FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820–1895) and KARL MARX (1818–1883)

Summary

In 1883, delivering the funeral oration upon his friend and collaborator of almost forty years standing, Engels claimed that ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human society’. Such an appeal to scientific analogies as the foundation for a critique of capitalism was not novel. But insofar as the Political Economists had identified their discipline with the Newtonian model of a materialist science, most of our Victorian critics challenged it from an alternative standpoint – history, religion, morality, or art and culture. Engels's proposition was an attempt to relate the challenge posed to Christian views of man's origins by the biological science of evolution, and that posed by an historical science of socio-economic development to the ‘ideological’ character, as he saw it, of Political Economy.

A more apposite comparison than the scientific one, however, might have been that Darwin and Marx replaced the old sacred drama of struggle, death and redemption with a new secular drama. Darwin's story was the creation of man through the accidental biological mutation of animal species and their competitive battle to survive and adapt in a hostile environment. Marx's was the drama of homo faber (man the creator) deploying ingenuity, technology and organised social power in the struggle to dominate Nature, yet in the process forging the means of his own enslavement.