Darwinian doctrine

[Hinrich Kuhls <kls@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Engels to P. L. Lavrov in London, Nov. 12-17, 1875

1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin's
method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a
first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until
Darwin's time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for
existence (Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely
cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies
oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal
kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was
particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within
certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrowminded as the other.
The interaction of bodies in nature - inanimate as well as animate -
includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When
therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the
whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the
one-sided and meager phrase "struggle for existence", a phrase which even
in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis , such a
procedure really contains its own condemnation.

[ ....]

3) I do not deny the advantages of your method of attack, which I would
like to call psychological; but I would have chosen another method.
Everyone of us is influenced more or less by the intellectual environment
in which he mostly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better
than I, and for a propaganda journal that appeals to the "restraining
effect", [a quote from Lavrov's article] the moral sense, your method is
probably the better one. For Germany, where false sentimentality has done
and still does so much damage, it would not fit; it would be misunderstood,
sentimentality perverted. In our country it is hatred rather than love that
is needed - at least in the immediate future - and more than anything else
a shedding of the last remnants of German idealism, an establishment of the
material facts in their historical rights. I should therefore attack - and
perhaps will when the time comes - these bourgeois Darwinists in about the
following manner:

The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a
transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of bellum
omnium contra omnes [from Hobbes's Elementa philosophica de cive and
Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of
competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this
conjurer' s trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute
permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the
Malthusian theory is concerned ), the same theories are transferred back
again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their
validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of
this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it.

But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by
depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second
place as bad naturalists and philosophers.

4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in
the fact that animals at most collect while men produce . This sole but
cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of
animal societyies to human societies. It makes it possible, as you properly
remark:

"for man to struggle not only for existence but also for pleasures and for
the increase of his pleasures ,... To be ready to renounce his lower
pleasures for the highest pleasure". [Engles italics ? quoted from Lavrov'
Sierra article]

Without disputing your further conclusions from this I would, proceeding
from my Poppa remises, makes the following inferences. At a certain stage
the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries
but also luxuries, at first, true enough, only for a minority, are
produced. The struggle for existence - if we permit this category for the
moment to be valid - is thus transformed into a struggle for pleasures, no
longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development, socially
produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived
from the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now
happened, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater quantity
of means of subsistence and development than capitalist society can consume
because it keeps the great mass of real producers artificially away from
these means of subsistence and development; if this society is forced by
its own law of life constantly to increase this output which is already too
big for it and therefore periodically, every 10 years, reaches the point
where it destroys not only a mass of products but even productive forces -
what sense is their left in all this talk of "struggle for existence"? The
struggle for existence can then consist only in this: that the producing
class takes over the management of production and distribution from the
class that was hitherto entrusted with it but has now become incompetent to
handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution.

Apropos. Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of
class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the
conception of this history as a feeble variety of the "struggle for
existence". I would therefore never do this favor to these false naturalists.

[...]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/engels/75_11_17-ab.htm