The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity

It is a fundamental premise of Marxism that as material conditions change, so do our ideas about the world in which we live. Today we are seeing a vast transformation in the relations of human society to the natural-physical world of which it is a part, evident in the emergence of what is now referred to as the Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, during which humanity has become the major force in Earth System change. An “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the earth, arising from the capitalist system, is now threatening to destroy the earth as a safe home for humanity and for innumerable species that live on it on a timeline not of centuries, but of decades. 1 This necessarily demands a more dialectical conception of the relation of humanity to what Karl Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.” 2 The point today is not simply to understand the world, but to change it before it is too late .

Given that Marxism has been, since its conception in the mid-nineteenth century, the primary basis of the critique of capitalist society, it naturally could be expected to lead the way in the ecological critique of capitalism. But while historical materialists and socialists more broadly can be said to have played the leading, formative role in the development of the ecological critique—particularly within the sciences—the key contributions of socialist ecology, principally in Britain, took place outside the main tendencies that were to define twentieth-century Marxism as a whole. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, a deep chasm emerged within Marxian theory, impeding the development of a coherent ecological view within the left. The dogmatism with which, on one side of this chasm, official Soviet thought by the mid-1930s approached the issue of the dialectics of nature and dialectical materialism more generally, had its counterpart, on the other side, in Western Marxism’s categorical rejection of the dialectics of nature and the materialist conception of nature. To speak of “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity” is thus to refer to the transcendence in our time, based on classical historical materialism and the dialectical naturalism that arose in Britain in the interwar period, of the principal contradictions hindering the development of a unified Marxian ecological critique.