Marx "admired" Darwin

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Sun Aug 16 09:43:32 PDT 1998


Except that Stephen Jay Gould in "Darwin' Delay" ( in _Ever Since Darwin_) says:

"In 1869, Marx wrote to Engels about Darwin's _Origin'_: 'Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.'

Then Gould says: "Marx late offered to dedicate volume 2 of Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin gently declined, stating that he did not want to imply approval of a work he had not read. (I have seen Darwin's copy of volume 1 in his library at Down House. IT IS INSCRIBED BY MARX WHO CALLS HIMSELF A "SINCERE ADMIRER" OF DARWIN...)" emphasis added C.B.

In other words, Gould does not rely on the evidence that below Andrew claims was refuted.

As to whether Marx's thought was "evolutionary", in The Preface to the First German edition of Capital Marx says:

"My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."

In the Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital Marx quotes at length a reviewer for the _The European Messenger_ of St. Petersburg which says in part regarding Marx's method:

",,,Marx treats the social movement as

a process of natural history......In a word, economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of evolution in other branches of biology. The old economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they likened them to the laws of physics and chemistry. A more thorough analysis of phenomena shows that social organisms differ among themselves as fundamentally as plants or animals...The scientific value of such an inquiry lies in the disclosing of the special laws that regulate the origin, existence, development, death or a given social organism and its replacement, by another higher one. And it is this value that, in point of fact, Marx's book has."

Then Marx says, "Whilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and (as far as concerns my own application of it ) generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectical method ?"

In other words, Marx speaks approvingly of the writers characterization of his dialectical method as like that of evolutionary biology.

Charles Brown

Detroit


>>> "Andrew Kliman" <Andrew_Kliman at email.msn.com> 08/16 12:00 AM >>>
Ed wrote: "As I receall, and the cite's 20+ years gone, Marx wanted V. I of Das Kapital to be dedicated to Darwin."

That's the old myth. Margaret Fay demolished it.

In addition to the paper that Michael cites, some on this list may have easier access to

Margaret A. Fay, "Marx and Darwin: A Literary Dectective Story," _Monthly Review_, March 1980.

Aveling wrote a book on Darwin and wanted to dedicate it to him. Darwin declined, but his letter of reply didn't address Aveling by name. It got mixed in with Marx's documents, which were in the possession of Eleanor Marx and Aveling. When Darwin's letter was discovered later, it was "naturally" thought to be referring to _Capital_, even though, of course, the letter doesn't mention the title of the book.

So a key piece of "evidence" regularly trotted out in support of the view that Marx's thought was scientistic and evolutionary turns out to be no evidence at all. Or rather, it tells us a lot about post-Marx Marxism, but nothing about Marx himself.

Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman Home: Dept. of Social Sciences 60 W. 76th St., #4E Pace University New York, NY 10023 Pleasantville, NY 10570 (914) 773-3951 Andrew_Kliman at msn.com

"... the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical.* It is the *critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." -- K.M.



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