However, such a view hardly seems durable in the face of a long view on history nor is it particularly resonant among the working class with whom it is supposedly so sympathetic. It attributes societal composition as entirely due to arbitrary cultural impositions and humanity as endlessly fungible under culture’s influence. Meanwhile biology sits quietly but comfortably in the room, daring anyone brave enough to reckon with it.
The trouble starts with the way Marxist theory, and all subsequent social theories inspired by its paradigm, break with history. Perhaps even as late as the early twentieth century it was not too unreasonable to think that humanity could be moulded like clay into whatever form of our choosing. Then it may have seemed that pure behaviourism or a combination of behaviourism and eugenics would be sufficient to guide a given population towards a desired direction on a timeline of perhaps a few decades. Human nature has proved far less flexible in practice, with the sturdy foundations of the biological basement proving hard to shake. We are as much products of our ancestral environment as we are of our present environment, and there's a real failure to reckon with this reality among such social theories.
Take the end vector of a utopian Marxist society. Would it really resemble Star Trek? If everyone has what everyone else has and cannot get anymore, will that really focus humanity’s efforts towards positive ends? To a certain degree it would. Base human desires, envy and greed cannot be entirely eliminated but external systems can amplify or dampen their effects through feedback loops. A society that rewards outright greed does tend towards being more greedy. But adverse human interactions cannot be solved entirely through social contracts, as these interactions arise through subtle combinations of needs and desires that lie below the waterline of influence of the conscious mind. Greed, jealousy, hatred, discontent and other conventionally "negative" emotions form part of a carefully crafted arsenal wielded by our genes, honed over generations, against the individual to compel one towards more procreative impulses. Those who would endorse eugenics in the past, genetic engineering in the present, would do well to consider Orgel's Second Rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are." An academic theory, particularly one that is not based in a far more complete and data1-driven science of sociology and neurology is not about to outwit millions of years of trial and error.
In a crucial sense all such class-based ideology misses the point. Because the human condition is not identified with class, with community or with the group, but instead is embodied in the individual, who forms part of a network of different groups that change in time. This is not to say that group identity is not more important or pronounced in the mind of the individual in a given society, but that misery and suffering are ultimately personal affairs, not adequately addressed by appeasing the group at large.
On Even Distribution
Nobody wants the same thing as everyone else. Everyone wants as much as they can get. We don’t want to equalise the number of our progeny with our neighbours, establishing a sort of reproductive armistice, we want to maximise the number of our offspring. These are biologically based and are not simply overturned by societal changes. Of course that doesn’t mean they can’t be subverted or put to service to even worse effects. One might contend that even the greediest eater eventually stops eating, and this is true, since there is a physical limit to consumption. However, for abstract things for which there exist no physical limits or penalties, like say money, the human urge to ceaselessly acquire goes unchecked. The invention of an abstract exchange medium thereby amplifies natural human greed. Simply redistributing the exchange medium does little to temper this impulse.
Consider the plight of the super-rich, who have more money than can perhaps be reasonably spent, yet are frequently besought by neuroses, depression, anxiety and other problems of the common person. They still struggle to find purpose and meaning in their existences and ultimately have to deal with their own mortality. It is the quest for survival, for self-fulfilment, the manifestations of the biological urge for procreation and the coming to terms with mortality that form the basis of human misery, not class struggle.
On Religion
Such theories have a particular blind spot as it relates to religion. Generally they don't understand it or don't want to and venerate the theory as being able to solve individual needs to the point of making religion irrelevant. Generally the position taken is that religion is used as a temporary relief or balm from suffering (among many other functions) and that improvement of the material concerns of society will remove this suffering and thereby also the need for such an opiate.
This thinking derives from a view of suffering, misery, and discontent as being extrinsic, owing primarily to external conditions rather than the view more often adopted by religion that these are intrinsic properties of being human, and that coping with them rather than trying to rearrange the world is the path forward. Neither view (at least as simply presented here) is completely tenable, but an acknowledgement of intrinsic human dissatisfaction would certainly help to temper the ambitious social engineering that is so breathlessly extolled in such theories.
On Equality
The ideal that all humans should be equal presupposes that people are equal, or ever can be. The truth is we are all unequal, we’re unique after all. There is a strong biological basis for inequality. Consider small societies or communes that have tried to do away with mating and have free and open sexual relations. Not everyone is equally sexually desirable and so there is an unequal distribution of preferences which soon manifests itself in the form of an unofficial hierarchy. Some members are left out, others get all the action. The commodity of sexual attention quickly becomes very unevenly distributed. The ‘communal’ organisation is simply a lack of organisation, and so one establishes itself to fill the vacuum. Meanwhile a system of assigned pairing based on preferences and desirability would achieve a much more even distribution of sexual attention. Such a system would be quite imperfect, but would be much less prone to runaway violence and collapse than in a ‘free love’ polygamist tyranny.
On Scale
I sense also that all such social theories are blind to the problem of scale. The problem of scale is something that is easy to lose sight of in the easy abstraction with which we are accustomed. A 'group' may be five, or fifteen, or fifty thousand members strong. But in practice numeracy rears its head and heavily influences social affairs. This is in part because while our tools of mathematics and abstraction may allow us to handle arbitrarily large quantities, our biological hardware has not been updated and remains optimally tuned for relatively small numbers of fixed individuals.
The problem of scale goes unnoticed I suspect because Marxist and other theories arrived on the scene when human populations had already grown beyond any reasonable level for which a working social theory could be constructed. There's an implicit assumption that we can make all these numbers work if we just get the arrangement right, when the answer from biology may be that our numbers are too large to begin with.
On Ambition
Such theories want to break with history and overturn the status quo. They are demanding. They demand complete reorganisation of what has come before and tend to be quite rigid in structure. Capitalism has succeeded in large part to its adaptability. Once thought of (at least by some) as being inextricably tied to democracy, capitalism has demonstrated transference to dictatorships and even communism with remarkable success, enabling increasing wealth accumulation and resource depletion without stoking the fires of social change. This I think argues against 'total system' social theories and more for adaptable "influencing" social modules: the goal being to be infectious but influential in the desired directions.
Footnotes
1 Good data that is.↩
References
Debord, G. (2004) The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Knabb, K. London: Rebel Press.
Power, N. (2009) One Dimensional Woman. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Adorno, T. W. (1991). The Culture Industry. London: Routledge.
