Hitler, Evolution, and Survival of the Fittest
"Darwin, Marx, and Freud helped shape the modern mind into conformity with the world view of Mechanistic Materialism."—*E.A. Opitz, "The Use of Reason in Religion," in Imprimis 7(2):4 (1978).
"The idea that evolution is a history of competitive strife fits well with his [Marx’s] ideology of ‘class struggle.’ "—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 412."
‘This is the book,’ he [Marx] wrote to his disciple Engles in 1866, ‘which contains the basis in natural history for our view,’ and he would gladly have dedicated his own major work, Das Kapital, to the author of The Origin of Species if Darwin had let him.
"At Marx’s funeral Engels declaimed that, as Darwin had discovered the law of organic evolution in natural history, so Marx had discovered the law of evolution in human history. With its denigration of non-material aspects of human life, and its mission to uproot tradition and destroy creationist concepts in men’s minds, communism remains one of Darwin’s strongest adherents . . After 1949 when the communists took control of China, the first new text introduced to all schools was neither Marxist nor Leninist, but Darwinian."—*Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984), p. 24.
"Like Darwin, Marx thought he had discovered the law of development. He saw history in stages, as the Darwinists saw geological strata and successive forms of life . . But there are even finer points of comparison. In keeping with the feelings of the age, both Marx and Darwin made struggle the means of development. Again, the measure of value in Darwin is survival with reproduction—an absolute fact occurring in time and which wholly disregards the moral or ethical quality of the product. In Marx the measure of value is expended labor—an absolute fact occurring in time, which also disregards the utility of the product [and also the workman]."—*J. Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1958), p. 8.
"Again, Marx wrote to Engels, January 16, 1861, ‘Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural selection for the class struggle in history . . not only is a death blow dealt here for the first time to ‘teleology’ in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is emphatically explained.’ "—*C. Zirkle, Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene (1959), p. 88.
"Defending Darwin is nothing new for socialists. The socialist movement recognized Darwinism as an important element in its general world outlook right from the start. When Darwin published his Origin of the Species in 1859, Karl Marx wrote a letter to Fredrick Engels in which he said: ‘. . this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view . .’ By defending Darwinism, working people strengthen their defenses against the attacks of these reactionary outfits, and prepare the way for the transformation of the social order."—*Cliff Conner, "Evolution vs. Creationism: In Defense of Scientific Thinking," International Socialist Review, November 1980.
"Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was an avid, self-appointed spokesman for Darwinism in Germany . . Haeckel professed a mystical belief in the forces of nature and a literal transfer of the laws of biology to the social realm. The movement he founded in Germany was proto-Nazi in character; romantic Volkism and the Monist League (established 1906), along with evolution and science, laid the ideological foundations of [German] National Socialism. " . . English Darwinism interlinked two main themes, natural selection and the struggle for existence. Social Darwinism is an attempt to explain human society in terms of evolution, but Haeckel’s [proto-Nazi] interpretation was quite different from that of capitalist Herbert Spencer or of communist Marx. For him a major component was the ethic of inherent struggle between higher and lower cultures,—between races of men."—*Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984), p. 48."Along with his social Darwinist followers, [Haeckel] set about to demonstrate the ‘aristocratic’ and nondemocratic aspect of the laws of nature . . Up to his 