Marx, Meteors, and Buckthorn

This past weekend I attended the 2025 Marxist School of Chicago, hosted by the Revolutionary Communists of America, at the invitation of a friend who is a member. (To protect that friend's privacy I'll assign them the pseudonym "Sam" for this post.) At this time I'm just a fellow-traveler (I have always been wary of officially declaring allegiance to a specific political party), but I also think that it would be wise for me to get a more formal education on leftist theory, having up til now been largely self-taught via various blogs (in the 2010s) and "BreadTube" (in the 2020s).

It's ya boi, Karl Marx. 

During the opening remarks, the presenter said something that immediately got my hackles up: that capitalism had been "necessary" for human progress. He even went so far as to invoke chattel slavery as part of that, as it was through the stolen labor of enslaved people that the US was able to accumulate so much wealth. I will gladly concede that capitalism requires slavery to be successful; there's a reason why capitalists to this day keep trying to find ways to extract free labor from the working class. However, if capitalism requires slavery, and if capitalism was necessary for human progress, then it would follow that slavery (and the genocide of indigenous Americans, and all the other horrors of capitalism) was necessary for human progress. 

This is a conclusion that I flatly reject on multiple grounds:

1) If leftists (whether communists, socialists, or anarchists) concede that a past atrocity was "necessary" for human progress, that lays the groundwork for justifying future atrocities as "necessary" as well. I hope I don't need to explain further why that's a dangerous line of logic that should never be countenanced.

2) The claim that capitalism was "necessary" for human progress is un-falsifiable, which is something that should be of great concern to people who tout "scientific socialism." In fact, I'd argue it's a Panglossian sort of fallacy: it mistakenly concludes that because capitalism did become the dominant economic model, it was the only possible outcome, when we don't actually know that; we can't run the experiment of human history a hundred times to see if capitalism always dominates, or if other ways of organizing society could have persisted.

I raised my concerns to Sam during our lunch break, and amusingly enough they anticipated that I would take issue with that portion of the opening remarks. (Perhaps they noticed me furiously scribbling in my notebook.) I will provide the essence of their counter-argument to the best of my ability here and try to interrogate it a bit further.

A very rare chance event

When explaining my objection to Sam, I used the metaphor of evolution; it was not inevitable for humans to become the dominant species - that happened through a thousand chance events, one massive example being the Chicxulub impact that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs and allowed mammals to take over the ecological niches they left behind. Claiming otherwise is the sort of anti-scientific determinist thinking that one normally sees amongst "intelligent design" boosters. Sam conceded the point but countered that, continuing with the metaphor, evolution is still constrained by environmental factors ("material conditions," if we want to get Marxist in our language). Furthermore, chance events on the scale of the Chicxulub impact are incredibly rare, and they still ultimately are about changing the material conditions in dramatic ways; if the environmental pressures for a trait don't exist, that trait simply will not come about. Humans are not going to suddenly evolve wings; we can say that with certainty because our environmental conditions don't select for that trait, and the previous millions of years of evolution have taken our species down a path that renders our physiology completely unsuited to flight.

Thus, Sam's argument is that capitalism, while not strictly inevitable, was the most logical/likely outcome given the material conditions at the end of feudalism - in Europe.

I want to add that last caveat to their argument because I think that is where I still have hangups; it's the Eurocentrism of it all. Feudalism was not universally adopted by humanity; other systems of organization could be found all over the other five inhabited continents, some similarly hierarchical and unequal, but others much more egalitarian in nature. Even in those other feudal (or feudal-like) societies, capitalism did not arise - it was only in Europe, through whatever chance sequence of events and combination of environmental factors, and then through European colonialism it was exported.

Sam used this last point in their counter-argument: yes, other systems did exist, but capitalism steamrolled every one once they came into contact. Which is undeniably true! However, we don't say that buckthorn is a necessary step in the progress of North American plant life; it's a goddamn invasive species.

Buckthorn: almost as noxious as capitalism

Buckthorn did not evolve for the environmental conditions of North America. So when it was introduced to the continent (to "improve" the landscape), its evolutionary traits that were perfectly well-suited to its native range went haywire. The species crowds out native plant life and creates monocultures. It certainly provides some benefits to animals: the berries are eaten by birds, and its dense ground cover provides shelter to both birds and small mammals. That does not mean the spread of buckthorn is "progress," however, nor was it "necessary". It is the result of human selfishness and short-sightedness.

It's not a perfect metaphor, of course - no metaphor is - but I do think it serves the purpose of questioning the application of value-charged terms like "progress." Evolution is not a system of "progress" where organisms improve over time; it's just about change in response to environmental conditions. We are not "more evolved" or "better" than our Australopithecus ancestors; they were perfectly well-suited to their environment, and when their environment changed, so did they. Similarly, pre-contact indigenous American societies and pre-colonial African societies worked just fine for their environment, and the introduction of an invasive species (i.e. capitalism) should not be described as progress. (I'd also argue that the wave of diseases that wiped out up to 95% of the indigenous American population before the year 1700 was a catastrophic event comparable to the Chicxulub impact in terms of radically changing the environment to allow new organisms/ideas/systems to fill vacant niches.)

To be clear, I am not saying all this to "debunk" Marxist theory or dialectical materialism. I do believe they are among the best ways to study and describe history as it did actually happen, and they are critically important tools to analyze what is currently happening in the world as well. I just want to remind people to be cautious about confusing descriptivism for prescriptivism; accurately describing the way things did happen does not mean that it is the only way things should have happened.

And I want to give Sam their due credit, as they agreed that Marxist theory cannot/should not place a value judgment on the evolution of feudalism > capitalism > (hopefully) communism. Sam also pointed out that if communism is the thing that evolves out of capitalism, eventually the environment will change again, and communism will need to be replaced with yet something else altogether. That is evolution: it has no end-game. It has no stasis. It is always changing. Capitalism may have provided a very real benefit to the humans who developed it at one point, but clearly the environmental conditions have changed. Capitalism has become an invasive monoculture that is destroying the planet; a trait that once helped a select population of humans is now hindering pretty much all humans. So we must change, or go extinct.