David Klinghoffer is promising to deliver some revisionism over at the Discovery Institute:
Starting tomorrow, I would like to devote a couple posts to the thesis that Communism has deeper Darwinian roots than many of us realize. That, in fact, even though Marx had already begun sketching the outlines of his ideas before Darwin published the Origin of Species — the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, the Origin in 1859 — he is fairly called a Darwinist. That, finally, the men who translated Marxism into practical political terms in the form of Soviet terror were evolutionary thinkers, just as they themselves claimed to be.
Yup, it is the old Darwin/Marx meme coupled with the evolution=genocide meme, both much beloved to creationists, anti-evolutionists, and cranky conservatives.
Let me repeat something I have posted before: While Marx initially described Origin as containing “the natural-historical basis of our outlook” and “a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle,” by 1861 he was noting that “[i]t is remarkable how Darwin recognises among beasts and plants his English society with its labour, competition, opening up of new markets, 'inventions’, and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence’.” Indeed he would view Darwinism as a bourgeois ideology which mirrored the bourgeois competitive struggle in capitalist society. Marx’s use of Darwin is underwhelming - he twice mentions Darwin’s theory in Das Kapital, both as footnotes and neither indicate that he can “fairly be called a Darwinist”+. These are the only published references of Marx to Darwin. More importantly, Marx chastised a number of his followers, in particular Ludwig Büchner and Friedrich Lange for attempting to link his ideas with those of Darwin. Büchner’s work was described as “superficial nonsense” and Lange lead Marx to describe the struggle for life as “the Malthusian population fantasy”. Clearly, Marx was no Darwinist. As Ball notes,
Marx clearly admired and agreed with Darwin’s having finished off teleology in the natural sciences ... [In Marx’s view] Darwin’s theory of natural selection applies, at best, only to prehuman, preconscious natural history; it does not apply to the epoch of human history in which men consciously transform nature and therefore themselves. (emphasis mine)
Marx accepted the idea of organic evolution and the denial of teleology in natural science. What he did not however accept were Mathusian arguments and use of such to explain human history. In other words, Marx - like many other thinkers of the time - ultimately denied the efficacy of natural selection.
Clearly, Marx was no Darwinist and cannot “fairly” be called so despite how Klinghoffer may squeal over the next few days.
--
+ Here are the two footnotes from Das Kapital (1867). The first occurs in a discussion of tool specialization and the second in one of the difference between tools and machines. Marx is clearly not utilizing Darwin’s ideas (“epoch-making” though they may be) in any meaningful way.
Darwin in his epoch-making work on the origin of species, remarks, with reference to the natural organs of plants and animals: 'So long as one and the same organ has different kinds of work to perform, a ground for its changeability may possibly be found in this,that natural selection preserves or suppresses each small variation of formless carefully than if that organ were destined for one special purpose alone.Thus, knives that are adapted to cut all sorts of things, may, on the whole, be of one shape; but an implement destined to be used exclusively in one way must have a different shape for every different use.’
Darwin has interested us in the history of natural technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of the organs that are the material basis of all social organism, deserve equal attention?.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
I think the real point here is that even if Marx were a Darwinist it wouldn't mean a damn thing. Hitler was a vegetarian (okay, that's open to debate...) so does that mean all vegetarians support the Holocaust? I love it when they resort to this kind of argument, a clear sign that they're losing the plot to a ridiculous degree.
Posted by: Cannonball Jones | January 16, 2009 11:42 AM
Good stuff. But in my mind, the real question is: Who cares if Marx was a Darwinist? I am sure there have been (and still are) hundreds of scientists that have ideologies or beliefs that I disagree with or find despicable, but that does not make their research or conclusions incorrect.
Posted by: DA | January 16, 2009 11:47 AM
Wehrner von Braun was a Nazi. That means rocket science is EVIL!!!1!!!!11!!!ONE!
They've got a less than a month until Darwin Day, so I'm sure we can expect more of the same "research."
Posted by: James F | January 16, 2009 12:54 PM
I find one of the most fascinating aspects of these attempts to link Darwin and Marx is that the people doing the linking seem to be under the impression that this would automatically be a very, very bad thing for Darwinism. This is only potentially the case if you accept the cardboard cut-out carton picture of Karl Marx and his work that unfortunately all too many people and in particular most Americans have. Point one is that the totalitarian state fascism practiced in Russia and a hand full of other countries during most of the twentieth century has little or nothing to do with anything Marx wrote. Although I personally disagree with Marx’s political theory, he is, not just in my opinion, one of the most important social philosophers ever and like many of my European colleagues in some aspects of my work I am quite happy to call myself a Marxist historian. Marx is not and never was the devil incarnate and trying to besmirch Darwin’s work by claiming that one of the intellectual giants of the 19th century was a Darwinian appears to me to be totally puerile.
Posted by: Thony C. | January 16, 2009 1:40 PM
To make this even worse for Klinghoffer: Stalin was definitely anti-evolution. He favored the lamarckian ideas of Lysenko.
Posted by: Martijn | January 16, 2009 3:16 PM
I've heard (in a Gould essay, I think) that Marx sent Darwin a signed copy of Das Kapital, which Darwin never read. The problem, it seems, is not that Darwin objected to the content, but rather that his German was not up to it.
Posted by: Alex, FCD | January 17, 2009 5:08 PM
Did Marx accept heliocentrism? If so, does that mean we can link Copernicanism to Pol Pot?
@Alex #6: Somehow I think that Darwin, a wealthy landowner, would not have been entirely sympathetic to Marx's views even if his German was up to the task. Marx may have been a "Darwinist", but Darwin was no Marxist.
Posted by: tresmal | January 17, 2009 5:22 PM
Marx was no more a "Darwinist" than he was a Rigellian.
For that matter, I'm no "Darwinist" in the sense the opponents of evolution mean. I don't follow Charles Darwin as a godhead and do not hold On the Origin of Species up as a holy text.
Posted by: DLC | January 18, 2009 8:29 AM