Insight Spring 2021

Utopia is Dystopian: Social Darwinism Defeats Communism Anthony Gadzi ’22 Karl Marx is widely considered the “Father of Communism”. As renowned historian Robert C. Tucker argues, “[n]o other intellectual influence has so powerfully shaped the mind of modern left-wing radicalism,” and as Marx put it himself, the duty of philosophers was not only to “interpret the world,” but to “change it” (Tucker ix; Marx and Engels 145).

Born in Prussia on May 5, 1818, Karl Marx became a pioneering scholar and philosopher, and he published many critiques of modern capitalism and its effects on society, including his famous Capital. In these critiques, Marx exposed how capitalism, a system that exploits the productive forces of labourers, is inherently unfair to the majority. In 1842, he met fellow philosopher and future collaborator Frederick Engels, who would prove to be a key contributor to the majority of Marx’s best works, including his solution to capitalism in The Communist Manifesto and the second and third volumes of his Capital (Tucker xv-xviii).

Though Herbert Spencer, self-educated English philosopher and biologist, agreed with Marx in that “the great aim of education is not knowledge but action”, he was the embodied opposition to the ideologies of Marx and Engels (“Herbert Spencer Quotes”). Spencer’s theories instead centred around his transfusion of Darwinian principles of Evolution into social theories, aptly named Social Darwinism, that he applied to humankind.

Contrary to Marx’s criticisms of capitalism, Spencer viewed the exploitation of members of society as a necessary and beneficial expression of human nature that would lead to our evolution as a species and society, and would propagate the “survival of the fittest” as he coined it.

Marxist and Spencerian logic thus represent the peaks of two contending and towering ideologies, and naturally neither is a perfect model for society to follow. Ultimately, although Marx and Spencer similarly recognized the inequalities within modern society, Spencerian logic better explains the necessity of inequity and exploitation than Marxist logic can refute them, lending Social Darwinism superior utility in shaping our future when compared to Marxist Communism.

While their ideologies contradict each other, the Marxist and Spencerian views of modern society are mostly analogous. It is well understood that 49