generally enjoy higher levels of reproductive success and thus, through differential reproductive success (and emulation of the reproductively more successful), tend to spread the socio-cultural characteristics that made them more productive. The operation of this process, the argument continued, would give rise to tendencies to increasing reproductive fitness and increasing productive power. That both of these tendencies seem to have been realized as historical trends supported these claims. The second part of the pamphlet was devoted to a critique of a paper by Andrew Levine and Elliott Sober (1985) that contrasted natural selection and historical materialism. I argued that there were greater structural similarities between the two than Levine and Sober allowed, and this made a synthesis between the theories more plausible.
Nine years later, the second part of this pamphlet, extensively revised and expanded, formed the basis of ‘What’s Darwinian about Historical Materialism? A Critique of Levine and Sober’ (Nolan 2002a). This resulted in a short exchange with Levine and Sober (Levine and Sober 2003; Nolan 2003). (If I reread my contribution to this exchange now, I suspect that I would find much of it irrelevant to what I wanted to achieve.)
The first part of the pamphlet reappeared, also revised and expanded, as ‘A Darwinian Historical Materialism’ (Nolan 2002b). These revisions contained what I think was an important new way of conceptualising the explanatory structure of Darwinian historical materialism. This change was inspired by an article of Jerry Cohen’s (1983) in which, responding to criticism from Phillipe van Parijs, Cohen clarified (or revised) his suggested explanatory structure for historical materialism. It took me a long time to understand this clarified/revised structure, and I only began to understand it when I realized that a similar structure was implicit in the theory of natural selection.
Natural selection claims that differential reproductive success leads to the spread of those inherited variations that enhance reproductive success. And which variations do enhance reproductive success is explained by the relationship between the organisms and their environment (particularly perhaps the way that the organisms acquire resources from their environment, their mode of production as it were).
(A natural selection of cultural variations, or a Darwinian theory of history, might claim that differential reproductive success leads to the spread of those (behaviourally-transmitted cultural) variations that enhance reproductive success. And which variations do enhance reproductive success is explained by the relationship between the people and their environment.)
I adopted an analogous structure for Darwinian historical materialism: differential reproductive success leads to the spread of those variations that enhance reproductive success (the Darwinian bit). And (because enhancing reproductive success is largely a matter of enhancing production) which variations do enhance reproductive success is explained by the way the people acquire and process resources from their environment, their mode of production (the historical materialist bit).
So I still argued, obviously, that more productive groups would enjoy higher levels of reproductive success, and thus tend to spread, through differential reproductive success, the characteristics that made them more productive. (And I still argued that the operation of this process would give rise to tendencies to increasing reproductive fitness and productive power, and that these tendencies might be realized as historical trends.) But I now added the claim that the existing productive circumstances explained which characteristics would make groups more productive, and therefore reproductively more successful. So the existing productive circumstances explained which variations would tend to spread (through differential reproductive success).
A paper published in 2006, and originally presented at a conference on the work of Jerry Cohen in 2005, was devoted to a critique of Cohen’s suggested mechanisms (he called them ‘elaborations’) for historical materialist explanations. I argued that these elaborations all involved rational choice, and were therefore not as robust as the Darwinian mechanism that I preferred. At the end of this paper, however, I suggested (in what I thought was an important qualification to the explanatory reach of Darwinian historical materialism) that, as our knowledge (including our self-knowledge) grows with the development of science, the scope for rational choice explanations of historical change could also grow, and the scope for a non- (or minimally) rational selective process might shrink.
Finally, in a paper (Nolan, 2009) responding to criticisms from David Laibman (2007), and influenced by of the work of Chris Bertram (1990) and Alan Carling (1991, 1993), I incorporated differential military success as a crucial selective force alongside differential reproductive success. I now argued that the more productive groups would enjoy higher levels of military success as well as higher reproductive success; and that differential military success would lead to the spread of those variations that (largely because they enhanced production) enhanced military success, just as differential reproductive success would lead to the spread of those variations that (also largely because they enhanced production) enhanced reproductive success.
So one way of now phrasing Darwinian historical materialism would be: differential reproductive and military success lead to the spread of those variations that enhance reproductive and military success respectively, and these are, largely, variations that enhance levels of production. And which variations do enhance levels of production, and therefore reproductive and military success, is explained by the way the people acquire and process resources from their environment, their mode of production.
In the course of developing Darwinian historical materialism, I have, at times, naively hoped that both Darwinists and Marxists would be attracted by this attempt to underpin historical materialism with a (quasi) Darwinian mechanism. In reality, of course, the Darwinists, had they noticed it at all, would no doubt have been repelled by (what they would have seen as) the Marxian elements. For their part, the Marxists were repelled by (what they saw as) the Social Darwinian elements.
In shifting from Marxian historical materialism to Darwinian historical materialism, of course, one is perhaps giving up the confidence that human liberation is virtually guaranteed by the course of human history, because increasingly rational people will, predictably, use the enormous and growing productive powers at their disposal to maximize human flourishing. But putting aside a misguided hope does not entail giving in to an equally misguided despair. When the future is uncertain, the rational response is the open-minded ‘dialectic’ of understanding the world in order to change it, and changing the world in order to understand it. A dialectic that Karl Marx, whatever his flaws, well understood.
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