Natural selection used to defend/support Capitalism?

[RedZero]

Below I'm going to post a short conversation I had with someone on the comment section of a video. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is mentioned. My comments probably have something outright wrong with them, but this person's most recent reply made me wonder: why is natural selection (maybe this person meant Social Darwinism? I'm not so keen on scientific/evolutionary terms) brought up so often with people defending and supporting capitalism? They will reject this idea in terms of evolution, they'll deny natural selection, but they'll say that social Darwinism is a necessity, or something. Maybe I'm on the wrong end of this, but whatever...I just want to learn and understand where people are coming from. Here is the conversation:

This is his first comment, the one that I decided to reply to. It wasn't directed to me, but to someone else. After this comment, it's me, then him, etc.

You and OWS are the ones who are dividing Americans. If you don't like big corporations, don't buy their products and don't work for them. Since we're obviously so much better off without the 1%, why don't you start getting the entire OWS movement to start boycotting the 1% and have everyone not ever buy anything from any person or company that is in the 1%. Good luck finding a job, a house, a car, a phone, a computer, or a TV. And I hope you don't enjoy listening to popular music.

The general consensus [in the OWS movement], I think, is this: people aren't against corporations altogether, they're against the corruption and malfeasance that exists inside of certain corporations.

First that is not the general consensus, especially considering the predominant slogan is "protesting corporate greed". As far as I know, greed alone is not illegal nor should it be. Second, if that is all this is about, why aren't you in DC protesting the government to enforce the law and end their crony capitalism?

Greed and corruption, yup. Not the corporations themselves. Corporations can still make a profit without making it into profits over people. "Greed" isn't going to be illegal, it's the fact that these actions and ideologies lead to a resounding "fuck you" to the average American worker.

and here's the last reply from him, which had me scratching my head...curious.

This is the way capitalism works for you laymen. Workers gravitate toward work environments where they feel they are compensated fairly. This increases demand for jobs where workers feel they are paid fairly. The employers who provide these jobs can be more selective in hiring because of the greater demand. Higher quality employees cause these corporations to succeed more than the corporations that compensate workers less fairly. Now apply the principles of natural selection.

I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't be arguing with people whenever I'm stumped as far as thinking of a response. *sigh*

[xub3rn00dlex]

I didn't know capitalism was a living organism with genetic traits...

[RedZero]

I didn't know capitalism was a living organism with genetic traits...

Ha, yeah. *shrug* I assume he's applying it to the people in charge of the economic system, capitalism. "If you're weak and not good enough, too bad. Capitalism, fuck yeah!"

[xub3rn00dlex]

Ha, yeah. *shrug* I assume he's applying it to the people in charge of the economic system, capitalism. "If you're weak and not good enough, too bad. Capitalism, fuck yeah!"

Yeah I figure that too, but what happens when you know, the really "strong and good enough" get ill? According to his principles they should be left to die... Capitalism, fuck yeah!

[Erratus]

He made the argument that workers choose to work in the best environment, causing more demand for them. Like how if people decided red was an awesome color and bought mostly red cars, the demand for red cars would be higher. I think by natural selection he meant social Darwinism, because xub3rn00dlex is right, capitalism is not an organism.

And it would be sturdy logic is it was like the normal demand (such as for red cars). However he fails to consider that workers are not the only force involved. They are not in short demand, and don't get to call the shots. For every worker who doesn't want to work in that environment there are ten that would be happy to just take any job. This leads to the one who did have high standards to lower them, accepting whatever job they can. The strength of the force, along with other factors, is largely based on where the most unmet demand lays. The demand for workers is pretty well filled. The demand for jobs is not.

For this reason, and several other reasons that I won't get into, the corporations hold the power, not the workers. It doesn't matter if the workers want a nice wage and good working conditions. Beggars can't be choosers and they will take what they can and they will be happy about it.

[NewLeft]

Social darwinism or mutual aid & cooperation?
I chose social darwinism because there's a gun to my head, I have no choice.


Capitalism out compete socialism! It was favoured by natural selection...

[Marxaveli]

Capitalism and Social Darwinism have a very close relationship with one another. Some might even say that Capitalism IS SD in a economic context. At the very least, Capitalism does create the divisions in society that are often justified by Herbert Spencer proponents. "You're poor? Sorry to hear that. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work harder, and maybe youll get ahead".

[Lanky Wanker]

Corporations can still make a profit without making it into profits over people.

lol

The funny thing is how pro-capitalists always argue the "it will make things better" story, yet capitalism has existed more than long enough to have proven its greatness, which it hasn't. They speak of how this "competition" (workers demanding better pay, companies competing for business etc.) will lead to an overall improvement of everyone's lives, when in fact we know this is obviously a load of crap. Funny how he says there's nothing wrong with greed, but makes out as though capitalism is the solution to everyone's problems. So... which one is it? Personal greed or group work?

In regards to the crap about not buying into big corporations, that's a useless argument. I'm sorry, but I think it's absolutely pointless trying to avoid buying anything with a brand name on it you've actually heard of before.

As for the whole natural selection/survival of the fittest crap, we're not neanderthals finding for survival in the wild anymore. If he's gonna argue about individual achievement, tell him not to use a computer next time he wants to argue.

[Zealot]

What a perversion of Darwin's ideas, even Darwin abhorred the idea of Social Darwinism. I find it amusing that they seem to ignore the fact that altruism has a solid evolutionary basis as well. Even if it was true, we should move past these barbaric ideas, killing people in order to take their wife could also be said to have a foundation in evolution but I don't hear of anyone doing that (save for a few barbarians). What it really comes down to is the need to scrape any and all academic theories to support their horrid capitalism, even if it comes at the expense of making themselves look like an idiot.

[Rafiq]

Natural selection exists only between different species of animals.

ignore this chauvinist shit.

[blah]

Natural selection exists only between different species of animals.

ignore this chauvinist shit.

Not defending that chauvinist shit, but I am sure natural selection in nature exists even within a single animal species, between the animals of the same species.

[Lanky Wanker]

Natural selection exists only between different species of animals.

ignore this chauvinist shit.

I'm pretty sure it happens within species too, like when males fight over who gets to impregnate the sexy female.

[ZeroNowhere]

They seem to be forgetting the fact that capitalism is currently in a crisis, and that this is why there are protests.

Natural selection exists only between different species of animals.

Hm? Natural selection exists for traits within species as well.

Since we're obviously so much better off without the 1%, why don't you start getting the entire OWS movement to start boycotting the 1% and have everyone not ever buy anything from any person or company that is in the 1%. Good luck finding a job, a house, a car, a phone, a computer, or a TV. And I hope you don't enjoy listening to popular music.

Um, the '1%' are rich because they own these things. It's not clear how their ownership of these things means that we wouldn't be better off without them, given that 'without them' presumably implies that they won't be owning these things.

Workers gravitate toward work environments where they feel they are compensated fairly. This increases demand for jobs where workers feel they are paid fairly. The employers who provide these jobs can be more selective in hiring because of the greater demand.

Firstly, this is an ultimately static picture of capital. Secondly, it ignores the fact that unemployment isn't necessarily a great occupation. The working class follows the movement of capital, capital does not follow the whims of the working class.

Thirdly.

So yeah, doesn't work like that. It's not as if going unemployed and getting replaced is a perfectly good substitute for striking, quite apart from the fact that even striking is subject to the hiring of scabs and so on, and still gives capital the upper hand. In any case, I doubt that they're promoting strikes, even though that's probably the closest that they're going to get to their ideal at the present moment.

Edit: Incidentally, while I was looking for that news article, I also found this. Ah, the Mail.

[Franz Fanonipants]

because unlike the sciences forum and the technocrats on revleft want you to think, popular scientific discourse in a given society is often used to justify the economic conditions present in the society.

[Mr. Natural]

RedZero, Your debate opponent is shilling for capitalism, and almost all he wrote is radically wrong.

I'm going to attempt to unpack the organization of natural selection, life, evolution, communism, and capitalism, but before I begin I want to state I believe you need to learn to hate capitalist corporations. Capitalism is an assault on all forms of life--human and nonhuman--and gobal capitalism's corporations are major instruments of its exploitation. We will kill capitalism and its corporations or they will kill us.

Your scumbag opponent implicitly identifies natural selection with Tennyson's "nature red in tooth and claw." He is excusing a capitalism that is red in tooth and claw.

But this is not life's natural selection. Natural selection is "competition-with," not "competition-against." Life could not continue if its beings were truly violently opposed to each other, and humanity cannot continue much longer within a juggernaut global capitalism that inherently splits social being into warring individuals and camps.

So here is the real natural selection. First of all, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory falsely believes evolution occurs solely through natural selection with random mutation. This is an incomplete thus dead evolution that ignores the founding phenomena of self-organization and emergence so integral to life.

The phenomenon of self-organization was first discovered by Ilya Prigogine in 1967 and discovered anew in a separate field by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela a year later and called "autopoiesis" (self-making). What self-organization/autopoiesis mean is that all living systems--cells to people to Gaia (a giant self-regulating ecosystem)--are structurally open but internally organizationally closed to their environment. All living systems are structurally open, organizationally closed to their surround, and this is a most difficult concept to grasp.

Well, don't you, RedZero, have an internal organization with which you connect to externals? If a cop at OWS London tells you to move, don't you decide how you will react? The cop triggers a reaction (hopefully not with a gun) and your mental organization determines your response. Or, if you as its environment kick a dog and provoke a response, doesn't the dog's breed and individual history determine how it will respond?

Self-organization is the heart and mind of life, but it is unknown to most persons and carefully ignored by most of the rest. Let's take a look at the creation of life on Earth some 4 billion years ago. In the pre-biotic (molecular) evolutionary process, organic molecules autocatalyzed (self-organized) into a primitive system that then evolved in chemical steps into the first true living system, a bacterium. Thus life on Earth began with self-organization, and much of this hypothesized pre-biotic process has been replicated in scientific experiment.

Now for emergence. When those organic molecules self-organized into a primitive living system, the emerged into a new system with new properties and behaviors, just as people pissed off at Wall Street in various ways (they are actually protesting capitalism) can come together into a movement with radically new behaviors and significance. Revolution is an emergent process, as is life. Think of cells self-organizing to emerge into organs that self-organize into bodies that self-organize with other bodies into a colony or social system that .... Gaia!

As for natural selection, it is just "external self-organization." All of life's living systems self-organize into a dynamic interdependence and adapt and are adapted as they maintain the life process that they create and compose together. Living systems are intimately integrated with each other and their physical environment. There is no separate life.

Here is a simple notation that expresses all of this: "s-o/S-O." Here we have a "core" internal self-organization that merges with an external (natural selection) self-organization, and the slash represents the emergence that results.

The organization described above is a "communist" organization. In a communist society, self-organizing individuals come together in common purpose. "We shall have an association, in which the freedom of each is the condition for the freedom of all." (Manifesto)

RedZero, I hope I haven't given you a headache. Here is a major point: Do you see how essential cooperation is in evolution and life? Life is not capitalism's war of all against all. "Nature red in tooth and claw" is an anthropomorphic misperception. What we see as nature's bloodiness is in actuality life maintaining its dynamically interdependent connections. Life is preserving its process, and there is no "morality" involved other than life preserving its organization.

What is commonly thought of as naural selection (but is the S-O of s-o/S-O) generates countless offspring that are eaten (energy sources), reproduce together, form countless life partnerships (cells/organs/body, a bee colony, "parasites") and evolve. So natural selection and evolution are cooperative processes, as is life. And communism.

Capitalism, though, pits human social individuals against each other and life. Capitalism captures human labor and turns it into a runaway system of relentless profit (energy) taken from our labors and life. Life generates an ecological "energy profit" in order to maintain its communities; capitalism attacks life's communities to manufacture a malignant profit. Capitalism is a cancer of life.

My red-green best.

[Steve_j]

Regarding resources, humans have evolved from both cooperation and competition, although the competition element primarily developed due to natural scarcity, the scarcity of our time is not due to natural occurrences, but instead due to the economic conditions imposed upon us by the capitalist class.

Competition for resources between individuals or groups is no longer necessary and the result is counter productive for the species.

[Charlie Watt]

I try to avoid debating these sort of drones. It's like they have fucking Stockholm Syndrome. They're the sort of idiot that actually claim to be a capitalist, merely because they are one of it's cheerleaders. Their arguments hold no water and their childish interpretations of competition in nature are utterly one dimensional.

[Rafiq]

Hm? Natural selection exists for traits within species as well.

Sorry, I was talking out of my ass :/. I got caught up reading too much Mutual Aid by kropotkin

I'm pretty sure it happens within species too, like when males fight over who gets to impregnate the sexy female.

My mistake

[Susurrus]

Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution
Kropotkin was a zoologist too.

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

[NewLeft]

Isn't it preferred to go through capitalism before anyhow?