KARL MARX

THE LAST DECADE
4ii
Towards the end of his life Marx moved nearer to the positivism then
so fashionable in intellectual circles. This tendency, begun in Anti-Diihring
and continued by Engels in his Ludwig Feuerbach and Dialectics of Nature,
reached its apogee in Soviet textbooks on dialectical materialism. It was
this trend which presented Marxism as a philosophical world-view or
Weltanschauung consisting of objective laws and particularly laws of the
dialectical movement of matter taken in a metaphysical sense as the basic
constituent of reality. This was obviously very different from the 'unity
of theory and practice' as exemplified in, for instance, the Theses on
Feuerbach. This preference for the model of the natural sciences had
always been with Engels, though not with Marx, who had, for example,
a much more reserved attitude to Darwinism.
Marx had always had a great admiration for Darwin's work. He had
read On the Origin of Species in i860, a year after its publication, and
had at once written to Engels that it contained 'the natural-history basis
lor our view'. 41 He considered that the book had finally disposed of
religious teleology, but he regretted 'the crude English manner of the
presentation'. 42 Two years later, however, his view was slightly different:
It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his
Knglish society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of
new markets, 'inventions', and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence'.
It is Hobbes's 'bellum omnium contra omnes', and one is reminded of
I legel's Phenomenology, where civil society is described as a 'spiritual
animal kingdom', while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil
society. 43
In 1866 Marx wrote - again to Engels - and even more critically: 'in
I )arwin progress is merely accidental' and the book did not yield much
'111 connection with history and politics'. 44 Although he admitted that
I )arwin's book might have 'an unconscious socialist tendency', anyone who
wanted to subsume the whole of history under the Darwinian expression
struggle for survival' merely demonstrated his 'feebleness of thought'. 45
Marx certainly used biological metaphors to express his ideas and considered
his method in the study of economic formations more akin to
biology than to physics or chemistry. The only place where Marx drew a
direct parallel between himself and Darwin was in an ironical review of
his own work for the Stuttgart newspaper Der Beobachter, 46 Marx certainly
wished to dedicate the Second Volume of Capital to Darwin. (Darwin
lefused the honour, apparently because he had the impression that it was
in overtly atheistic book and did not wish to hurt the feelings of his
lamily.) But this suggests no more than that Marx appreciated Darwin's
work - and not that he approached history in the same way as Darwin