| American
Liberals and Conservatives alike, both guided by short-sighted, naïve capitalist
economic ideology and completely alienated from the dialectical workings of Nature,
are once again demonstrating reactionary, romantic, and anachronistic stupidity
in their attempts to legislate against Microsoft’s near-monopolization of
the computer software industry with its ubiquitous Windows platform just as they
have done with emergent monopolies in the past. The emergence of unity and cooperation
amidst competition that these politicians are trying to fight is not only a natural,
progressive stage in the evolution of human societies, but also, as modern Evolutionary
Biologists such as Lynn Margulis are proving, one of the primary dynamics of evolutionary
development common to all biological life. This sort of cooperation amongst disparate
organisms leads to innovation, stability, and complexity. As
Karl Marx described 150 years ago, Capitalism has a tendency to produce bigger
and bigger monopolistic businesses that are able to out-compete and swallow up
their smaller rivals by virtue of size, efficiency, expanse, and convenience.
The first few decades of this century had many examples of this tendency, as massive
monopolies emerged and expanded in the oil, steel, and other industries, including
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and many others. Eventually these megacorporations
and the failure of Capitalism in general drew the concern of American politicians,
and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal institutionalized 8 of Marx and
Engels’ 10 points from the Communist Manifesto by allying these industries
to the state (primarily for the war effort), passing anti-trust laws, and creating
the famous “alphabet soup” of social programs to benefit The People.
As even bourgeois historians admit, FDR preserved Capitalism by Socializing it,
and the love the American people felt for him was only matched by the love of
the Soviet people for their own Socialist leader, Joseph Stalin. However, these
New Deal programs have slowly eroded away since the death of FDR, and we are once
again witnessing (just as Marx and Lenin predicted) massive corporate mergers,
as well as Capitalism’s globalization in search of exploitable labor and
fresh markets to peddle their wares. Corporate mergers and buy-outs can be observed
on all scales and in all industries, from the funeral parlors of Northern Virginia
to Mobil and Exxon to McDonald’s. As a New Yorker article pointed out last
year, history has completely vindicated Marx’s analysis of Capitalism.2 These
monopolies eventually control prices, produce shoddy goods, and destroy the very
free market competition that created them. The unrealistic solution that Capitalist
economists and politicians always propose once this happens is to break up the
monopolies with anti-trust laws in order to restore the “golden days”
of Laissez-faire Capitalism where small companies are free to compete “all
against all.” In Capitalism’s Hobbesian ideology, monopolies are always
considered bad primarily because they inhibit competition, which supposedly produces
the best workers and businesses. This romantic view of competition is not only
stupid and pernicious to human happiness, but also completely at odds with the
laws of Nature itself. The type of human that is driven to action only by hate
(which is the driving force of competition) is an utterly warped and broken waste
product of bourgeois society. It is this type of loveless, joyless person that
has always been the enemy of peace and prosperity, and it its this type of person
that universally and incorrectly imagines their own warped beings to be common
to all humans, and even to all of life. Such people create hellish economic systems
like Wild West Capitalism because they are unconsciously driven to steal and destroy
by greed and desire for power, desires that are all ultimately fueled by an insatiable
inner wanting, emptiness, and lack of the basic light and joy of life. With people
like this on top, it is no wonder that Capitalism is the most supremely wasteful
economic system created by mankind. In every society and every race, these dissatisfied,
greed-driven people are the enemies of all humanity (as well as our entire oxygen-based
ecosystem), yet it is these defective humans that have been consistently glorified
as the paragons of human evolution, when in fact they are, by biological standards,
failed, destructive waste products that must be eliminated if our species is to
progress, or even survive. The bleak
and Hobbesian worldview that these broken people create has often been integrated
into pseudoscientific “Social Darwinist” theories of evolution, such
as the
“selfish gene” theory of Richard Dawkins, dualism all over
again with the gene substituting for the soul. However, Symbiogenesis, a new and
powerful biological paradigm backed up by increasingly extensive microbiological
evidence, has emerged in the scientific community, among its proponents people
like University of Massachusetts microbiologist Lynn Margulis. This new paradigm
says that the major documented dynamic of evolutionary change and novelty is not
competition, but cooperation and symbiosis. A now-accepted and dramatic example
of this symbiogenic principle in evolutionary history is the once mysterious origin
of the first eukaryotic (nucleated) cell: during the Oxygen Revolution (when Oxygen
pollution from anaerobic bacteria threatened life on Earth), a newly-evolved aerobic
(oxygen-breathing) bacterium invaded an old-fashioned anaerobic bacterium, and,
instead of destroying each other, the two microbes joined forces, producing a
new, more-complex eukaryotic cell that was to become the progenitor of higher
life forms, including humans, mitochondria. The next time you breathe, you should
think of the billions of tiny mitochondria cooperating inside your body, helping
to make you possible. Other, even more exciting research in this area has yielded
DNA evidence that the undulipodia (whip-like tails) on sperm cells are the descendents
of once-autonomous spirochete bacteria; these same undulipodia not only propel
sperm cells, but also filter the air that enters our lungs, and form the basic
of all sensory perception in animals. The new view of living organisms suggested
by this research is not one of independent, bloodthirsty, Hitlerite gene machines
striving to climb their way to some “top” of an evolutionary ladder
at the expense of weaker, “inferior” organisms, but instead one of normally
cooperative creatures, all organically connected by our physical environment and,
at a microscopic level, composed of specialized microbes, which sometimes specialize
and coalesce to create supercolonies in the form of higher organisms, including
humans. In other words, we are, to use Margulis’ term, nothing more than
“glorified sludge”: a unified supercolony of bacteria organized into
a massive and complex organism that is still completely dependant on a larger
microbial environment, which includes prokaryotic bacteria that can exchange DNA
between strains with only a touch; even the axons and dendrites in our supposedly
superior brains are only networks of squirmy, specialized spirochete bacteria.
These scientific glimpses into a larger reality is not only a blow to human dignity
and illusory individualism, but also a beautiful and inspiring demonstration of
Dialectical Materialism at work in Nature. This
new model of evolutionary biology gives hard scientific evidence to projections
of the inevitable future of human society projected by such thinkers as Karl Marx
and Albert Einstein: the hateful, stressful, oppressive, and competitive condition
of human civilization, whose purest manifestation is global Capitalism (which
humans are quickly approaching), is only a primitive stage of development that
must be overcome and replaced with a populist, socialist democracy of all working
people. Albert Einstein cited our current state as the “predatory phase of
human development,” and Karl Marx concluded that competition would give rise
to increasingly expansive and an increasingly concentrated and oppressive bourgeoisie,
which must be eventually overthrown by the working people in order to usher in
a new, cooperative, and universal society. These parasitic industrial monopolies
are the elitist collectives of the bourgeoisie, whose technology and infrastructure
could nevertheless be put to the service of The People. The healthy human body,
with its democratic hierarchy of organelles, cells, tissues, organs, systems,
and unified totality, is a naturally occurring and immediately obvious example
of Communism in action. This type of unified, democratic, and centralized organization
found in living organisms is identical to the model of human society dreamt of
and striven for by Red women and men throughout the history of human civilization.
So far, our dream has been unrealized. However, humans are just now entering a
new era of global interaction never seen before in history, where nationalism
and others previously-secure divisions of mankind are quickly becoming obsolete.
The human experiment begun in the Neolithic Revolution is approaching an unavoidable
fork in the road: we must either somehow unite as a species and create a harmonious
society, or we will go extinct. Humanity’s waste and destruction of its own
habitat might eradicate most of life as we see it, but there are more microbes
where that came from, some of which do not even require our familiar solar ecosystem
(photosynthesis) to live. As Lynn Margulis has said, Mother Nature is a tough
bitch, and the ancient web of life on Earth, in which the human species forms
but a tiny, transient development, does not require us to survive. Answers
to our species’ problems need no longer be sought in the obsolete thoughts
of ignorant philosophers and mystical obscurantists of past eras. As Harvard professor,
entomologist, environmentalist, and founder of Sociobiology Edward O. Wilson has
pointed out, the natural sciences are beginning to provide real, factual answers
to questions that were once open to capricious speculation. Now we can finally
begin to synthesize our knowledge into a more coherent and scientific worldview,
and apply it to create a happier and more harmonious human society. Also, In addition
to globalizing humanity, Capitalism is also developing computer technology that
could solve the problem of employment and resource allocation in a future global,
centralized Communist society. The dream of creating the kind of society predicted
by Karl Marx and depicted in Star Trek, where people are motivated by pleasure,
joy, and love (instead of pain, fear, and hate) and work for the common good,
is finally within sight; however, thanks to destruction of the environment, so
is our extinction. If humans are to survive, we must look to Nature, including
the Nature within ourselves, for guidance. Bibliography:
1. Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and
Dorian Sagan. 2. "The Return of
Karl Marx" by John Cassidy The New Yorker, October 20 & 27 1997, pp.248-259.
(A bourgeois admission that Marx's theory accurately predicted the behavior of
a Capitalist economy.) 3. "Attack
of the Microbiologists" by Elizabeth Royte. The New York Times Magazine,
January 14 1996, pp.21-23. 4. "Why
Socialism?" by Albert Einstein. Monthly Review, May 1949. (Reprinted in Ideas
and Opinions by Albert Einstein, and also available on the WWW.) 5.
On Contradiction by Mao Zedong. (In most collected works of Mao, plus on the WWW.
Excellent essay on Dialectical Materialism.) 6.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E.O. Wilson. |
