While Marx died in 1883 and would have never heard of eugenics, many on the left came to embrace Galton’s ideals. For instance, Sidney Webb, the co-founder of the London School of Economics, early member of the Fabian Society, and an influential socialist, lamented in 1896 about the ‘wrong production, both of commodities and of human beings; the preparation of senseless luxuries whilst there is need for more bread, and the breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized “residuum” unfit for social life’. The socialist and phi­losopher Bertrand Russell made similarly eugenicist proposals, writing in 1927 that by ‘sterilizing the feeble-minded of two gen­erations, feeble-mindedness and idiocy could be almost stamped out’. Similarly, women’s rights campaigners such as Marie Stopes advocated compulsory sterilisation and suggested that birth control could improve British stock. In turn – as I shall return to later – eugenic ideas were also adopted in the Soviet Union, with the Russian Eugenics Society being founded in 1920 and Marxists such as Alexander Serebrovsky arguing for mass eugenics programmes.

— Empire of Normality by Robert Chapman (Page 58)