The Planned action of Animals

Animals can act in a planned, premeditated fashion.

On the contrary, a planned mode of action exists in embryo wherever protoplasm, living albumen, exists and reacts, that is, carries out definite, even if extremely simple, movements as a result of definite external stimuli.

Such reaction takes place even where there is yet no cell at all, far less a nerve cell.

There is something of the planned action in the way insect-eating plants capture their prey, although they do it quite unconsciously.

In animals the capacity for conscious, planned action is proportional to the development of the nervous system, and among mammals it attains a fairly high level.

In English fox-hunting, the fox unerringly uses its excellent knowledge of the locality in order to elude its pursuers.

Our domestic animals are more highly developed thanks to their association with man. They can act as cunning as our children.

For, just as the development history of the human embryo in the mother’s womb is only an abbreviated repetition of the history, extending over millions of years, of the bodily development of our animal ancestors, starting from the worm, so the mental development of the human child is only a still more abbreviated repetition of the intellectual development of these same ancestors, at least of the later ones.

But all the planned action of all animals has never succeeded in impressing the stamp of their will upon the earth. That was left for man.

In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction.

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us.

Each victory in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.

When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula.

Thus at every step, we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

With every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature.

In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities.

But the more this progresses:

• the more will men feel and know their oneness with nature
• the more impossible will be the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose after the decline of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity.

It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to calculate the more remote natural effects of our actions in the field of production.

But it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social effects of these actions. We mentioned the potato and the resulting spread of scrofula.

But what is scrofula compared to the effects which the reduction of the workers to a potato diet had on the living conditions of the popular masses in whole countries, or compared to the famine the potato blight brought to Ireland in 1847, which consigned to the grave a million Irishmen, nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes, and forced the emigration overseas of two million more?

When the Arabs learned to distil spirits, it never entered their heads that by so doing they were creating one of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the aborigines of the then still undiscovered American continent.

When Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so he was reviving slavery, which in Europe had long ago been removed. He laid the basis for the Negro slave trade.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, men laboured to create the steam-engine. It concentrated wealth in the hands of a minority and dispossessed the huge majority.

The steam engine gave social and political domination to the bourgeoisie, Later, it gave rise to a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat.

• This struggle can end only in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class antagonisms.

By collecting and analysing historical material, we get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our production activity. This gives us an opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well.

This regulation, however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.

All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at achieving the most immediately and directly useful effect of labour. The further consequences, which appear only later and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation, were totally neglected.

The original common ownership of land corresponded, on the one hand, to a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was restricted in general to what lay immediately available, and presupposed, on the other hand, a certain superfluity of land that would allow some latitude for correcting the possible bad results of this primeval type of economy.

When this surplus land was exhausted, common ownership also declined.

All higher forms of production, however, led to the division of the population into different classes and thereby to the antagonism of ruling and oppressed classes.

Thus the interests of the ruling class became the driving factor of production, since production was no longer restricted to providing the barest means of subsistence for the oppressed people. This has been put into effect most completely in the capitalist mode of production prevailing today in Western Europe.

The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions. Indeed, even this useful effect – inasmuch as it is a question of the usefulness of the article that is produced or exchanged – retreats far into the background, and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be made on selling.

Classical political economy is the social science of the bourgeoisie. It examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of production and exchange that are actually intended.

Individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account.

As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied. He does not concern himself with what afterwards happens to the commodity and its purchasers.

The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions.

The Spanish planters in Cuba burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees.

The heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!

In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result.

They were surprised when the more remote effects of their actions turned out to be quite opposite in character.

The harmony of supply and demand is transformed into the very reverse opposite, as shown by the course of each ten years’ industrial cycle – even Germany has had a little preliminary experience of it in the “crash”; that private ownership based on one’s own labour must of necessity develop into the expropriation of the workers, while all wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of non-workers; that [… the manuscript breaks off here.]

Notes

1. In the 1870s, when this was written, British zoogeographer Philip Lutley Sclater put forth the theory that a continent (he called “Lemuria”) existed which reached from modern Madagascar to India and Sumatra – and this continent has since submerged beneath the Indian Ocean.