Marx and Darwin neck and neck?

Darwin showed how live on earth evolved of itself and not by virtue of some other god. Marx had already come to that conclusion, but also that man, as a species among others, was not only a product and part of other life on earth but its effective author. Two minds, one truth in the making.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (also referred to as The Paris Manuscripts) are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx.Not published during his lifetime, they were prepared for publication in original German by researchers in the Soviet Union, in Moscow's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute and first released in Berlin in 1932.

'Plants, animals, minerals, air, light etc constitute....part of human consciousness as objects of natural science and art.... To say that man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must be in continuous interchange not to die. The statement that the physical and metnal life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.'

'.. The (non-human) animal is one with its life and activity. It does not distinguish the activity fron itself....Conscious life activity distinguishes distinguishes man from the life activity of other animals...man, because he is a self-conscious being...The practical construction of an objective world, the manipulation of inorganic nature...Animals produce only themselves while man reproduces the whole of nature.... Animals construct only in accordance with the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man knows how to produce in accordance with the standards of of every species and knows how to apply the appropriate standard to the object. Thus man constructs also in accordance with the laws of beauty.'

Meanwhile 'We shall begin with the contemporary economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces...The devalutation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things...the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates, the poorer he becomes in his inner life and the less he belongs to himself. It is just the same as in religion. The more of himself man attrributes to God, the less he has left in himself....just as the gods are fundamentallly not the cause but the produce of confusions of human reason...

'Private property is likewise) the product... of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself....

'From the relation of alienated labour to private property it also follows that the emancipation of private property from servitude takes the political form of the emancipation of workers, not in the sense that only their emancipation is involved but because this emancipation includes the emancipation of humanity as a whole.'

And now, more than 150 years later, we can realise how completely human activity has transformed – or deformed – the nature of not just human life but a lot of the rest as well. Unless and until we can wise up, 'emancipate' or heal ourselves, life as we know it is also lost. We're all in that global boat. No good just blaming one race or master class, we'd have all done much the same in their position. To get us out of this fix and find a safer shore is all our job. No god, superwoman or higher law to put things right.

Marx wrote his economical and philsophical notes around 1844, about fifteen years before Darwin pubblished his 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life'on 24 November 1859. 

Darwin is now considered the founder evolutionary biology. Perhaps Charles Darwin might have got in first with his more scientific vision if he had not been so distressed at the prospect of dethroning God, shocking the world and upsetting his wife in his revelation of a self-generating natural world, with us part of it. What Marx did, though that was also kept under wraps for years, was reveal the role of man, not God, in the making – or breaking? - of the natural world and begin to outline not just what was going wrong but what we could do about it. The founder of revolutionary recovery?