Marx, Darwin, Heraclitus, and Parmenides

Marx, Darwin, Heraclitus, And Parmenides

Charles Darwin and Karl Marx were separated geographically and sociologically. These two individuals had much in common in their youth. They were both born to wealthy European families and were thus privileged with the chance to receive a good education without having to worry about supporting their family or the fear of survival. Despite the comfort into which they were born, both men sought out ways to increase their own understanding of the world and to share that understanding with the rest of humanity. In so doing, both men changed the world by exposing unknown facts and exploring unrealized realities. One man was primarily a scientist who became embroiled in controversial philosophy because of his scientific observations. The other man held equally controversial views, but based on a study of humanity and human interaction rather than scientific inquiry. Both men hypothesized about the world in terms of struggle, but differed in the way that they envisioned this struggle, as well as the reasons behind the need for struggle.

Darwin devised his concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest after witnessing finches and tortoises amongst other things during his voyage on the HMS Beagle. He famously wrote in his book The Origin of the Species that all animals have to struggle in order to survive. There is a constant battle that is going on between the creatures who need to eat and the creatures on which they wish to feed. Animals are always fighting to gain life and then to stay alive. Even before birth, organisms fight one another in order to be born and then they have to continue to fight until the time they finally succumb to death. Darwin writes of struggles between siblings, between genders, between beings of different ages, and between beings within the same geographic area. He writes:

[It] is likewise sometimes the case with those which may be strictly said to struggle with each other for existence, as in the case of locusts and grass-feeding quadrupeds. But the struggle will almost invariably be most severe between the individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers (Darwin 89).

Creatures have to fight against members of their own species in order to gain food, shelter, and to find their mates. They have to fight against any dangerous predators and they have to fight against their prey. The reward for these struggles is to live a little longer than another, but none can survive forever. It is the struggle to survive which leads to evolution via adaptation. Survival of the fittest refers to the fact that creatures who have favorable traits will be more likely to mate successfully and more prolifically, thus ensuring that their offspring will also possess these favorable traits.

Unlike Darwin, Marx did not look at survival and conflict in nature. Rather, he concentrated his efforts on the interactions between human beings and how humans struggle against one another in order to survive and thrive in the world. Marx wrote that there were essentially two classes of people in the world, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is the working class laborers who have to perform jobs in order to pay for the things necessary to sustain life. The bourgeoisie are the wealthy, upper class people who make money without physical labor. They can afford to pay others to do the menial tasks because the products that are made or the services performed can be sold for even more money than the bourgeoisie has to pay. They are able to buy large houses and afford luxuries which the lower classes could never hope to acquire. Survival is not a concern for the bourgeoisie because they have more than enough to sustain them. In order to keep the proletariat dependent on the upper class, the wealthy factory owners pay the lower class as little as possible and provide as few other resources as possible. The intention is to keep the two spheres as separate as possible and defer any aspirations the lower class might have for social mobility. Due to the disparities between the classes, there is necessarily a constant struggle between them. As Marx writes in The Communist Manifesto, "With its birth begins [the proletariat's] struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual laborers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them" (7). The proletariat struggle to survive and to keep their families alive, to better their chances of survival, and to obtain simple creature comforts which will make their existence more bearable. The bourgeoisie struggle to keep down the proletariat and prevent them from becoming self-sufficient. As time has gone one, some members of the proletariat have been able to transcend the class structure and in fact, there have been other classes created, first the middle class and now those have been broken into the upper and lower middle classes. Still there is a decided gap between the people who are truly wealthy and those who have to work and struggle continuously for a living.

Both men viewed the world as one of struggle and violence. This is similar to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who hypothesized that war is the father of all things. He believed that change was an ever-present part of existence, that everything was subject to change and nothing could remain as it was when it began existing. Heraclitus said, "War is both father and king of all, some he has shown forth as gods and others as men, some he has made slaves and others free" (Harris 13). In Heraclitus' time, the men who lost in a war would have the course of their life determined by whether or not their side won. They would either become the kings of a land, or the slaves of a new master. Darwin's and Marx's theories speak to a similar truth. Darwin believed that creatures compete with one another in order to survive. Animals fight each other in a form of combat. Sometimes this combat is physical, as with predator and prey or between two males fighting over a single female. In the animal kingdom, male lions fight potential challengers to lead their prides. If the male wins, then he becomes the leader of the pride, but if he loses then he is forced to flee and most likely die without the foods provided by the female lions. Defeating the challenger defines the lion's role. In Marx's view of the world the role of slave and god is clearly defined in terms of finances and class. The person with money rules over those without. To secure his position he engages in a kind of war. Sometimes there is physical conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but most often this is crushed by the upper class that can employ others to quell the masses.