If not struggle, then?

Struggle we understand of course also in non-Darwinian terms. But Darwin brought to it a naturalness, an inevitability: A million centuries of struggle led to the survival of the fittest, to human progress. B. W. Higman’s Writing West Indian Histories argues that Darwin’s use of struggle was a response to the growth of industrial capitalism and the competitive mindset it entailed. Marx’s class struggle too was rooted in this same world. Perhaps the ideological heft of Marxism explains why the deterministic bent of the struggle concept – its profound conservatism – stays muted.