Reading time: ~4 min read
Darwinism was of such great importance to Communism that only months after Darwin's book was published, Engels wrote to Marx, "Darwin, whom I am just now reading, is splendid."78
Marx wrote back to Engels on December 19, 1860, saying, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."79
In a letter Marx wrote to Lassalle, another socialist friend of his, on January 16, 1861, he said: "Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history."80
thus revealing the importance of the theory of evolution for Communism.
Marx revealed his sympathy for Darwin by dedicating his most important work, Das Kapital, to him. Darwin's copy of Marx's first volume was inscribed by Marx, describing himself as a "sincere admirer" of the English naturalist.81
Engels too admitted his admiration for Darwin elsewhere:
Nature is the test of dialectics, and it must be said... that in the last resort nature works dialectically and not metaphysically... In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others.82
Engels praised Darwin and Marx as being the same, "Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history" he said.83
In another of his works,Engels stressed the importance of Darwin's having developed a theory opposed to religion:
He (Darwin) dealt the metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that the organic world of today — plants, animals, and consequently man too — is the product of a process of evolution going on through millions of years.84
As well as this, Engels at once showed how he had accepted Darwin's theory by writing an article titled "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man."
The American researcher Conway Zirckle explains why the founders of Communism immediately accepted Darwin's theory"
Marx and Engels accepted evolution almost immediately after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Evolution, of course, was just what the founders of communism needed to explain how mankind could have come into being without the intervention of any supernatural force, and consequently it could be used to bolster the foundations of their materialistic philosophy. In addition, Darwin's interpretation of evolution–that evolution had come about through the operation of natural selection–gave them an alternative hypothesis to the prevailing teleological explanation of the observed fact that all forms of life are adapted to their conditions.85
Tom Bethell, of Harper's Magazine, explains the fundamental link between Marx and Darwin in the following manner:
Marx admired Darwin's book not for economic reasons but for the more fundamental one that Darwin's universe was purely materialistic, and the explication of it no longer involved any reference to unobservable, nonmaterial causes outside or 'beyond' it. In that important respect, Darwin and Marx were truly comrades.86
Today the link between Darwinism and Marxism is an obvious truth accepted by everyone. Biographies of Marx always make this plain. For example, a biography of Karl Marx describes the link in this way:
"Darwinism presented a whole string of truth supporting Marxism and proving and developing the truth of it. The spread of Darwinist evolutionary ideas created a fertile ground for Marxist ideas as a whole to be taken on board by the working class… Marx, Engels, and Lenin attached great value to the ideas of Darwin and pointed to their scientific importance, and in this way the spread of these ideas was accelerated."87
As we have seen, Marx and Engels were delighted to believe that Darwin's concept of evolution formed a scientific support for their own atheist world view. But this delight proved to be premature. The theory of evolution saw wide acceptance because it was proposed in a primitive 19th century scientific environment and was full of errors lacking any sort of scientific proof. Science, which developed in the second half of the 20th century, revealed the invalidity of the theory of evolution. This meant the collapse of Communist and materialist thinking as much as it did of Darwinism.. But because scientists with materialist views knew that the collapse of Darwinism also meant the collapse of their own ideologies they tried all possible methods to conceal Darwinism's collapse from people.