Page:Anton Pannekoek - Marxism and Darwinism - tr. Nathan Weiser (1912).pdf/36

Rh in the other domain? In practice it is very convenient to have one principle for the human world and another one for the animal world. In having this, however, we forget that man is also an animal. Man has developed from an animal, and the laws that apply to the animal world cannot suddenly lose their applicability to man. It is true that man is a very peculiar animal, but if that is the case it is necessary to find from these very peculiarities why those principles applicable to all animals do not apply to men, and why they assume a different form.

Here we come to another grave problem. The bourgeois Darwinists do not encounter such a problem; they simply declare that man is an animal, and without further ado they set about to apply the Darwinian principles to men. We have seen to what erroneous conclusions they come. To us this question is not so simple; we must first be clear about the differences between men and animals, and then we can see why, in the human world, the Darwinian principles change into different ones, namely, into Marxism.

The first peculiarity that we observe in man is that he is a social being. In this he does not differ from all animals, for even among the latter there are many species that live socially among themselves. But man differs from all those that we have observed until now in dealing with the Darwinian theory; he differs from those animals that do not live socially, but that struggle with each other for subsistence. It is not with the rapacious animals which live separately that