The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology

The rejection of the ‘dialectics of nature’ has long been thought of as the most fundamental factor distinguishing Western Marxism from official Soviet-style Marxism. Yet, in Tailism and the Dialectic, Georg Lukács – perhaps the most influential figure in Western Marxism – strongly endorses the existence of an objective dialectic in nature. A close examination of Lukács’s main writings on science shows, however, that he still in effect denied the possibility of applying dialectical method to nature. This paradox is bound up with a dualistic conception of natural and social science with distinctly adverse implications for the development of an ecological Marxism.

This essay centres on the English translation (2000) of Georg Lukács’s Tailism and the Dialectic (written in either 1925 or 1926). Lukács is generally heralded as a founding theoretician of a ‘Western Marxism’, in opposition to ‘Eastern’ Soviet Marxism, and his most impressive and most influential work, History and Class Consciousness (1923), is generally treated as having rehabilitated Marxist concern with questions of subjectivity. It might therefore come as a surprise when Lukács in Tailism states that the purpose of History and Class Consciousness was to demonstrate ‘that the organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism’. In my view, however, this should already be abundantly clear from History and Class Consciousness. For Lukács’s absorption with proletarian subjectivity was motivated by an obsession with what he saw as its immaturity. And he coined the category of ‘reification’ in order to explain his disappointed expectations, to explain, that is, why the proletariat did not make a ‘socialist’ revolution in the ‘objectively ripe’ situation of an ‘imperialist war’ created by ‘moribund capitalism’. In short, Lukács did raise anew the question of the subjective, but only to then declare that workers, not even ‘the most revolutionary among them’, could never attain proper class consciousness, which he attributed instead to the ‘revolutionary party’ bearing the properly revolutionary theory. For this reason I agree with Slavoj Žižek’s characterisation of Lukács as the ‘ultimate philosopher [my emphasis] of Leninism’ – although I do think that Lenin himself would have found, as he did in connection with one of Lukács’s other works, Marxism ‘present only at a verbal level’. My concern is two-fold: with a critique of the methodological short-cuts that Lukács made in his purely conceptual derivation of the concept of reification, and his purely conceptual attribution of it as the necessary form of working-class consciousness ‘in its immediacy’; and with the dangerous political consequences that Lukács derived from his assessment of the reified character of working-class subjectivity, mainly a theoretical guarantee that the party with the proper revolutionary theory must always be right, or at least more right than anyone else.

SUMMARY The aim of the article is to offer a closer examination and elucidation of the views of materialism set forth by S. Timpanaro in his book Considerazioni sul materialismo (1970; English translation: On Materialism, NLB, 1975). To this end I first consider the notions developed by one of the authors criticized by Timpanaro, namely A. Schmidt, referring to his study Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx. By means of a comparison between these two authors I try to show in more detail the significance of discussing the various conceptions of materialism, and to elucidate Timpanaro's views on the matter. In discussing materialism Schmidt emphasizes the role played by the subject, and the subject's labour. To this end he relies on the theoretical principles of Marx (referred to by Schmidt as “historical materialism”), contrasting them with Engels' principles, which he considers to be the source of the view embodied in soviet Marxism. Engels' principles, called ‘dialectical materialism’ by Schmidt, ...

The Frankfurt School, as represented especially by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, was noted for developing a philosophical critique of the domination of nature. Critical theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt were heavily influenced by the writings of the early Karl Marx. Yet, their critique of the Enlightenment domination of nature was eventually extended to a critique of Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure, especially in relation to his mature work in Capital. This position was expressed most notably in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s student, Alfred Schmidt, author of The Concept of Nature in Marx (1970). Due largely to Schmidt’s book, the notion of Marx’s anti-ecological perspective came to be deeply rooted in Western Marxism. Moreover, such criticisms of Marx were closely related to questions raised regarding Fredrick Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which was frequently said to have extended dialectical analysis improperly beyond the human-social realm. First generation ecosocialists, such as Ted Benton and Andre Gorz, furthered these criticisms, arguing that Marx and Engels had gone overboard in their alleged rejection of Malthusian natural limits.

The idea of praxis was explored in the 1960s, contemporaneously with the publication of an English translation of History and Class Consciousness—the early writings of Hungarian Marxist Georgy Lukacs. Reminding us that Marx titled Capital Volume One ‘The Process of Production’, his dynamic, processional and revolutionary brand of Marxism inspired many would-be radicals by its contrast with the official Marxism of the Eastern Bloc (and Western European communist parties). Like Elias, his notion of social figurations going through long-term processes of change as the motor of history represented a dynamic breakthrough from the rigidities of previously held versions of necessary stages of historical development. When Lukacs wrote in the 1920s he was countering the determinism represented by the Second International Marxism of Kautsky and Plekhanov, the leading theoreticians of Western social democracy and Russian menshevism. By the 1960s and 1970s this ‘objectivist’ brand of Marxism was associated with Althusser and the structuralists. The political sense of liberation represented by the Paris uprising in May 1968 gelled with Lukacs’ revolutionary ‘subjectivism’, which affirmed that the working class could make history in the dynamic process of making social change. Like his contemporary Antonio Gramsci, Lukacs was centrally involved in a revolutionary uprising in 1919, in Turin and Budapest respectively. Both sought what Lukacs called ‘the algebra of revolution’;1 both wrestled with the ways in which the state and its rulers hegemonised, and the tactics of the resistance; and both wrote in a style that was both suggestive whilst being open to a range of interpretations. Ninety years on, this article explores the extent to which these two ‘Western Marxists’ agree, and still provide relevant insight, and how linked ideologies from contemporaries such as Mannheim and Elias2—and later, Wacquant—have further developed ‘praxical’ sociology. 1 J. Rees, The Algebra of Revolution (London: Routledge, 1998). 2 R. Kilminster, Praxis and Method (London: Routledge, 1979).

This essay reads Georg Lukács’s early thought in light of his vexed relationship to the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Though Lukács criticized Kautsky as the archetypal “vulgar Marxist,” Lukács’s larger project of promoting “class consciousness” follows from Kautsky’s own political and pedagogical work. For Kautsky, Social Democratic intellectuals had to transmute proletarian “class instinct” into class consciousness by disseminating a simplified version of scientific socialism, transmitting the conclusions but not the method of Marxist thought. But because Lukács had defined “vulgar Marxism” as the forgetting of Marx’s method in favor of his conclusions, “vulgar Marxism” turned out to be both the precondition and an obstacle to proletarian class consciousness and thus to revolutionary action. The essay then reads Lukács’s changing understanding of the role of the party as a response to this impasse: a response that can help us understand the heterogeneous tradition of “Western Marxism.”

Donald Kuspit's Achievement as an Art Critic During the 1970s

The resurrection of the classical Marxian ecological critique in the context of the current planetary emergency has led to the return of the concept of the dialectics of nature, associated with the work of Frederick Engels in particular. In the century following the deaths of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, the dialectics-of-nature conception played a formative role in the development of the modern ecological critique within science, notably in Britain, and helped inspire the contemporary environmentalist movement. Nevertheless, all of this occurred outside the dominant streams of Marxian thought and practice, where a great chasm had arisen in this area. Whereas official Marxism in the Soviet Union reduced the dialectics of nature to a fixed dogma, Western Marxism rejected it altogether. In the current Anthropocene Epoch in the geological time scale – and in what is referred to here as the Capitalinian Age of the Anthropocene – a new historical-materialist synthesis constructed on classical foundations, reintegrating the dialectics of nature, so as to address the immense ecological challenges confronting humanity, is seen as objectively (and subjectively) necessary.

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the East in the early 1920s. It focuses particularly on the work of Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism from 1920 to 1975. The theoretical production of each of these thinkers is related simultaneously to the practical fate of working-class struggles and to the cultural mutations of bourgeois thought in their time. The philosophical antecedents of the various school within this tradition Lukacsian, Gramscian, Frankfurt, Sartrean, Althusserian and Della Volpean are compared, and the specific innovations of their respective systems surveyed. The structural unity of 'Western Marxism', beyond the diversity of its individual thinkers, is then assessed, in a balance-sheet that contrasts its heritage with the tradition of 'classical' Marxism that preceded it, and with the commanding problems which will confront any historical materialism to succeed it.

Few NORTH AMERICAN STUDENTS of the history of the labour movement and socialism know very much about the life and work of Karl Korsch. Of course, many know of him ? as the 'poor cousin' of George Lukacs in the school of * Western Marxism' popularized by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as a Frankfurt School tag-a-long, or as Bert Brecht's close friend and teacher. For historical and linguis tic reasons Korsch's work is better known in Germany (more accurately in the Federal Republic of Germany, for is reviled in the German Democratic Republic), yet even in his native land the general unavailability of many of his writings has prevented even his most enthusiastic readers from grasping the totality of his practical and theoretical contribution to the working-class movement. This is lamentable for was perhaps the most sensitive student of Marx in the twentieth century. (Franz Borkenau, in a review of Korsch's intellectual biography Karl Marx, wrote: Korsch possesses a model knowledge of every imaginable literature connected with Marxism_I have little doubt that his is the Marx-study most solidly close to the actual teaching of Marx. Where every other author instinctively attempts to reinterpret Marx on his own lines of thought, Korsch, I believe, successfully tries to interpret Marx's own line of thought.) Fortunately this sorry state of affairs is changing for the better due largely to the efforts of Michael Buckmiller and his colleagues Gotz Langkau and Jiirgen Seifert, who are bringing out Korsch's collected works (in 12 volumes) over the course of this decade. The recent appearance of the first two volumes in the planned series gives us cause to rejoice.

The tensed relationship between Engels and Western Marxism is well-known. This tension originates from Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, but it is much less known that the late Lukács seems to change his attitude toward Engels’s dialectic, incorporating Engels’s discussion of “labor” as a key element to grasp the qualitative jump from nature to society. However, this shift does not mean that Lukács admitted that his claim made in History and Class Consciousness was utterly false. One can even argue that his late theory of metabolism is a consistent and continuous development of his earlier view in History and Class Consciousness. Nevertheless, at least one thing has significantly changed in his late writings as a result of his reception of Engels. Lukács briefly elaborated on his theory of “crisis” based on his theory of metabolism in the 1920s, but this is precisely what disappears in his Ontology of Social Being.

Many Western Marxists have jettisoned the concepts of imperialism while retaining opposition to actually existing socialist projects of the Global South. This paper asserts that the failure to critique imperialism and to support socialist projects in the Global South is grounded in a rejection of classical Marxist human relations to nature and a failure to contemplate the continuance of state-socialist projects in the Global South. Since the 1990s, Western Marxists have replaced imperialism with global capitalism that is untethered to Western imperialism. Western Marxists have also deemed socialist projects as a betrayal of their utopian views rooted in the Hegelian “purity fetish.” Instead, some Western Marxists have aligned with imperialist states in support of political and economic intervention against countries they view as failed projects, often leading to the reassertion of imperialist domination. Consequently, Western Marxists blindly support Western policies which undermine socialist state projects and wittingly or unwittingly, the reassertion of economic, political, cultural and military dependency on imperialist capitalism.

Lukács pioneered the Western Marxist intellectual movement, holding significant research value. This study employs a totality approach. To analyze the historical context from three aspects: the Theoretical Dilemma of the Second International, the German Sociological Tradition and the Debates within the Communist International. Analyze the Totality, Class Consciousness and Practice-Oriented of the theory to clarify the fundamental tenets of Lukács' Historical Epistemology, and examine the contemporary relevance of Lukács' Historical Epistemology from the perspectives of criticism of mechanical materialism, communist debate and its influence on contemporary international socialist movement.. This research and analysis method is helpful for us to deepen our understanding of Lukács' Historical Epistemology and Western Marxism. It argues that Lukács' theory represents an innovative response to the crisis of Marxism during the proletarian revolutionary era, while also offering impetus for the global socialist movement in the 21st century.

The Relationship of Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness to Multiculturalism in Postmodern Times

This is a recent contribution to the Routledge series Studies in Critical Realism. Jonathan Joseph, its author, aims to develop Gramsci�s celebrated analysis of hegemony in a critical realist direction by distinguishing analytically between �structural hegemony� and hegemonic projects and then connecting them dialectically. He develops this approach through a critical engagement not only with Gramsci�s work but also with other positions and debates within classical Marxism, Western Marxism, and post-Marxism. The intended result is a �theory of hegemony [that] combines the political moment of agency with the structural nature of social reproduction� (161). He illustrates his arguments with observations on a range of historical conjunctural analyses drawn from classical Marxism (i.e., Lenin and Trotsky) and Western Marxism (notably the Anderson-Nairn thesis on the peculiarities of British development) and, for his contemporary analyses, from the development of Fordism and the state in post-war Britain in the context of globalization. And he concludes with the view that the Leninist theory of the vanguard party can be grounded in a critical realist understanding of the heterogeneity and complexity of capitalist social formations.