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Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
The period from 1848-1871 saw the rise of transformative new ideas, particularly the ideas of Darwinian Evolution and Marxism. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. His argument was simple: life originated and perpetuated itself through a push-and-pull struggle in which successful species adapted themselves to changing conditions and survived, while those that did not adapt became extinct. Though he never used the word “evolution,” his work forms the basis for evolutionary theory. Years later, the notion of “social Darwinism”—the application of “survival of the fittest” to political and economic arenas—offered a distinctly conservative approach that advocated unregulated capitalism as the natural form of progress. Darwin, however, never intended such an interpretation of his original biological theory.
Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital
In 1848, Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. He followed this with his seminal work in 1867, Das Kapital, introducing “scientific socialism,” a materialist interpretation of history and society. Labor, as Marx defined it, was the essential effort to transform nature into things useful for survival. Building on this, Marx, joined by his colleague Friedrich Engels, saw society as divided into two groups: those who owned property and those who did not. In the 19th century, the middle-class bourgeoisie owned property and thus, the means of production, while the workers, or the proletariat, owned nothing.
In history, Marx argued, any society based on class division was doomed from the start by its own very divided nature because, inevitably, the proletariat would rise up and overthrow the capitalist system that kept them down. Marx predicted that, as the bourgeois society expanded and grew its capitalist base, it would employ more workers in ever larger factories and industries. Bringing the working class together in this way would thus create the atmosphere for workers to organize and overthrow the capitalist system in favor of socialism.
