The Role of Production and Reproduction in Evolution of Species and Society
Can the same laws describe evolution of species and evolution of society? Why does Western Marxism delink reproduction from production?
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted.
— Engels, 1890
Kwame Nkrumah started his philosophical masterpiece, Consciencism, with this passage taken from a letter sent by Engels to J. Bloch. Often in Western Marxist circles, the question of reproduction is often left out in favor for an analysis of production in isolation, when both are two sides of one coin. The reason why there exists a break is a longer discussion on a history of attacks Western Marxism sought out on Engels and his relationship to Marx, and the relationship of dialectical materialism to the natural sciences. Helena Sheehan's Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History covers these discussions in some detail.
In the mean time, I argue that communists must realize the importance and consequences of isolating production and reproduction from each other because a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of historical materialism will inevitably lead to complete failure in building revolution. To best understand the relationship of production and reproduction, it’s best to relate the evolution of species to the evolution of society.
The scientific importance of Marxism as well as of Darwinism consists in their following out the theory of evolution, the one upon the domain of the organic world, of things animate; the other, upon the domain of society.
— Anton Pannekoek, 1912
Firstly, what is the communist worldview?
The communist worldview does not separate nature and human society. Contrary to this, the bourgeoisie worldview has two main trends which conclude otherwise. In one case, remaining elements of pre-capitalist philosophies dictate that a human soul is mystically separate from the material universe, for example, as seen in religious frameworks. In other cases, the human mind and some aspects of human society are agreed to be extensions to nature but cannot be described by the scientific method. For example, sociology is not considered to be part of the natural sciences such as physics and chemistry. While it is true that the scientific method often fails in these areas, the bourgeoisie assumption is that the scientific method is a fully advanced epistemological tool. In both of these trends, there is an underlying assumption that human society and its history cannot be scientifically studied, or at least can only be done so with a strictly limited empirical method.
While laws which describe the natural world can be discovered, laws which describe human society can also be discovered because man emerged through an evolutionary process from nature. If Newton discovered laws governing physical bodies and Darwin discovered laws governing the transformation of life, Marx and Engels discovered fundamental laws governing the transformation of human society (later expanded on by Mao and others). Doing this required a scientific process very similar to Darwin, and geologist, Charles Lyell, both of whom took a general systems approach to discovering change and transformation in life and the earth. It’s no coincidence that they were contemporaries of Marx and Engels.
Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859. Marx’s Criticism of Political Economy was published in 1859. A singular fact that the two books which were to revolutionise the biology, the economics, the whole thought, the whole life, of the nineteenth century were both published in the same year.
— Edward Aveling, 1897
The basic premise of Marx and Engel’s theory is that the reproduction of life, and the production of goods necessary to maintain and grow life, are what drive the transformation of nature and all aspects of nature including all life and the environment all life exists in. Humans and human society are thus governed by the same laws.
Engels writes in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State:
On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.
In fact, he even provides a concrete example outside of the human experience in Dialectics of Nature when writing about the role of labor in the evolution of ape to man, in which the use of tools and emergence of an opposable thumb was a significant advancement in the means of production of primates. This resulted in (and coincided with) longer lifespans, more varied diets, and gradual transformations in the brain. Importantly, these transformations are impossible without the reproduction of life itself as reproduction is an essential part of evolution.
Social relations of mankind are directly linked to structures of nature—material reality—and moreover, the structures of nature can and do undergo change. Just as qualitative changes in the body led to the evolution from ape to man, oil existing in an easily extractable form in the Middle East shapes the capitalist economy towards violent colonial destruction of both life and land for the sake of profits. Colonial extraction then has a significant effect on the environment and this process continues. It is not essentialist to link social processes to the constantly changing material reality of nature. However, material reality doesn’t undergo significant change under short periods of time or through individual will. Evolution is a social process.
Dialectics of evolution
Because man and nature are not separate, each cannot be analyzed in isolation, especially in respect to evolutionary transformation. There is constant interaction between the external environment of an individual organism and the biological makeup of the individual organism. Generalized biological changes in a species are driven by the external environment and evolutionary changes in a species will result in generalized changes to the environment.
For example, bird beaks will undergo adaptation over long periods of time to defensive mechanisms of surrounding food sources such as seeds or insects. Adaptation which increases the efficacy of food gathering in those birds may result in an decrease of certain seeds or insects, for instance, which influences change in the soil or the efficacy of other organisms to find food. In other words, a generalized change to the birds’ environment is a response to qualitative changes in the birds. Consequently, this new change can have more downstream effects including gradual evolutionary changes in other organisms. The cycle continues and change is infinite.
When enough individual organisms have undergone the same adaptation, a process which can span thousands of years, and a certain threshold is crossed of significant quantitative change across the species, the species as a whole undergo qualitative change. One example is the inability for the newly emerged species to sexually reproduce with its predecessor. It’s important to note that changes within individual organisms do not constitute biological or generalized evolution. In fact, most existing organisms, especially in the plant, insect, and single-cell worlds, exist largely in between species. Further, biological variation across one species can be quite varied on an individual level but not varied enough on a group level to constitute an evolutionary change on the species level, or qualitative differentiation.
To parallel this to evolutionary processes in human society, the emergence of markets, capitalists, and proletarianization did not necessitate a qualitative shift from feudalism and capitalism until a revolutionary process exchanged political, social, and economic institutions from the hands of monarchs to bourgeoisie democracy, constituting a significantly qualitative change in the relations of production.
The previous points should make obvious that evolutionary change on a species level rely on productive and reproductive processes. This is how changes which are positively adaptative to the environment are carried forward, while negative changes which hamper life quality have a smaller likelihood to be carried over. In either case, it is clear that for a species to flourish, it needs to be able to reproduce (in a way that does not hamper its environment to its own detriment) and to be able to produce what is necessary to sustain life, whether it’s hunting or gathering food, building shelters, protecting offspring, and more.
From evolution of species to evolution of society
Humans have overcome many of the direct conflicts with their environment. Their advanced consciousness and intelligence allows for them to participate in efficient hunting, agriculture, engineering, among other productive skills. However, not all challenges are yet conquered.
Inadequacies in technology of production and lack of social consciousness resulted in the development of class society because tools, commodities, and land necessary to produce what is needed to maintain life increasingly concentrated into the hands of a few at a certain stage of human development. Often overlooked is the second part of the equation. However, Engels (and others) made clear that the other half of appropriation of life was the control over reproduction, particularly of the female sex. Whoever controls reproduction and production of life has significant control over the direction and position of humanity. Today, those hands most prominently belong to monopoly corporations of the West. They have the power to isolate entire countries (such as Cuba or Venezuela) from accessing important commodities necessary for the flourishing of life and they have the power to control reproduction, for example, the project to sterilize African women under the direction of Bill Gates or Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger’s eugenics plan for Black children the United States.
Kwame Ture said “life has but one purpose: to advance life.” The question of reproduction, and thus the question of women (and children), is as central as the question of production, and thus the question of the means of production. In fact, many Marxist historians argue that the first emergence of class was the slavery of women, exploited as an instrument of reproduction. Those who controlled women controlled the production of labor. This was especially true in tribal societies of Europe, such as the Germanic groups, and Northern African, such as the Arabs (among many others), in which political unions were bartered through the trade of women and female slaves.
Gerda Lerner explains this process in detail in The Creation of Patriarchy, though in an introductory chapter, she summarizes:
The appropriation by men of women's sexual and reproductive capacity occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society. Its commodification lies, in fact, at the foundation of private property. Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their earlier practice of dominance over the women of their own group. This found expression in the institutionalization of slavery, which began with the enslavement of women of conquered groups.
She further cites Engels in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State on a latter transformation of the “means of reproduction”:
The overthrow of the mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.
Conclusion
No matter the stage of production in human society, arguably besides very early classless society, both production and reproduction are controlled by the ruling class. Understanding this (as opposed to a reductive “means of production”) has great implications in worldview for communists. Firstly, the creation of gender as an ideological tool to control reproduction through the subjugation of the female sex is evident. Second, a society’s organization of production and control over reproduction indicates both its current state and it’s possible future directions. Currently, society has little control over this direction because the forces of production and reproduction of life are in the control of a small few. The liberation of these forces will determine the future direction of society. Such is the task for communists.