If you’re a paid subscriber — hey you! subscribe! — you may have noticed that my response to Vivek Chibber yesterday touched briefly on Marxism’s engagement with the social Darwinists. I didn’t want to take too big a detour on that in the post, but there is some fascinating material there that I’d like to look at today.
Marx and Engels had some ambivalence about Charles Darwin for reasons we will return to, but broadly they were both extremely enthusiastic about his work. In multiple notes and letter Marx describes On The Origin of Species as “the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.” In a draft of The German Ideology Marx elaborated on this point:
One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist.
The “history of nature” is how he and Engels typically described Darwin’s theory; the “history of man,” of course, was the history of class struggle. Though it was important to Marx to stress how humans were different from other animals, it was equally important to insist that we had not somehow transcended nature: as Engels put it, “we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst”.
At the same time as they praised Darwin, however, both — to their immense credit — were also quite critical of the social Darwinists. Marx, in a footnote in Capital v.1, takes them to task thus:
The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.
As I noted yesterday there are two important takeaways from this passage. The first is that despite his criticism, Marx does explicitly describe the natural sciences as materialist. The second is that he is not criticizing the social Darwinists for claiming that human social psychology has a biological basis; rather, he is criticizing them for excluding the role of class struggle. This makes perfect sense in light of his previous comment that they are “inseparable”.
Later, Engels would begin to develop his own synthesis of the two. In 1876 he laid out a remarkable (and remarkably underappreciated) argument. The human larnyx, he writes, evolved because coordinating production required it: “Necessity created the organ…this explanation of the origin of language from and in the process of labor is the only correct one.” Thus he provides a material analysis of its origin.
But then an extraordinary passage follows. Language, he explains, has curious side-effects that are entirely unrelated to labor. When dogs and horses learn to understand human speech, he argues, they acquire “the capacity for feelings…which were previously foreign to them.” Parrots, he adds, speak “for the sheer pleasure of talking” — and a parrot not only learns to use swear words, “it gets an idea of their meaning.”
It is tempting to dismiss this passage as an odd tangent, but I would argue that Engels is drawing attention to language as a spandrel. This is a very modern observation that one can find in the science of Stephen J. Gould and Noam Chomsky, among others: our capacity for language evolved for one reason, but once in place it allowed us to do all kinds of other things. Here, Engels observes that we can use language not just for labor, but to express feelings and for sheer pleasure.
On one hand, this seems obvious. On the other, however, this conception of speech flatly contradicts the compulsion of some vulgar Marxists to read into every speech act an expression of economic conditions. Speech is related to economic conditions, but only in the remote sense that it evolved (Engels argues) in order to coordinate labor, and in the narrow sense that it can express economic conditions. But sometimes people shout out swear words not in subversive proletarian defiance of bourgeois morality — they do it because they stubbed their toe.
This reading already poses a serious challenge to vulgar Marxism, but Engels then takes it even further:
First labour, after it and then with it speech — these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man…
That this passage occurs immediately after his discussion of animals makes his argument clear: the human brain was shaped by more than labor. It was also shaped by an aspect of human intelligence, speech, that is only related to labor in origin. Various biological impulses like emotions and pleasure-seeking are material in nature and they have real consequences for evolutionary psychology even though they cannot be tortuously reduced to economic imperatives.
I suspect there was a reason that Engels thought this point important to stress. Returning to Marx’s ambivalence about Darwin: in an 1862 letter to Engels, he complains that
It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition…and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes…
The problem here is that Darwin has incorrectly imposed upon nature a conception of the world that comes from capitalism, one in which men and animals are “red in tooth and claw,” existing only in brutal competition. This of course is also the standard left critique of the social Darwinists: they are only able to conceive of humanity as in the grips of a deadly struggle for survival in which the fittest will (and must) make it.
Marx and Engels believed that there is more to humans than these base animal impulses. Our intelligence, expressed by our capacity for speech, allows us to aspire to a better world than the social Darwinists think is possible.
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