Darwin versus Marx:
Labour, sex and human origins
For the rest it is not difficult to see that our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation. It is indeed never at rest, but carried along the stream of progress ever onward. But it is here as in the case of the birth of a child; after a long period of nutrition in silence, the continuity of the gradual growth in size, of quantitative change, is suddenly cut short by the first breath drawn – there is a break in the process, a qualitative change – and the child is born. In like manner the spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is indicated only by symptoms here and there. Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown – all these betoken that there is something else approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind
In 1844, following a four-year voyage around the world, Charles Darwin confided to a close friend that he had come to a dangerous conclusion. For seven years, he wrote, he had been ‘engaged in a very presumptuous work’, perhaps ‘a very foolish one’. He had noticed that on each of the Galapagos Islands, the local finches ate slightly different foods, and had correspondingly modified beaks. In South America, he had examined many extraordinary fossils of extinct animals. Pondering the significance of all this, he had felt forced to change his mind about the origin of species. To his friend, Darwin wrote: ‘I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 314).
In 1844, belief in transmutation – the idea that species could evolve into one another – was politically dangerous. Even as Darwin was writing to his friend, atheists and revolutionaries were circulating penny papers around London’s streets, championing evolutionary ideas in opposition to the authorised doctrines of Church and State. At that time, the best-known champion of evolution was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose job was to display insects and worms at the Natural History Museum in Paris. Closely identified with atheism and other radical tenets emanating from revolutionary France, evolutionism in Britain was then known as ‘Lamarckism’. Any ‘Lamarckian’ – in other words, anyone doubting the God-given immutability of all natural species – was likely to be branded a communist, rioter and insurrectionary. Should the feared revolution break out, Darwin’s clerical friends stood to be stripped of their tithes by the ‘red Lamarckians’. Caught between his cautious liberal politics and his science, Darwin became ill with anxiety, suppressing his findings as if he had, indeed, secretly committed a murder (Desmond and Moore 1992: 313-338).
Fanned by the still-glowing embers of 1789, the revolutionary movements of the 1830s and 1840s culminated in a wave of insurrections across Europe. Each ended in defeat. ‘After the failure of the Revolutions of 1848’, recollected one participant (Marx 2000 [1864]: 579) in his inaugural address to the Workers’ International, all party organizations and party journals of the working classes were, on the Continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labour fled in despair to the Transatlantic Republic, and the short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral marasmus, and political reaction.
Darwin was slow to realise that he and his clerical friends were now in a more congenial political situation. By 1858, another natural scientist – the socialist-leaning Alfred Wallace – had independently hit upon the principle of evolution by natural selection; if Darwin did not publish, Wallace would win all the scientific glory. With revolution no longer an immediate threat, Darwin’s courage rose and in 1859 he at last published The Origin of Species.
In his great book, Darwin outlined a concept of evolution quite different from that of his French predecessor. Lamarck had viewed evolution as driven by a ‘tendency to progression’ – a constant striving for self-improvement on the part of animals during their lifetimes. Darwin viewed this as ‘nonsense’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 315). His own grimmer, crueller idea was borrowed from the Reverend Thomas Malthus, an economist employed by the East India Company. Malthus had no interest in the origin of species; his agenda was political. Human populations, he argued (Malthus 1826), will always increase faster than the supply of food. Struggle and starvation must inevitably result. Public charities, said Malthus, can only aggravate the problem: hand-outs will make the paupers feel comfortable, encouraging them to breed. More mouths to feed must lead to more poverty and so to yet further – insatiable – demands for welfare. The best policy is to let the poor die.
Darwin’s genius was to link the zoology, botany, geology and palaeontology of his day with this politically motivated advocacy of free competition and the ‘struggle for survival’. Darwin saw Malthus’s ‘laissez-faire’ morality at work throughout nature. Population growth in the animal world would always outstrip the local food supply. Hence competition was inevitable, with many individuals starving to death. Whereas moralists or sentimentalists might have sought to tone down this image of a cruel and heartless Nature, Darwin learned to celebrate it. Just as capitalism brutally punished the poor and needy, so ‘natural selection’ would weed out those creatures less able to fend for themselves. As the less fit in each generation kept dying, so the survivors’ offspring would multiply, transmitting to future generations the characteristics responsible for their success. Starvation and death, then, were positive factors, within an evolutionary dynamic which relentlessly punished failure while rewarding success.
Darwin’s incorporation of Malthusianism succeeded in transforming the political implications of evolutionary theory. Far from legitimising resistance to privilege, Darwin’s evolutionism was designed to serve a reverse political function. Darwin pictured nature as a world without morals. By implication, this lent justification to an economic system based on unrestrained competition, free of any misguided ‘moral’ interference from religion or state. Later in the century, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer would invoke ‘the survival of the fittest’ to assure Britain’s rich and powerful that their privileges were indeed well deserved. Spencer’s brazenly imperialist evolutionary ideology – ‘Social Darwinism’ – would make its contribution to a variety of political currents including eugenics and eventually Nazism. Darwin’s biographers (Desmond and Moore 1992: xix) comment:
‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start – ‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society.
Following the revolutionary failures of 1848, communist and socialist activists came close to despair. As an asylum-seeker in Britain, Karl Marx attempted to keep hope alive by equipping the proletariat intellectually for its future inevitable victory, burrowing deep into obscure records in the British Museum and keeping abreast of all major developments in bourgeois scholarship and science. In his mature years, Marx came to fully appreciate the ideological implications of post-Lamarckian evolutionary theory. But despite this, he found no difficulty in welcoming Darwin’s The Origin of Species soon after it was published. Certainly, its bourgeois premises and assumptions were no obstacle. Marx, after all, was steeped in the dialectic of Hegel, for whom history is driven by internal conflict and contradiction. Pursued relentlessly to its logical conclusion, every historical idea – he knew – must collapse eventually into its dialectical antithesis. During the 1840s – as fears of social turbulence caused Darwin to suffer anxiety attacks – Marx was optimistically concluding that the more ruthlessly capitalism advanced, the closer it must bring its own revolutionary overthrow. As Marx and Engels drafted The Communist Manifesto, they therefore felt uninhibited in celebrating the bourgeoisie’s role: The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation (Marx 2000 [1848]: 247-8). When – years later – Marx and Engels encountered Darwin’s thought, they instantly recognised in it that same ‘icy water’, that same ‘unconscionable freedom’. Darwin seemed intent on shattering all former illusions about ‘natural harmony’ in favour of ‘naked, shameless, direct, brutal’ competition and exploitation, whether human or animal. Marx and Engels knew how to categorise such a school of thought. ‘The ideas of the ruling class’, they had always held (Marx 2000 [1845]: 192), ‘are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’. ‘Natural selection’ was clearly an accurate intellectual reflection of its age.
Marx welcomed Darwin’s materialist methodology and unsentimental celebration of the role played by suffering, conflict, extinction and death. ‘Darwin’s book’, he wrote to his friend Lassalle in 1862, ‘is very important and serves me as a natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history’. He expressed his delight at the ‘death-blow’ dealt by Darwin against teleology in the natural sciences. Evolution – Marx agreed – did not unfold in fulfilment of a preordained plan (Marx 2000 [1858-1868]: 565). In 1873, Marx even sent Darwin a copy of his own recently published Das Kapital, inscribed ‘from a sincere admirer’. It was a ‘great work’, Darwin realized, as he cut open the first few dozen pages. But Darwin was not fluent in German; moreover, the tenor of Marx’s book seemed ‘so different’ from his own. Politely thanking Marx for his gift, Darwin expressed the wish that he was ‘more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political economy’. No doubt, he added, their respective efforts towards ‘the extension of knowledge’ would ‘in the long run…add to the happiness of mankind’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 601-02).
The two thinkers were, in fact, poles apart. While admiring Darwin as a natural scientist, Marx scorned his Malthusian political assumptions. In 1862, he wrote to Engels:
….Darwin, whom I have looked up again, amuses me when he says he is applying the ‘Malthusian’ theory also to plants and animals, as if with Mr. Malthus the whole point were not that he does not apply the theory to plants and animals but only to human beings – and with geometrical progression – as opposed to plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening-up of new markets, ‘inventions’, and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, and one is reminded of Hegel’s Phenomenology, where civil society is described as a ‘spiritual animal kingdom’, while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society….. (Marx 2000 [1858-1868]: 565). Whatever its relevance to plants and animals, Marx saw no reason why an unregulated ‘struggle for existence’ should serve as a model for politically self-organised, conscious human beings.
Long before he had heard of Darwin, the young Marx had been nurturing his own convictions about human evolution. As ‘everything natural must have an origin’, he wrote in 1844, ‘so man too has his process of origin, history, which can, however, be known by him and thus is a conscious process of origin that transcends itself’ (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 113). According to this conception, history ‘transcends itself’ as the species at last grasps its own evolutionary trajectory, consciousness then entering as a factor in shaping future developments. Marx’s whole life was dedicated to this task.
Marx’s thoughts on human nature and human origins drew heavily on the concept of ‘species-life’ as developed by the materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. An enormous influence on the young Marx, Feuerbach taught that the essential human capacities are always universal rather than individual – they are properties of the species, connecting men instead of dividing them from each another. ‘The individual man by himself’, Feuerbach (1970a) insisted, whether as a moral being or as a thinking one, does not contain in himself the nature of man. The nature of man is contained only in community, in the unity of man with man – a unity, however, that rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and Thou. Isolation is finiteness and limitation; community is freedom and infinity. Man by himself is but man; man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God.
Feuerbach (1970b) defines ‘truth’ in corresponding terms:
That is true in which another agrees with me – agreement is the first criterion of truth; but only because the species is the ultimate measure of truth. That which I think only according to the standard of my individuality is not binding on another, it can be conceived otherwise, it is an accidental, merely subjective, view. But that which I think according to the standard of the species, I think as man in general only can think, and consequently as every individual must think if he thinks normally, in accordance with law, and therefore, truly. That is true which agrees with the nature of the species, that is false which contradicts it. There is no other rule of truth.
It was from this standpoint that Marx approached the topic not only of science but also of labour in social evolution. In both intellectual and physical labour – in both scientific and economic production – the individual produces not merely for his own benefit but for others. Ultimately, all human production is an activity of the species as a whole.
Each natural species, Marx argued, is defined by the way it reproduces. Productive life, as he puts it (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 90),
is species-life. It is life producing life. The whole character of a species, its generic character, is contained in its manner of vital activity, and free conscious activity is the species-characteristic of man. In fact, Marx conceptualised labour – the distinctively human form of ‘life producing life’ – as a variation on the theme of procreation. Like all animals, humans not only survive but also procreate, co-operating socially to do so. In social action each individual is conceived, born and subsequently nurtured during infancy. Labour in the human case, however, represents a radical extension and intensification of such biological interdependence. Throughout adult life, the human individual continues to depend on food and other means of subsistence provided through the labour of others.
As humans engage in the labour-process, Marx argued, they act universally rather than individually, producing for others rather than just for themselves — and defining themselves thereby as human. ‘Men can be distinguished from animals’, as he put it (Marx 2000 [1845]: 177), by consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. Labour, then, is what defines our uniquely productive species as human. ‘It is true’, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 90) concedes, ‘that the animal, too, produces. It builds itself a nest, a dwelling, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc.’ But the animal only produces what it needs immediately for itself or for its offspring; it produces one-sidedly whereas man produces universally; it produces only under the pressure of immediate physical need, whereas man produces freely from physical need and only truly produces when he is thus free; it produces only itself whereas man reproduces the whole of nature.
With the arrival of humanity, in other words, something extraordinary occurs – as if procreative ‘species life’ had evolved all over again, but this time on a higher level. ‘The production of life’, writes Marx (2000 [1845]: 182), ‘both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social, relationship’. Individuals now produce and reproduce not only their own species – but an entire world of objects and relations entailing the transformation of nature and themselves.
Above all, the young Marx offers an idealistic vision of human consciousness arising out of such ‘life-producing life’. The species is born in conscious creativity amounting to a kind of love, as individuals produce life for one another not grudgingly – not just as a means to a selfish end – but in expressing their innermost, deeply social nature:
Supposing that we had produced in a human manner; each of us would in his production have doubly affirmed himself and his fellow men. I would have: (1) objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity and thus both in my activity enjoyed an individual expression of my life and also in looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realizing that my personality was objective, visible to the senses and thus a power raised beyond all doubt. (2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have had the direct enjoyment of realizing that I had both satisfied a human need by my work and also objectified the human essence and therefore fashioned for another human being the object that met his need. (3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been acknowledged and felt by you as a completion of your own essence and a necessary part of yourself and have thus realized that I am confirmed both in your thought and in your love. (4) In my expression of my life I would have fashioned your expression of your life, and thus in my own activity have realized my own essence, my human, my communal essence. ‘In that case’, concludes Marx (2000 [1844c]: 132), ‘our products would be like so many mirrors, out of which our essence shone’.
This, then, is the young Marx’s picture of human ‘species life’ prior to its alienation under those drawn-out historical processes which eventually culminated in capitalism. To be human is to reproduce the species, nourishing and sustaining others’ lives not out of obligation, not under compulsion and not merely to gain materially as an individual – but for the intrinsic enjoyment such productivity brings: In so far as man is human and thus in so far as his feelings and so on are human, the affirmation of the object by another person is equally his own enjoyment (Marx 1972 [1844]: 178-9). According to the young Marx, it is characteristic of man not only that he enjoys such life-sustaining activity, but that he does so with full awareness – that he ‘makes his vital activity itself into an object of his will and consciousness’ (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 90). It is in the light of this species-specific human potential that Marx offers his celebrated critique of the suppression of this potential which so characterises modern times. In all his economic writings, Marx’s target remains the same: the alienated, mindless labour which distinguishes capitalism – social production divorced from the will and consciousness of the producers themselves. Labour of this kind, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 88) writes, produces works of wonder for the rich, but nakedness for the worker. It produces palaces, but only hovels for the worker; it produces beauty, but cripples the worker; it replaces labour by machines but throws a part of the workers back to a barbaric labour and turns the other part into machines. It produces culture, but also imbecility and cretinism for the worker.
The producer, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 88) continues, is not in possession of his own work:
Therefore he does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself, feels miserable instead of happy, deploys no free physical and intellectual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind…. His labour is therefore…. not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy needs outside itself. To the young Marx (1963 [1844]), it seemed ‘unbearable, dreadful and contradictory’ that humans should possess consciousness and a social nature – yet submit to arrangements in which these seem superfluous. Yet exclusion from human life is precisely what alienated labour entails: The social life from which the worker is shut out is….life itself, physical and cultural life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, real human existence (Marx 1963 [1844]).
Under capitalism, then, Marx sees human capacities turned in on themselves. Human nature – Marx calls it ‘the human essence’ – is everywhere denied. Bourgeois man doesn’t even know that to possess things in a human way is to enjoy them not just for their intrinsic utility – but for their value in creating and sustaining relationships. ‘Private property’, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 100) observes, ‘has made us so stupid and narrow-minded that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists as capital for us or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc. in short, when we use it’. Marx continues:
Man – and this is the basic presupposition of private property – only produces in order to have. The aim of production is possession. Not only does production have this utilitarian aim; it also has a selfish aim; man produces only his own exclusive possession. The object of his production is the objectification of his immediate, selfish need. Thus, in this savage and barbaric condition man’s production is measured, is limited by the extent of his immediate need whose immediate content is the object produced (Marx 2000 [1844c]: 129). Under these conditions, our species’ uniquely social creativity is subordinated to the perverse, flatly antithetical project of merely selfish individual gain. Such alienation ‘degrades man’s own free activity to a means, it turns the species-life of man into a means for his physical existence’ (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 91). It is as if poetry were being composed – merely to buy food or pay the rent. Once productive labour – our species’ most distinctive activity – is reduced to the status of a compulsory and mindless means of staying alive, the final paradox is reached. ‘The result we arrive at then’, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 89) concludes, ‘is that man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions of eating, drinking and procreating, at most also in his dwelling and dress, and feels himself an animal in his human functions’. The world has been turned upside-down.
Darwin, according to Marx, had sought to explain and legitimise capitalism by projecting free market principles – conceptualised as the ‘struggle for existence’ – directly onto ‘nature’, as if no distinctively human nature could ever have existed. Without his Hegelian background, Marx might have responded in mechanical fashion – merely denying Darwin’s identification of Malthusian ‘laissez-faire’ as the secret of ‘natural selection’. Instead, he did the opposite. Marx agreed with Darwin. There really is something ‘capitalist’ about the way natural selection works. Capitalism, in short, is far from an unprecedented or one-sidedly artificial system: on the contrary, it echoes certain very ancient themes. From a proletarian standpoint, however, any similarities between Malthusian social policy and the amorality to be found in nature serves not as an inspiration but rather as a terrible warning. Is this what we have come to? Are we really no more than wild animals? The parallels which so inspire Darwin have in Marx’s eyes just the opposite effect: they demonstrate not the legitimacy of capitalism – only its inhuman brutality and backwardness when viewed in the context of human evolution as a whole.
Marx (1971 [1857-8]: 21) contested the notion that private property can be traced to the origin of the species:
History points rather to common property (e.g. among the Hindus, Slavs, ancient Celts, etc.) as the primitive form, which still plays an important part at a much later period as communal property. Bourgeois ‘society’, from this perspective, represents not continuity with our relatively recent cultural past but a decisive break with all traditional concepts of human solidarity and community. In Hegelian terms, it represents a return to a stage so primitive and savage as to be effectively pre-human – a reversion to animal-like conditions of unregulated competition, isolation and consequent stress. ‘What sort of a society is it, in truth’, the young Marx (quoted in Kamenka 1962: 36) had asked, where one finds several millions in deepest loneliness, where one can be overcome by an irresistible longing to kill oneself without anyone discovering it. This society is not a society; it is, as Rousseau says, a desert populated by wild animals. In his later writings, Engels developed this point. Darwin, Engels (1964 [1873-86]: 35-36) caustically observes, did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom.
Capitalism, as Engels sums up the situation (Marx and Engels 1952 [2]: 131), is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The coming socialist revolution, by contrast, will return our species once more to its proper human status. This, in fact, is the ultimate aim of the proletarian insurrection – it will the ensure that man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones (Engels 1962 [1887]: 153}.
It was for good reason, therefore, that Engels dedicated so much effort to the study of human origins. The task of today’s communists is to learn about the process in order to repeat it a second time.
Once Darwin’s anxieties over communists and radical atheists had been dispelled, he found himself battling against a very different enemy – conservative preachers who denied that natural selection could possibly explain man’s god-given ‘soul’. For Darwin, it seemed axiomatic that the ‘soul’ concept was unscientific; furthermore, human evolution could not have been a special case. Our species must have evolved gradually – the way all species evolve. Ancestral humans would have been ape-like creatures – and humans today remain essentially ape-like, albeit with certain peculiarities such as a larger brain. In 1857, Darwin’s creationist adversary Richard Owen had announced the discovery a uniquely human cerebral lobe, the hippocampus minor, on account of which Man should be allocated to a special sub-class. Darwin was incredulous, throwing up his hands: ‘I cannot swallow Man’ being that ‘distinct from a Chimpanzee’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 453). Darwin was equally emphatic that ‘the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind’ (Darwin 1871 [1]: 104).
Turning to sexual relationships, Darwin (1877 [2]: 362-363) postulates convergence between early human arrangements and those of living apes:
We may indeed conclude from what we know of the jealousy of all male quadrupeds, armed, as many of them are, with special weapons for battling with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is extremely improbable….Therefore, if we look far enough back in the stream of time, it is extremely improbable that primeval men and women lived promiscuously together. Judging from the social habits of man as he now exists, and from most savages being polygamists, the most probable view is that primeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men. Or he may have lived with several wives by himself, like the Gorilla; for all the natives “agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community”’.
Note how in this short passage, Darwin links ‘polygamy’ among ‘savages’ and ‘gorillas’, the ‘habits of man as he now exists’ and the postulated marital arrangements of ‘primeval men and women’. If there is a Garden of Eden in Darwin’s scheme, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the young Marx’s dream of equality and reciprocity between the sexes. For Darwin, the social habits and psychology of humans must always have evolved under the tyranny of polygamous, ape-like males. No idea could have seemed more repugnant to the young Marx. The term ‘human’ in his early writings always has a moral ring to it. Nowhere is this more so than when he touches on sexual relationships. ‘The immediate, natural, and necessary relationship of human being to human being’, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 96) writes, ‘is the relationship of man to woman’. Here, each gives the other pleasure not out of calculating self-interest or moral compulsion – but simply out of intrinsic enjoyment :
Thus, in this relationship is sensuously revealed and reduced to an observable fact how far for man his essence has become nature or nature has become man’s human essence. Thus, from this relationship the whole cultural level of man can be judged (2000 [1844b]: 96).
Marx (pp. 96-7) continues:
From the character of this relationship we can conclude how far man has become a species-being, a human being, and conceives of himself as such; the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Thus it shows how far the natural behaviour of man has become human nature or how far the human essence has become his natural essence, how far his human nature has become nature for him. The sexual relationship is ‘human’ in that each partner directly and immediately needs another human being – without whose presence man’s social nature cannot be expressed.
Relationships devoid of love, or in which the love is only one-sided, not only fail to affirm the participants’ humanity – they actively dehumanise those involved. As Marx (2000 [1844b]: 120) writes:
If you suppose man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one, then you can only exchange love for love, trust for trust, etc…. Each of your relationships to man – and to nature – must be a definite expression of your real individual life that corresponds to the object of your will. If you love without arousing a reciprocal love, that is, if your love does not as such produce love in return, if through the manifestation of yourself as a loving person you do not succeed in making yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune….
To be human – to feel fully human in body and mind – is in this conception to experience fulfilment precisely by producing it in one’s intimate partner.
For the young Marx, the proper relationship between subsistence and sex was self-evident. First, you should be able to eat, find shelter and by other means avoid physical extinction. Then, when you are free of such material anxieties, you might be in a position to enjoy sexual or other human relationships for their own sake. In order to eat, the individual may of course have to work – seeking out, appropriating and processing the necessary food. But it would seem wholly unnatural to invert the relationship between eating and sex to the extent of engaging in sexual intercourse in order to eat – in order to stay alive. Marx, however, saw an inversion of just this kind as the inner secret of capitalist production.
To Marx, it was self-evident that procreation in its widest sense – that enjoyable activity through which we produce and sustain one another’s lives – should be experienced as an end in itself. Such social creativity is life – human life. A particular mode of production, consequently, must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce (Marx 2000 [1845]: 177).
Since to produce socially is to live a human life — since, indeed, such productivity is human life — it should be bent to the service of nothing less. Against this background, Marx’s central accusation against capitalism is that it subordinates human creativity — human ‘species-life’ — to the basest imaginable priority. Under capitalism, individuals no longer produce consciously and willingly, finding satisfaction in meeting others’ needs. Instead they do so reluctantly and instrumentally — to secure material gains for themselves. It is as if lovers were engaged in procreative activity not for its own sake — not for the enjoyment of the relationship — but simply in order to earn a living.
It is for this reason that prostitution features so centrally as a theme in Marx’s early writings. No idle metaphor for the alienation of labour, it serves to expose capitalism’s ultimate shame – its ultimate inner secret:
Suppose I ask the economist: am I acting in accordance with economic laws if I earn money by the sale of my body, by prostituting it to another person’s lust…? He will reply: you are not acting contrary to my laws, but you must take into account what Cousin Morality and Cousin Religion have to say. My economic morality and religion have no objection to make, but…. But then whom should we believe, the economist or the moralist? (Bottomore 1963: 173). Bourgeois moralists who repudiate prostitution, in Marx’s view, are completely hypocritical. Capitalism entails prostitution as a matter of course. Its internal logic is to commercialise everything – including even ‘the species-relationship itself’: ‘The species-relationship itself, the relationship of man to woman, etc., becomes an object of commerce! Woman is bartered (Marx 2000 [1843]: 68).
The person so bartered must meet others’ needs not out of passion or enjoyment — but simply in order to make ends meet. Marx has already demonstrated, however, that alienated labour in general entails precisely this perversion – namely, that ‘work, vital activity, and productive life itself appear to man only as a means to the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve his physical existence’. ‘Life itself’ as Marx (2000 [1844b]: 90) sums up the situation, now ‘appears merely as a means to an end’. Since this fate is shared by wage-workers everywhere, anyone genuinely opposed to prostitution should avoid picking on sex-workers and instead confront the system as a whole.
In opposing prostitution, then, Marx repudiates conventional morality. He refuses to portray the ‘bartered woman’ as especially debased. On the contrary, her position is that of the entire proletariat: Prostitution is only a particular expression of the general prostitution of the worker, and because prostitution is a relationship which includes both the person prostituted and the person prostituting – whose baseness is even greater – thus the capitalist, too, etc. is included within this category (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 98n). Marx, as we have seen, conceptualises human origins not as past history, but as current and urgent work in progress. Capitalism is more than an aberration – its emergence was historically inevitable. The prostitution of human species-life was destined to happen, being central to an inverted, pre-revolutionary world of problems and paradoxes out of which communism will emerge. It is only when we fail to see it in its dialectical, evolutionary perspective that ‘prostitution’ appears merely negatively – as ‘prostitution’. In its historical context, Marx (1971 [1859]: 71) observes, ‘universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, abilities, capacities and activities’. By being harnessed and alienated in the service of capital, human species-life becomes enormously developed, socialised and – more and more – subjected to global forms of control. This divorce of creative labour from its former attachment to purely local, limited needs is a precondition which has to be met if, eventually, an expanded human species-life is to return to self-organisation. By joining with others and reclaiming her self, the prostitute – her predicament inseparable from that of the proletariat – will decisively reclaim her full human status. ‘All emancipation’, declared Marx (2000 [1843]: 64), ‘is bringing back man’s world and his relationships to man himself’. The young Marx, as we have seen, linked humanity’s initial situation with communism and sexual freedom. Late in his life, he began intensively studying ethnography in order to elucidate how primitive communism might have worked. The science of kinship – arguably the core discipline of modern social anthropology – can be traced to events which occurred in North America during the 1840s, just when in Europe the young Marx was first becoming politically radicalised. The eventual outcome was a book as significant as Darwin’s in determining how Marx conceptualised anthropological science.
In 1844, a young American named Lewis Henry Morgan was browsing in a bookstore in Albany when he met a Seneca Indian. The young man invited him to meet some chiefs. That night, with his new acquaintance interpreting for him, Morgan interviewed several Seneca elders in their hotel room. He returned again the next day and the day after, pencil in hand, asking questions ‘as long as propriety would permit’. Morgan’s informants explained the organization of the Iroquois Confederacy, the structure of a tribe and clan, and supplied him with relevant Seneca terms. In this chance encounter, American ethnology – and arguably the discipline of anthropology – was born (Resek 1960: 27). The young Iroquois first encountered by Morgan was the son of a chief. Educated at a Baptist mission station, he was now studying law to defend his people against deportation beyond the Mississippi. As Morgan learned more and more about the Iroquois system of self-governance, he became increasingly filled with admiration, resolving to use his own legal training to defend these and other tribes against prejudice, dispossession and persecution. So much did he gain the confidence of his new Iroquois friends that they arranged an initiation ritual and adopted him into the tribe. Morgan – an instinctive republican and democrat – devoted much of the remainder of his life to championing their cause.
In 1877, Morgan published his Ancient Society – the first scholarly attempt to draw on ethnographic knowledge to reconstruct the whole span of history since the origin of the human species. The book had an immediate impact, coming quickly to the attention of Darwin – who generously commented that Morgan’s work on the evolution of the family ‘would stand till the end of time’ (Resek 1960: 125). The volume was also carefully studied by Marx and Engels, who found confirmation of their youthful beliefs – and enormous political inspiration – in the author’s account of the egalitarian matrilineal clan system of the Iroquois and other North American tribes.
The Iroquois were one confederated people who called themselves ‘Ho-de’-no-sau-nee’ or ‘People of the Long-House’. A typical communal dwelling or ‘long-house’, writes Morgan (1965 [1881]: 126-7), was from fifty to eighty and sometimes one hundred feet long. It consisted of a strong frame of upright poles set in the ground, which were strengthened with horizontal poles attached with withes, and surmounted with a triangular, and in some cases with a round roof. It was covered over, both sides and roof, with large strips of elm bark tied to the frame with strings or splints. An external frame of poles for the sides and of rafters for the roof were then adjusted to hold the bark shingles between them, the two frames being tied together. The interior was compartmentalised at intervals of six or eight feet, each room facing like a stall into the central corridor. A house would contain perhaps twenty apartments, each spacious and tidily-kept and with raised bunks constructed around the walls.
The mothers and children in a given house would all belong to the same clan, having invited in as guests husbands and fathers belonging to neighbouring ones. The well-organised mothers took collective possession of all incoming provisions:
Whatever was taken in the hunt or raised by cultivation by any member of the household….was for the common benefit. Provisions were made a common stock within the household. In describing women’s status, Morgan (1907 [1877]: 455n) cites personal correspondence from ‘the late Rev. Arthur Wright, for many years a missionary among the Seneca Iroquois’:
As to their family system, when occupying the old long-houses, it is probable that some one clan predominated, the women taking in husbands, however, from the other clans; and sometimes, for a novelty, some of their sons bringing in their young wives until they felt brave enough to leave their mothers. Usually, the female portion ruled the house, and were doubtless clannish enough about it. The stores were held in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pack up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him; and, unless saved by the intercession of some aunt or grandmother, he must retreat to his own clan; or, as was often done, go and start a new matrimonial alliance in some other. The women were the great power among the clans, as everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion required, to ‘knock off the horns’, as it was technically called, from the head of a chief, and send him back to the ranks of the warriors. The original nomination of the chiefs also always rested with them’. As Marx and Engels read all this, they excitedly realised that Iroquois women must traditionally have possessed what modern trade unionists could only dream of – collective control over their own bodies and lives.
Morgan visited Paris shortly after the defeat of the Commune. For several days, he roamed the workers’ quarters of the city, noting the remnants of barricades, the marks of cannon and rifle fire and revolutionary slogans carved into masonry. Such scenes made a deep impression. ‘The Commune, the principles, objects and acts which made up its history, have been unjustly condemned, because not justly understood’, Morgan wrote (Resek 1960: 123). While in Austria, the American traveller had been shocked at the working conditions of women carrying bricks and mortar, shovelling coal and digging soil along railroad embankments. Everywhere across Europe, reaction appeared rampant. The poor of this continent, he concluded, were as oppressed as any class in history.
No less than Darwin but with a diametrically opposite agenda, Morgan drew on his deep convictions to fuel his scientific scholarship. Morgan was a democrat, a socialist and a supporter of women’s rights. Like many an American patriot, he detested monarchy, feudal despotism and aristocratic privilege. He looked forward to a communist future for humanity. Reconstructing our species’ past, he saw ‘communism in living’ as fundamental to society in the period before the family, private property and the state had emerged. One of Morgan’s basic themes was that in the course of human history and prehistory, the matrilineal clan must have long antedated the more familiar Roman-style patriarchal family. Reversing Darwin’s picture of early ape-like family units each under the dominance of its tyrannical patriarch, he placed organised females centre stage. Writing shortly after Marx’s death, Engels stressed the theoretical significance of Morgan’s work:
The rediscovery of the original mother-right gens as the stage preliminary to the father-right gens of the civilized peoples has the same significance for the history of primitive society as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology, and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy (Engels 1972 [1884]: 36). Intent on completing Marx’s unfinished work, Engels adopted Morgan’s scheme as he attempted to provide for the communist movement an up-to-date theory of human origins. The relative prosperity and relaxed communal atmosphere of a typical Iroquois longhouse offered a vision of pre-capitalist life far removed from Malthus’ picture of endless scarcity, misery, starvation and extinction for all but a privileged few.
Morgan was a gradualist. Engels needed to integrate his work on social evolution with Darwin’s ideas. But how? The two thinkers’ basic premises seemed incompatible. In Darwin’s scenario, pre-civilised humans were organised under the dominance of polygamous ape-like males. In Morgan’s alternative vision, alpha-males were nowhere to be seen and instead ‘group marriage’ led eventually to Iroquois-style matrilineal sisterhoods. To resolve the contradiction, Engels drew on his Hegelian background, postulating not evolutionary continuity but a break. There was no need to choose. Darwin’s and Morgan’s pictures were both correct. Engels could accept with Darwin that male apes – should the reports of his day prove accurate – compete violently for females, a minority succeeding in monopolising all those locally available. He accepted that the ape-like ancestors of humans may well have lived something like this. But if Morgan’s ideas were also correct, then the transition to distinctively human status must have involved at some point a leap. There must have been a momentous transition from alpha-male dominance to a whole new level of organisational complexity. Distinctively human arrangements must have been established not under the dominance of polygamous males but owing to the eventual triumph of collective counterstrategies. ‘Animal’ family arrangements, as Engels’ put it (1972 [1884]: 49-50), have ‘a certain value in drawing conclusions regarding human societies – but only in a negative sense’.
Engels sees privatisation as the secret of the ‘animal family’ – the system which, speculatively, he attributes to our ape-like ancestors. Despite variability in mating arrangements, as Engels explains, ‘the higher vertebrates know only two forms of the family: polygamy or the single pair’. In either case, ‘only one adult male, one husband, is permissible’ (1972 [1884]: 49). The dominant male’s sexual prerogatives, however, face threat from the countervailing solidarity of the primate ‘horde’ – Engels’ term for the ever-present possibility of a coalitionary alliance representing wider community interests. In terms resonant with echoes of The Communist Manifesto, Engels pictures pre-human social life as a battle between these conflicting camps or forces, one tending in an ‘animal’ direction, the other offering glimpses of human potential:
The jealousy of the male, representing both tie and limits of the family, brings the animal family into conflict with the horde. The horde, the higher social form, is rendered impossible here, loosened there, or dissolved altogether during the mating season; at best, its continued development is hindered by the jealousy of the male. This alone suffices to prove that the animal family and primitive human society are incompatible things; that primitive man, working his way up out of the animal stage, either knew no family whatsoever, or at the most knew a family that is nonexistent among animals. In the remotest past, continues Engels, our ancestors could survive in pairs or in small groups without need of community-wide collective solidarity. But as challenges and threats to survival intensified, there came a point when such social fragmentation could no longer be afforded:
For evolution out of the animal stage, for the accomplishment of the greatest advance known to nature, an additional element was needed: the replacement of the individual’s inadequate power of defence by the united strength and joint efforts of the horde.
The eventual liberation of human potential – the ‘greatest advance known to nature’ – was finally achieved by escaping altogether from the constraints imposed by male sexual jealousy and control. According to Engels (1972 [1884]: 49-50), correspondingly, ‘the first condition for the building of those large and enduring groups in the midst of which alone the transition from animal to man could be achieved’ was the establishment of marital arrangements in which ‘whole groups of men and whole groups of women belong to one another’, the outcome being ‘freedom from jealousy’ and ‘mutual toleration among the adult males’.
Engels in this way built on Morgan’s scheme to construct a detailed speculative scenario of human social origins. Drawing on support from sons and brothers and linked by the strongest bonds of sisterhood, early human females – according to Engels’ inspired narrative – resisted privatisation under the control of competitive, jealous males. Through strategies of resistance culminating in Iroquois-style ‘communism in living’, they collectivised childcare and other domestic responsibilities, thereby safeguarding their own solidarity and power. Denying patriarchal rights, females ensured that in-marrying males – if they were to enjoy marital access – must bring food and supplies to the communal home. ‘The communistic household’, Engels (1972 [1884]: 61) proclaimed, was ‘the material foundation of that predominancy of women which generally obtained in primitive times’. It was an origins myth as distant from Darwin’s as could possibly be imagined.
In this debate as in all others, Engels was motivated by contemporary passions and controversies. ‘It is a curious fact’, he had written the previous year (1883 [1957]: 205), ‘that with every great revolutionary struggle, the question of “free love” comes into the foreground’. Marx and Engels had daringly called for full sexual freedom in The Communist Manifesto, where they had advocated – to the horror of their bourgeois opponents – the total ‘abolition of the family’. But lurid fantasies aside, the aim of the communists – the two revolutionaries insisted – was not to prostitute ‘wives’ by turning them into ‘common property’. The aim was to abolish the category of ‘wife’ precisely by abolishing that of ‘prostitute’, ending men’s traditionally one-sided access to sexual ‘property’ in either sense.
A version of ‘sexual communism’ which prostituted all females could only end in horror. Such ‘crude’ so-called ‘communism’, Marx and Engels observe, considers immediate physical ownership as the sole aim of life and being. The category of worker is not abolished but applied to all men. The relationship of the community to the world of things remains that of private property. Finally, this process of opposing general private property to private property is expressed in the animal form of opposing to marriage (which is of course a form of exclusive private property) the community of women where the woman becomes the common property of the community. One might say that the idea of the community of women reveals the open secret of this completely crude and unthinking type of communism. Just as women pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole world of wealth, that is the objective essence of man, passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage to the private property owner to the relationship of universal prostitution with the community (Marx 2000 [1844b] : 96).
Genuine communism, as envisaged by Marx and Engels, turns this hideous vision inside out. Instead of submitting to ‘society’ as an external force, the living ‘instruments of production’ – in other words, socially productive human beings – establish mutual possession of one another, constituting themselves as ‘society’ and thereby transcending their former instrumental status. It is this theoretical possibility which Marx and Engels believed to have been confirmed by Morgan’s discovery of domestic solidarity, sexual equality and ‘communism in living’ among the Iroquois Indians. With this precedent in mind, communism, for these writers, would not be a mere leap into the unknown. Its establishment would be no novelty but instead an act of restoration – return us on a higher level to the human relationships of our pre-capitalist past.
Morgan had not read Hegel; neither was he familiar with the work of Engels or Marx. Despite this, he shared with communism’s intellectual founders the dialectical view that history is ultimately non-linear – that in ancient forms of human solidarity a possible future can be discerned. ‘A mere property career’, writes Morgan (1877: 561-2) in the closing paragraph of his Ancient Society, cannot be the final destiny of mankind. Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.
The time will come, nevertheless, when ‘human intelligence’ will ‘rise to the mastery’ over property. ‘The time which has passed away since civilization began’, continues Morgan, is but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, quality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.
References
Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species. London: Murray.
Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.
Desmond, A. and J. Moore, 1992. Darwin. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Engels, F. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: Pathfinder Press.
Engels, F. 1964 [1873-86]. The Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Progress.
Engels, F. 1962 [1887]. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 2 vols, Vol. 2, pp. 93-155.
Kamenka, E. 1970. The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge.
Feuerbach, L. 1970a. Basic propositions of the philosophy of the future (extract). In Kamenka, E. The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge, p. 126.
Feuerbach, L. 1970b. The essence of Christianity (extract). In Kamenka, E. The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge, p. 101-02.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1949 [1807]. The Phenomenology of Mind. London: Allen and Unwin.
Marx, K. 1963 [1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts [extract]. In T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosphy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 242.
Marx, K. 1972 [1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Early Texts. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 130-183.
Marx, K. 2000 [1843]. On the Jewish question. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 46-69.
Marx, K. 2000 [1844a]. Towards a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 71-82.
Marx, K. 2000 [1844b]. Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 83-120.
Marx, K. 2000 [1844c]. On James Mill. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 124-133.
Marx, K. 2000 [1845]. The German Ideology. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175-208.
Marx, K. 2000 [1848]. The communist manifesto. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 245-271.
Marx, K. 1971 [1857-58]. Marx’s Grundrisse. D. McLellan (ed.), London & Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Marx, K. 2000 [1864]. Inaugural address to the First International. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 575-81.
Karl Marx 2000 [1858-1868]. Letters 1858-1868. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 562-567.
Marx, K. and F. Engels, 1951. Collected Works. Vols. I & II. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Morgan, L. H. 1877. Ancient Society. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.
Morgan, L. H. 1881. Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Morgan, L. H. 1907 [1877]. Ancient Society. New York: Henry Holt.
egel, G. W. F. 1949 [HegelMcLellan, D. 2000. Karl Marx. Selected Writings. Second Edition. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Resek, C. 1960. Lewis Henry Morgan, American Scholar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Pres..
Chris Knight, Lewisham. May 1st, 2011
Darwin versus Marx.pdf
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind
In 1844, following a four-year voyage around the world, Charles Darwin confided to a close friend that he had come to a dangerous conclusion. For seven years, he wrote, he had been ‘engaged in a very presumptuous work’, perhaps ‘a very foolish one’. He had noticed that on each of the Galapagos Islands, the local finches ate slightly different foods, and had correspondingly modified beaks. In South America, he had examined many extraordinary fossils of extinct animals. Pondering the significance of all this, he had felt forced to change his mind about the origin of species. To his friend, Darwin wrote: ‘I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 314).
In 1844, belief in transmutation – the idea that species could evolve into one another – was politically dangerous. Even as Darwin was writing to his friend, atheists and revolutionaries were circulating penny papers around London’s streets, championing evolutionary ideas in opposition to the authorised doctrines of Church and State. At that time, the best-known champion of evolution was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose job was to display insects and worms at the Natural History Museum in Paris. Closely identified with atheism and other radical tenets emanating from revolutionary France, evolutionism in Britain was then known as ‘Lamarckism’. Any ‘Lamarckian’ – in other words, anyone doubting the God-given immutability of all natural species – was likely to be branded a communist, rioter and insurrectionary. Should the feared revolution break out, Darwin’s clerical friends stood to be stripped of their tithes by the ‘red Lamarckians’. Caught between his cautious liberal politics and his science, Darwin became ill with anxiety, suppressing his findings as if he had, indeed, secretly committed a murder (Desmond and Moore 1992: 313-338).
Fanned by the still-glowing embers of 1789, the revolutionary movements of the 1830s and 1840s culminated in a wave of insurrections across Europe. Each ended in defeat. ‘After the failure of the Revolutions of 1848’, recollected one participant (Marx 2000 [1864]: 579) in his inaugural address to the Workers’ International, all party organizations and party journals of the working classes were, on the Continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labour fled in despair to the Transatlantic Republic, and the short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral marasmus, and political reaction.
Darwin was slow to realise that he and his clerical friends were now in a more congenial political situation. By 1858, another natural scientist – the socialist-leaning Alfred Wallace – had independently hit upon the principle of evolution by natural selection; if Darwin did not publish, Wallace would win all the scientific glory. With revolution no longer an immediate threat, Darwin’s courage rose and in 1859 he at last published The Origin of Species.
In his great book, Darwin outlined a concept of evolution quite different from that of his French predecessor. Lamarck had viewed evolution as driven by a ‘tendency to progression’ – a constant striving for self-improvement on the part of animals during their lifetimes. Darwin viewed this as ‘nonsense’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 315). His own grimmer, crueller idea was borrowed from the Reverend Thomas Malthus, an economist employed by the East India Company. Malthus had no interest in the origin of species; his agenda was political. Human populations, he argued (Malthus 1826), will always increase faster than the supply of food. Struggle and starvation must inevitably result. Public charities, said Malthus, can only aggravate the problem: hand-outs will make the paupers feel comfortable, encouraging them to breed. More mouths to feed must lead to more poverty and so to yet further – insatiable – demands for welfare. The best policy is to let the poor die.
Darwin’s genius was to link the zoology, botany, geology and palaeontology of his day with this politically motivated advocacy of free competition and the ‘struggle for survival’. Darwin saw Malthus’s ‘laissez-faire’ morality at work throughout nature. Population growth in the animal world would always outstrip the local food supply. Hence competition was inevitable, with many individuals starving to death. Whereas moralists or sentimentalists might have sought to tone down this image of a cruel and heartless Nature, Darwin learned to celebrate it. Just as capitalism brutally punished the poor and needy, so ‘natural selection’ would weed out those creatures less able to fend for themselves. As the less fit in each generation kept dying, so the survivors’ offspring would multiply, transmitting to future generations the characteristics responsible for their success. Starvation and death, then, were positive factors, within an evolutionary dynamic which relentlessly punished failure while rewarding success.
Darwin’s incorporation of Malthusianism succeeded in transforming the political implications of evolutionary theory. Far from legitimising resistance to privilege, Darwin’s evolutionism was designed to serve a reverse political function. Darwin pictured nature as a world without morals. By implication, this lent justification to an economic system based on unrestrained competition, free of any misguided ‘moral’ interference from religion or state. Later in the century, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer would invoke ‘the survival of the fittest’ to assure Britain’s rich and powerful that their privileges were indeed well deserved. Spencer’s brazenly imperialist evolutionary ideology – ‘Social Darwinism’ – would make its contribution to a variety of political currents including eugenics and eventually Nazism. Darwin’s biographers (Desmond and Moore 1992: xix) comment:
‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start – ‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society.
Following the revolutionary failures of 1848, communist and socialist activists came close to despair. As an asylum-seeker in Britain, Karl Marx attempted to keep hope alive by equipping the proletariat intellectually for its future inevitable victory, burrowing deep into obscure records in the British Museum and keeping abreast of all major developments in bourgeois scholarship and science. In his mature years, Marx came to fully appreciate the ideological implications of post-Lamarckian evolutionary theory. But despite this, he found no difficulty in welcoming Darwin’s The Origin of Species soon after it was published. Certainly, its bourgeois premises and assumptions were no obstacle. Marx, after all, was steeped in the dialectic of Hegel, for whom history is driven by internal conflict and contradiction. Pursued relentlessly to its logical conclusion, every historical idea – he knew – must collapse eventually into its dialectical antithesis. During the 1840s – as fears of social turbulence caused Darwin to suffer anxiety attacks – Marx was optimistically concluding that the more ruthlessly capitalism advanced, the closer it must bring its own revolutionary overthrow. As Marx and Engels drafted The Communist Manifesto, they therefore felt uninhibited in celebrating the bourgeoisie’s role: The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation (Marx 2000 [1848]: 247-8). When – years later – Marx and Engels encountered Darwin’s thought, they instantly recognised in it that same ‘icy water’, that same ‘unconscionable freedom’. Darwin seemed intent on shattering all former illusions about ‘natural harmony’ in favour of ‘naked, shameless, direct, brutal’ competition and exploitation, whether human or animal. Marx and Engels knew how to categorise such a school of thought. ‘The ideas of the ruling class’, they had always held (Marx 2000 [1845]: 192), ‘are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’. ‘Natural selection’ was clearly an accurate intellectual reflection of its age.
Marx welcomed Darwin’s materialist methodology and unsentimental celebration of the role played by suffering, conflict, extinction and death. ‘Darwin’s book’, he wrote to his friend Lassalle in 1862, ‘is very important and serves me as a natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history’. He expressed his delight at the ‘death-blow’ dealt by Darwin against teleology in the natural sciences. Evolution – Marx agreed – did not unfold in fulfilment of a preordained plan (Marx 2000 [1858-1868]: 565). In 1873, Marx even sent Darwin a copy of his own recently published Das Kapital, inscribed ‘from a sincere admirer’. It was a ‘great work’, Darwin realized, as he cut open the first few dozen pages. But Darwin was not fluent in German; moreover, the tenor of Marx’s book seemed ‘so different’ from his own. Politely thanking Marx for his gift, Darwin expressed the wish that he was ‘more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political economy’. No doubt, he added, their respective efforts towards ‘the extension of knowledge’ would ‘in the long run…add to the happiness of mankind’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 601-02).
The two thinkers were, in fact, poles apart. While admiring Darwin as a natural scientist, Marx scorned his Malthusian political assumptions. In 1862, he wrote to Engels:
….Darwin, whom I have looked up again, amuses me when he says he is applying the ‘Malthusian’ theory also to plants and animals, as if with Mr. Malthus the whole point were not that he does not apply the theory to plants and animals but only to human beings – and with geometrical progression – as opposed to plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening-up of new markets, ‘inventions’, and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, and one is reminded of Hegel’s Phenomenology, where civil society is described as a ‘spiritual animal kingdom’, while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society….. (Marx 2000 [1858-1868]: 565). Whatever its relevance to plants and animals, Marx saw no reason why an unregulated ‘struggle for existence’ should serve as a model for politically self-organised, conscious human beings.
Long before he had heard of Darwin, the young Marx had been nurturing his own convictions about human evolution. As ‘everything natural must have an origin’, he wrote in 1844, ‘so man too has his process of origin, history, which can, however, be known by him and thus is a conscious process of origin that transcends itself’ (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 113). According to this conception, history ‘transcends itself’ as the species at last grasps its own evolutionary trajectory, consciousness then entering as a factor in shaping future developments. Marx’s whole life was dedicated to this task.
Marx’s thoughts on human nature and human origins drew heavily on the concept of ‘species-life’ as developed by the materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. An enormous influence on the young Marx, Feuerbach taught that the essential human capacities are always universal rather than individual – they are properties of the species, connecting men instead of dividing them from each another. ‘The individual man by himself’, Feuerbach (1970a) insisted, whether as a moral being or as a thinking one, does not contain in himself the nature of man. The nature of man is contained only in community, in the unity of man with man – a unity, however, that rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and Thou. Isolation is finiteness and limitation; community is freedom and infinity. Man by himself is but man; man with man, the unity of I and Thou, is God.
Feuerbach (1970b) defines ‘truth’ in corresponding terms:
That is true in which another agrees with me – agreement is the first criterion of truth; but only because the species is the ultimate measure of truth. That which I think only according to the standard of my individuality is not binding on another, it can be conceived otherwise, it is an accidental, merely subjective, view. But that which I think according to the standard of the species, I think as man in general only can think, and consequently as every individual must think if he thinks normally, in accordance with law, and therefore, truly. That is true which agrees with the nature of the species, that is false which contradicts it. There is no other rule of truth.
It was from this standpoint that Marx approached the topic not only of science but also of labour in social evolution. In both intellectual and physical labour – in both scientific and economic production – the individual produces not merely for his own benefit but for others. Ultimately, all human production is an activity of the species as a whole.
Each natural species, Marx argued, is defined by the way it reproduces. Productive life, as he puts it (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 90),
is species-life. It is life producing life. The whole character of a species, its generic character, is contained in its manner of vital activity, and free conscious activity is the species-characteristic of man. In fact, Marx conceptualised labour – the distinctively human form of ‘life producing life’ – as a variation on the theme of procreation. Like all animals, humans not only survive but also procreate, co-operating socially to do so. In social action each individual is conceived, born and subsequently nurtured during infancy. Labour in the human case, however, represents a radical extension and intensification of such biological interdependence. Throughout adult life, the human individual continues to depend on food and other means of subsistence provided through the labour of others.
As humans engage in the labour-process, Marx argued, they act universally rather than individually, producing for others rather than just for themselves — and defining themselves thereby as human. ‘Men can be distinguished from animals’, as he put it (Marx 2000 [1845]: 177), by consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. Labour, then, is what defines our uniquely productive species as human. ‘It is true’, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 90) concedes, ‘that the animal, too, produces. It builds itself a nest, a dwelling, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc.’ But the animal only produces what it needs immediately for itself or for its offspring; it produces one-sidedly whereas man produces universally; it produces only under the pressure of immediate physical need, whereas man produces freely from physical need and only truly produces when he is thus free; it produces only itself whereas man reproduces the whole of nature.
With the arrival of humanity, in other words, something extraordinary occurs – as if procreative ‘species life’ had evolved all over again, but this time on a higher level. ‘The production of life’, writes Marx (2000 [1845]: 182), ‘both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social, relationship’. Individuals now produce and reproduce not only their own species – but an entire world of objects and relations entailing the transformation of nature and themselves.
Above all, the young Marx offers an idealistic vision of human consciousness arising out of such ‘life-producing life’. The species is born in conscious creativity amounting to a kind of love, as individuals produce life for one another not grudgingly – not just as a means to a selfish end – but in expressing their innermost, deeply social nature:
Supposing that we had produced in a human manner; each of us would in his production have doubly affirmed himself and his fellow men. I would have: (1) objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity and thus both in my activity enjoyed an individual expression of my life and also in looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realizing that my personality was objective, visible to the senses and thus a power raised beyond all doubt. (2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have had the direct enjoyment of realizing that I had both satisfied a human need by my work and also objectified the human essence and therefore fashioned for another human being the object that met his need. (3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been acknowledged and felt by you as a completion of your own essence and a necessary part of yourself and have thus realized that I am confirmed both in your thought and in your love. (4) In my expression of my life I would have fashioned your expression of your life, and thus in my own activity have realized my own essence, my human, my communal essence. ‘In that case’, concludes Marx (2000 [1844c]: 132), ‘our products would be like so many mirrors, out of which our essence shone’.
This, then, is the young Marx’s picture of human ‘species life’ prior to its alienation under those drawn-out historical processes which eventually culminated in capitalism. To be human is to reproduce the species, nourishing and sustaining others’ lives not out of obligation, not under compulsion and not merely to gain materially as an individual – but for the intrinsic enjoyment such productivity brings: In so far as man is human and thus in so far as his feelings and so on are human, the affirmation of the object by another person is equally his own enjoyment (Marx 1972 [1844]: 178-9). According to the young Marx, it is characteristic of man not only that he enjoys such life-sustaining activity, but that he does so with full awareness – that he ‘makes his vital activity itself into an object of his will and consciousness’ (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 90). It is in the light of this species-specific human potential that Marx offers his celebrated critique of the suppression of this potential which so characterises modern times. In all his economic writings, Marx’s target remains the same: the alienated, mindless labour which distinguishes capitalism – social production divorced from the will and consciousness of the producers themselves. Labour of this kind, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 88) writes, produces works of wonder for the rich, but nakedness for the worker. It produces palaces, but only hovels for the worker; it produces beauty, but cripples the worker; it replaces labour by machines but throws a part of the workers back to a barbaric labour and turns the other part into machines. It produces culture, but also imbecility and cretinism for the worker.
The producer, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 88) continues, is not in possession of his own work:
Therefore he does not confirm himself in his work, he denies himself, feels miserable instead of happy, deploys no free physical and intellectual energy, but mortifies his body and ruins his mind…. His labour is therefore…. not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy needs outside itself. To the young Marx (1963 [1844]), it seemed ‘unbearable, dreadful and contradictory’ that humans should possess consciousness and a social nature – yet submit to arrangements in which these seem superfluous. Yet exclusion from human life is precisely what alienated labour entails: The social life from which the worker is shut out is….life itself, physical and cultural life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, real human existence (Marx 1963 [1844]).
Under capitalism, then, Marx sees human capacities turned in on themselves. Human nature – Marx calls it ‘the human essence’ – is everywhere denied. Bourgeois man doesn’t even know that to possess things in a human way is to enjoy them not just for their intrinsic utility – but for their value in creating and sustaining relationships. ‘Private property’, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 100) observes, ‘has made us so stupid and narrow-minded that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists as capital for us or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc. in short, when we use it’. Marx continues:
Man – and this is the basic presupposition of private property – only produces in order to have. The aim of production is possession. Not only does production have this utilitarian aim; it also has a selfish aim; man produces only his own exclusive possession. The object of his production is the objectification of his immediate, selfish need. Thus, in this savage and barbaric condition man’s production is measured, is limited by the extent of his immediate need whose immediate content is the object produced (Marx 2000 [1844c]: 129). Under these conditions, our species’ uniquely social creativity is subordinated to the perverse, flatly antithetical project of merely selfish individual gain. Such alienation ‘degrades man’s own free activity to a means, it turns the species-life of man into a means for his physical existence’ (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 91). It is as if poetry were being composed – merely to buy food or pay the rent. Once productive labour – our species’ most distinctive activity – is reduced to the status of a compulsory and mindless means of staying alive, the final paradox is reached. ‘The result we arrive at then’, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 89) concludes, ‘is that man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions of eating, drinking and procreating, at most also in his dwelling and dress, and feels himself an animal in his human functions’. The world has been turned upside-down.
Darwin, according to Marx, had sought to explain and legitimise capitalism by projecting free market principles – conceptualised as the ‘struggle for existence’ – directly onto ‘nature’, as if no distinctively human nature could ever have existed. Without his Hegelian background, Marx might have responded in mechanical fashion – merely denying Darwin’s identification of Malthusian ‘laissez-faire’ as the secret of ‘natural selection’. Instead, he did the opposite. Marx agreed with Darwin. There really is something ‘capitalist’ about the way natural selection works. Capitalism, in short, is far from an unprecedented or one-sidedly artificial system: on the contrary, it echoes certain very ancient themes. From a proletarian standpoint, however, any similarities between Malthusian social policy and the amorality to be found in nature serves not as an inspiration but rather as a terrible warning. Is this what we have come to? Are we really no more than wild animals? The parallels which so inspire Darwin have in Marx’s eyes just the opposite effect: they demonstrate not the legitimacy of capitalism – only its inhuman brutality and backwardness when viewed in the context of human evolution as a whole.
Marx (1971 [1857-8]: 21) contested the notion that private property can be traced to the origin of the species:
History points rather to common property (e.g. among the Hindus, Slavs, ancient Celts, etc.) as the primitive form, which still plays an important part at a much later period as communal property. Bourgeois ‘society’, from this perspective, represents not continuity with our relatively recent cultural past but a decisive break with all traditional concepts of human solidarity and community. In Hegelian terms, it represents a return to a stage so primitive and savage as to be effectively pre-human – a reversion to animal-like conditions of unregulated competition, isolation and consequent stress. ‘What sort of a society is it, in truth’, the young Marx (quoted in Kamenka 1962: 36) had asked, where one finds several millions in deepest loneliness, where one can be overcome by an irresistible longing to kill oneself without anyone discovering it. This society is not a society; it is, as Rousseau says, a desert populated by wild animals. In his later writings, Engels developed this point. Darwin, Engels (1964 [1873-86]: 35-36) caustically observes, did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom.
Capitalism, as Engels sums up the situation (Marx and Engels 1952 [2]: 131), is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The coming socialist revolution, by contrast, will return our species once more to its proper human status. This, in fact, is the ultimate aim of the proletarian insurrection – it will the ensure that man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones (Engels 1962 [1887]: 153}.
It was for good reason, therefore, that Engels dedicated so much effort to the study of human origins. The task of today’s communists is to learn about the process in order to repeat it a second time.
Once Darwin’s anxieties over communists and radical atheists had been dispelled, he found himself battling against a very different enemy – conservative preachers who denied that natural selection could possibly explain man’s god-given ‘soul’. For Darwin, it seemed axiomatic that the ‘soul’ concept was unscientific; furthermore, human evolution could not have been a special case. Our species must have evolved gradually – the way all species evolve. Ancestral humans would have been ape-like creatures – and humans today remain essentially ape-like, albeit with certain peculiarities such as a larger brain. In 1857, Darwin’s creationist adversary Richard Owen had announced the discovery a uniquely human cerebral lobe, the hippocampus minor, on account of which Man should be allocated to a special sub-class. Darwin was incredulous, throwing up his hands: ‘I cannot swallow Man’ being that ‘distinct from a Chimpanzee’ (Desmond and Moore 1992: 453). Darwin was equally emphatic that ‘the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind’ (Darwin 1871 [1]: 104).
Turning to sexual relationships, Darwin (1877 [2]: 362-363) postulates convergence between early human arrangements and those of living apes:
We may indeed conclude from what we know of the jealousy of all male quadrupeds, armed, as many of them are, with special weapons for battling with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is extremely improbable….Therefore, if we look far enough back in the stream of time, it is extremely improbable that primeval men and women lived promiscuously together. Judging from the social habits of man as he now exists, and from most savages being polygamists, the most probable view is that primeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men. Or he may have lived with several wives by himself, like the Gorilla; for all the natives “agree that but one adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community”’.
Note how in this short passage, Darwin links ‘polygamy’ among ‘savages’ and ‘gorillas’, the ‘habits of man as he now exists’ and the postulated marital arrangements of ‘primeval men and women’. If there is a Garden of Eden in Darwin’s scheme, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the young Marx’s dream of equality and reciprocity between the sexes. For Darwin, the social habits and psychology of humans must always have evolved under the tyranny of polygamous, ape-like males. No idea could have seemed more repugnant to the young Marx. The term ‘human’ in his early writings always has a moral ring to it. Nowhere is this more so than when he touches on sexual relationships. ‘The immediate, natural, and necessary relationship of human being to human being’, Marx (2000 [1844b]: 96) writes, ‘is the relationship of man to woman’. Here, each gives the other pleasure not out of calculating self-interest or moral compulsion – but simply out of intrinsic enjoyment :
Thus, in this relationship is sensuously revealed and reduced to an observable fact how far for man his essence has become nature or nature has become man’s human essence. Thus, from this relationship the whole cultural level of man can be judged (2000 [1844b]: 96).
Marx (pp. 96-7) continues:
From the character of this relationship we can conclude how far man has become a species-being, a human being, and conceives of himself as such; the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Thus it shows how far the natural behaviour of man has become human nature or how far the human essence has become his natural essence, how far his human nature has become nature for him. The sexual relationship is ‘human’ in that each partner directly and immediately needs another human being – without whose presence man’s social nature cannot be expressed.
Relationships devoid of love, or in which the love is only one-sided, not only fail to affirm the participants’ humanity – they actively dehumanise those involved. As Marx (2000 [1844b]: 120) writes:
If you suppose man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one, then you can only exchange love for love, trust for trust, etc…. Each of your relationships to man – and to nature – must be a definite expression of your real individual life that corresponds to the object of your will. If you love without arousing a reciprocal love, that is, if your love does not as such produce love in return, if through the manifestation of yourself as a loving person you do not succeed in making yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune….
To be human – to feel fully human in body and mind – is in this conception to experience fulfilment precisely by producing it in one’s intimate partner.
For the young Marx, the proper relationship between subsistence and sex was self-evident. First, you should be able to eat, find shelter and by other means avoid physical extinction. Then, when you are free of such material anxieties, you might be in a position to enjoy sexual or other human relationships for their own sake. In order to eat, the individual may of course have to work – seeking out, appropriating and processing the necessary food. But it would seem wholly unnatural to invert the relationship between eating and sex to the extent of engaging in sexual intercourse in order to eat – in order to stay alive. Marx, however, saw an inversion of just this kind as the inner secret of capitalist production.
To Marx, it was self-evident that procreation in its widest sense – that enjoyable activity through which we produce and sustain one another’s lives – should be experienced as an end in itself. Such social creativity is life – human life. A particular mode of production, consequently, must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce (Marx 2000 [1845]: 177).
Since to produce socially is to live a human life — since, indeed, such productivity is human life — it should be bent to the service of nothing less. Against this background, Marx’s central accusation against capitalism is that it subordinates human creativity — human ‘species-life’ — to the basest imaginable priority. Under capitalism, individuals no longer produce consciously and willingly, finding satisfaction in meeting others’ needs. Instead they do so reluctantly and instrumentally — to secure material gains for themselves. It is as if lovers were engaged in procreative activity not for its own sake — not for the enjoyment of the relationship — but simply in order to earn a living.
It is for this reason that prostitution features so centrally as a theme in Marx’s early writings. No idle metaphor for the alienation of labour, it serves to expose capitalism’s ultimate shame – its ultimate inner secret:
Suppose I ask the economist: am I acting in accordance with economic laws if I earn money by the sale of my body, by prostituting it to another person’s lust…? He will reply: you are not acting contrary to my laws, but you must take into account what Cousin Morality and Cousin Religion have to say. My economic morality and religion have no objection to make, but…. But then whom should we believe, the economist or the moralist? (Bottomore 1963: 173). Bourgeois moralists who repudiate prostitution, in Marx’s view, are completely hypocritical. Capitalism entails prostitution as a matter of course. Its internal logic is to commercialise everything – including even ‘the species-relationship itself’: ‘The species-relationship itself, the relationship of man to woman, etc., becomes an object of commerce! Woman is bartered (Marx 2000 [1843]: 68).
The person so bartered must meet others’ needs not out of passion or enjoyment — but simply in order to make ends meet. Marx has already demonstrated, however, that alienated labour in general entails precisely this perversion – namely, that ‘work, vital activity, and productive life itself appear to man only as a means to the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve his physical existence’. ‘Life itself’ as Marx (2000 [1844b]: 90) sums up the situation, now ‘appears merely as a means to an end’. Since this fate is shared by wage-workers everywhere, anyone genuinely opposed to prostitution should avoid picking on sex-workers and instead confront the system as a whole.
In opposing prostitution, then, Marx repudiates conventional morality. He refuses to portray the ‘bartered woman’ as especially debased. On the contrary, her position is that of the entire proletariat: Prostitution is only a particular expression of the general prostitution of the worker, and because prostitution is a relationship which includes both the person prostituted and the person prostituting – whose baseness is even greater – thus the capitalist, too, etc. is included within this category (Marx 2000 [1844b]: 98n). Marx, as we have seen, conceptualises human origins not as past history, but as current and urgent work in progress. Capitalism is more than an aberration – its emergence was historically inevitable. The prostitution of human species-life was destined to happen, being central to an inverted, pre-revolutionary world of problems and paradoxes out of which communism will emerge. It is only when we fail to see it in its dialectical, evolutionary perspective that ‘prostitution’ appears merely negatively – as ‘prostitution’. In its historical context, Marx (1971 [1859]: 71) observes, ‘universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, abilities, capacities and activities’. By being harnessed and alienated in the service of capital, human species-life becomes enormously developed, socialised and – more and more – subjected to global forms of control. This divorce of creative labour from its former attachment to purely local, limited needs is a precondition which has to be met if, eventually, an expanded human species-life is to return to self-organisation. By joining with others and reclaiming her self, the prostitute – her predicament inseparable from that of the proletariat – will decisively reclaim her full human status. ‘All emancipation’, declared Marx (2000 [1843]: 64), ‘is bringing back man’s world and his relationships to man himself’. The young Marx, as we have seen, linked humanity’s initial situation with communism and sexual freedom. Late in his life, he began intensively studying ethnography in order to elucidate how primitive communism might have worked. The science of kinship – arguably the core discipline of modern social anthropology – can be traced to events which occurred in North America during the 1840s, just when in Europe the young Marx was first becoming politically radicalised. The eventual outcome was a book as significant as Darwin’s in determining how Marx conceptualised anthropological science.
In 1844, a young American named Lewis Henry Morgan was browsing in a bookstore in Albany when he met a Seneca Indian. The young man invited him to meet some chiefs. That night, with his new acquaintance interpreting for him, Morgan interviewed several Seneca elders in their hotel room. He returned again the next day and the day after, pencil in hand, asking questions ‘as long as propriety would permit’. Morgan’s informants explained the organization of the Iroquois Confederacy, the structure of a tribe and clan, and supplied him with relevant Seneca terms. In this chance encounter, American ethnology – and arguably the discipline of anthropology – was born (Resek 1960: 27). The young Iroquois first encountered by Morgan was the son of a chief. Educated at a Baptist mission station, he was now studying law to defend his people against deportation beyond the Mississippi. As Morgan learned more and more about the Iroquois system of self-governance, he became increasingly filled with admiration, resolving to use his own legal training to defend these and other tribes against prejudice, dispossession and persecution. So much did he gain the confidence of his new Iroquois friends that they arranged an initiation ritual and adopted him into the tribe. Morgan – an instinctive republican and democrat – devoted much of the remainder of his life to championing their cause.
In 1877, Morgan published his Ancient Society – the first scholarly attempt to draw on ethnographic knowledge to reconstruct the whole span of history since the origin of the human species. The book had an immediate impact, coming quickly to the attention of Darwin – who generously commented that Morgan’s work on the evolution of the family ‘would stand till the end of time’ (Resek 1960: 125). The volume was also carefully studied by Marx and Engels, who found confirmation of their youthful beliefs – and enormous political inspiration – in the author’s account of the egalitarian matrilineal clan system of the Iroquois and other North American tribes.
The Iroquois were one confederated people who called themselves ‘Ho-de’-no-sau-nee’ or ‘People of the Long-House’. A typical communal dwelling or ‘long-house’, writes Morgan (1965 [1881]: 126-7), was from fifty to eighty and sometimes one hundred feet long. It consisted of a strong frame of upright poles set in the ground, which were strengthened with horizontal poles attached with withes, and surmounted with a triangular, and in some cases with a round roof. It was covered over, both sides and roof, with large strips of elm bark tied to the frame with strings or splints. An external frame of poles for the sides and of rafters for the roof were then adjusted to hold the bark shingles between them, the two frames being tied together. The interior was compartmentalised at intervals of six or eight feet, each room facing like a stall into the central corridor. A house would contain perhaps twenty apartments, each spacious and tidily-kept and with raised bunks constructed around the walls.
The mothers and children in a given house would all belong to the same clan, having invited in as guests husbands and fathers belonging to neighbouring ones. The well-organised mothers took collective possession of all incoming provisions:
Whatever was taken in the hunt or raised by cultivation by any member of the household….was for the common benefit. Provisions were made a common stock within the household. In describing women’s status, Morgan (1907 [1877]: 455n) cites personal correspondence from ‘the late Rev. Arthur Wright, for many years a missionary among the Seneca Iroquois’:
As to their family system, when occupying the old long-houses, it is probable that some one clan predominated, the women taking in husbands, however, from the other clans; and sometimes, for a novelty, some of their sons bringing in their young wives until they felt brave enough to leave their mothers. Usually, the female portion ruled the house, and were doubtless clannish enough about it. The stores were held in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pack up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him; and, unless saved by the intercession of some aunt or grandmother, he must retreat to his own clan; or, as was often done, go and start a new matrimonial alliance in some other. The women were the great power among the clans, as everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion required, to ‘knock off the horns’, as it was technically called, from the head of a chief, and send him back to the ranks of the warriors. The original nomination of the chiefs also always rested with them’. As Marx and Engels read all this, they excitedly realised that Iroquois women must traditionally have possessed what modern trade unionists could only dream of – collective control over their own bodies and lives.
Morgan visited Paris shortly after the defeat of the Commune. For several days, he roamed the workers’ quarters of the city, noting the remnants of barricades, the marks of cannon and rifle fire and revolutionary slogans carved into masonry. Such scenes made a deep impression. ‘The Commune, the principles, objects and acts which made up its history, have been unjustly condemned, because not justly understood’, Morgan wrote (Resek 1960: 123). While in Austria, the American traveller had been shocked at the working conditions of women carrying bricks and mortar, shovelling coal and digging soil along railroad embankments. Everywhere across Europe, reaction appeared rampant. The poor of this continent, he concluded, were as oppressed as any class in history.
No less than Darwin but with a diametrically opposite agenda, Morgan drew on his deep convictions to fuel his scientific scholarship. Morgan was a democrat, a socialist and a supporter of women’s rights. Like many an American patriot, he detested monarchy, feudal despotism and aristocratic privilege. He looked forward to a communist future for humanity. Reconstructing our species’ past, he saw ‘communism in living’ as fundamental to society in the period before the family, private property and the state had emerged. One of Morgan’s basic themes was that in the course of human history and prehistory, the matrilineal clan must have long antedated the more familiar Roman-style patriarchal family. Reversing Darwin’s picture of early ape-like family units each under the dominance of its tyrannical patriarch, he placed organised females centre stage. Writing shortly after Marx’s death, Engels stressed the theoretical significance of Morgan’s work:
The rediscovery of the original mother-right gens as the stage preliminary to the father-right gens of the civilized peoples has the same significance for the history of primitive society as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology, and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy (Engels 1972 [1884]: 36). Intent on completing Marx’s unfinished work, Engels adopted Morgan’s scheme as he attempted to provide for the communist movement an up-to-date theory of human origins. The relative prosperity and relaxed communal atmosphere of a typical Iroquois longhouse offered a vision of pre-capitalist life far removed from Malthus’ picture of endless scarcity, misery, starvation and extinction for all but a privileged few.
Morgan was a gradualist. Engels needed to integrate his work on social evolution with Darwin’s ideas. But how? The two thinkers’ basic premises seemed incompatible. In Darwin’s scenario, pre-civilised humans were organised under the dominance of polygamous ape-like males. In Morgan’s alternative vision, alpha-males were nowhere to be seen and instead ‘group marriage’ led eventually to Iroquois-style matrilineal sisterhoods. To resolve the contradiction, Engels drew on his Hegelian background, postulating not evolutionary continuity but a break. There was no need to choose. Darwin’s and Morgan’s pictures were both correct. Engels could accept with Darwin that male apes – should the reports of his day prove accurate – compete violently for females, a minority succeeding in monopolising all those locally available. He accepted that the ape-like ancestors of humans may well have lived something like this. But if Morgan’s ideas were also correct, then the transition to distinctively human status must have involved at some point a leap. There must have been a momentous transition from alpha-male dominance to a whole new level of organisational complexity. Distinctively human arrangements must have been established not under the dominance of polygamous males but owing to the eventual triumph of collective counterstrategies. ‘Animal’ family arrangements, as Engels’ put it (1972 [1884]: 49-50), have ‘a certain value in drawing conclusions regarding human societies – but only in a negative sense’.
Engels sees privatisation as the secret of the ‘animal family’ – the system which, speculatively, he attributes to our ape-like ancestors. Despite variability in mating arrangements, as Engels explains, ‘the higher vertebrates know only two forms of the family: polygamy or the single pair’. In either case, ‘only one adult male, one husband, is permissible’ (1972 [1884]: 49). The dominant male’s sexual prerogatives, however, face threat from the countervailing solidarity of the primate ‘horde’ – Engels’ term for the ever-present possibility of a coalitionary alliance representing wider community interests. In terms resonant with echoes of The Communist Manifesto, Engels pictures pre-human social life as a battle between these conflicting camps or forces, one tending in an ‘animal’ direction, the other offering glimpses of human potential:
The jealousy of the male, representing both tie and limits of the family, brings the animal family into conflict with the horde. The horde, the higher social form, is rendered impossible here, loosened there, or dissolved altogether during the mating season; at best, its continued development is hindered by the jealousy of the male. This alone suffices to prove that the animal family and primitive human society are incompatible things; that primitive man, working his way up out of the animal stage, either knew no family whatsoever, or at the most knew a family that is nonexistent among animals. In the remotest past, continues Engels, our ancestors could survive in pairs or in small groups without need of community-wide collective solidarity. But as challenges and threats to survival intensified, there came a point when such social fragmentation could no longer be afforded:
For evolution out of the animal stage, for the accomplishment of the greatest advance known to nature, an additional element was needed: the replacement of the individual’s inadequate power of defence by the united strength and joint efforts of the horde.
The eventual liberation of human potential – the ‘greatest advance known to nature’ – was finally achieved by escaping altogether from the constraints imposed by male sexual jealousy and control. According to Engels (1972 [1884]: 49-50), correspondingly, ‘the first condition for the building of those large and enduring groups in the midst of which alone the transition from animal to man could be achieved’ was the establishment of marital arrangements in which ‘whole groups of men and whole groups of women belong to one another’, the outcome being ‘freedom from jealousy’ and ‘mutual toleration among the adult males’.
Engels in this way built on Morgan’s scheme to construct a detailed speculative scenario of human social origins. Drawing on support from sons and brothers and linked by the strongest bonds of sisterhood, early human females – according to Engels’ inspired narrative – resisted privatisation under the control of competitive, jealous males. Through strategies of resistance culminating in Iroquois-style ‘communism in living’, they collectivised childcare and other domestic responsibilities, thereby safeguarding their own solidarity and power. Denying patriarchal rights, females ensured that in-marrying males – if they were to enjoy marital access – must bring food and supplies to the communal home. ‘The communistic household’, Engels (1972 [1884]: 61) proclaimed, was ‘the material foundation of that predominancy of women which generally obtained in primitive times’. It was an origins myth as distant from Darwin’s as could possibly be imagined.
In this debate as in all others, Engels was motivated by contemporary passions and controversies. ‘It is a curious fact’, he had written the previous year (1883 [1957]: 205), ‘that with every great revolutionary struggle, the question of “free love” comes into the foreground’. Marx and Engels had daringly called for full sexual freedom in The Communist Manifesto, where they had advocated – to the horror of their bourgeois opponents – the total ‘abolition of the family’. But lurid fantasies aside, the aim of the communists – the two revolutionaries insisted – was not to prostitute ‘wives’ by turning them into ‘common property’. The aim was to abolish the category of ‘wife’ precisely by abolishing that of ‘prostitute’, ending men’s traditionally one-sided access to sexual ‘property’ in either sense.
A version of ‘sexual communism’ which prostituted all females could only end in horror. Such ‘crude’ so-called ‘communism’, Marx and Engels observe, considers immediate physical ownership as the sole aim of life and being. The category of worker is not abolished but applied to all men. The relationship of the community to the world of things remains that of private property. Finally, this process of opposing general private property to private property is expressed in the animal form of opposing to marriage (which is of course a form of exclusive private property) the community of women where the woman becomes the common property of the community. One might say that the idea of the community of women reveals the open secret of this completely crude and unthinking type of communism. Just as women pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole world of wealth, that is the objective essence of man, passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage to the private property owner to the relationship of universal prostitution with the community (Marx 2000 [1844b] : 96).
Genuine communism, as envisaged by Marx and Engels, turns this hideous vision inside out. Instead of submitting to ‘society’ as an external force, the living ‘instruments of production’ – in other words, socially productive human beings – establish mutual possession of one another, constituting themselves as ‘society’ and thereby transcending their former instrumental status. It is this theoretical possibility which Marx and Engels believed to have been confirmed by Morgan’s discovery of domestic solidarity, sexual equality and ‘communism in living’ among the Iroquois Indians. With this precedent in mind, communism, for these writers, would not be a mere leap into the unknown. Its establishment would be no novelty but instead an act of restoration – return us on a higher level to the human relationships of our pre-capitalist past.
Morgan had not read Hegel; neither was he familiar with the work of Engels or Marx. Despite this, he shared with communism’s intellectual founders the dialectical view that history is ultimately non-linear – that in ancient forms of human solidarity a possible future can be discerned. ‘A mere property career’, writes Morgan (1877: 561-2) in the closing paragraph of his Ancient Society, cannot be the final destiny of mankind. Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.
The time will come, nevertheless, when ‘human intelligence’ will ‘rise to the mastery’ over property. ‘The time which has passed away since civilization began’, continues Morgan, is but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, quality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.
References
Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species. London: Murray.
Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.
Desmond, A. and J. Moore, 1992. Darwin. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Engels, F. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: Pathfinder Press.
Engels, F. 1964 [1873-86]. The Dialectics of Nature. Moscow: Progress.
Engels, F. 1962 [1887]. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 2 vols, Vol. 2, pp. 93-155.
Kamenka, E. 1970. The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge.
Feuerbach, L. 1970a. Basic propositions of the philosophy of the future (extract). In Kamenka, E. The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge, p. 126.
Feuerbach, L. 1970b. The essence of Christianity (extract). In Kamenka, E. The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge, p. 101-02.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1949 [1807]. The Phenomenology of Mind. London: Allen and Unwin.
Marx, K. 1963 [1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts [extract]. In T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosphy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 242.
Marx, K. 1972 [1844]. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In D. McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Early Texts. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 130-183.
Marx, K. 2000 [1843]. On the Jewish question. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 46-69.
Marx, K. 2000 [1844a]. Towards a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 71-82.
Marx, K. 2000 [1844b]. Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 83-120.
Marx, K. 2000 [1844c]. On James Mill. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 124-133.
Marx, K. 2000 [1845]. The German Ideology. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175-208.
Marx, K. 2000 [1848]. The communist manifesto. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 245-271.
Marx, K. 1971 [1857-58]. Marx’s Grundrisse. D. McLellan (ed.), London & Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Marx, K. 2000 [1864]. Inaugural address to the First International. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 575-81.
Karl Marx 2000 [1858-1868]. Letters 1858-1868. In David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 562-567.
Marx, K. and F. Engels, 1951. Collected Works. Vols. I & II. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Morgan, L. H. 1877. Ancient Society. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.
Morgan, L. H. 1881. Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Morgan, L. H. 1907 [1877]. Ancient Society. New York: Henry Holt.
egel, G. W. F. 1949 [HegelMcLellan, D. 2000. Karl Marx. Selected Writings. Second Edition. Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Resek, C. 1960. Lewis Henry Morgan, American Scholar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Pres..
Chris Knight, Lewisham. May 1st, 2011
Darwin versus Marx.pdf