Marx and Darwin

[Excerpted from Darwin’s Leap of Faith, Harvest House, 1998]

Darwinism was effectively used to propagate Communist ideology. Karl Marx “felt his own work to be the exact parallel of Darwin’s” and he was so grateful that he wanted to dedicate a portion of Das Kapital to Darwin, who declined the honor.^[1]

Marx wrote to Engels concerning The Origin of Species, that this was the book which “contains the basis in natural history for our views.”^[2] In 1861 he also wrote, “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural selection for the class struggle in history….”^[3] Thus, as Burrow observes, “Even Marx and Engels adopted Darwinism as the biological counterpart to the class war….”^[4]

Indeed:

…Marx and Engels based their communistic philosophy squarely on the foundation of evolutionism….Marx and Engels were doctrinaire evolutionists, and so have all Communists been ever since. Since atheism is a basic tenet of Marxism in general, and Soviet Communism in particular, it is obvious that evolution must be the number one tenet of communism. Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin were all atheistic evolutionists, and so are today’s Communist leaders. In fact, they have to be in order ever to get to be Communist leaders….The continuing commitment of modern communism to atheistic evolutionism is evident in communistic publications all over the world.^[5]

Significantly, at the time of Marx’s death in 1883, his ideas had made little or no im­pact. Marxist philosophy seems to have gained little ground historically until evolutionary theory had been sufficiently accepted, providing a scientific basis for denying the existence of God and supplying a drastically revised view of man’s nature and the historical process. Thus, in some ways, Darwinism appears to have been a key agent for bringing about ideological changes for fostering the growth and application of communist theory.^[6]

Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith remarks: “The political and anti-religious propaganda put out since Marx’s time writhes with the most primitive Darwinism” observing that communism “brutalizes those it is forced upon.”^[7]

Marx’s philosophy, like Hitler’s, reflected the brutality of Darwinian nature. He referred to “the disarming of the bourgeoisie…revolutionary terror…and the creation of a revolution­ary army…liberty is dismissed as a purely bourgeois ideal….” Further, the revolutionary government would “have neither time nor opportunity for compassion or remorse. Its business is to terrorize its opponents into acquiescence. It must disarm antagonism by execution, imprisonment, forced labor, control of the press….”^[8]

Clearly, some of the most inhuman actions ever seen have been perpetuated in the name of national socialist or Marxist “social advancement,” based on evolutionary philoso­phies:

The world today, for the most part, despises Hitler—Stalin, also. Both rejected the ethics of loving neighbors as set forth in the Bible, and both slaughtered millions. Stalin self-consciously chose Darwin. Hitler tried to ram survival of the fittest down the world’s throat. Entomologist Vernon L. Kellogg, mentioned by Gould, summarized the position held, “That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary state…should win in the struggle for existence….”^[9]

Consider the following terrorist communique as reported on the CBS Evening News February 21 and 22, 1985, “Life has no special sacred character”; “Hate is your law and revenge is your first privilege.”

Where did the terrorists who stated these things get such ideas? From Jesus? Would it be surprising to discover they devised them logically, as evolutionary materialists, in combi­nation with their Marxist philosophy? According to evolutionary principles there can be no special sacred character to life since it simply arose by chance, exists a brief time and is forever ended. It has no ultimate meaning, no special value. And certainly, in a reading of the writings of Karl Marx and other communist leaders one can understand the concept that hate and revenge are laws or privileges. This is exactly what Marxist ideology has spawned in the last 100 years, leading to the deaths of some 150 million people.

Given the impact of Hitler, Marx and their associates and the demonstrable connection of their anti-human philosophies to evolutionary atheism, the comments of historical phi­losopher John Koster should be considered relevant:

Many names have been cited beside that of Hitler to explain the Holocaust. Oddly enough, Charles Darwin’s is almost never among them. [Yet]…Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust….Hitler and Stalin between them murdered more innocent victims than had died in all the religious wars in mankind’s history. They murdered these victims not with the misguided intentions of saving their souls or punishing their sins, but because they were competitors for food and obstacles to “evolutionary progress.” Many humanitarians, Christian, Jewish, or agnostic, have understood the relationship between Nietzsche’s ideas and Hitler’s mass murder teams and crematoria. Few have traced the linkage back one step further to Darwin, the “scientist” who directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman. The evidence was all there—the term neo-Darwinism was openly used to describe Nazi racial theories. The expression “natural selection,” as applied to human beings, turns up at the Wannsee Conference in the prime document of the Holocaust….

We can see the events of Hitler’s Germany and of Stalin’s Russia as a meaningless collection of atrocities which took place because Germans and Russians are terrible people, not like us at all. Or we can realize that imposing the life-is-pathology theories of Huxley and Darwin, of clinical depression masquerading as science, played a critical role in the age of atrocities. And we can take warning. People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls….

History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness.^[10]

It should surprise no one that amoral theories reflecting nature’s “Darwinian methods,” methods which have a utilitarian ethic, can play such a part in human affairs.

Ideas do have consequences.

Notes

1. ↑ Burrow, intro to Charles Darwin, p. 45; J. Barzun, Darwin, Marx, and Wagner, p. 8; cf. Q.v. “Darwinism,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 2, p. 304.
2. ↑ In David Jorafsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 12 from Morris, Long War, p. 84.
3. ↑ Marshall and Sandra Hall, The Truth, pp. 139-140.
4. ↑ Burrow, Charles Darwin, p. 45.
5. ↑ Morris, Long War, pp. 84-85.
6. ↑ John P. Koster, Jr., The Atheist Syndrome (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989), pp. 168-179; Hall and Hall, The Truth, pp. 140-142.
7. ↑ A.E. Wilder-Smith, Man’s Origin—Man’s Destiny, pp. 192-195.
8. ↑ In Marshall and Hall, pp. 150-151.
9. ↑ Koster, Atheist, p. 142.
10. ↑ Ibid, pp. 187-189.