Every time someone brings up any sort of even half utopian vision (read: a world where people aren’t actively trying to kill each other), communism for example, people are sure to bring up “but how will technological/societal/human progress be driven without conflict? Wouldn’t humanity stagnate like the fatasses aboard the space ship in WALL-E?”
I’ve never agreed with this, and though I’m obviously not a sociopolitical theorist, I have some vague justifications of my stance:
First of all, human curiosity and desire to create are intrinsic to our species and does not require conflict. There are enough makers slapping together half baked DIY projects in their garage that do a whole lot of nothing aside from being fun to prove that, with many enjoying the process of making the thing more than the thing itself, but sometimes those pet projects do turn into real products that solve real problems. As are the scientists that research the weirdest things just for the hell of it, and surprise surprise decades later it turns out to actually be useful. Astronomers studying exoplanets and cosmic gas clouds are another example, they’re never going to visit those things, certainly won’t be colonizing them anytime in their or our lifetime, and it’s not like there’s an obvious path from that to any sort of weapon. Are they doing it specifically because there might be a war soon? When Galileo fought tooth and nail for his heliocentric theory, he never expected it to physically affect existence on Earth, nor could he have conceived any way of using said theory in battle, but he still advocated it simply because he believed it was the truth about the nature of our universe.
Also, things like radar, nuclear fission, or any of the things commonly associated with war were not initially discovered because of war. The mechanisms of action were discovered by physicists probing and trying to understand the universe, simple as that. The Chinese developed the first forms of gunpowder, and they used it for fireworks at first, guns came much later with the European colonization of East Asia.
Also also, in times of peace, art flourishes. Any period known as the golden age of a given culture or society are almost always in times of relative peace. Can’t do much art if you’re being raided from the neighbouring empire can you?
Another thing, just because there are no longer external geopolitical conflict doesn’t mean there are no conflicts period. Illness, mortality, minor inconvenience, hell even being bored are all conflicts that people have worked very hard to defeat. And there are sci-fi sounding things that can be explored even after all of that is solved. Transhumanism, transphysics, mind uploading, telepathy, faster than light travel, time travel, seeing into or visiting other universes or higher dimensions, do other universes or higher dimensions even exist? We genuinely do not know if these things are possible or what they can do for us, so do they not warrant exploration? Or, instead of exploring outer space, how about exploring inner space? The nature of life and consciousness, emotion, love, and attachment, higher and higher orders of mathematics and logic, do living things truly have spirits or life force within or are we just complicated, mostly self contained chemical reactions? Plenty to chew on in a post conflict world, no?
Finally, one must consider, is no change or advancement really stagnation? Why do we need infinite advancement? Why can’t we just focus on being human, living, and enjoying what we have now? This reminds me of the excuses European colonists made for the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, that, “well they aren’t actively trying to build empires or advance themselves, we’re doing them a favour by bring them our way of life because they were never going to achieve anything their way” meanwhile many Indigenous people believed that simply living life has intrinsic value, that being human and enjoying all the things that come with that is enough.
IDK, what do you think of all this?
A brief answer by way of question: does it depend on what you mean by conflict?
The way I see it, resolving the contradictions of capitalism will not end all contradictions, but create new ones. There will still be conflict, and this will still drive change. It just might not be ‘armed conflict’ – but who’s to know?
Stagnation is impossible if one accepts dialectical materialism. It’ll just be different kinds of conflict and contradictions that drive change. Those contradictions are more or less impossible to predict from our vantage point within capitalism. It’s not that we need advancement, it’s that we can’t stop it.
Reactionaries do try to stop progress. Maybe that’s why they think that future communists will also try to do the same, just as reactionaries have been happy to try to keep humanity within this epoch. They got theirs a few hundred years ago and have done everything possible to make sure we don’t get ours. Committed Marxists should not try to stop at communism, though.
It’s hard enough to imagine socialism, never mind communism. But communism is not the end state; it’s just the only viable option after capitalism. It’s either that or an uninhabitable earth, one way or the other. But socialism and communism will still contain contradictions, giving rise to problems that humans will need to fix, leading to change (progressive or regressive, at different times).
In dialectical materialism, there is indeed no social progress without conflict, but its notion of conflict is different from the vulgar one. For starters, the term “dialectics” comes from the idea of a philosophical dialogue. In a dialogue, two parties with opposing viewpoints attack each other, each forcing the opponent to strengthen their position by pointing out flaws in their arguments, and eventually either one position is found so weak it must be entirely discarded, or a common position is reached which contains the elements of both previous viewpoints that have withstood scrutiny by the other party.
This schema of a battle between two conflicting forces, first applied to nature and the political economy by Marx and Engels, is what really hides behind the term “conflict” in dialectical materialism. The misconception that this always has to involve bloodshed stems from the context of capitalism and its predecessors, because they provide for no permanent method of resolving class interests other than class struggle. There is a component of class warfare baked into every parliamentary decision, every military operation, every court case, every corporate merger, and it would be foolish for the capitalists to sit idly by and not throw their weight around to gain ground.
In socialism, although still marred by the remnants of the capitalist class and its ideology, this component of class warfare is of declining importance, and with the elimination of the class enemy it will vanish entirely. In its place will fall other aspects which will be weighed against each other in a less hot-blooded and fearful manner. Indeed, considering the classical anatomy of a dialectical conflict presented in the first paragraph, one could say that such conflicts under capitalism aren’t really proper conflicts just yet, since the component of class struggle often outweighs any considerations that would be actually merited by the substance of the conflict, and thus a resolution by the means of class warfare does not lead to any progress insofar as that substance is concerned.
If you want to how exactly conflicts would look like under socialism and communism, look at conflicts where it is in the material interests of the capitalist not to interfere with their outcome: A good example would be companies selecting a “red team” to discover vulnerabilities in their own security, but which will not come with the repercussions of an actual attack from e.g. a competing company. In a similar way, socialism may resolve (or even initiate) conflicts through two teams having a friendly competition in a sandbox.
Another example would be peer review within the scientific community, but that too suffers from the many, many shortcomings imposed on it via the material workings as well as the ideology of capitalism: The scientific community receives inadaequate funding, consists of overly specialised researchers, lacks peer reviewers, answers to predatory publishers, is detached from and out of reach for low-income households and minorities, bleeds at the hand of companies and institutions offering better salaries and benefits, has a crushing work environment, and is often poisoned by vainglorious thirst for prizes and honours.
