One of the enduring confusions of the left has been the relationship of Marx and Darwin. This is partly the result of Engels' views which were not quite concordant with those of Marx. Engels' somewhat eclectic writings proceed on the one hand toward a distinctly post-Hegelian version of materialism and dialectics, and yet on the other toward the scientism of the times, with a close embrace of the views of Darwinism. 

Of course, the general acceptance of Darwin's theory makes this situation seem normal! Noone can get it straight, the more so as Marx was a closet Darwin heretic, too often taken in the way Engels is taken. In fact, in his remarkable passage from the generation of the Left Hegelians to the era of Comte and the positivistic scientism that became so dominant Marx remained in many ways within the mental universe of the Hegelian generation. Here again great confusion arises because of the problems with Hegelianism. In any case the issue of evolution as such was one thing, the theory of natural selection quite another. It was apparent to Marx almost at once that this was British ideology at work!  

Perhaps in the age of Postdarwinism it will be possible to do justice to this original insight of Marx. But everyone is so conditioned to Darwinian thinking that this is now counted against Marx, and not generally discussed by his followers! 

It is thus significant that Marx is on record as being skeptical of Darwin's thinking. There is one telling episode. His enthusiastic interest in 1865 in a now forgotten book by Tremaux Origin and Transformations of Man and Organisms because of its critique of natural selection. Marx of course was clutching at straws, and was soon 'corrected' by Engels, but he was clearly ambivalent from the first about Darwin. He felt that Darwinism was a natural complement to his philosophy of history. And at the same time he perceived at once the ideological character of Darwin's thinking. This acute insight quite naturally made him skeptical of the mechanism of evolution, the more so as the latent strain of Hegelian of his theories enabled him to straddle two domains of discourse. 

It is small wonder that Marx said he wasn't a Marxist. He must have wondered what was becoming of his thinking as the German Socialist movement took hold, embracing the veiled ideology of Darwinism, after all the labors to expose the economic ideology with which he began. 

It is almost impossible to set the matter straight in the current environment of the Darwin paradigm, and confusion over Hegel. In all fairness to Engels, the Hegelian strain in Marx (and in Hegel!), although profound and elusive, is as open to challenge as the rest. The culprit is Hegel, but Hegel requires to be understood on his own terms, for he is not an easy thinker, and interpretation and critique is frequently vitiated by the wrong assumptions about evolution now current. 

What a muddle!

Engels has been criticized many times for the type of thinking that emerged later in Dialectics of Nature. He scores a plus for intuition, and a minus for bad theories that don't do what they claim. The intuitions about dialectic, and 'evolutionary leaps' are as significant as they are flawed, and have resulted in a considerable amount of wrong thinking about the nature of revolution. 

The views of Darwin rapidly became an object of interest by many thinkers in the Second Internationale, and the myth of Marx's wish to dedicate the second edition of Capital to Darwin was a staple until finally exposed.For the latter question, cf. Terence Ball, Reappraising Political Theory (Oxford, 1995), "Marx and Darwin, A Reconsideration".

For the question of Marx and Tremaux, cf. Alan Megill, Karl Marx, The Burden of Reason (Rowman & Little field, 2002), p. 55.

John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology NY: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 199.

Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1999).