Darwin and Marx: Correcting the Record

(Letter)

New York City
15 September 2012

To the editor:

I enjoyed reading Parts One and Two of “A Marxist Critique of the ‘New Atheists’” and look forward to the conclusion. Part One mentions Richard Dawkins’ reputation as “Darwin’s Rottweiler” for defending the teaching of evolution in public schools. Seven years ago, we saluted Dawkins in “The Evolution Wars: Religious Reaction and Racist Oppression—Hail Charles Darwin!” (WV No. 854, 16 September 2005) for combating the forces for creationism. Therefore, now would be a good time to make a small correction to our 2005 article, which wrongly states that Karl Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin.

Our source for this mistake is Stephen Jay Gould from the first edition of his Ever Since Darwin. Gould later corrected this error (without acknowledging the change). Unwittingly, we relied on Gould’s earlier version when we noted that “Darwin’s discovery of the continual motion and interaction between organisms and their environment was embraced enthusiastically by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Gould, Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin (who declined as he had not read it).” However, as Gould stated in the revised Ever Since Darwin, “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.”

Gould expounded with greater detail in an interesting essay, “The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral: Resolving Evolution’s Oddest Coupling,” on “the mythology [that] centers upon a notorious, if understandable, scholarly error [by Isaiah Berlin] that once suggested far more affinity between Marx and Darwin.” In his 1939 biography of Marx, Berlin inferred that Marx offered to dedicate volume two of Capital.

Here is the relevant passage of Gould’s essay:

“This tale of Marx’s proffered dedication then gained credence when a second letter, ostensibly from Darwin to Marx, but addressed only to ‘Dear Sir,’ turned up among Marx’s papers in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. This letter, written on October 13, 1880, does politely decline a suggested dedication: ‘I Shd. Prefer the Part or Volume not be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honor) as it implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.’...

“To shorten a long story, two scholars, working independently and simultaneously in the mid-1970s, discovered the almost comical basis of the error.... Marx’s daughter Eleanor became the common-law wife of the British socialist Edward Aveling. The couple safeguarded Marx’s papers for several years, and the 1880 letter, evidently sent by Darwin to Aveling himself, must have strayed into the Marxian collection.

“Aveling belonged to a group of radical atheists. He sought Darwin’s official approval, and status as dedicatee, for a volume he had edited on Darwin’s work and his (that is Aveling’s, not necessarily Darwin’s) view of its broader social meaning (published in 1881 as The Student’s Darwin, volume two in the International Library of Science and Freethought).... Darwin ended his letter to Aveling (not to Marx, who did not treat religion as a primary subject in Das Kapital) by writing:

‘It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science’.”

Comradely,
Richard G.