How to prove "The Law of the Jungle" is wrong

[RedPaladin]

When was arguing with a capitalist, I asked him why some people should have right to exploit other people.
He told me that is because these people have more talents and abilities. In his opinion, according to the nature selection theory by Darwin, it was the survival of the strongest that people who have more advantages than others should have the right to exploit other people.

How can we prove this is unreasonable?
Engels did say something in his book about such kind of "The Law of the Jungle", didn't he?

[Chambered Word]

Kill him and say you were the fittest.

But seriously, he obviously doesn't understand that societies cannot simply operate that way and doesn't know that Darwin's theory is biological, objective fact and not a blueprint for how a society should work.

tl;dr I'm not sure you should debate with Randroids, most are lost causes.

[JazzRemington]

When was arguing with a capitalist, I asked him why some people should have right to exploit other people.
He told me that is because these people have more talents and abilities. In his opinion, according to the nature selection theory by Darwin, it was the survival of the strongest that people who have more advantages than others should have the right to exploit other people.

A few things come to mind off the top of my head.

1) Talents and abilities aren't something innate in people; there's no genes or anything biological that makes people "naturally" good at anything. If he says there is, then ask him to show what genes or organ or whatever can make people good at sports, using computers, or the like. He may say something like you may have some genes that affect your physical appearance, so someone who is naturally tall will be better at basketball than someone who is short. If he does that, then he's conflating physiology and skill.

2) This person seems to be something of a social Darwinist. While I don't claim to be an expert on Darwin or his theories, I know a thing or to about natural selection, as biologists use the term. When biologists use the term, they are referring to an organisms ability to survive its natural environment, whether the actual environment itself or evade/fight off predators. In other words, it refers to nature. The person you are arguing with seems to be confused as to the the theory of natural selection because he's applying a theory that deals with natural environment to conditions that are the result of social processes between people.

3) Further, the reason why capitalists get away with exploiting proletariats is because they have the State to back them up. In words that this person would understand, there is a group of people who is stronger than the capitalists and the proletariat combined that is defending the interests of the capitalists. If anything, the capitalists are unfit for the environment because they have to rely on the protection of someone stronger than them. By the same logic this person is using, the State is justified in limiting the power fo the capitalists through labor laws.

[Catillina]

First of, tell this guy that Social-Darwinism/Eugenic times are over(the fact that the Nazis believed in Social Darwinism/Eugenic shouldnt fortify him). And even then, we arent animals(yeah ok in fact we are animals, but we are more inteligent, and souldnt behave like the other animals)

Second, you can refer to Kropotkins "Mutual Aid", where he describes that even in animal "society", there exist Mutual Aid, and not only competition.

[RED DAVE]

Ask him why we have laws to protect children? Why not just eat them like Swift suggested or let them starve to death like Rothbard okayed?

RED DAVE

[x371322]

Darwin's theory had nothing to do with social conditions. A person being born into poverty versus someone born into riches has nothing to do with which one is "better." It's the luck of the draw, or chance, which is the exact opposite of natural selection.

[Raven of Odin]

Well, this sort of comes back to the age old assertion that Communism/Socialism would never work because of "human nature", i.e. the idea that we as humans are competitive and aggressive-that we always want to outdo someone else, and since we are filled with such desires, our talents only help us to achieve them. Now, when it comes to his idea that one should be able to exploit another simply because of his merits, then just explain to him that after an alteration of human nature, through a Socialist state per say, people won't feel the need to compete against one another. In fact, get rid of money, brainwash (which is in fact what you have to do) people into believing the virtues of socialism and in a few generations, human nature will change (as it always has throughout centuries [for instance, try and become the monarch of Europe and everyone will tell you to bugger off, because we are now so used to this idea of "freedom" that a monarchy would be out of the question]), thus removing the need to outdo your fellow man. Thus, him saying that Social Darwinism makes Communism impossible is complete bollocks.
P.S. If all else fails, you could just attack his ideology by saying, "Simply because a man is stronger than you, does that give him the right to beat you up?" Being the sane person that he is, he would go for a "No, because the law is there to stop him." Thus, iunder Socialism, the law would stop people from exploiting others. Basically, it's a simple matter of how much one's society allows you to do, and their point of view when it comes to "human nature". If society today, believed that stronger men have the right to kill off others, then we'd be in some hell-hole. In contrast, if society was against the idea of private enterprise, then we'd be living equally and happily. :)

[danyboy27]

laws of the jungle dosnt apply today beccause....i dont know, perhaps its have something to do with thousand of year of evolution or something like that.

the thing is, we moved away from this kind of behavior beccause it was a threat to our verry existance, and that we needed to collaborate a minimum to thrive.

[Foldered]

There are fundamental problems with his argument; Darwin's theory was not a social theory, and even if adopted as such it contains problems. Even if we believe for a second that it is "human nature" to struggle for existance and that only the strong survive, this idea produces many contemporary issues. None of the things that we do are "natural," aside from a few, in these times, and using an argument surrounding "nature" to justify an ideology like capitalism (in this day) seems iffy. And again, Darwin did his work with animals, not humans.
As suggested before, Kropotkin's Mutual Aid is a good direction to point that person in, and he doesn't limit his studies to animals.

[Robocommie]

People who actually believe in the law of the jungle are complete idiots. Those who actually practice it are complete sociopaths. The strong dominating the weak is not a way to live a peaceful, fulfilling life. All it does is sow misery, and sooner or later, even the strongest will be found in a moment of weakness, and when they are, they will wish they had not treated others so cruelly.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Red Paladin:


When was arguing with a capitalist, I asked him why some people should have right to exploit other people.
He told me that is because these people have more talents and abilities. In his opinion, according to the nature selection theory by Darwin, it was the survival of the strongest that people who have more advantages than others should have the right to exploit other people.

Human beings (or our ancestors) would not have survived a million or so years ago had this been the case. Indeed, we evolved cooperative strategies, which were part of the reason for our success.

Class society (5-10,000 years ago) screwed all this up.

You might like to ask this character if he/she applies this strategy to the way he/she treats his/her relatives and friends (that is, if he/she has any).

And, as Socrates pointed out 2400 years ago, if we band together to stop him/her exploiting us, then, as we would thereby be the strongest and 'fittest', he/she would now have no room to complain. Which is, of course, why we form unions to defend ourselves from such idiots.

[Crusade]

If people worked based on their "superior talents" they wouldn't need to exploit other people. They'd not only develop the ideas, but they'd build it themselves. In fact, we wouldn't need to work as a society period if that were the case. People praise how independent they are, completely ignoring that almost everything they use constructing their "independent" lifestyle was made by someone else.

[mikelepore]

because these people have more talents and abilities

It's important not to let anyone get away unchallenged when they claim without any evidence that someone in power has more "talents and abilities" than other people of their time. Let's see the evidence that Henry VIII was the smartest person in 16th century England, and that Nero was the smartest person in 1st century Rome. Your critic will object that this comparison isn't fair because the position of a monarch is inherited from one's parents. Sure it is. And likewise, the wealth of a capitalist is inherited from one's parents.

[28350]

[The Bourgeois Darwinists] claimed that only the extermination of all the weak is in accordance with nature and that it is necessary to prevent the deterioration of the race, while protection of the weak is unnatural and leads to degeneration. But what do we see? In nature itself, in the animal world, we find that the weak are protected, that they don't need to persist by their individual strength, and that they are not exterminated due to their individual weakness. And this arrangement does not weaken a group in which it is the rule, but strengthens it. The animal groups in which mutual aid is best developed maintain themselves best in the struggle for existence.
—Anton Pannekoek, Darwinisme en Marxisme (in Dutch), 1909.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Comrades might also like to read Engels more considered views on Darwin (after his initial enthusism):


"1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin's method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin's time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for existence (Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrow-minded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature -- inanimate as well as animate -- includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the one-sided and meagre phrase 'struggle for existence,' a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis [with a grain of salt -- RL], such a procedure really contains its own condemnation.

"...I should therefore attack -- and perhaps will when the time comes -- these bourgeois Darwinists in about the following manner:

"The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes ['the war of all against all' - RL-- from Hobbes's De Cive and Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the Malthusian theory is concerned), the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it. But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad naturalists and philosophers.

"4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies to human societies....

"At a certain stage the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, at first, true enough, only for a minority, are produced. The struggle for existence -- if we permit this category for the moment to be valid -- is thus transformed into a struggle for pleasures, no longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development, socially produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived from the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now happened, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater quantity of means of subsistence and development than capitalist society can consume because it keeps the great mass of real producers artificially away from these means of subsistence and development; if this society is forced by its own law of life constantly to increase this output which is already too big for it and therefore periodically, every 10 years, reaches the point where it destroys not only a mass of products but even productive forces -- what sense is their left in all this talk of 'struggle for existence'? The struggle for existence can then consist only in this: that the producing class takes over the management of production and distribution from the class that was hitherto entrusted with it but has now become incompetent to handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution.

"...Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the conception of this history as a feeble variety of the 'struggle for existence.' I would therefore never do this favour to these false naturalists....

"6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the 'bellum omnium contra omnes' was the first phase of human development. In my opinion, the social instinct was one of the most essential levers of the evolution of man from the ape. The first man must have lived in bands and as far as we can peer into the past we find that this was the case...." [Engels to Lavrov, 17/11/1875. Spelling altered to conform to UK English.]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_11_17-ab.htm

[RedPaladin]

The capitialist that I argued with probably meant that many rich people were rags-to-riches, so they have made greater efforts than other people and as such reasons they should have right to exploit other people. And some people have more contribution (like they invests more money or provides more technology, etc.), they should have right gain value from others' fruit of labour as a matter of course.

[BAM]

The capitialist that I argued with probably meant that many rich people were rags-to-riches, so they have made greater efforts than other people and as such reasons they should have right to exploit other people. And some people have more contribution (like they invests more money or provides more technology, etc.), they should have right gain value from others' fruit of labour as a matter of course.

That's ideology, not biology. It's the justification on the part of the capitalist that simply by owning capital he deserves remuneration for his contribution, i.e., that the ownership of capital is its own reward. But capital is not productive by itself and every entrepreneur needs a workforce in order to do the work for him to create his profits. In fact, the process of capitalist production itself depends on the setting in motion of co-operation in offices, factories and workshops of an enormous scale.


Human beings (or our ancestors) would not have survived a million or so years ago had this been the case. Indeed, we evolved cooperative strategies, which were part of the reason for our success ... And, as Socrates pointed out 2400 years ago, if we band together to stop him/her exploiting us, then, as we would thereby be the strongest and 'fittest', he/she would now have no room to complain. Which is, of course, why we form unions to defend ourselves from such idiots.

Agreed. Co-operation, if you want to look at it in those terms, is the better evolutionary strategy for the human race as a whole.