>>> kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca 10/04/00 11:59PM >>>
PS. Hey... I just found out that Marx didn't ask Darwin if it was ok if the second german edition of his book be dedicated to him. Apparently the letter was misplaced in the Marx archive.
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CB: Ken, FYI, the following is from LBO-Talk about two years ago.
>>> Phil Gasper <ptrg at sirius.com> 08/16/98 05:38PM >>>
*Ever Since Darwin* was first published in 1977 and the essays in it date from the early to mid-70s, before the myth that Marx wanted to dedicate Capital to Darwin was exposed. When the book was republished in paperback, Gould changed the passage above to read as follows:
"A common bit of folklore-that Marx offered to dedicate volume 2 of Das Kapital to Darwin (and that Darwin refused)-turns out to be false. But Marx and Darwin did correspond, and Marx held Darwin in very high regard."
So while Marx did send Darwin an inscribed copy of Capital Vol. 1, he didn't make a dedication request.
More importantly, what Marx and Engels admired about Darwin was his materialism, not his gradualism. In any case, unlike contemporary sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, they did not think that one could simply read off social theory from biology. Engels put it nicely in a letter to Lavrov (Nov. 1875):
"The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most *collect* while men *produce*. This sole but cardinal difference alone precludes the simple transfer of laws of animal societies to human societies."
Earlier in the same letter he writes:
"I accept the *theory of evolution* of the Darwinian doctrine, but I regard Darwin's method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) only as a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin's time the very people who now see everywhere only *struggle* for existence (Vogt, Buchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasised precisely *co-operation* in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrow-minded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature-inanimate as well as animate-includes both harmony and collision, struggle and co-operation."
The whole letter should be read by anyone interested in the relation between Marx and Darwin.
Phil Gasper ptrg at sirius.com 415-522-1895