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To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx (5 May 1818) and 150 years since Das Kapital was published in 1867, the lecture will explore the possible affinity between Marx’s work in human history and Darwin’s in natural history. Enthusiasm for Darwin was shared by successive generations of Communists but Marx’s conception of a ‘natural human being’ was different.
In the new political and intellectual climate, Marx viewed competition as a product, not of ‘the struggle for existence’, but of private property and commercial society.
Professor Stedman Jones is Director of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, and Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion' (Penguin, 2016).
