COMMUNISTS ANNEX DARWIN

Evening Star, Issue 21147, 6 July 1932, Page 1

COMMUNISTS ANNEX DARWIN

“ HE IS aues" After having previously taken advantage of the Hegel and Goethe centenaries to claim for the proletariat a monopolistic possession of the creative inheritance of these thinkers, Soviet public opinion has carried out a similar annexationist policy in regard to Darwin. The fiftieth anniversary of Darwin’s death was widely commemorated in Russia with meetings, speeches, brochures, and exhibitions (says the Moscow correspondent of * The Times’). As usual in such cases, attention was concentrated not so much on the objective substance of Darwin’s scientific teachings as on their supposed significance in relation to the Communist doctrine of class war. For instance, the leading Soviet newspaper, * Izvestia,* devoting two of its four large pages to articles about Darwin, published them with these militant phrases: “ We mobilise millions for struggle against superstitious ‘scientists’ who exploit Darwin’s .teaching to justify the rule of the bourgeoisie, colonial oppression and imperialistic wars! Wc utilise all the achievements of bourgeois science and technique, critically working them over on the basis of Marxist-Lcninist theory! Armed with the method of dialectic materialism wc place evolutionary science at the‘service of socialist livestock breeding and plant culture, for the fulfilment of the historic decisions of the seventeenth party conference. A certain Soviet biologist, S. 0. Lcyit, ends a long article on ‘ Darwin’s Teaching of Race Chauvinism, Social-Fascism ’ (an absnive Communist characterisation ot Social Democracy) with the following somewhat grandiloquent outburst: “ The proletariat of the Soviet Union, creator of the cultural revolution, will not give up Darwin to be devoured by the hueof the international bourgeoisie. On this anniversary it says: Notwithstanding some occasionally very gross mistakes Darwin is basically ours, the fundamental substance of his teaching is ours. And, mobilising our forces on this annneisaiy for the better utilisation of this fundamental substance, we must not a moment forget those hundreds of millions of coloured slaves who arc groaning under the yoke of imperialism abroad, one of the weapons of whose enslavement is Daiwmism, as distorted by the bourgeoisie and its * Social-Fascist adherents.