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Stuart, I have been naively scientifically open about Paul Mason’s case.  One could hardly present it more clearly in limited space.Perhaps you take offense at my sheeting home the blame for world-wide social confusion about world socialism onto the Bolsheviks and especially their unscrupulous Western politico followers.Or perhaps, oh dear, oh dear, you do maliciously agree with Paul Mason that Walmart should be forced to tell its workers how to increase their wages, etc., etc., along with the other 43 different varieties and flavours of Paul Mason’s wish list.Or perhaps you might explain why his market reform agenda is not at all foolish and utterly impossible, but is actually brilliant and totally implementable.I cannot help it if the appropriate epithet that involuntarily springs to mind is the one that Marx applied to the declarations of Henry George—they reveal the unmistakable sign of the ass’s hoof.If you, instead, perceive in them the lion’s paw (as Bernoulli detected in Newton’s unsigned proof of the brachistochrone problem) then tell me so.So, please tell me what you are really desperate to say against me in your veiled criticism?

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Socialists agree with these objectives.What socialists disagree with is that Paul Mason’s market economy, with all its attendant legislation (as listed above), is any way a post-capitalist society.  It is not the society of our Objective.

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Quite happy. I imagine you’ll eventually read the book.  I did so in a single sitting, initially encouraged, but ultimately appalled when I reached the final chapter.  I assume that you'll agree with my assessment.  In any case I’m happy for you to edit and shorten my review to make it appropriate in tone and size for the Standard.  

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Paul Mason explains the periodic growth and contraction of the capitalist economy by Kondratieff wave theory.Kondratieff waves are named after the soviet economist who imagined a 50-year periodicity in capitalist economic activity, and who then concluded that each economic cycle reflected the advent, adoption, flourishing and demise of its age’s defining technology.Kondratieff’s waves operate on a timescale midway between the epochal transformations of social systems, based on changing class ownership and control of the social means of production, and the Marxian economics of nature-imposed social reproduction under the capitalist social system, based upon its characteristic mode of class ownership and control of the social means of production.Scientifically, one would seek to explain Kondratieff’s apparent wave phenomena in Marxian terms, i.e. in terms of the social system’s essence—capital—but such attempts have so far failed to convince (which is not surprising given how contemptuously Marx’s Capital is now treated) and this intriguing problem for Marxian theory remains unresolved.However, for the purposes of Paul Mason’s argument, capitalist society has now started to ride the information technology Kondratieff wave. For Paul Mason, information technology is the surfboard that took us out to the wave and, once we master it, it will be the surfboard that rescues us from the capitalist depths and carries us to the post-capitalist shore.Our ride will take one Kondratieff period of 50 years.  But we should not take Paul’s mathematics seriously. His absurd definition of the mathematical sine wavefunction betrays his amateurism—he really should have limited his ratios to the opposite and hypotenuse of right-angled triangles.So what characterises the Kondratieff IT wave we are now on?The IT wave has already established its essential characteristics through the emergence of free Open Source software, free creative commons internet resources, free Wikipedia collaboration, etc.The IT wave’s free goods are premised on the assumption that IT development and IT maintenance require a vanishing amount of human labour, and that consequently IT software products and IT firmware-based technology possess a vanishing marginal cost (i.e. can be replicated for everybody for free).  And IT technology will invade everything we produce.Paul’s point is that this characteristic invariant of the IT wave—free technology and its technology-based products—is totally subversive of capitalism, since the indispensable compulsion for a capitalist ruling class to withhold ownership and control of the means of production from the working class, thereby forcing the working class to work on its terms, will no longer serve its capitalist purpose once everything is free.  The means of production might just as well be owned by everyone or by no-one.That, in a nutshell, is his argument.  IT will issue us into an Age of Abundance—the necessary precondition for post-capitalism to succeed.Post-capitalism will be characterised by renewable energy, neutral carbon, zero socially necessary labour time, and zero marginal cost.So far, so good, up to a point.  Some interesting socialist (in our sense) arguments, entertainingly and intelligently told, including a good discussion of the economic calculation pseudo-problem, etc.But Paul’s argument, such as it is, is grossly tainted by anti-socialist stuff (in our sense), because it is overtly saddled with Paul’s serious acceptance of duplicitous soviet and Leninist assertions that the soviet Russian economy was in any way socialist.But much worse is to come—Paul Mason’s apology for gradualism and the reformist transitional plan…Paul wants post-capitalism to preserve the capitalist state apparatus—its legislature, its judiciary, its law enforcement coercion, its commercial banks and its market.  He wants to preserve all of the capitalist social superstructure without realising that the capitalist social superstructure is a consequence of the capitalist economic foundation—ownership and control of the means of production by the capitalist class.You’d think that if he were a consistent Marxist he’d comprehend that.But, in fact, it turns out that Paul Mason is quite consistent because, despite himself, he does want to preserve capitalist relationships of ownership and control of the means of production after all. Paul is prepared to submerge the Marxian objectivity of the social organism that is capitalism beneath the epiphenomenal subjectivity of the Kondratieff wave. 
Consequently, he offers us all sorts of wonderful reforms that have no chance of succeeding in the world of Marxian objectivity, but have every chance of succeeding in his uncomprehended phenomenal world.The only Marxian answer to Paul’s reform agenda is that, while capitalist social relationships exist, his wonderful reforms have no chance of succeeding.  Once a socialist majority consciously abolishes capitalist social relations of ownership and control of the social means production, Paul’s wonderful reform agenda becomes redundantly unnecessary and effectively meaningless.If this seems an unnecessarily harsh judgment on Paul Mason, judge for yourself from the legislation, and the prevailing social relations under which it is to be promulgated, that he wants society to pass while in its IT Kondratieff wave.Here is Paul’s list…Keep the market (oh dear, oh dear, oh dear)Only suppress market forces for energySuppress all monopolies (oh dear, the free market nirvana)Regulate the rate of profitEnforce profits to be plowed back into social justice (oh dear, “profits for social justice”)Force McDonalds to induct employees with a one-hour course in trade unionismForce McDonalds to stop dispensing promotional plastic toysForce Walmart to advise employees how to increase their wages (oh dear, what planet is he on?)Make WiFi free to break up the telco monopoliesOutlaw price fixing (except by the government)Break up Apple/Google by public ownershipCheapen the cost of basic necessities (oh dear, the capitalist’s desideratum)Produce more stuff for freeSell water, energy, housing, transport, healthcare, telecommunications and education at cost priceShrink (national and personal) debtDestroy market forcesForbid monopoly pricesEuthenase the renter (or perhaps the rentier)Reward creativity—the market will reward entrepreneurship and genius (which he utterly misconstrues as Keynes’s “animal spirits”)Reduce the time for holding patent and intellectual property rights, e.g. 25 yearsIncrease the use of creative commonsIncentivise investment in renewablesSupport local power gridsLet communities keep their efficiency gains (Oh dear, there’s “socialisation” out the window)Punish energy inefficiencyCreate cooperatives like Mondragon, who exploit with a social conscience (oh dear, exploitation is fine if your conscience is clear)Socialise the financial system (oh dear, it is nationalised below)Socialise financial rewards on the grounds that we already socialise financial risks (oh dear, what a howler)Increase the velocity of money to “tame” speculationNationalise the national central bank
Set a high inflation rate to stimulate sustainable growth (oh dear, Keynesian stimulus!)Elect bank bosses democratically, and scrutinise their financial behaviour (oh dear, this is a pure gem!)Make the state the lender of last resort, but cap its profit rates (oh dear, à la soviet Russia)Track down and suppress (just as the West did to Al-Qaeda [sic]) all off-shore tradingMake it unethical for a chartered accountant to propose a tax avoidance scheme (oh dear, laws establish ethics!)Preserve fractional reserve banking at all costs [sic]Issue fiat money to kill neoliberalism [sic]Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!  If anyone wanted proof of the imbecility inflicted by exposure to Leninist indoctrination, it is here on display.  What an incalculable service the bolsheviks and their thuggish supporters have rendered the world’s capitalist class if one of the better survivors thinks—actually fails to think—like this!  The bolsheviks and their lickspittles must answer for world-wide social confusion.Now listen to his justification for his shopping list of social goodies.  We can do all of the above because “we” did it once before for slavery and child labour.  (Oh dear!)  Yes, “we” simply regulated slavery and child labour out of existence.  This imbecile justification is all the evidence we need that the man is intellectually crippled by his Leninist past.His noble aim is to promote the transition to an economy where many things are free, but where profit is paramount, and profit is both monetary and non-monetary—that is Paul Mason’s conception of post-capitalism.The post-capitalism of Paul Mason’s book’s title turns out to be a fantasy hybrid world of his Leninist crippled dreams.It is a confused imaginary landscape in which one happily extends the (non-functioning) carbon trading model to trade in other commodities, in which one quite happily “socialises” energy and banking, in which one simply breaks up monopolies and imposes huge constraints on public-sector outsourcing, all by legislative decree.It operates an illusory economy in which everyone is guaranteed a basic wage, in which market and behavoural information is forced to flow back from its commercial monopolisers (Amazon, Google), so that present-day information asymmetry becomes artistically symmetric.It is populated by fairy-tale personages in which the magical kiss of legislation enthuses managers, trade unions and industrial system designers to collaborate in networked modular non-linear teamwork because apparently that “can be less alienating—and deliver better results” [sic].And best of all, there’s wonderful news for the 1%.  Paul’s post-capitalism will apparently liberate the 1% female surfers in lycra who jog Bondi beach.  The “99% are coming to their rescue”.

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I will put the same challenge to you, ajj, as I put to Stuart:

wrote:

show us one—only one instance is necessary—just one diversion of the social surplus from its rightful owners, the capitalist class, that didn’t find its way back to its true social destination.

If you can’t demonstrate one instance—only one—over the past 111 years since the Party was founded in 1904, then the two of you are spinning populist delusion, like Brand.

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Stuart wrote:

not everyone who disagrees is a fool or a knave.

Quite so, but you have proved that you are one of those who is a fool and a knave.You are not escaping so lightly by clinging to such a miserable subterfuge.Fool.  Your ostentatious pride in “making a difference” by voting Labour—the same bunch of fools and knaves that were humiliated in the polls beyond your wildest dreams and most confident fantasies.Your party is not expected to “make a difference” in the sense you imagined for another five years.  Well done!On this very forum, you turned your personal disappointment and frustration over socialism into supercilious mockery aimed at demoralising the political efforts of your erstwhile colleagues.Well, you foolishly set yourself up.  And the proof of the pudding reveals yourself to be a self-proclaimed totally willing fool of capitalism.Knave.  You took great malicious pleasure in mocking the small socialist party for sticking to its socialist anti-capitalist politics of over a century.You constantly sought to emotionally bolster your socialist renegacy by demoralising the very working men and women who hold the socialist conviction that you no longer can.  Such is an act of political and emotional malice.You crave sympathy for your own highly important—to you—emotional disillusionment.  Stuart, capitalism is not about you!  If you are so deluded as to think it is, you are seriously deranged beyond being a mere fool.I do not know you personally—only impersonally—but to me you are simply the ordinary fool and petty knave that you have ably demonstrated yourself to be here on this forum.2nd warning: 1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.

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Stuart wrote:

Capitalism is not a thing.  It can’t do anything.

Capitalism is a thing.  Capitalism does everything.It is only the philosophical mindset that gets hung up by such hairsplitting.  The distinction you wish to make proves nothing, except that you refuse to recognise social systems as such, and so—as a good Labourite—proudly repudiate Marx, as a dead dog.Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means for reproducing daily life with a view to consuming the social surplus.  The social surplus belongs to the owners by right of possession of the means that create it—human labour [power] and the raw materials.You, as mere supplier of labour [power] are merely a part of the means for reproducing daily life.  You are therefore owned, just like the raw material.  As such, what right do you possess to the social surplus when you have already forfeited your right to possession of your own labour [power]?From the start, every working day of your life, you willingly allow yourself to be dispossessed of the social means of production, and willingly become the possession of the capitalist class.  And yet, you fondly imagine that by advocating for the Labour Party, Stuart can magically withdraw from the rightful ownership of the capitalist the proceeds of the surplus labour he has legally forfeited to the capitalist.The delusion of capitalism could not be more complete than in the mind of Stuart.Stuart, your daily consumption is not siphoned from the social surplus, like that of the capitalist class.  Your meagre daily consumption is simply that paid portion that is necessary to reproduce the social surplus for the owners of your labour [power].  Unlike the social surplus itself, your consumption is not an end in itself, no matter how real that illusory end bulks in your deluded mind.Similarly, our general communal needs are only met insofar as their general neglect might impact adversely on the privileged consumption of the social surplus by the capitalist class.  Nothing can be permitted to impede that social imperative.  That’s what capitalism—the thing—is all about, and only about. Just look at the present desperation of the capitalist class world wide.Capitalist society is there solely for the capitalists, to serve their consumption of the social surplus.  Society is subservient to their consumption of its surplus product.  Our consumption is incidental, merely necessary to theirs, and is getting less so when it can be obtained more cheaply in foreign markets.  We are becoming a burden to privileged consumption of the social surplus.  Something will have to give.Their social right to consumption of the social surplus is backed by might.  This “non-thing” capitalism is very brutal for the non-thing you “philosophically” claim it to be.Of course, Stuart, capitalism is not a thing for you.  You are a thing for it.  That may be the source of your dim satisfaction in making vapid philosophical hairsplitting distinctions over “thingness”.You, as a thing for capitalism, are compelled deterministically to live out your stunted daily life by reproducing the social surplus for private consumption of the class of possessors of the means of daily life—for the class that you freely permitted to possess your labour [power] and everything it produces.  Sorry, dear thing, you get back your wage, and that’s as fair as it should be.Of course, you are perfectly free to withhold your labour [power] on principle, as being too proud to be owned along side, and classed with, mere raw materials.  But if you refuse to play the ignominious part of a possessed means of production, you are perfectly free to starve with honour.But far worse for us socialists, whom you take immense pride in mocking, you, as Labour praiser Stuart, do the capitalist class—presumably a “philosophical” thing that doesn’t exist in your book—an incalculable service in their interest by agreeing to keep their deterministic ownership relation in tact when you blindly attempt the impossible—to divert by Labour Party legislation their legal consumption of the surplus to yourself.  Oh folly, a thousand times over!The Labour Party only has an imaginary right to the social surplus, and that real thing, capitalism, will put it right on that score, now, and in the future, as it always has in the past.  Stuart, the mocker of socialism, has failed to see through its greatest political smokescreen, the Labour Party.Try as you might, oh mighty Labour campaigner Stuart, the system of capitalism is deterministic—just as our Declaration of Principles state—and negative feedback in the thing, capitalism, simply brings private consumption of the social surplus back on track to its rightful destination.  Homeostasis deterministically returns the social surplus, stolen from the capitalist class, back to its rightful owners, the possessors of the means of reproducing daily life.  That is determinism.The history of the 20th century proves this determinism.Every well-intentioned, Labour-inspired diversion of the social surplus away from its rightful social owners has found its way back to them.  The challenge to you, oh Labour idolator Stuart, is to show us one—only one instance is necessary—just one diversion of the social surplus from its rightful owners, the capitalist class, that didn’t find its way back to its true social destination.The thing, capitalism, does not work—as you Labourites misconceive it—in the social interest.  You, a willing Labourite, are compelled to eke out your daily working life till your last gasp labouring to ensure the social surplus arrives exactly where it should.  You, my proletarian, have no other social function under the thing capitalism.If that’s not a thing—and a deterministic thing—then nothing is.If capitalism does nothing—as you claim—then neither does a hurricane of raindrops, nor a tornado of air molecules, nor an earthquake of shifting rocks, nor anything that humans conceive of collectively or hierarchically.  By the way, that happens to be everything we conceive of.But dogmatic shallow idealists, like you, conceive the world, as Marx put it, trapped within a philosophical mindset:

Marx, Grundrisse wrote:

Let us now consider how all of this is misconceived by the kind of consciousness—and this is characteristic of the philosophical mindset—for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only real world.

There, to satisfy your bleating, I've made no mention of the words ‘reform’ or ‘revolution’.  But they lurk as opposites in everything I’ve written.We want, as always, common ownership and democratic control of the means for reproducing daily life.  Nothing, my deluded Labourite, has changed.The issue is exactly the same as Marx and Engels formulated it.  Exactly the same as the founders of World Socialism formulated it in the Declaration of Principles and Object over a century ago in 1904.  The solution is exactly the same.  Until people comprehend what capitalism is about, they will remain totally powerless to implement socialism.First warning: 1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.

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Dave B wrote:

I think Honeywill would have been unwise not to have put something like that on the back of his book anyway.

Unsure how well this protects him under Australian defamation law.

Dave B wrote:

But if the establishment are going to make an example of someone and take them down it is always best to select an otherwise ‘unpopular’ individual.

The medieval church acted otherwise over heliocentrism.If staff ‘popularity’ is a key point—and Steele, as activist, apparently made himself unpopular with many colleagues and thorn in the side of management—this still doesn't prove that his neo-Lamarckian science was the intended target.

Dave B wrote:

I don’t dispute that the establishment was upset at the erupting ‘soft marking’ debate the details of which don’t concern me too much; even if it has been a bit of a cause célèbre in its own right.

I don’t deny that capitalist administrators seek pretexts for getting around trade unions and legal terms of employment in order to dismiss “uncooperative” staff.  I therefore can’t deny your story but, without direct evidence, it remains for me a just-so-story.It’s inconceivable that Steele himself didn’t table documentary evidence and testimony for a neo-Lamarckian “scientific” vendetta out to sack him—such “evidence” and “testimony” appears to be nil.Additional such evidence seems never to have been committed to writing, or has been destroyed by others, or languishes out of sight under a suppression order, and so remains conjectural.On the other hand, Honeywill provides ample evidence of Steele’s non-reengagement by places other than Wollongong on the grounds of his neo-Lamarckian science.For example, Honeywill’s Chapter 21 describes a desperate down-and-out Steele accepting term employment at the Australian National University on condition of not pursuing his neo-Lamarckian science.  His term was quietly extended, although he broke the impossible injunction imposed upon him.Nevertheless Steele knew he was under pressure to seek permanent tenure elsewhere and, as it turned out, at Wollongong.  It’s possible that the false security of “permanent tenure” played its part in fuelling his devil-may-care assault on management’s judgement and integrity.When the axe fell, he was struck by utter disbelief.  Like Bligh in the NSW Rum Rebellion, though in the right, he bore the inviting stigma of one who had been rolled before.Whatever the case, Steele’s scientific passion exemplifies that of the revolutionary scientist.Science is the most subversive practice that humans engage in.In the long run, nature exacts her cruel vengeance on all mere human injunctions upon scientific enquiry, and defeats all vain attempts to gag scientific thought.

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Hi Dave,I comprehend, but still stand by my claim.I’ve just devoured Ross Honeywill’s racy “Lamarck’s Evolution”.  It is really about Ted Steele, and is obviously sympathetic towards him.Even so, in Chapter 24 on the university dismissal, Honeywill makes it absolutely clear that the substantive issue was Steele’s going to the external press with a specific “whistle-blowing” allegation against the University that it had upgraded two honours students by “soft marking”—with the unstated implication of mercenary financial motives.As I said above, Steele’s public accusation was sufficient—on its own—to force the University’s hand, quite independently of his neo-Lamarckianism.Honeywill’s account is problematic in ways that whistle-blower advocate Brian Martin’s isn’t.  Honeywill claims his own account is not entirely factual, which leaves the reader in the dark over who said what and whether they even said it.  This is the journalistic writer at work on science and history.

Ross Honeywill wrote:

While some incidental characters have been imagined, they are not central to the story and amplify, but in no way alter, factual events.  Some plausible conversations between real people have been assembled using real events, with every endeavour made to ensure the dialogue is factually correct.

Nevertheless, Honeywill’s book contains fascinating secondary material on the remarkable scientific, personal and financial encouragement Steele gained from erstwhile anti-Darwinians Karl Popper and Arthur Koestler, who naturally had stakes in the demolition of strict Darwinism.It also contains unflattering material—as seen from Steele’s viewpoint—on his rough treatment by aging Darwinian Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar and [that lesser light] Nature editor Sir John Maddox.[Among the popular media, “the BBC was out to set him up”, while New Scientist, which often thrives on iconoclasm, was generally supportive of Steele.]

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YMS,I enjoyed listening to the audio recording of your Inca talk and ensuing discussion, for the second time as it turns out.  It brought back vivid memories of my only visit to Head Office when in England three years ago, on which happy occasion you delivered this talk.twc

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Dave,You misrepresent Steele’s dismissal from Wollongong as the revenge of an offended scientific establishment.That representation, at least in the specific dismissal incident, is quite false.Champion of whistleblowers, Brian Martin, then Steele’s colleague at the University of Wollongong, wrote perhaps the best current account of Steele’s dismissal, and it has nothing to do with his scientific “heresy” over retrogenes.  http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/02aur.html.Brian Martin makes it clear that Steele’s dismissal arose from Steele’s public allegation that staff at Wollongong University laboured under a policy to mark full-fee paying international students more “softly” than local students—because they constituted golden-egg laying geese that brought in more money than the locals.Steele’s allegation went to the heart of the University’s intellectual integrity and—economically damaging—financial probity, and so forced the University’s hand.Martin discusses the dismissal from the point of Steele’s “soft marking policy” allegation alone, even though Martin is quite familiar with Steele’s on-going scientific battles over neo-Lamarckian inheritance.No-one can rightly accuse Brian Martin of involuntarily siding with the establishment.  One look at his fascinating website dispels that myth:  http://www.bmartin.cc.

Brian Martin wrote:

This site deals with attacks on dissenting views and individuals.  The general field of “suppression of dissent” includes whistleblowing, free speech, systems of social control and related topics.  The purpose of the site is to foster examination of these issues and action against suppression.  It is founded on the assumption that openness and dialogue should be fostered to challenge unaccountable power.

Steele may have been sidelined by scientifically dissenting colleagues, but not dismissed from Wollongong University thereby.He was dismissed for publicly alleging a policy of “soft” examination marking;  not for proposing “soft” epigenetic inheritance.

[twc]

Apologies for sticking my neck out—like a Lamarckian giraffe—but we should spell Jean-Baptiste Lamarck correctly, by reinstating the “c” before the “k”.

[twc]

Thanks Dave B.I unreservedly acknowledge the open scientific nature of your attribution of Lamarckianism to Engels’s Transition notes.I mistook Alan Johnstone’s attribution of phrenology as being yours and, in that light, saw your later attribution of Lamarckianism as a follow up putdown.Please accept my apologies.But, on Engels’s transition argument for hands-free bipedalism as (1) the actual pathway and (2) a necessary precondition for our essential cerebral sociability:Actual pathway.  This is amply confirmed by the fossil record.Necessary precondition.  This is more difficult to demonstrate.[Evolutionary necessity, like historical necessity, is constrained by contingency in both the  environmental stressors that enforce it and in the plastic material to hand that it can shape.For example, I have just returned from close proximity to another hands-free bipedal social grasslands species, the kangaroo, but see little prospect of this polygamous marsupial, lacking simian intelligence, embarking upon a palaeolithic mode of production over the next ten million years or so.Mind you, its gentle reproductive cycle and intimate mother–child bonding have much to recommend themselves to us humans, could we so choose, although human mums may demur at the prospect of having to lick up young joey’s faeces inside their own belly pouch in order to keep it sterile.]Regarding Engels’s scientific credentials, I incline toward the generous assessment made by the young Stephen Jay Gould in his essay “Posture Maketh the Man” [in Ever Since Darwin] almost 40 years ago.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

This idealistic tradition [that thought is more noble and important than the labour it supervised] dominated philosophy right up to Darwin’s day.  Cerebral primacy seemed so obvious and natural that it was accepted as given, rather than recognised as a deep-seated social prejudice related to class position of professional thinkers and their patrons.Engels writes:“All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain.  Men became accustomed to explain their actions from their thoughts, instead of from their needs. … And so there arose in the course of time that idealistic outlook on the world which, especially since the decline of the ancient world, has dominated men’s minds.  It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour.”

Engels’s essay is equally remarkable for its ecology, and reveals how “pre-adapted” his materialist social science was for situating the ethnographical science of Lewis Henry Morgan almost a decade later.

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Dave B wrote:

That was a bit of a touched raw nerve reaction.

No, a normal response when there are “none so poor to do him reverence”.Consider the trashing of Marx’s scientific credentials a generation ago, culminating in Steedman’s effective influential demolition job, Marx After Sraffa [1977].Socialism had its marxian foundations ripped from underneath.  It was “proven” mathematically—and none among the dwindling tribe of marxian mathematical economists could disprove it for 30 years, try as they might—that marxian value, surplus-value and rate-of-exploitation could all be mathematically negative, and worse they could still be negative when profits were positive!That was a genuine paradise for putdowns of Marx’s scientific credentials.So, in the case of your throwaway putdown of Engels’s scientific credentials:I’m genuinely interested in seeing an actual Engels reference that substantiates your claim that he endorses Lamarkianism,I’d genuinely like to comprehend what motivates your own putdown of Engels’s scientific credentials.

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Dave B wrote:

Engels endorsed Lamarkianism

Please support your claim by supplying us with a precise post-1859 [Origin of Species] instance.For example, in his private 1876 notes “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man”, i.e. in the transition from natural evolution to social [cultural] evolution, Engels’s account may appear awfully like Lamarkianism, but that isn’t necessarily so.You see, cultural evolution, being man made, always appears to be Lamarkian.  But Marx’s and Engels’s materialism was devised to show precisely that what man culturally proposes, the inexorable internal logic of his social system, disposes.Engels always treats culture as ultimately independent of man’s wishes, and—on the contrary—that the organisation of human labour determines his culture and his will to action.For Marx and Engels, society subverts man’s intentionalism.  Intention is determined by social need, and not the other way round.  They repudiated social Lamarkianism—or the idealist explanation of culture—point blank.

Engels, in Part Played by Labour, wrote:

Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant.But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of an integral, highly complex organism.  And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served; and this in two ways.In the first place, the body benefited from the law of correlation of growth, as Darwin called it.  …Changes in certain forms involve changes in the form of other parts of the body, although we cannot explain the connection.The gradually increasing perfection of the human hand, and the commensurate adaptation of the feet for erect gait, have undoubtedly, by virtue of such correlation, reacted on other parts of the organism.  However, this action has not as yet been sufficiently investigated for us to be able to do more here than to state the fact in general terms.Much more important is the direct, demonstrable influence of the development of the hand on the rest of the organism.It has already been noted that our simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non-gregarious immediate ancestors.Mastery over nature began with the development of the hand—with labour—and widened man’s horizon at every new advance.  He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in natural objects.On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual.In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other.  Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.

Now all of this, especially the bit in bold, can be read in Lamarkian terms.    But it is actually concomitant with the pure 19th century Darwinian adaptive evolutionary speak of Darwin’s circle, e.g., Huxley, but extended by Engels to explain the origin of humanity as cultural, rather than as purely natural, beings. Engels is merely using the 19th century language of Darwinian adaptation, still used as shorthand today, even though today we are impelled in formal Darwinian discourse to treat the evolutionary process as a purely natural one of differential individual survival rates leading to new species under purely fortuitous changed environmental circumstance.But 19th century Engels is not so impelled to adopt the strict discourse of the new Darwinian synthesis, etc.  In any case, he adopts a discourse concomitant with the transition from new species to new culture that he is thinking through in these amazing unpublished notes.More importantly, Engels is primarily concerned with the transition from the domination of hominids by Darwinian evolution to their gradual freeing themselves from total Darwinian domination, and entering the phase that Marx and Engels first discovered thirty years earlier—man’s gradual domination of himself by his self-produced social evolution—a transition that neither the extraordinary Darwin nor his naturalist acolytes successfully explained.In Vere Gordon Childe’s memorable phrase, Engels is here postulating the pathway to “man creating himself”—social man, never absolutely freed from the necessities of his natural roots, but increasingly freeing himself, by himself, from them.Thus, for example, Stephen Jay Gould in the first published volume of collected essays from his “This View of Life” monthly column on evolutionary theory in Natural History:

Gould, in Ever Since Darwin wrote:

Indeed, the nineteenth century produced a brilliant exposé from a source that will no doubt surprise most readers—Frederick Engels.In 1876, Engels wrote an essay entitled, ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’.  It was published posthumously in 1896 and, unfortunately, had no visible impact upon Western science.Engels considers three essential features of human evolution:  speech, a large brain, and upright posture.He argues that the first step must have been a descent from the trees with subsequent evolution to upright posture by our ground-dwelling ancestors.“These apes when moving on level ground began to drop the habit of using their hands and to adopt a more and more erect gait.  This was the decisive step in the transition from ape to man.”Upright posture freed the hand for using tools (labour, in Engels’s terminology);  increased intelligence and speech came later.

Now if anybody knew a thing or two about Darwin and Lamark, it is the father of evolution through punctuated equilibrium, Stephen Jay Gould.  He does not read Engels through Lamarkian spectacles.For Gould on Lamark, see pp. 62–64, and Ch. 3 of his enormous historical overview “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”—so named in honour of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, which gave Gould the inspiration and the courage to demolish Darwin’s gradual evolution mechanism for Gould’s now accepted stasis–punctuation–stasis mechanism.For us, as for Marx and Engels, our current great task is to free ourselves from the tyranny of blind subservience to our capitalist mode-of-production social being, as described in our Declaration of Principles, and institute a consciously comprehended socialist mode-of-production social being as described in our Object.For Dave B, please explain how a 19th century adaptationist Darwinian could describe the emergence of cultural evolution without using quasi-Lamarkian language.  [While at it, you might also care to show us Engels’s supposed phrenology.]

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