Engels and the second foundation of Marxism

Abstract

Since the 1920s Marxism has often been conceptualised, particularly within what has come to be known as the western Marxist philosophical tradition, in terms of a narrow historical materialism, directed exclusively at human-social existence. It was thus severed from the wider realm of dialectical materialism or materialist dialectics, concerned with what Karl Marx referred to as the ‘universal metabolism of nature’. In the process, the materialist conception of history was alienated from the materialist conception of nature. Today, faced with the planetary ecological emergency of the Anthropocene epoch, it is essential to heal this breach within the philosophy of praxis by returning to the second foundation of Marxism associated with Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, seeing this as an indispensable key to the ecological and social revolution of the 21st century.