Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels's Books ?

[tradeunionsupporter]

Did Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels ever talk about Darwin and or Evolution in any of their Books ?

[Nox]

I don't think so.

Like any non-delusional people, they simply acknowledged it as fact.

[La Comédie Noire]

They acknowledged him in a few works with Engels going so far as to praise him for bringing dialectal thought to biology in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

[Zealot]

They acknowledged it as fact in some of their writings and Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Darwin and that's about it

[hatzel]

They acknowledged it as fact in some of their writings and Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Darwin and that's about it

I'm sure Darwin had nothing better to do than read a hundred million bagillion pages of economic theory :unsure:

[Hit The North]

In correspondence to Engels, Marx praises Darwin but regrets his "crude English style of presentation".


They acknowledged it as fact in some of their writings and Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Darwin and that's about it


If Marx did send Darwin a signed copy of Das Kapital then it would have been the German edition. Could Darwin even read the language?

[GatesofLenin]

Darwin found religion in his last few years of life, that right there irks me.

[ComradeMan]

Darwin found religion in his last few years of life, that right there irks me.

I don't think that's true. He seems to have been at most an agnostic and stories about his deathbed conversion back to Christianity seem to be false.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Hope#The_Lady_Hope_story

[hatzel]

Darwin found religion in his last few years of life, that right there irks me.

Ah...Darwin trained to be a clergyman in his youth and subsequently described himself as "quite orthodox" in his late twenties. In fact, he was by all accounts a bit of a Bible-thumper on the Beagle. Not sure where all this 'in the last few years of life' is coming from...

[ComradeMan]

Ah...Darwin trained to be a clergyman in his youth and subsequently described himself as "quite orthodox" in his late twenties. In fact, he was by all accounts a bit of a Bible-thumper on the Beagle. Not sure where all this 'in the last few years of life' is coming from...

It was a story that was put around

"The Lady Hope Story first appeared in an American Baptist newspaper, the Watchman-Examiner, on 15 August 1915, preceded by a four-page report on a summer Bible conference held in Northfield, which that year ran from 30 July to 15 August 1915.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Hope#cite_note-1).... Everyone in Darwin's family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%E2%80%94_Wedgwood_family) denied the validity of the story. In 1918, Darwin's son Francis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Darwin) wrote that "Lady Hope's account of my father's views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father's agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304–317. You are at liberty to publish the above statement. Indeed, I shall be glad if you will do so." In 1922, Darwin's daughter, Henrietta Litchfield (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etty_Darwin), said she did not believe Lady Hope had ever seen her father and that "he never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Hope#The_Lady_Hope_story

[graymouser]

Darwin is mentioned in Engels's unfinished Dialectics of Nature, including the well-known chapter "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man". (Link here (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch09.htm)) There is not a full discussion of Darwin, but that's the most relevant place in the works aside from references in letters. Of course as materialists Marx and Engels thought very highly of Darwin and his work.

[tradeunionsupporter]

Thank you for all your answers.

[GatesofLenin]

Thanks for the clearing up of the lie of Darwin becoming religious near the end of his life. Figured the church would try to reclaim him.

[ComradeMan]

Thanks for the clearing up of the lie of Darwin becoming religious near the end of his life. Figured the church would try to reclaim him.

Well, it was some obscure group in the US with a dubious reference to an English "aristocrat" Lady...

They buried him in Westminster Abbey with full honours all the same though...

[GatesofLenin]

Well, it was some obscure group in the US with a dubious reference to an English "aristocrat" Lady...

They buried him in Westminster Abbey with full honours all the same though...

Good to know, thanks! :thumbup1:

[ZeroNowhere]

Well, yes, both did see Darwin quite positively. Engels noted that, in Darwin, species ceased to be something fixed for all time and necessary and rather became something in a constant process of self-creation and becoming, comparing this to Marx's view on society. Marx was quite fond of Pierre Tremaux (http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3806/1/Tremaux-on-species.pdf), and saw him as representing an important advance over Darwin; Engels was a bit less enthusiastic about him.

[tradeunionsupporter]

Thanks for your answers.

[promethean]

Engels was skeptical about the struggle for existence theory that was becoming popular around the late 19th century which adapted Darwin to the standards of bourgeois apologists.
The struggle for life.[264] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07g.htm#n264) Until Darwin, what was stressed by his present adherents was precisely the harmonious cooperative working of organic nature, how the plant kingdom supplies animals with nourishment and oxygen, and animals supply plants with manure, ammonia, and carbonic acid. Hardly was Darwin recognised before these same people saw everywhere nothing but struggle. Both views are justified within narrow limits, but both are equally one-sided and prejudiced. The interaction of bodies in nonliving nature includes both harmony and collisions, that of living bodies conscious and unconscious co-operation as well as conscious and unconscious struggle. Hence, even in regard to nature, it is not permissible one-sidedly to inscribe only “struggle” on one’s banners. But it is absolutely childish to desire to sum up the whole manifold wealth of historical evolution and complexity in the meagre and one-sided phrase “struggle for existence.” That says less than nothing.

The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes’ theory of bellum omnium contra omnes[265] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07g.htm#n265) and of the bourgeois economic theory of competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population. When once this feat has been accomplished (the unconditional justification for which, especially as regards the Malthusian theory, is still very questionable), it is very easy to transfer these theories back again from natural history to the history of society, and altogether too naive to maintain that thereby these assertions have been proved as eternal natural laws of society.

Let us accept for a moment the phrase “struggle for existence,” for argument’s sake. The most that the animal can achieve is to collect; man produces, he prepares the means of life, in the widest sense of the words, which without him nature would not have produced. This makes impossible any unqualified transference of the laws of life in animal societies to human society. Production soon brings it about that the so-called struggle for existence no longer turns on pure means of existence, but on means of enjoyment and development. Here – where the means of development are socially produced – the categories taken from the animal kingdom are already totally inapplicable. Finally, under the capitalist mode of production, production reaches such a high level that society can no longer consume the means of life, enjoyment and development that have been produced, because for the great mass of producers access to these means is artificially and forcibly barred; and therefore every ten years a crisis restores the equilibrium by destroying not only the means of life, enjoyment and development that have been produced, but also a great part of the productive forces themselves. Hence the so-called struggle for existence assumes the form: to protect the products and productive forces produced by bourgeois capitalist society against the destructive, ravaging effect of this capitalist social order, by taking control of social production and distribution out of the hands of the ruling capitalist class, which has become incapable of this function, and transferring it to the producing masses – and that is the socialist revolution.

The conception of history as a series of class struggles is already much richer in content and deeper than merely reducing it to weakly distinguished phases of the struggle for existence.