‘The Foundation of Our Theory’
Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species came out on 24 November 1859. The first edition sold out almost immediately. Engels was among the lucky few who succeeded in getting hold of a copy, and by 12 December he had written to Marx that the book was ‘absolutely splendid’.67 He saw its significance first in the fact that it made all teleology impossible – that is, all ideas that organisms in some respect are determined for a purpose. Second, that it was the greatest attempt at demonstrating historical development in nature.
The latter meant that Darwin got Engels to change his understanding on an important point. Only a few months previously, in his review of Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he had established that nature lacked a history.68 Marx came to the same conclusion when, approximately a year later, he went through The Origin of Species. For several weeks, he had been unable to write, since he had been sitting by his wife Jenny’s side during the time she was critically ill with smallpox. But he had been able to read a lot by her sickbed, he told Engels, including Darwin’s book. Although it was ‘developed and accrued English fashion’, it was still ‘the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views’. These were important words. The phrase ‘natural history’ is, to be sure, a little confusing. Well into the nineteenth century, it was the prevalent term for knowledge that could not be summed up in a few statements of law. Natural philosophy was the opposite; Newton’s Principia was the very emblem of a natural philosophical tract, while Linnaeus was a typical natural historian. Traditionally, natural history thus had nothing to do with any development in time.69
But obviously, it was precisely development in time that Marx had in mind. Humanity had developed from other animal species. Its history is a continuation of a long biological process. Roughly the same viewpoints recur in a letter he wrote to Ferdinand Lassalle a few weeks later. Darwin’s publication was ‘most important’ and ‘suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle’, he wrote, adding: ‘One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument.’70
Marx’s relief, now that he could talk about the biological origins of humanity, is understandable. He had uneasily avoided the question with a rather sophistic line of argument in the Manuscripts, and after that he had not even brought it up for discussion. With Darwin, he received a clear and honest response. It is true that in Origin, Darwin did not say anything about the genesis of the human species – he did that first in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man. But both followers and opponents drew the conclusion that humanity was in the middle of the great process of transformation as soon as Origin was published. It would be bizarre for humanity to have remained the same since the dawn of time, while every other living thing had changed.
But Marx complained about Darwin’s ‘clumsy English style’. This must be the method of presentation itself he was bothered by – the rather artless suite of chapters packed with information, so far from the grand architecture of Capital. It was worse with Darwin’s enthusiastic references to Thomas Robert Malthus and his theory of overpopulation. Malthus was an important name in Great Britain at the time. His ideas that people – and the underclass in particular – increased more rapidly than food production long remained a fixture in British public debate. Malthus is among those who provided arguments for drastic measures against the poor and the unemployed, at the same time as he was an important target for Chartists and other harsh critics of the prevailing social order. In the liberal environment that Darwin was a part of, Malthus was among the popular topics of conversation. One did not need to read his books in order to get a clear understanding of him. He himself had been dead since 1834, but has name turned up in particular when the social problems of poverty, starvation, and childbirth made themselves felt (Malthus, himself a priest, had recommended sexual restraint as an effective means against overpopulation).
Once Darwin was finally ready to publicize his theory through The Origin of Species, Malthus was already being regarded as a bit old-fashioned. But Darwin, who was rather unaffected by the ideas then in fashion, assigned him a place of honour among his inspirers. He called the important third chapter in Origin – where the principle of selection itself is established – ‘Struggle for Existence’, which later in the text is used interchangeably with ‘struggle for life’, a phrase similar in meaning. He got the idea from the seventh edition of Malthus’s 1836 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population.71
Marx had always been a merciless critic of Malthus, which extended to his traces in Darwin’s Origin. In a letter to Engels, Marx wrote: ‘It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, “inventions” and Malthusian “struggle for existence”.’ He remembered how Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit, spoke about bourgeois society as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom’. In Darwin, on the contrary, bourgeois society is found in the animal kingdom.72
Marx was therefore displeased when Friedrich Albert Lange, a German socialist and neo-Kantian philosopher, presented human history as one long ‘struggle for existence’ in his 1865 book Die Arbeiterfrage. Lange explained that it was his intention to ‘derive the worker question from Darwin’s principles’. In the same breath, he added that he did not see these principles as inevitable for humanity since they rise above ‘the cruel and soulless mechanism through calculating purposefulness’. But they cannot completely liberate themselves from the struggle for existence. Lange saw his own book as an initial imperfect attempt at showing that intellectual as well as economic development can be understood with the same principles as the origin of species – that is, through the struggle for existence.
It never becomes clear where the boundary lies between blind selection and humanity’s ability to plan and predict. The main thing was to demonstrate the significance of natural selection for humanity’s development. Lange gave the expression ‘struggle for existence’ a broad interpretation. Even in nature, the struggle concerns not only pure survival but also the best conditions governing life. So it is also among humans. The struggle of the workers is primarily a struggle over ‘wages’.
The conditions for selection are, naturally, overproduction – of ‘the seeds of life’ in nature, but of ‘talents’ in human society. These talents are scattered among the mass of the people, but in a hierarchical society they are never put to use since the leading positions are reserved for ‘certain layers’.
According to Lange, a more effective screening of these gifts is required for development in a socialist direction. Capitalism forces the workers to be just that – workers. Their hope lies in a process of moral improvement that can partially eliminate natural necessity. Obviously, the struggle for existence could serve both rational and irrational purposes: both the struggle for justice and for an unjust hierarchical society.73
Marx’s commentary on Lange’s book is thoroughly acid. When he read the second edition from 1870, he wrote to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann that Mr Lange had made a great discovery, namely that all of history can be subordinated to one great law of nature. But this law of nature is nothing more than a phrase – the phrase ‘struggle for life’ – and its content is Malthus’s theory of population, or more correctly overpopulation. Lange did not try to analyse the phrase; he found in it only ‘a very rewarding method – for stilted, mock-scientific, highfalutin ignorance and intellectual laziness’.74
Marx stressed that Darwin’s ‘struggle for life’ loses its usefulness in the field of history. This was also Engels’s view. Selection is crucial for biological evolution, but not for the development of humanity. Long before Marx and Engels had heard the name of Darwin, they explained in The German Ideology: ‘Men can be distinguished from animals by conscience, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as
soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization.’75
This was a declaration they both stuck to. But, at the time they wrote The German Ideology, they still had no biological theory that they could simultaneously assume and contrast their idea with. But Darwin changed the situation drastically. Selection provided a key to the understanding of the development of life on Earth, but with humanity and their conscious production something fundamentally new had come.
But Marx had problems with Darwin’s uncritical use of Malthus. It could make Marx himself uncritical in relation to alternative explanations for the development of species. In 1866, when he was finally on the way towards completing the first volume of Capital, he happened to read a book by the French polymath Pierre Trémaux, Origine et transformations de l’homme et des autres êtres (Origin and Transformation of Man and Other Beings), published in 1865. Trémaux was a prize-winning architect, photographer, and Orientalist who also wrote works on natural science; the book that Marx read is his best known. In it, Trémaux maintained that it was not selection that characterized the various species and their variants, but instead the external environment – the ‘soil formations’. His chief interest was in explaining racial differences in this manner: the different human races were formed by various geographical conditions.76
Marx became very enthusiastic after reading it. Considering his own basic understanding of history, it may seem surprising that he noted with satisfaction that Trémaux could use his explanatory scheme in a more full and varied manner than Darwin on historical and political conditions. Trémaux had, for example, found the ‘natural base’ for nationalities. But with that, biology would be muscling in on the field of the social sciences!
Marx’s enthusiasm was not to Engels’s taste. Engels explained that the fact that Trémaux lacked insight into geology and had no concept of source criticism was reason enough to not take him seriously. His explanation of how white people became Black ‘sind zum Kranklachen’ (was something one could die laughing at). Marx responded – visibly wounded but nonetheless subdued in his enthusiasm – that whatever faults Trémaux may have had, his basic idea about the influence of the soil was worth taking seriously. But Engels was merciless: the environment is certainly worth taking seriously, but Darwin was already doing that. What Trémaux had arrived at, apart from this scarcely original idea, was pure nonsense.77
The discussion was thereby concluded, and Marx seems to have capitulated unconditionally. The disagreement not only testifies to Marx judging Darwin’s theory quite highly based on his antipathy towards Malthus, thus becoming uncritical in his hunt for alternatives. It also shows that Engels, in precisely this field, had a more confident assessment than his friend. Up until then, he had also devoted significantly greater attention to the philosophical (or, if you like, ideological) side of the natural sciences. After his university days and until the encounter with Darwin, Marx had largely been occupied with the technical applications.
In Capital, Darwin alone ruled the roost. He turns up twice, both times in footnotes. In the first, Marx talks about Darwin’s ‘epoch-making work’ with no reservations whatsoever. He has accepted the correction, an art he was otherwise not very distinguished in.78
In fact, his feeling of affinity with Darwin was so great that he sent a copy of the second edition of Capital to the great man himself. In the dedication, he described himself as a ‘sincere admirer’. Darwin cut open the first pages and observed that it was a ‘great work’, but at the same time was confused by the German. He wrote back to Marx, thanking him and apologizing that he was not a worthy recipient of the book since he knew so little about political economy. But he understood that Marx, like himself, was working to broaden knowledge and thereby over the long term to ‘add to the happiness of mankind’.79
Darwin and Marx got no closer to each other. But during his last years, Marx made the acquaintance of Ray Lankester, a gifted follower of Darwin. Despite an age difference of twenty-nine years, Lankester became a close friend to him – so close that he was among the little group at Marx’s funeral. Lankester was a first-rate biologist and a sworn enemy of the superstition that blossomed alongside the widespread faith in science during the second half of the nineteenth century. But he was also completely taken by Marx, his knowledge, and his critical disposition. He read Capital and wrote an enthusiastic letter to the author of the work. He had obviously also been inspired by Marx’s analysis of capitalism. For example, John Bellamy Foster reproduces Lankester’s reaction to the sinking of the Titanic. It was, he said, one example among many of how impersonal mechanisms drove businesses to put profit before all else – even the lives and safety of people. It was a comment entirely in the spirit of Marx.80
One main idea in John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology is that Darwin and Marx are the two great materialists of the nineteenth century. It is possible – but, in that case, they are materialists of two highly different types. There is nothing in Darwin of the view of history – and, more precisely, capitalist society – that is at the centre of Marx’s interest. It was not by chance that Darwin chose the theses of Malthus on the mechanisms of overpopulation as a model for his theory on natural selection. But the theory does not rise and fall with Malthus; on the contrary, it has only a superficial connection with the theory of that modest pastor. Darwin lived in an intellectual environment that greedily sucked up that type of liberalism whose clearest expression was the ‘Manchester School’ with Bright and Cobden at the centre – that is, precisely the ideology that Marx fought so persistently. But personally, Darwin had very little contact with the hard world where capitalists and workers dwell. He was privately educated with a private fortune, and in his view of society he was more an idealist than a materialist. A small patch of this conviction can be seen in his letter of thanks to Marx: it is through knowledge that the aggregate happiness of humanity increases. The phrase sounds like an echo from Jeremy Bentham and his thinking.
On the other hand, it can be said without a doubt that Darwin was of greater importance than anyone else in showing that living nature developed on its own without intervention from some metaphysical power. He himself only came to such conclusions with a certain degree of uneasiness. For Marx, if anything, Darwin fulfilled a hope. With Darwin’s theory, his own view on the history of humanity gained a foundation. At the same time, he was careful to separate the development of nature from human production, which changed both its own circumstances and its environment. Humanity is and remains one species among many, but it is alone in changing conditions for itself and other species in a conscious, planned way.
Human Prehistory
During his final, feverishly active years of life, Marx entered into a field of knowledge that largely was new to him: social anthropology. As a young man, he had encountered philosophical anthropology, above all in the form of the Norwegian-German philosopher Steffens. Hegel later became his guiding star in anthropology, before Feuerbach took over the role. Once Marx had pretty well freed himself from Feuerbach as well, anthropology sank out of his consciousness and did not seriously return until 1880. The new social anthropology he encountered at that time was something quite different than the thinking of Steffens, Hegel, and Feuerbach on what was uniquely human. It was now a primarily empirical discipline that had got some wind beneath its wings thanks to Darwinism. With the ideas on the development of species, there also came interest in the earliest history of the human species. This history was now more firmly limited to pure biology. Fossils of a human-like being were found for the first time in 1856, in the Neander valley in the German province of Nordrhein-Westfalen. When Darwin’s theory made its triumphal march soon thereafter, the discovery became a rewarding subject of discussion. T. H. Huxley, the indefatigable defender of natural selection, openly declared that humans and ‘Neanderthals’ originated from the same species of apes.81
This was one of the reasons that the earliest histor
y of humanity aroused an increasingly lively interest. People wanted to get as close to the great moment of evolution as possible. As long as one ignored the fundamental discoveries of Gregor Mendel, conceptions of heredity were extremely blurry. It was common to violently exaggerate the speed with which a species changed. For the most daring, it was a question of mere generations. Herbert Spencer imagined he could see a new race of Anglo-Americans being developed, and he awaited the same development among the immigrant Australians.82
At the same time, the conviction remained that contemporary societies perceived as primitive in substance resembled the earliest stages of development of civilization. Simply put, humanity’s own earliest history was available in the modern age. Marx would also become interested in societies perceived as primordial. But his motives, as far as we know, were different. Above all he was increasingly fascinated by Russia and its distinctive character – something we will come back to in the next chapter.
Marx’s ideas on early society were bolstered by the American Lewis H. Morgan, whose 1877 book Ancient Society he had read and taken careful notes from. Morgan was an American lawyer, born the same year as Marx, and was one of the first to seriously study the indigenous American peoples. At the centre of Ancient Society stood an idea about human progress that is older than Darwin, and had been fully developed by Scottish Enlightenment philosophers back in the eighteenth century. This doctrine says that humans were savages at first, then barbarians, and finally civilized; Morgan refined it further by distinguishing between lower and higher stages of the savage state and barbarism.83
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