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… there is no place in the work of Marx where he quotes Darwin as authority for any of his ideas. Marx and Darwin are two separate phenomena…. However, if you can show me where Marx relied on Darwin, I'll admit my error.

Hello Patrick! Thanks again for the link to Das Kapital (1867). I haven’t read through all 33 chapters yet; but I have found some interesting connections to Darwin’s theory of natural selection in my reading so far, in particular as it informs Marx’s own theory of division of labor. See “Part IV: Division of Labor in Manufacture, and Division of Labor in Society,” in Chapter 14. Also, in 1873 Marx appended an “Afterward to the Second German Edition” of Das Kapital which is basically a reply to his critics; it is revealing of some of the sources of his ideas.

Here’s a little sampler from Chapter 14:

“Castes and guilds arise from the action of the same natural law that regulates the differentiation of plants and animals into species and varieties, except that when a certain degree of development has been reached, the heredity of castes and the exclusiveness of guilds are ordained as laws of society.”
“If we keep labor alone in view, we may designate the separation of social production into its main divisions or genera — vz., agriculture, industries, &c., as division of labor in general, and the splitting up of these families into species and subspecies…., as division of labor in particular, and the division of labour within the workshop as division of labour in singular or in detail…. Different communities find different means of production, and different means of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence their modes of production, and of living, and their products are different. It is this spontaneously developed difference which, when different communities come in contact, calls forth the mutual exchange of products, and the consequent gradual conversion of those products into commodities.”
“The division of labor within the society brings into contact independent commodity-producers, who acknowledge no other authority but that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests; just as in the animal kingdom, the bellum omnium contra omnes more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species.”

That bellum omnium contra omnes remark is a direct quote from Darwin. Darwin first made his theory public a year before On the Origins of Species was published, in 1858, in a paper delivered to the Linnean Society. [see Charles Darwin, “The Linnean Society Papers,” in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 83.]

The paper begins with the words, “All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature” — the “war of all against all.” Darwin elucidates the character of this war in The Origin of Species:

“There must be in every case a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.” [Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Mentor, 1958), p. 75.]

It is clear to me beyond a reasonable doubt that this motif of the bellum omnium contra omnes is common to both Darwinian and Marxian analysis.

Marx, in Section 2 of Das Kapital Chapter 14, “The Detail Laborer and His Instruments,” cites the authority of Charles Darwin in relation to his analysis of how the manufacturing process “simplifies, improves, and multiplies the implements of labor, by adapting them to the exclusively special functions of each detail laborer.” As footnote 6 explains,

“Darwin in his epoch-making work on the origin of species, remarks, with reference to the natural organs of plants and animals: ‘So long as one and the same organ has different kinds of work to perform, a ground for its changeability may possibly be found in this, that natural selection preserves or suppresses each small variation of form less carefully than if that organ were destined for one special purpose alone. Thus, knives that are adapted to cut all sorts of things, may, on the whole, be of one shape; but an implement destined to be used exclusively in one way must have a different shape for every different use.’”

Marxian labor theory envisions a situation in which each laborer is reduced to a specialized function, organ — or worse, a machine part — dedicated to “one special purpose alone” within the capitalist productive enterprise. Marx sees this process as an adaptation directly analogous to the working of natural selection in Darwin’s scheme. He doesn’t approve of it; but he understands how the situation could come about — because essentially, Darwin has explained it to him.

Turning now to the 1873 “Afterward to the Second German Edition,” we find Marx replying to his critics — some approvingly, others not so. He is very pleased with a review of Das Kapital carried in The European Messenger of St. Petersburg (author not identified):

“The one thing that is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned; and not only is the law of moment to him, which governs these phenomena, in so far as they have a definite form and mutual connexion within a given historical period. Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development, i.e., of their transition from one form into another, from one series of connexions into a different one. This law once discovered, he investigates in detail the effects in which it manifests itself in social life. Consequently, Marx only troubles himself about one thing: to show, by rigid scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social conditions…. For this it is quite enough if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this is all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it. Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence…. That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as [the inquiry’s] starting point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact. For this inquiry, the one thing of moment is that both facts be investigated as accurately as possible, and that they actually form, each with respect to the other, different momenta of an evolution; but most important of all is the rigid analysis of the series of successions, of the sequences and concatenations in which the different stages of such an evolution present themselves.” [italics added]

It is evident from its context in the “Afterward” that Marx was enormously well pleased to have had his work understood in this fashion by an anonymous Russian writer.

Marx then goes on to protest that his “dialectical materialism” was not at all of the “idealist” sort of dialectics as propounded by the great German transcendental idealist philosopher, Hegel. Still, dialectics is dialectics — indubitably, inherently evoking an evolutionary process, whether it be of the Marxian or the Hegelian type.

Now it’s true that Darwin could have had no way to anticipate that Marx would later appropriate his theory in support of his own economic/social theory in the manner he did. But to me, that’s entirely beside the point: It is clear that Marx did make this appropriation.

And it seems quite “natural” that he did so. For the two men share common presuppositions about the fundamental structure of reality: that it is essentially materialist, determinist, mechanistic — both men are firmly planted in the Newtonian universe — and wholly subject to the workings of natural law, which essentially denies any role to consciousness, or intelligence, in the workings of evolutionary development. The natural world determines consciousness and intelligence; it is not the other way around.

Well, that would be my “preliminary report” on the issue at hand, dear PH. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter.