Many Socialists Imagined that Darwinism Was an Affirmation of Marxism

In some imprecise sense, Marx pretended to see symmetry between Darwin’s notions of the biological descent of man and his own theory of social evolution. Marx apparently imagined that he increased the credibility of his system by somehow associating it, however indirectly, with Darwin’s theory of the descent of man.

Whatever his ulterior purpose, it seems clear that Marx imagined that Darwinism somehow contributed to the credibility of his own conception of human social evolution. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, other than the fact that both systems trafficked on “struggle” and were developmental in character, the one really had very little to do with the other. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, given the fact that many socialists imagined that Darwinism was an affirmation of Marxism, the differences could only be apparent to those profoundly familiar with both.

--A. James Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 62-63.