It probably never occurred to Haeckel that the argument which he here uses to meet Virchow’s opposition to evolution, would serve quite as effectively as a reply to his own opposition to Socialism.
As regards Haeckel’s “often quoted declarations against” Socialism, “they have obtained great favor in wide circles, only because of the high authority which this famous naturalist enjoys in an entirely different domain of science. His biogenetic principle, discovered in embryology, “introduced a grand advance in that science thirty years ago. This great and lasting service rendered by him has, however no connection whatever with the unyielding and negative position which, unfortunately,” Haeckel “persists in assuming towards the doctrine of” Socialism.
Haeckel’s complaint that Virchow could not judge the merits of evolution because he was not a zoologist, is well taken. But the Socialist has as good or better right to assert that Haeckel was incapable of estimating the relationship of Socialism to Darwinism, for he certainly knew a good deal less about Socialism than Virchow knew of zoology.
This is precisely the trouble with Haeckel’s criticism of what he calls Socialism. Of the theories of Karl Marx and the modern scientific Socialists, he knew absolutely nothing. The Socialism he condemned had been abandoned by the Socialists themselves, nearly thirty years before his criticism was made.
“Absurd equalitarian notions,” granted; but they were not even the sole property of the utopian Socialists. They borrowed them from the bourgeois revolutionists of 1789. It was they who boasted of the equality they would set up. That equality, which, as Engels says, only “materialized in bourgeois equality before the law.”--“The equality before the law of all commodity-owners.” It was this struggling bourgeoisie that adopted as its catch-words, “liberty, fraternity, equality,” and applied them to a typical bourgeois use when they inscribed them above the entrances to French prisons.
A significant clause in the second sentence of Haeckel’s criticism is, “in human societies as in animal societies,” the duties, etc., of the members cannot be “equal.” The only possible point this could have as a criticism of Socialism, would be its use to deny the possibility of abolishing social class divisions. There is nothing to show whether Haeckel intended it to have such a specific application, but as any other application it might have could be in no way opposed to the Socialist position, I need only show its failure in that regard.