Just a quick thought, drawing on some of the elements from a conversation happening over at roger’s site.
In the post below, I mentioned that one of the parallels that could be drawn between Darwin’s work, and Marx’s, was that both are concerned to explain how a nonrandom result – a pattern of historical change – might take place without a conscious designer. Another parallel is the notion that adaptation takes place through the gradual modification of existing structures – biological structures, for Darwin; social structures, for Marx. Marx’s understanding of historical development has often been misinterpreted as teleological, as though later periods of history realise some sort of immanent essence of earlier ones. Darwin’s theory has often been similarly misinterpreted. But the point, in both cases, is much more prosaic: things that exist now – biological or social – have arisen from the gradual modification of things that existed in the past. A relation therefore connects the present to the past – not because the past necessarily drove history in some particular developmental direction, but because the present was formed from the reconfiguration of materials that existed in the past.
“God is a hacker, not an engineer”, Francis Crick is reported to have said: evolution, in other words, does not operate according to conscious intention or predetermined plan, but opportunistically, blindly seizing situational potentials for transformation. For Marx, history has been a hacker as well: our present time has emerged from a similar sort of gradual, unintentional modification of the detritus of earlier societies.
Marx poses the possibility of a new driving force of historical change – one consciously, collectively chosen. But even this possibility is situated historically – Marx’s argument is not that, unlike all preceding historical periods, our time should be the first to defy the notion of adaptation through modification. Instead, Marx carefully analyses the potentials immanent within our history, allowing him to present communism as another historical adaptation that operates by reconfiguring materials that lie ready to hand. At the same time, and more profoundly, Marx presents the possibility for the sort of conscious politics of social development on an aggregate scale as itself one of the historical adaptations that has been generated unintentionally, through a prior process of blind gradual modification operating on earlier social structures. In this case, the blind historical process, stumbling along its accidental path, has speciated a new kind of potential driving force for historical change: a possibility to recognise and consciously participate in what, up until this point, has been an unconscious process.
Very little time at the moment, so the phrasing here is probably not ideal – it’s so easy to hear either teleology or voluntarism in these kinds of discussions, and so I’m not sure the way I’ve presented this quite captures what I’m trying to convey… But more at a quieter time…