Marx, Darwin & Russell Wallace

 

Jeffrey St. Clair

 Marx famously sent Darwin a copy of the English translation of Capital, inscribed “To Charles Darwin from a true admirer, from Karl Marx.” He should have sent it Alfred Russel Wallace. Although they arrived independently at the theory of evolution by natural selection, Wallace and Darwin were very different people. The intrepid Wallace was one of the greatest field naturalists ever. Darwin barely left his estate in Down after the voyage of the Beagle. A lifelong socialist, Wallace had to work his entire life. Darwin, a starchy Whig, was a trust-funder who never held a job. Imagine the strength of character it took for Wallace to recover after watching 4 years of his grueling work in the Amazon go up in smoke during a ship fire on the voyage home–not only all of his meticulously documented specimens but hundreds of pages of his field journals–then several years later while deep in the Malay Archipelago have Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell connive to delay publication of his theory of natural selection so as not to pre-empt Darwin. I don’t know who was greater. Darwin had the advantages in class, wealth, education and connections, of which Wallace had none. But Wallace was more fun, more engaged in the political struggles around him and much more at home in the natural world. So why did Marx send Darwin that copy of Capital and not Wallace? It may have been the influence of Engels, who had taken a profound dislike to the upstart Welshman on account of his interest in spiritualism. One might also infer that Engels’ own class affinity aligned with Darwin and not a working-class, autodidact with dirt under his fingernails like Wallace. I find the notion of Wallace bringing a “mesmerist” into the snobbish confines of the Royal Society amusing. Guy Debord would have smiled.