Darwin becomes a Marxist

[artificialbloom]

Marx sent Charles Darwin a copy of Capital volume one, but Darwin only read a fraction of it, and their correspondence ended with a brief thank-you note.

What if the book caught Darwin's attention. He and Marx enter into a lively, years-long correspondence, which affects Darwin deeply. When the English translation of Capital is finally published posthumously by Engels in 1887, it contains a brief preface by Darwin. He praises Marxism as 'the beginning of a new science', and 'an historical equivalent to the study of biological evolution'.

How does this effect everything.

 

[rndbabylon]

Maybe Darwin will not be so Malthusian, as Marxism is explicitly opposed to it. This could have significant effects, potentially blunting the popularity of eugenics, and what we'd call OTL Social Darwinism*.

Btw OTL Darwinism in socialist countries took a different path, see the book Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought by Daniel P. Todes. While that trend began in Imperial Russia, I suspect in TTL such thinking would begin earlier and more Western.

*I know Darwin was not the father of so-called Social Darwinism, but I think if he were to become a Marxist that would really hamper the development of "scientific racism"/classism. It almost certainly wouldn't take his name in TTL in any case!

 

[Ex Nihilo]

Under this scenario, Marxism and Evolution probably become pretty heavily linked politically. This probably leads to evolution getting a smaller degree of acceptance, and alternative theories remaining popular. After all, neither before nor after the Russian Revolution was communism really that popular, so linking the two just decreases evolution's popular appeal.

 

[GullibleCynic]

Under this scenario, Marxism and Evolution probably become pretty heavily linked politically. This probably leads to evolution getting a smaller degree of acceptance, and alternative theories remaining popular. After all, neither before nor after the Russian Revolution was communism really that popular, so linking the two just decreases evolution's popular appeal.

Building on that, it could mean that when evolution is experimentally verified later, some people could interpret that as also supporting Marxism/socialism/communism. People often have trouble unbundling ideas

 

[dcharles]

Darxist...

Badass.

 

[Maburo]

I don't think this would happen, as Darwin was deeply religious, but this is speculative fun after all! Obviously ITTL the ideas of evolution and marxism share many paralelisms and similarities. One is science applied to the natural world, the other to the social world after all. And, as other comments above have mentioned, I think this would lead to the idea of evolution being perhaps somewhat linked to marxism in the common imagination, the same way as the labour theory of value nowadays is widely considered to be, despite its premarxist origins with Smith and Ricardo.

Perhaps western academia may have taken very slightly longer to accept it, but ultimately, I don't think this would have been such a great impediment to the acceptance of the theory of evolution. Eventually the scientific arguments would be too heavy to ignore. Einstein was a socialist, and that didn't stop his ideas and theories being accepted. Even within the realms of evolutionary science, J.B.S Haldane, the man that first cobined Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution by natural selection was a Marxist

 

[Mildtryth]

Perhaps western academia may have taken very slightly longer to accept it, but ultimately, I don't think this would have been such a great impediment to the acceptance of the theory of evolution. Eventually the scientific arguments would be too heavy to ignore. Einstein was a socialist, and that didn't stop his ideas and theories being accepted. Even within the realms of evolutionary science, J.B.S Haldane, the man that first cobined Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution by natural selection was a Marxist

For all we now, that might result on Wallace getting more credit for the theory than Darwin.

 

[Maburo]

For all we now, that might result on Wallace getting more credit for the theory than Darwin.

ahaha, I can definately see that! I can see a world where evolution is considered Wallaces theory, and that there was a Marxist scientist who came up with the same theory at the same time becomes little more than a pub-quiz question!

 

[Ex Nihilo]

Building on that, it could mean that when evolution is experimentally verified later, some people could interpret that as also supporting Marxism/socialism/communism. People often have trouble unbundling ideas

I suspect not, assume TTL vaguely follows the trajectory of OTL and has a Marxist state, the failures of Marxism will likely link the two together.

Alternatively however, Marxist *Evolution could become somewhat warped by ideological views. Just as Marxists say society is invariably marching towards communism, evolution could invariably be marching towards something. This could then be contrasted by a non-Marxist view that the evolutionary process is more akin to Selective Breeding and guided by something (God, the Divine, whatever) rather than a purely "natural" process.

 

[Synecdoche]

I don’t think Darwin being a Marxist will change the way that communists view evolution. Yes there have been crazies who say ideology trumps science (Lysenko) but marxists generally support science because they see their social views as scientific as well. And this did not result in Marxist Eugenics, I think of all the groups in the early 20th, there were probably less Marxist Eugenicists that Liberal, because they almost always side with the oppressed, AKa the supposed inferior genes. I believe fascists will simply point to another thinker who isn’t socialist and believes in eugenics and say that Darwin was partially right but THIS guy is 100% right. OTL Darwin never advocated for racial policies as far as I know because he actually understood that survival of the fittest doesn’t mean survival of the strongest, shittiest, and whitest- he knew that social compassion was a vital trait in survival of the species. But Social Darwinists from Washington to Berlin conveniently ignore that.

So if there are any ripples it will be in the religious liberal/conservative groups. I would expect a larger outcry against evolution from creationists in the USA

 

[Nivek]

Or Marx become a Darwinism with mutual influence and the Communist theory ittl is called social darwinism (ie the evolution of man come from gather to communism and capitalism is a defective evolution)

 

[Synecdoche]

Or Marx become a Darwinism with mutual influence and the Communist theory ittl is called social darwinism (ie the evolution of man come from gather to communism and capitalism is a defective evolution)

in Communist terms, Primitive human society is called Primitive Communism, and Capitalism is not a defect but a necessary phase. Marxists don’t hate capitalism because it is evil but because it is no longer necessary, they support capitalism over feudalism and socialism over capitalism. So that would be a significant departure from what Marx actually wrote about, more in tune with Peasant Socialists like in Russia who wanted to emulate the example of collective ownership in traditional Russian peasant societies.

If he did say that he would probably be buried by other Communist thinkers as someone who had some good ideas but ultimately did not have the complete picture, though, like Proudhon, Blanqui, and Robert Owen, he will probably have a fringe following today distinct from the overall communist movement. However the butterflies of an academic shuffle could be immense, such as a different revolutionary faction winning in Russia and other countries

Edit: fixed a typo

 

[TimTurner]

Well this will have butterflies...

 

[BELFAST]

I suspect being associated with Marx would make a lot more people hostile to natural selection as a valid idea.

 

[artificialbloom]

I think it'd be very possible that a number of Marxists and Biologists would attempt to demonstrate the scientific connectedness of Darwinian evolution and Marxist history, rather than a mere equivalence between some of their methodologies. I could imagine research into thermodynamic principles which attempt to account for rising complexity in both the biological and non-biological world... such as interpetations of the Maximum entropy production principle. What could essentially emerge is an theory aspiring to envelope history and evolution within a longer, physics-based account of inevitably rising complexity. I don't know how much of the research into this area would be of scientific value: but certainly a few fascinating new breakthroughs in the thermodynamics of nature, and in complexity theory are pretty likely.

I imagine that a lot of the energy which Marxist scholars IOTL put into synthesizing Marx and Freud would instead get redirected here. However, Freud himself was already drawing heavily, (and very, very loosely) from developments in biology for his more important later books. If evolutionary science and Marxism are already overlapping in this timeline, I wonder if any of Marx's ideas could make it, directly or indirectly, into Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilisation and its Discontents. So perhaps Freud himself invents Freudian-Marxism, and this TL version of Civilisation and its Discontents more resembles Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation. 25 years earlier.

Finally, in this timeline Deleuze is still unreadable, but for entirely different reasons.

 

[Polish Eagle]

Darwin's main contribution to evolutionary theory was the idea of natural selection, the idea that traits propagate because they allow the creation of more offspring. This differed from earlier concepts like orthogenesis (see: Deist Great Chain of Being, a teleological drive where life evolves toward man just because--an idea with lots of cultural staying power, given how many people misunderstand evolution to be this even today) or Lamarckism (traits are inherited by changing the phenotype). There's no real relation between that and Marx's theory of dialectical materialism--Darwin embracing Marxist ideas of social development wouldn't have a different perspective on evolution, nor would Marxists who embrace Darwin be all that different (though I wonder if this might have an impact on the propagation of Vernadsky's Noosphere ideas).

On the other hand, this might lead to an earlier emphasis on social organization and cooperation as evolutionarily advantageous developments, and less of the overly-simplistic "survival of the fittest" idea.

 

[Karl the Writer]

Probable answer: It's one of those interesting historical tidbits that Marxists use as pathos, like how Helen Keller was a member of the SPA

Unrealistic but mildly fun: Evolution as an explanation of natural events is far less accepted in the time frame it was IOTL

 

[BELFAST]

Marxists might embrace eugenics and planned breeding to improve humans.