Thread by @shrikanth_krish

Charles Darwin, the author of "Origin of Species" and the propounder of the theory of evolution, is widely regarded as one of the 3-4 greatest scientists of all time

Fair

But what's often overlooked is Darwin's impact on social science and his unfortunate influence on Karl Marx

Marx was a HUGE Darwin fan.

And it might be argued that many of his ideas including the utopia of a "classless society" and his "materialist conception of history" might have been less successful but for their legitimization using the "natural science" of Darwin

Though a lot of Marx's early work in the 1840s preceded the rise of Darwin, Marx's later work, particularly Das Kapital (published in 1867) was influenced by Charles Darwin whose work "Origin of Species" was published in 1859

Marx read the first edition of Darwin's book the year it came out. It appears Engels, his collaborator, introduced Marx to Darwin's work in a letter where he writes -

"Darwin, by the way, whom I'm just reading now, is absolutely splendid"

Marx, in a letter the following year, explicitly declared in a letter to Engels, that Darwin's theory provides the basis for Marxist thought in natural history!

19th Dec 1860 - Marx to Engels -

"These last four weeks, I have read all sorts of things. Among others, Darwin's book on natural selection. Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis on natural history for our view"

In a letter to a friend in 1861, Marx again declares -

"Darwin's work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle"

In Das Kapital itself, Darwin features in a couple of footnotes in Volume 1. In that work, Marx leverages Darwin to nitpick on specialization and division of labor - the great theories defended stoutly by classical economists like Adam Smith

Marx, as is well known, did not like specialization very much. In his view specialization dulls man, and alienates him from the process of production because of the dull repititive work

So to critique this great cornerstone of capitalism, he leverages Darwin

Here he is quoting Darwin in a footnote

“So long as one and the same organ has different kinds of work to perform,... natural selection preserves or suppresses each small variation of form less carefully than if that organ were destined for one special purpose alone"

In the same volume, elsewhere, Marx talks about how Darwin has written a history of nature, so that should interest us in writing a history of society from a materialist lens.

He declares

"Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, ... also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, ..... Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical"

So clearly Marx is enamored with Darwin and he is very delighted that here is after all a "scientific" stamp for his "materialist conception of history" and his view of man's past as a series of class struggles (analogous to the Darwinian "survival of the fittest")

In a review of Marx's Das Capital, Engels wrote that Marx is

"simply striving to establish the same gradual process of transformation demonstrated by Darwin in natural history as a law in the social field"

This is a classic example of how one great man's work in the domain of natural sciences, ended up inspiring and arguably legitimizing several questionable notions of another thinker - notions that ended up having a huge impact (mostly deleterious) on the history of the world

Besides the points mentioned, the other thing that probably drew the two men together is that both their ideas were an assault on revelatory religion.

So Darwin's ideas were convenient for Marx to attack religion and make a case for his materialist dialectic