Marx and Darwin

• Author: Terence Ball
• DOI: 10.1177/009059177900700403
• Published date: 01 November 1979
• Date: 01 November 1979
• Published By: Sage Publications, Inc.
• Subject Matter: Articles

MARX
AND
DARWIN
A Reconsideration
TERENCE
BALL
University of Minnesota
lR NEARLY
OR
A
NEARLY
CENTURY
A
the
CENTURY
names of Karl
of
Marx and Charles
Darwin have been linked in an apparently indissoluble union. That union, I
shall argue, is almost wholly chimerical. It derives from a myth created
after Marx’s death by Friedrich Engels, disseminated by later Marxists as
evidence for their theory’s &dquo;scientific&dquo; status, and given considerable
credence and support by the discovery of two letters written by Darwin to
Marx. As we shall see, the first of these letters is authentic; so too is the
second-except that the addressee was not Karl Marx. And thereby hangs a
tale. The myth of a connection, methodological or otherwise, between
Marx and Darwin, far from being malicious, rests upon a series of mix-ups.
This veritable comedy of errors is at once instructive, amusing, and-inso-
far as it hastened Marxism’s ossification into scientistic dogma-tragic.
I
The Marx-Darwin myth began innocently enough. In his speech at
Marx’s graveside in 1883, the distraught but ever-respectful Engels paid his
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am indebted to Sir Isaiah Berlin and James Farr for their
critical comments on an earlier version of this essay, which is excerpted from my
larger work-in-progress, Marxism as Science: An Historical and Critical Study. I am
no less grateful to the Warden and Fellows of Nuffield College, Oxford, for kindly
extending an invitation to join them during the 1978-1979 academic year; their
stimulation and encouragement made the writing of this essay a pleasure.
POLITICAL THEORY. Vol 7 No. 4. November 1979 469-483
@ 1979 Sage Publications, Inc.
469

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470
old friend the high compliment of comparing his achievement with Dar-
win’s. &dquo;Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic
nature,&dquo; said Engels, &dquo;so Marx discovered the law of development of
human history.&dquo; Engels’s remarks were published the following week in
Der Sozialdemokrat.1
Five years later Engels again drew the comparison in
his preface to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto. This
was followed in 1895 (the year of his death) by Engels’s &dquo;Darwinian&dquo;
interpretation of human history, The Part Played by Labor in the Trans-
ition from Ape to Man.
2 As Marx’s life-long friend, confidant, and literary
executor, Engels’s comparison bore the stamp of authenticity.
The putative parallel between Marxism and Darwinism was quickly
picked up by Marxists throughout Europe and was thereafter repeated
almost ritualistically whenever Marxism’s &dquo;scientific&dquo; character was called
into question. In Italy Engels’s comparison was enthusiastically seconded
by Filippo Turati, who in an 1892 polemic called Marx &dquo;the Darwin of
social science,&dquo; a judgment later reiterated by Antonio Labriola.3 In
Russia a still-obscure revolutionary, V. I. Lenin, drew the parallel between
Marx and Darwin in his 1894 essay, &dquo;What the ’Friends of the People’
Are.&dquo;4 In England the 1897 New Century Review carried an article by
Edward Aveling, Marx’s son-in-law, entitled &dquo;Charles Darwin and Karl
Marx: A Comparison,&dquo; German and French translations of which were
published simultaneously on the Continent.~
5
In 1894 Ludwig Buchner
published his Darwinismus und Sozialismus. This was followed in 1899 by
Ludwig Woltmann’s Die Darwinsche Theorie und der Sozialismus and still
later, in 1906, by Karl Kautsky’s influential Ethik und materialistische
Geschichtsauffassung.6 All shared the common conviction that Marx’s
method and his intentions paralleled Darwin’s and that, moreover, human
history should be regarded merely as a branch of natural history. Purpose,
intention-teleology-were out, &dquo;evolution&dquo; via &dquo;natural selection&dquo; in. All
were alike in subscribing to a leftist version of Social Darwinism-a
Socialist Darwinism, as it were. None was aware that such a view con-
trasted sharply with Marx’s own rather more skeptical view of Darwin’s
relevance to the study of human history.
II
In spite of their long friendship and obvious political affinities, it must
be remembered that Marx and Engels were two men, not one. Each had his

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471
own predilections, preferences, and peculiarities. (Marx, for example,
could never quite understand Engels’s fascination with military history,
nor Engels Marx’s fondness for higher mathematics.) Chief among their
differences was their contrasting views of nature. Much more than Engels,
Marx was inclined to view &dquo;nature&dquo; in &dquo;human&dquo; terms. Nature began to
exist &dquo;for man,&dquo; Marx believed, only with the advent of active human
intervention in natural processes.7 Nature, as we know it, is nature as it
has been fitted to human purposes through invention, technology, and
industry. The idea (later espoused by Engels) that nature exists inde-
pendently of, and prior to, men’s efforts to transform it, is utterly foreign
to Marx’s radical humanism.8
Marx’s humanism is &dquo;radical&dquo; in the etymological, teleological, and
epistemological senses of the term. His etymological pun in the Contri-
bution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is instructive: &dquo;To
be radical is to grasp matters at the root. But for man, the root is man
himself.&dquo;’ Marx’s humanism is radical in a second, teleological sense: Men
transform nature-and thereby, indirectly, themselves-according to their
own designs and purposes. The only &dquo;purpose&dquo; to be found in nature is
that which is supplied by human beings. It is this teleological aspect of
human consciousness that separates men from the lower animals and
human history from prehuman natural history.l° This humanistic view,
first advanced in the early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844, is reiterated in the capstone of Marx’s mature work, Capital I. There
Marx acknowledges that &dquo;a bee puts to shame many an architect in the
construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from
the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination
before he erects it in reality.&dquo;&dquo; (Marx’s aside was doubtless a slap at
Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, in which the activities of bees and
men are compared and Nature is shown to be operating benevolently
according to an unseen Higher Law.) Human history is therefore teleologi-
cal in a way that natural history cannot be. Citing Vico, Marx avers that
&dquo;human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the
former, but not the latter.&dquo; 12 And finally, Marx’s humanism is radical
inasmuch as his epistemology is grounded in a conception of the active
human subject-as-knower. &dquo;Man as the subject&dquo; constitutes for Marx both
the &dquo;point of departure&dquo; and the &dquo;end result&dquo; of scientific inquiry. 13
Natural phenomena can be known by man only as they become objects of
practical human interest. The scientist never confronts nature, simpliciter;
he confronts a humanly transformed nature and, as he confronts himself, a
reciprocally transformed human.

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472
Marx’s &dquo;humanist&dquo; conception of nature is clearly at odds with Engels’s
&dquo;naturalist&dquo; or &dquo;positivist&dquo; view. If Marx subordinates nature to man,
Engels subordinates man to nature. &dquo;Nature&dquo; is for Engels what it could
never be for Marx-a nonhuman realm of iron necessity to whose &dquo;laws of
motion&dquo; men are ultimately subject. Whereas Marx was interested in the
study of nature insofar as it exemplified the historical operation and
development of human powers and possibilities, Engels evinced an interest
in human history only insofar as it provided a stage upon which natural
processes unfolded and developed autonomously. Human history is for
Engels-as for Aveling, Woltmann, Buchner, Kautsky, and other latter-day
Socialist Darwinists-a branch of natural history. Or, to put the contrast in
Young-Hegelian terms: For Marx &dquo;Man is always the subject&dquo; and nature
the predicate;’4 for Engels and the Socialist Darwinists, by contrast,
...