Engels: “The Production and Reproduction of Real Life”.

 

 

                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Engels:

 

“The Production

 

and

 

Reproduction

 

of

 

Real Life”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Reader,

 

Frederick Engels wrote the following, in a 21 September 1890 letter, from London, England, to J. Bloch, in Konigsberg, Germany:

 

“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.  Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted.  Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.” [Paul Blackledge, Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory, SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 2019, p. 168, emphasis added by M.D.].

 

This statement not only refutes the ideology of ‘‘‘economy- determinism”’.

 

Whether consciously, intentionally or not, on the part of Engels at the time, this formulation also opens a door to Darwin’s work, and to its immanently-critical dialectical extension – and both Marx and Engels were critical students of Darwin’s work – to its extension to what we call the ‘Meta-Darwinian concept’ of human-social, human-species collective fitness.

 

This is because, once we overcome the fog of the false analogy between “artificial selection” – human agents’ domestication, via selective breeding, of the “social animals”, internalized into human ‘meta-social’ societies – and “natural selection”, as if Nature or the God behind Nature consciously picks favorites in biological evolution, it becomes plain that reproduction, and reproduction rates, are the key to fitness in biological evolution, and beyond, e.g., in human social evolution and ‘meta-evolution’ as well.

 

The measure of biological species fitness is the sustained rate of reproduction of their biomass.  Higher sustained biomass reproduction rates indicate higher fitness.

 

Likewise, higher sustained rates of human ‘socio-mass’ self-reproduction indicate higher human species fitness.

 

But here is a key part of what puts the “Meta” in the ‘Meta-Darwinian Hypothesis’.  Human social individuals are not provided, by their genome, with a fixed tool-kit – e.g., with a particular configuration of beak and/or of claw.  On the contrary, the human genome provide us with open hands, that can put down one tool and pick up another, and with a capability for continual learning of new behaviors, new activities, new social praxis.

 

Thus, the human ‘socio-mass’ level and rate-of-expansion must take account of, not just the ‘population socio-mass’, the mass of living human bodies, but also the ‘socio-mass’ of human-Nature-made artifacts of all kinds, that humans add to Nature, and whose use can increase the total ‘socio-mass’ of the human species at an accelerating rate. 

 

This ‘Meta-Darwinian Fitness’ of the human species, as expressed in the generally exponential growth of ‘human socio-mass’ throughout our species known history, can increase dramatically, and does increase dramatically.

 

This accelerating advance of this ‘human-social fitness’ is not the product of the human genome alone.

 

It is also the product of human culture and of human cultural evolution and revolution [‘meta-evolution’], i.e., the product of the ‘‘‘human phenome’’’ as well.

 

In summary, it is the product of the evolving and also ‘meta-evolving’ dialectical synthesis, which is the human phenome/human genome “complex unity”.  It is not based upon, or coded-in, our chromosomes alone.

 

And the core of that sustained accelerating rate of ‘human socio-mass self-reproduction’ – of that ‘Meta-Darwinian Fitness’ of the human species – is what Marx called, critically appropriating/‘«aufheben»-ating’ a concept from the ideology-vitiated science of capitalist “political-economy”, “the growth of the social forces of production”; of what we rename, and reconceptualize as, ‘the human-societal self-force of expanding human-social self-reproduction’, i.e., ultimately, the ‘self-productivity of humanity’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For more information regarding these Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free of charge, PDFs and/or JPGs of Foundation books, other texts, and images, please see:

 

www.dialectics.info

 

 

and

 

 

https://independent.academia.edu/KarlSeldon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books published by the F.E.D. Press, see –

 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

¡ENJOY!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

 

Miguel Detonacciones,

 

Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];

Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;

Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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