This essay may be read in conjunction with an earlier piece on our website by Professor Anthony Edwards concerning the ‘de-fenestration’ of R. A. Fisher, described as the greatest biologist since Darwin, and a eugenicist, whose college, Caius in Cambridge, saw fit to remove his memorial window from their hall in 2020. See https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/r-a-fishers-comment-on-otmar-von-verschuer-in-1948-an-explanation/ )
R. A . Fisher’s comment on Otmar von Verschuer in 1948: An Explanation.
As Professor Robert Tombs pointed out in his article “Must Marx and Engels be cancelled?” (History Reclaimed 16/11/2021 https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/must-marx-and-engels-be-cancelled/ ), there are several examples of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels expressing racist and chauvinistic prejudices regarding the superiority and inferiority of entire peoples and cultures. Both also made strongly derogatory and stereotypical assessments of Jews and their role in society. Their political ideology was not based on antisemitism or racism, as later National Socialism was. But both antisemitism and racism found a place within the ideological framework that Marx and Engels established. Antisemitic prejudices and racist ideas – as well as notions of the West’s civilizational supremacy – could be, and were, incorporated into their theory of historical materialism and their critique of capitalism.[1]
It is unsurprising, therefore, that the same tendency can be found among their ideological heirs. Several socialist politicians, writers, and social scientists in Germany and France embraced strongly racist and chauvinistic ideas and theories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was also true of prominent British socialists.
Let us begin with a few examples illustrating the influence of the racial thinking of the time on British socialist politicians. At the 1900 party congress of the Social Democratic Federation, the first Marxist party in the Britain, founded in 1881, one of its leading member, John Spargo, took the floor and according to the party newspaper Justice, declared that “blacks” were far better suited for life in Africa than whites.
Spargo said Africa was the black man’s country. The blacks were adapted to the peculiar conditions of the country, and they multiplied far more rapidly than the whites.
The party’s founder and chairman, H. M. Hyndman, agreed with this, Justice reported.
Hyndman endorsed Spargo’s words – Africa was black man’s country. […] In regard to treatment of blacks, there were some root difficulties. The negro’s brain was not constructed like that of the white man. Its convolutions were different. […] We had to accept the general racial physiological facts as we found them.[2]
Henry Mayers Hyndman, 1842-1921
In the following year, the leading Scottish socialist James Leatham asserted in Justice that:
It seems that the inferior races cannot skip any of the rungs in the ladder of evolution; that they cannot accept a ready-made civilization imported by the white man. The negro is somewhat of an exception to this rule; but even the negro would appear to turn out an ill-conditioned brute in a large number of cases, or why the intense aversion with which he is regarded in the United States?[3]
One of the most eager proponents of Marxist socialism in this era was Edward Aveling, for fourteen years the partner of Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor. Aveling had a university education in zoology and anatomy and was a great admirer of both Marx and Darwin. In lectures, articles, and books, he eagerly sought to combine, disseminate and popularise their ideas. In an article titled “The Ape-Men,” he celebrated the scientific advances made in the exploration of human origins. According to Aveling, it could be established that certain intermediate forms existed between modern humans and their animal origins. One of these intermediate forms could be found in “certain ape-men.” By this he meant deformed children born with extremely small head size and brain volume, a condition known as microcephaly.[4] To elaborate on this, Aveling further pointed out “that the length of the skull in the anthropoid ape is intermediate between its length in the negro, and in the microcephali.” In a series of tables comparing skull sizes and brain volumes, categories such as “Australians,” “Negro” / “Negroes,” “White,” “Ancient Egyptians,” “Parisians, 12th century,” and “Parisians, 19th century” were included as examples of various stages in the progressive development from ape to modern human. In this hierarchy, “Australians” (indigenous aborigines) and “Negroes” ranked lowest in terms of cranial size and brain volume, while contemporary Parisians ranked highest.[5]
Edward Aveling (1849-1898)
In his pamphlet The People’s Darwin, or, Darwin Made Easy, Aveling explained that when investigating the validity of the theory of evolution’s claims about the origin of species, one should not make comparisons between the highest race – “the civilised and cultivated European” – and apes, but instead
between the lowest types of men and the man-like apes. If this comparison is made, if we study the various races of men from the highest to the lowest, and at the same time study the nearest allies of man, we find that there are greater differences in every point of anatomy and physiology between man and man than between man and ape.[6]
Other leading British socialists were also capable of theoretically incorporating the racial prejudices of their time and giving them a scientific veneer. This was the case, for example, with the mathematician and statistician Karl Pearson, who, from the late nineteenth century, was a leading influence in the intellectual circles of the socialist movement. Pearson, who was closely associated with Francis Galton, the founder of ‘eugenics’, was also inspired by both Marxism and Darwinism, and in his book The Grammar of Science (1892) he claimed that the prerequisites for civilisational and scientific progress consisted both of well-organised (socialist) societies and of citizens with the right mindset and the appropriate physical and mental abilities. In this context, he believed that humanity must rely on “civilized men of the European race.”[7]
Karl Pearson, 1857-1936
In National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1901), Pearson addressed similar themes, explicitly discussing the issue of race. “What I have said about bad stock seems to me to hold for the lower races of man,” he explained.
How many centuries, how many thousands of years, have the Kaffir and the Negro held large districts in Africa undisturbed by the white man? Yet their inter-tribal struggles have not yet produced a civilization in the least comparable with the Aryan. Educate and nurture them as you will, I do not believe that you will succeed in modifying the stock.
Pearson added that, in his view, it would be harmful if the races attempted to coexist and intermix in the regions of the world where Europeans had gained dominance. This would only lead to the degradation of the superior race (in the form of “the white man”) and to conflict. “The only healthy alternative is that he should go, and completely drive out the inferior race.”[8]
In 1911, Pearson was appointed Professor of Eugenics in the University of London. The following year, he published Social Problems: Their Treatment, Past, Present, and Future, in which he outlined his hopes for the future of socialism. According to Pearson, addressing the societal challenges of the future required an inquiry into the significance of race. “What are the racial forces at work? – how can we modify or direct them towards furthering human evolution? – these are, I believe, the problems of true socialism – the socialism of the future.”[9]
Pearson contended that human development, as it had taken place over hundreds of thousands of years, had not, in all places, produced physically and mentally advanced races. This was evidenced, he claimed, by “the primitive races of today.” By this, he meant, for example, “the Red Indian”, who, he opined, exhibited a “marked inferiority to the white man.” The same, he claimed, applied to the Ainu, indigenous Australians, and Africans. Regarding Africa, he wrote:
We know now that there have been teeming black populations for endless ages, tribe fighting tribe as Greek fought Greek, kingdom supplanting kingdom as rapidly as in our own European history. And what result is there to show? Nothing, absolutely nothing comparable with the products of the European and Asiatic struggles.”
According to Pearson, the cause of this backwardness was race. He therefore concluded: “There is no natural equality of human races.”[10]
In 1925, Pearson participated in a study of the intelligence of Jewish immigrant children in an attempt to assess whether immigration by East European Jews was beneficial to Britain. According to its conclusion “the mind of man is for the most part a congenital product, and the factors which determine it are racial and familial.” Human intelligence was the result of “racial development and the action which environment has exerted in selecting for survival or destroying during long years of history the more or the less intelligent.” Consequently, argued Pearson, Britain would be better off rejecting these Jews, who, according to the study, showed no superior abilities when compared with the native population. Every country, especially those that were overcrowded, should only admit “the superior stocks.”[11]
In 1901, H. G. Wells had described how he envisaged the development of the future socialist world society – “the New Republic” or “the world state” as he called it. According to Wells, this society would improve its population through planned eugenic programmes. And when it came to “the inferior races,” these, including “the black” and “the yellow man”, would partly disappear with the establishment of the world state. The Jews, he claimed, would vanish once capitalism and the possibilities for “social parasitism” were eliminated.
And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.”[12]
Herbert George Wells, 1866-1946
Another of the era’s most prominent British socialists, and a leading member of the Fabian Society, who held similar views to Wells, was George Bernard Shaw. In 1911, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s race-theoretical work Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899) was published in English. Chamberlain, born in Hampshire and married to Wagner’s biological daughter Eva von Bülow, highlighted the alleged virtues of the Aryan race and the culturally-destructive influence of Jews. In his review in Fabian News, Shaw wrote: “This very notable book should be read by all good Fabians.” In its treatment of a wide range of topics, the book was “a magnificent manifesto” that illuminated “man’s unbounded inner freedom and infinity” and his struggle against “all the powers of darkness.”
George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950
Yet Chamberlain’s book, according to Shaw, also had its shortcomings. Chamberlain was right in stating that a “chaos of mongrels” had arisen. But one had also to acknowledge that the
the great Germanic stock […] no longer exists in a form which admits of the one element ostracizing or offering pitched battle to the other. Mr. Houston Chamberlain is right in protesting against the lumping together under the general name of “Humanity” of people who have different souls; and our hearts go out to his contention that the Renaissance was no rebirth at all, but the entry of a new race on the stage of history. All the same, no political segregation of that race seems now practical.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, 1855-1927
What Chamberlain called ‘chaos’ (i.e. the population of mixed peoples) was “an accomplished fact” that could not be altered. The enemy now faced, according to Shaw, was “not a mongrel, a Basque, or a Jew, but a British greengrocer” and all sorts of petty-bourgeois superstitions and fanaticisms that had taken up residence in his “short round skull”. Shaw felt that to the question of how to combat this concretely and practically, Chamberlain offered no answer. Perhaps he would provide one in a further book. “Meanwhile, as this book has produced a great effect in Germany, where 60,000 copies are in circulation, and is certain to stir up thought here, whoever has not read it will be rather out of it in political and sociological discussions for some time to come.”[13]
As we know today, Chamberlain’s book was highly prized among German National Socialists. They most certainly didn’t read Fabian News, but they most certainly did follow Shaw’s recommendation and made the themes of this “magnificent manifesto” subjects for “political and sociological discussions’ – and for something more than simply discussions, as well.
[1] Cf. Jesper Rosenløv: Other Sides of Marx and Engels. Antisemitism, Racism and Violence (forthcoming)
2 Justice, September 29, 1900
3 What is the Good of Empire?, London (1901) p.11, cf. Justice, January 19, 1901
4 “The Ape-Men”, Progress: A Monthly Magazine of Advanced Thought (1883) 2, pp. 209-213
5 Ibid. pp. 213-218
6 Darwin Made Easy, London [1885] (1887) pp. 20-22
7 The Grammar of Science, London (1892) pp. 437ff.
8 National Life from the Standpoint of Science, London (1901) pp. 19-21
9 Social Problems: Their Treatment, Past, Present, and Future, London (1912) s. 3-5
10 Ibid. pp. 6-8
[1]1 K. Pearson & M. Moul: “The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Children”, Annals of Eugenics 1:2 (1925) p. 124
[1]2 Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, New York / London [1901] (1902), pp. 340-342
[1]3 Fabian News, 22:7 (June 1911) pp. 52f.
Jesper M. Rosenløv holds a doctorate from the University of Copenhagen and worked originally on Greco-Roman culture and the history of religion. In recent years he has focused on intellectual and political history, including the expansion of Islam as the background for the crusading ideology. His forthcoming book examines Marx and Engels’s antisemitism, racism, and glorification of violence – and the continuation of these darker aspects of Marxist doctrine by their ideological heirs.
