Karl Marx (45 page)

However, Karl Marx’s unknown masterpiece did have at least one famous and appreciative reader – or so he thought. In October 1873, a few months after publication of the second German edition of
Capital
, he had received the following letter:

Downe, Beckenham, Kent

Dear Sir:

I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.

I remain, Dear Sir

Yours faithfully,

Charles Darwin

Marx and Darwin were the two most revolutionary and influential thinkers of the nineteenth century; and since they lived only twenty miles apart for much of their adult lives, with several acquaintances in common, the temptation to search for a missing link is hard to resist. Even as Marx’s coffin was being lowered into the earth of Highgate cemetery, Engels was already making the connection. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in human nature,’ he declared, ‘so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.’ The small group of mourners at the graveside included Professor Edwin Ray Lankester, an intimate friend of both Marx and Darwin, who apparently had no objection to this attempted marriage of the evolutionist and the revolutionist. The one man who might have protested, Marx himself, was in no position to do so.

His first reaction to Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
, published in 1860, might seem to justify Engels’s posthumous judgement. ‘
Although it is developed in the crude English style
,’ he wrote in December 1860, ‘this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.’ A month later, he told Lassalle that ‘
Darwin’s book is very important
and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history’. But this initial enthusiasm was modified and diluted over the next few years: though the Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ might be applicable to flora and fauna, as an explanation of human society it led to the Malthusian fantasy that over-population was the motive force of political economy.

Marx’s loathing of Malthus led him to take refuge in an even wackier theory, proposed by the French naturalist Pierre Trémaux in 1865. In his book
Origine et Transformations de l’Homme et des Autres Êtres
, Trémaux postulated that evolution was governed by geological and chemical changes in the soil. The idea attracted little attention at the time and is now entirely forgotten, but for a few weeks Marx could think of little else. ‘
It represents a
very significant
advance over Darwin
,’ he wrote. ‘For certain questions, such as nationality etc., only here has a basis in nature been found.’ The
‘surface-formations’ of the Russian landscape had tartarised and mongolised the Slavs, just as the secret of how ‘the common negro type is only a degeneration of a far higher one’ could be found in the dusty plains of Africa. Engels, who usually phrased his rare criticisms of Marx as mildly and respectfully as possible, didn’t trouble to hide his belief that the old boy had gone barmy. Trémaux was quietly removed from the Marxist pantheon soon afterwards, and Darwin rehabilitated. The edition of
Capital
which he sent out in 1873, inscribed to ‘Mr Charles Darwin on the part of his sincere admirer Karl Marx’, included a footnote referring to the ‘epoch-making’ effect of
On the Origin of Species
.

The history of the Marx – Darwin partnership might have ended there but for another letter, which was discovered seventy years ago and has misled countless Marxian scholars ever since. It is dated 13 October 1880:

Downe, Beckenham, Kent

Dear Sir:

I am much obliged for your kind letter & the Enclosure.—The publication in any form of your remarks on my writings really requires no consent on my part, & it would be ridiculous in me to give consent to what requires none. I shd prefer the Part or Volume not to be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.—Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my
family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.—I am sorry to refuse you any request, but I am old & have very little strength, & looking over proof-sheets (as I know by present experience) fatigues me much.—

I remain Dear Sir

Your faithfully,

Ch. Darwin

This was first published in 1931 by a Soviet newspaper,
Under the Banner of Marxism
, which hypothesised that the ‘Enclosure’ must have been two chapters from the English edition of
Capital
dealing with the theory of evolution. Palpable nonsense, of course, since the book was not translated into English until 1886, three years after Marx’s death.

Isaiah Berlin then added to the confusion. In his hugely influential study of Karl Marx, published in 1939, he claimed that it was the
original German edition
which Marx had wished to dedicate to Darwin, ‘for whom he had a greater intellectual admiration than for any other of his contemporaries’. According to Berlin, ‘
Darwin declined the honour in a polite, cautiously phrased letter
, saying that he was unhappily ignorant of economic science, but offered the author his good wishes in what he assumed to be their common end – the advancement of human knowledge.’ Berlin thus managed to fuse the two letters into one while entirely overlooking the fact that
Capital
– with its dedication to Wilhelm Wolff – appeared in 1867, a full thirteen years before Marx supposedly offered ‘the honour’ to Darwin.

Since the Second World War, all authors on Marx (and many on Darwin) have accepted the legend of the rebuffed dedication, differing only on the question of which particular version of the book it concerned. ‘Marx certainly wished to dedicate the second volume of
Capital
to Darwin,’ David McLellan wrote in his 1973 biography, an assertion that is still there in the most recent paperback (1995). This is no more plausible than Isaiah Berlin’s
theory: Volume Two was assembled by Engels from various notes and manuscripts only after Marx’s death. Darwin could not have been asked to ‘look over proof-sheets’ in 1880 since no such sheets existed. Besides, Engels’s introduction to the second volume confirmed that ‘the second and third books of
Capital
were to be dedicated,
as Marx had stated repeatedly
, to his wife’.

Everything about that second ‘letter to Marx’ rings false. Why should Darwin fret about ‘attacks on religion’ if he had been sent a work on political economy? Yet no quizzical eyebrow was raised until 1967, when Professor Shlomo Avineri argued in
Encounter
magazine that Marx’s misgivings about the political application of Darwinism made it ‘quite unthinkable’ for the great communist to have sought the great evolutionist’s imprimatur. How then to explain the 1880 letter? ‘
Marx’s dedication of
Capital
to Darwin,
’ he proposed, rather lamely, ‘was evidently made tongue in cheek.’

Avineri’s scepticism – if not his conclusion – struck a chord with Margaret Fay, a young graduate student at the University of California, when she came across the
Encounter
article seven years later. ‘My gut-feeling persisted in taking me on repeated and rather aimless trips to the Biology library,’ she wrote, ‘where I wandered around dipping into biographies of Darwin and Marxist interpretations of his theory of evolution to see if, after all, there was perhaps some political significance in Darwin’s work which had escaped me.’ Instead, and quite by chance, she found a slim volume called
The Students’ Darwin
. The contents were unremarkable enough, simply a rather schoolmasterish exposition of evolutionary theory. But what caught her eye was the publication date, 1881, and the name of the author – Edward B. Aveling, later to be the lover of Eleanor Marx. What if Darwin’s second letter had not been addressed to Marx at all, but rather to Aveling?

In this moment of inspiration Margaret Fay solved the mystery that had eluded Isaiah Berlin and innumerable other professors for half a century.
The Students’ Darwin
was the second volume in a series, ‘The International Library of Science and Freethought’,
edited by the crusading atheists Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. Hence Darwin’s reference to ‘the Part or Volume’ of a more general publication ‘about which I know nothing’, and his reluctance to be associated with ‘arguments against christianity and theism’. Fay’s hunch was confirmed by the discovery among Darwin’s papers at Cambridge University Library of a letter from Edward Aveling, dated 12 October 1880, attached to a few sample chapters from
The Students’ Darwin
. After requesting ‘the illustrious support of your consent’ Aveling added that ‘I purpose, again subject to your approval, to honour my work and myself by dedicating the former to you’.

The only remaining question – of how a letter to Aveling had ended up in the Marx archive – was easily answered. In 1895 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling began sorting through her father’s letters and manuscripts, which had come into their possession following the death of Engels. Two years later Aveling wrote an article comparing his two heroes, in which he quoted the 1873 letter and mentioned that he too had corresponded with Darwin. Having finished the piece he filed all his research materials in one folder, little guessing that he was thus laying a false scent which would be pursued over hill and dale for most of the next century. As recently as October 1998, the British historian Paul Johnson wrote that ‘
unlike Marx, Darwin was a genuine scientist
who, on a famous occasion, politely but firmly refused Marx’s invitation to strike a Faustian bargain’.

In fact, the only known contact between these two Victorian sages was the indisputably genuine letter of acknowledgement from 1873, which Marx showed proudly to his friends and family as proof that Darwin had saluted
Capital
as a ‘great work’. But the book in question, which still sits on a shelf at Downe House in Kent, tells a sadly different story. It has none of the pencilled notes with which Darwin habitually embellished anything that he read, and only the first 105 pages of the 822-page volume have been cut open. One is forced to conclude that he did no more than glance at the first chapter or two before sending his note of
thanks – and never looked at the unwanted gift again.

‘Typical Englishman,’ Marx would probably have muttered had he known the truth. On first reading
On the Origin of Species
he had warned Engels that ‘one does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument’, and the muted, incomprehending reaction to
Capital
convinced him that ‘the peculiar gift of stolid blockheadedness’ was every true Briton’s birthright. Thanks to yet another of fate’s practical jokes, the master of nimble dialectics had been exiled to the most philistine country on earth – a land governed by instinct and crude empiricism, where the word ‘intellectual’ was a mortal insult. ‘
Though Marx has lived much in England
,’ the barrister Sir John Macdonnell wrote in the March 1875
Fortnightly Review
, ‘he is here almost the shadow of a name. People may do him the honour of abusing him; read him they do not.’ The fact that no English edition was available in his lifetime seemed to Marx a symptom, not a cause, of the national myopia. (‘
We are much obliged by your letter
,’ Messrs Macmillan & Co. wrote to Engels’s friend Carl Schorlemmer, the professor of organic chemistry at Manchester University, ‘but we are not disposed to entertain the publication of a translation of
Das Kapital
.’) The language barrier was an insurmountable obstacle to those few Britons who actually wished to study the text. An old colleague from the International, Peter Fox, said after being presented with a copy that he felt like a man who had acquired an elephant and didn’t know what to do with it. Among Marx’s papers there are several desperate letters from a working-class Scotsman, Robert Banner, pleading for help:

Is there no hope of it being translated?
There is no work to be had in English advocating the cause of the toiling masses, every book we young Socialists put our hands on is work in the interest of Capital, hence the backwardness of our cause in this country. With a work dealing with economics from the standpoint of Socialism, you would soon see a movement in this country that would put the nightcap on this bastard thing.

Those most likely to appreciate the book were the least able to understand it, while the educated élite who could read it had no desire to do so. As the English socialist Henry Hyndman complained, ‘
Accustomed as we are nowadays, especially in England, to fence always with big soft buttons
on the point of our rapiers, Marx’s terrible onslaughts with naked steel upon his adversaries appeared so improper that it was impossible for our gentlemanly sham-fighters and mental gymnasium men to believe that this unsparing controversialist and furious assailant of capital and capitalists was really the deepest thinker of modern times.’