Originally part of the series ‘The Historical Method of Karl Marx’ written for Neue Zeit in 1903, Lafargue offers, alongside that which is antiquated, some brilliant insights into our relationship to natural and built worlds. “Eat the peach, spit the pit” as my grandfather would say.

‘The Natural and Artificial Environment’ (1903) by Paul Lafargue from New Review. Vol 1 No. 16 May, 1913.

The influence of the environment is not only direct, that is to say, it is not confined exclusively to the functioning organ (in the case of the pianist and ditch-digger, for instance, to the hand), but it is also indirect and is reflected in all the organs. This influence upon the entire organism has led the naturalists to an understanding of Geoffroy St. Hilaire’s theory, which he designates by the name of “subordination of organs,” and which Cuvier expounded as follows: “Every organic being forms an ensemble, a unitary, closed system, the parts of which correspond to one another and by reciprocal action contribute to the same final effect. None of these parts can be altered without the other parts being also altered.” (Address on the Revolutions of the Earth’s Surface.) For instance, the form of the teeth of an animal that for generations has become accustomed to a new kind of food, cannot be altered without entailing many other modifications in the jaws, the muscles that move them, the cranial bones to which they are attached, the brain enclosed by the skull,1 the bones and muscles that support the head, the form and length of the intestines, in a word, all the parts of its body Darwin asserts that the skeleton of many kinds of Scotch cows had undergone many changes solely because of their habit of grazing on sloping declivities. The naturalists are unanimous in regarding the cetacea (seals, whales, etc.) as former land mammals which found more favorable food conditions in the sea and for that reason became divers and swimmers. Hence this new mode of life effected a fundamental transformation in their organs and reduced to rudiments those which were superfluous, and on the other hand formed others adapted to the requirements of the new aqueous environment. The plants of the Sahara and other deserts, to adapt themselves to the barren environment, must limit their growth and reduce the number of their leaves to two or four; their process of vegetation takes place in a manner the reverse of the normal, for they rest in summer, during the hot season, and grow in winter, during the relatively cool and moist season.

The cosmic or natural environments, to which plants and animals must adapt themselves under penalty of death, form (precisely like an organic being) ensembles, complicated systems without precise limits, and their constituents are: the geologic formation of the earth, its chemical composition, its distance from the equator, its height above sea-level, the water courses which traverse it, its rainfall, its stored-up sun’s heat, and the plants and animals living upon it. The individual parts are so interlocked that not one can be altered without producing alterations in the other parts also. Although the alterations in the natural environments are less important than those of the organic being yet they are appreciable. For example, the forests have an influence upon the temperature, the rain, the moisture of the ground, its proportion of humus. Darwin has shown that insignificant animals, such as worms, have played an important part in the formation of the soil; Berthelot and the Ger- man agronomists, Hellriegel and Willfahrt, have proved that the microbes which swarm on the roots of the legumes make the ground more fertile. By the cultivation of plants and by stock-raising, man exerts a noticeable influence upon the natural environment. Deforestations begun by the Romans have transformed fruitful regions of Asia and Africa into uninhabitable wastes. Plants, animals and men, who, in the wild state, are subjected to the influence of the environment without other means of resistance than the capacity of adapting their organs, must finally, if for generations they live in different natural environments, become differentiated from one another, even when they have a common origin. Thus heterogeneous environments tend to divide plants and animals, and men as well, into different races.

Man’s ingenuity not only alters the natural environment, but also permits him to create an entirely new, artificial or social, environment, which enables him: to avoid, or at least to weaken considerably the influence of the natural environment upon his organism. But this artificial environment, like the natural environment, also exerts an influence upon man. Hence he is subject to the influence of two environments. The various artificial environments that one after another have been created by men greatly resemble each other, so that men are simultaneously subjected to the differentiating action of the heterogeneous natural environments in which they live, and to the effect of the artificial and similar environments the tendency of which is to diminish race distinctions and to produce the same needs, the same passions and the same intellectual condition. Moreover, natural environments situated in the same latitude and at the same altitude exert a similar unifying influence, owing to the similarity of their flora and fauna. Thus the artificial environments tend to unify the human species, which the natural environments have divided into races and varieties of races.

The evolution of the natural environment proceeds with extraordinary slowness. For this reason the species of plants. and animals that have adapted themselves to it appear to be fixed. In the artificial environment, on the contrary, evolution proceeds with increasing speed. Hence the history of men, compared with that of animals and plants, is extraordinarily rapid.

Precisely as with the organic being and the natural environment, the artificial environments form ensembles, systems, the parts of which are adapted to each other and are so closely connected that no single one of them can be displaced without all the others being disturbed and in their turn displaced.

While among savage tribes the artificial environment is of extreme simplicity and consists of but few parts, it becomes complicated in proportion to human progress by the addition of new constituents and by further development of those already present.

Since the beginning of the historical period the artificial environment is formed by the methods of production, the social, political and legal relations, the habits, customs and moral ideas, public opinion and sound common sense, the religions, literatures, arts, philosophies, etc., and the men who live in society. If all these mutually adapted parts were stable or varied only with great slowness, as do the parts of the natural environment, the artificial environment would remain in equilibrium and would have no history. But on the contrary, its equilibrium is extraordinarily and increasingly unstable and is constantly disturbed by alterations in some one of its parts and the consequent reactions in all the others.

The parts of an organic being and of a natural environment react upon each other directly, mechanically so to speak. If, for instance, the layer of vegetable soil of a place is increased by angle worms or through any other cause, it will then be able to nourish a forest instead of stunted plants, which in turn will alter the rain conditions, whereby the water-courses will be increased, and so on. But the parts of an artificial environment can only react upon each other through the medium of man. The altered part must first transform, in an intellectual and physical respect, the men affected, and suggest to them the modification of the other parts, so that these may reach the level attained by itself, for only then will they not hinder its further development and be completely adapted to it. The re-establishment of the equilibrium among the individual constituents of the artificial environment can often be effected only after struggles between the men interested in the partial transformation and those opposed to it.

In order to illustrate the action, produced through the medium of man, of the constituents of the artificial environment, it is sufficient to recall historical events of most recent times, which are still fresh in the memory of all.

After industry had made useful the dynamic force of steam, it required new means of transportation to convey its fuel, its raw material and its manufactured products. Thus it suggested to those interested in industry the idea of moving carriages upon iron rails by means of steam power, which was put into practice for the first time in France about 1830 in the coal fields of the Loire. But when it was desired to extend further this method of transportation, lively resistance was encountered in many quarters which delayed its general introduction for years. Even Thiers, one of the political leaders of the enfranchised bourgeoisie and one of the representatives of sound common sense endorsed by public opinion, opposed it energetically because, as he declared, a railroad was impracticable. But the railroads overthrew the most sensible and well-established ideas, and among other impossible things they demanded a transformation of the property-form that served then as the basis of the social structure of the dominant bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact until that time a citizen conducted an industrial or a commercial enterprise with his own money alone, at the most with the money also of one or two friends or acquaintances who had faith in his honesty and ability. He managed the money and was the actual owner of the factory or commercial house. But the railroads required such gigantic capital that it was impossible to find it accumulated in the hands of a few people. Hence a great number of the bourgeoisie were obliged to entrust their beloved money, which they had never allowed out of their sight, to people whose names they hardly knew and of whose morality and capability they knew still less. When the money was once yielded up they lost all control over its use, nor had they any property right in the railroad stations, the cars, locomotives, etc., which they had helped to manufacture. They had merely a right to the profits; instead of an article, which had volume, weight or some other substantial characteristics, there was handed to them in exchange for their money an insignificant little sheet of paper, which represented the fiction of an infinitely small and intangible share of the positive property, the name of which was printed thereon in large characters. As far back as bourgeois memory goes, property had never been clothed in such metaphysical garb. This form of property which alienated possession (or “impersonalized” property), was in such strong contrast to the form with which the bourgeoisie was familiar and which had been inherited through generations, that there came to its defense none but people accused of all sorts of crimes and reputed to desire the overthrow of the social order–none but Socialists: Fourier and St. Simon approved of the mobilization of property in paper shares.2 Among its adherents we find manufacturers, engineers, financiers, who had taken part in the revolution of 1848 and had been accomplices in Napoleon’s coup d’etat. They utilized the political revolutions in order to revolutionize the economic world by centralizing banking, legalizing the new form of property and making it acceptable to public opinion, and by creating a net-work of railroads in France.

The great mechanical industries, which must fetch their final and raw materials from a distance, and again must send their manufactured articles to distant points, cannot endure the partition of a country into small, independent states, each with its own customs tariff, laws, measures and weights, coinage, banks, etc.; they require united nations for their development. It was not until after bloody wars that Italy and Germany answered these requirements of great industry. Thiers and Proudhon, who resembled each other in so many respects and who represented the political interests of petty industry, were among the most zealous advocates of the independence of the Papal State and the states of the Italian princes.

Since man creates and alters the constituent parts of the artificial environment, the impelling forces of history must lie within him, as Vico and popular wisdom believe, and not in metaphysical virtues (justice, progress, humanity, patriotism, etc.), as the historians and the philosophers stubbornly reiterate. These confused and indefinite conceptions vary with the historical epochs and with the groups of men within an epoch, for in them are ideally mirrored the phenomena occurring in the various parts of the artificial environment. Thus, for example, the government official, the employer and the worker have each a different conception of justice. The Socialist understands by justice the restitution of the wealth stolen from the workers; the capitalist, the continuance of the robbery practiced upon the workers, and since he holds the economic and political power his idea is the prevailing one and has the force of law. For the very reason that the same word covers altogether contradictory conceptions, the bourgeoisie has made of these ideas a tool of rule and fraud.

That part of the social environment in which a man is active gives him a physical, intellectual and moral education. This education by the things which create in him ideas and arouse his passions is unconscious; when he acts he believes himself free to follow the impulses of his passions and ideas, while he really yields to the influences which are exerted upon him by a part of the artificial environment, which in its turn, can work upon the other parts only through his ideas and passions. While he unconsciously obeys the indirect pressure of the environment, he ascribes the guidance of his actions to a god or divine being. What is the least rigid part of the artificial environment, the part that changes most frequently in quantity and quality, the part that is most often suspected of effecting in men physical, intellectual and moral changes?

Marx answers: The mode of production.

By mode of production Marx means the manner in which man produces, not what he produces. Weaving has been carried on since prehistoric times, but we have been weaving with machines for only about a century. Machine production is the essential characteristic of modern industry. We have before our eyes an unparalleled example of its elementary, irresistible power to transform the social, economic, political and legal relations of a nation. Its introduction into Japan has, within a generation, raised this country from a medieval, feudal state to a constitutional, capitalist state.

Manifold causes co-operate to give it its omnipotent influence. Production absorbs, directly or indirectly, the energy of the overwhelming majority of a nation, while a small minority is active in the other parts of the artificial environment. In order to procure its material and intellectual means of existence, this minority also must take an interest in production. Consequently all men are mentally and physically subject to the transforming influence of the method of production, while a very small number of men is subjected to the influence of the other portions of the environment. But since the separate constituents of the artificial environment interact upon each other through the medium of man, that constituent which has the most energy to sway the whole will effect changes in the greatest number of men.

In the artificial environment of the savage, the mode of production is of relatively subordinate importance, but it gains an ever increasing importance in that of civilized man, for the reason that man has uninterruptedly impressed the forces of nature into his service from the time when he learned to know them. Prehistoric man began this subjugation when for the stone tool he substituted one of bronze and iron.

The advances of the method of production are so rapid, not only because production engages a vast number of men, but also because it involves “the furies of private interest” (Marx), the three great vices which, according to Vico, are the impelling forces of society, cruelty, greed and ambition.

The advances in the method of production are so precipitate that the men engaged in production are continually obliged to remodel the other parts of the social environment in order to bring them up to the level of the mode of production. The resistance which they encounter in carrying out this task gives occasion to ceaseless economic and political conflicts. Hence, if we desire to discover the fundamental causes of the historical movement, we must seek for them in the mode of production of the material life, which, as Marx says, generally dominates the development of the social, political and mental life.

1. The anatomists think that in the carnivora the strongly developed temporal muscles, by exerting pressure upon the skull, hamper the development of the brain, so that it is relatively small in comparison with that of those animals which, like man, have a little developed masticating apparatus and weak temporal muscles. In a given case we probably could, by intentional dwarfing of these muscles, alter the inner wall of the skull and increase the size of the cerebral chamber.

2. In his “Traité de l’unité universelle,” Fourier recites in detail the advantages which this form of property offers to the capitalists: “It runs no danger of being stolen, or of damage by fire or even earthquake. A minor never runs the risk of loss in the management of his property, for the management is the same for him as for all the stockholders. A capitalist, even if he possesses hundreds of millions, can convert his property into cash at any moment,” etc. It secures social peace, for “the subversive inclinations are transformed into love for the existing order so soon as a man becomes an owner of property”; on the other hand, “the poor man, even if he owns but a dollar, can buy an interest in the popular shares, which are divided into very small fractions…and thus, though to an infinitely small degree, can become a joint owner of the entire country and can speak of our palaces, our stores and our treasures.” Napoleon III. and his accomplices in the “coup d’etat” were greatly taken with these ideas; they made it easy for the lightest purses to acquire national bonds, which up to that time had been a monopoly of the heavy purses; they democratized the national debt, as one of them expressed it, by introducing the privilege of buying bonds for five francs, even for one franc. This way they hoped to interest the masses in the security of the public credit and thus to prevent political revolutions.

The New Review: A Critical Survey of International Socialism was a New York-based, explicitly Marxist, sometimes weekly/sometimes monthly theoretical journal begun in 1913 and was an important vehicle for left discussion in the period before World War One. Bases in New York it declared in its aim the first issue: “The intellectual achievements of Marx and his successors have become the guiding star of the awakened, self-conscious proletariat on the toilsome road that leads to its emancipation. And it will be one of the principal tasks of The NEW REVIEW to make known these achievements,to the Socialists of America, so that we may attain to that fundamental unity of thought without which unity of action is impossible.” In the world of the East Coast Socialist Party, it included Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Herman Simpson, Louis Boudin, William English Walling, Moses Oppenheimer, Robert Rives La Monte, Walter Lippmann, William Bohn, Frank Bohn, John Spargo, Austin Lewis, WEB DuBois, Arturo Giovannitti, Harry W. Laidler, Austin Lewis, and Isaac Hourwich as editors. Louis Fraina played an increasing role from 1914 and lead the journal in a leftward direction as New Review addressed many of the leading international questions facing Marxists. International writers in New Review included Rosa Luxemburg, James Connolly, Karl Kautsky, Anton Pannekoek, Lajpat Rai, Alexandra Kollontai, Tom Quelch, S.J. Rutgers, Edward Bernstein, and H.M. Hyndman, The journal folded in June, 1916 for financial reasons. Its issues are a formidable and invaluable archive of Marxist and Socialist discussion of the time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/newreview/1913/v1n16-may-1913.pdf