London, 12th Nov., 1875. Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise. The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished (as indicated under (1) I dispute its unqualified justification, especially where the Malthusian theory is concerned) the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved. The childishness of this procedure is obvious, it is not worth wasting words over. But if I wanted to go into it further I should do it in such a way that I exposed them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad natural scientists and philosophers. Incidentally it is to be noted that the mere consideration of past history as a series of class struggles is enough to reveal all the superficiality of the conception of that same history as a slightly varied version of the struggle for existence. I should therefore never make that concession to these spurious natural scientists. With cordial greetings, F. ENGELS.
Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1875