{"id":172507,"date":"2020-11-16T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2020-11-16T12:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=172507"},"modified":"2020-11-10T07:46:30","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T07:46:30","slug":"engelss-dialectics-of-nature-in-the-anthropocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/11\/engelss-dialectics-of-nature-in-the-anthropocene\/","title":{"rendered":"Engels\u2019s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A famous early photograph of Frederick Engels.
Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain<\/p><\/div>\n

In \u201cThe Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man\u201d from his Dialectics of Nature<\/i>, Frederick Engels declared: \u201cEverything affects and is affected by every other thing.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a> Today, two hundred years after his birth, Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times. If Karl Marx\u2019s theory of the metabolic rift is at the heart of historical-materialist ecology today, it nonetheless remains true that Engels\u2019s contributions to our understanding of the overall ecological problem remain indispensable, rooted in his own deep inquiries into nature\u2019s universal metabolism, which reinforced and extended Marx\u2019s analysis. As Paul Blackledge has stated in a recent study of Engels\u2019s thought, \u201cEngels\u2019s conception of a dialectics of nature opens a place through which ecological crises\u201d can be understood as rooted in \u201cthe alienated nature of capitalist social relations.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> It is because of the very comprehensiveness of his approach to the dialectic of nature and society that Engels\u2019s work can help clarify the momentous challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch and the current age of planetary ecological crisis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Racing to Ruin<\/h2>\n

Some intimation of the contemporary significance of Engels\u2019s ecological critique can be gained by commencing with Walter Benjamin\u2019s celebrated 1940 aside, often quoted by ecosocialists, from the \u201cParalipomena\u201d (or side notes) to his \u201cOn the Concept of History.\u201d There, Benjamin stated: \u201cMarx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by passengers on this train\u2014namely, the human race\u2014to activate the emergency brake.\u201d In Michael L\u00f6wy\u2019s well-known interpretation of Benjamin\u2019s statement: \u201cThe image suggests implicitly that if humanity were to allow the train to follow its course\u2014already mapped out by the steel structure of the rails\u2014and if nothing halted its headlong dash, we would be heading straight for disaster, for a crash or a plunge into the abyss.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Benjamin\u2019s dramatic image of a runaway locomotive and, hence, the necessity of conceiving of revolution as a pulling of the emergency brake, recalled a similar passage in Engels\u2019s Anti-D\u00fchring<\/i>, written in the late 1870s, a work with which Benjamin, like all socialists in his day, was familiar. Here, Engels had indicated that the capitalist class was \u201ca class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is too weak to open.\u201d It was precisely capital\u2019s inability to control \u201cthe productive forces, which have grown beyond its power,\u201d including the destructive effects imposed on its natural and social \u201cenvirons,\u201d that was \u201cdriving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution.\u201d Hence, \u201cif the whole of modern society is not to perish,\u201d Engels argued, \u201ca revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Engels\u2019s earlier metaphor differed slightly from Benjamin\u2019s later one, in that the object was to open the safety valve in order to prevent a boiler explosion and crash\u2014a fairly common cause of train wrecks in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.5<\/sup><\/a> If the system can be seen as \u201cracing to ruin,\u201d revolution here is less about simply stopping the forward momentum than exerting control over the out-of-control forces of production. Indeed, Engels\u2019s ecological and economic argument was not predicated, as would be the case today, on the notion that there was too much production in relation to the overall carrying capacity of the earth, a perspective that was scarcely present at the time he was writing. Instead, his chief ecological concern had to do with the wanton destruction wrought by capitalism on local and regional environments\u2014even if on an increasingly global basis. The visible effects of this were evident in industrial pollution, deforestation, the degradation of the soil, and the general deterioration of the environmental conditions (including periodic epidemics) of the working class. Engels also pointed to the devastation of whole environments (and their climates), as in the ecological destruction that played such a big role in the fall of ancient civilizations, due mainly to desertification, and the environmental damage imposed by colonialism on traditional cultures and modes of production.6<\/sup><\/a> Like Marx, Engels was deeply concerned with British colonialism\u2019s \u201cVictorian Holocausts,\u201d including the generation of famine in India through the destruction of its ecology and hydrological infrastructure, and the ruinous expropriation and extermination inflicted on Ireland\u2019s ecology and people.7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It is true that we can also find in these same pages, in which the question \u201cruin or revolution\u201d is raised, the most productivist (and, in this sense, seemingly Promethean) passage to be found anywhere in Marx and Engels\u2019s works.8<\/sup><\/a> Thus, Engels declared in Anti-D\u00fchring<\/i> that the advent of socialism would make possible the \u201cconstantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and\u2026a practically unlimited increase of production itself.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a> However, in the context in which Engels was writing, this presents no particular contradiction. The view that a future society, released from the irrationality of capitalist production would allow for what, by nineteenth-century standards, would have seemed like an almost unlimited development of production was of course practically universal among radical thinkers at the time. This was a natural reflection of the still low level of material development in most of the world at the time of the Industrial Revolution, when set against the still immeasurably vast scale of the earth itself. World manufacturing production was to increase by \u201cabout 1,730 times\u201d in the hundred and fifty years between 1820, when Engels was born, at the time of the early nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, and 1970, when the modern ecological movement was born, at the time of the first Earth Day.10<\/sup><\/a> Moreover, in Engels\u2019s analysis (as in Marx\u2019s), production was never viewed as an end in itself, but rather as a mere means to the creation of a freer and more equal society, dedicated to a process of sustainable human development.11<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Two centuries after his birth, the depth of Engels\u2019s understanding of the systematic nature of capitalism\u2019s destruction of the natural and social environment, together with his development of a dialectical naturalist perspective, makes it, along with Marx\u2019s work, a starting point for a revolutionary ecosocialist critique today. As Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock noted, Engels, in the Dialectics of Nature<\/i>, sought to develop the conceptual basis for understanding \u201cthe complete interdependence of human social relations and human relations to nature.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The Revenge of Nature<\/h2>\n

Ecological problems are the product of the interrelation of system and scale. In Engels\u2019s analysis, it is system that is emphasized above all. In his great work, The Condition of the Working Class in England<\/i>, written while he was still in his early twenties, he focused on the destructive environmental and epidemiological conditions of the Industrial Revolution in the large manufacturing towns, particularly Manchester. He highlighted the horrendous ecological conditions imposed on workers by the new industrial factory system, evident in pollution, toxic contamination, physical deterioration, periodic epidemics, poor nutrition, and high working-class mortality, all associated with extreme economic exploitation. The Condition of the Working Class in England<\/i> remains unique in its powerful indictment of the \u201csocial murder\u201d inflicted by capitalism on the underlying population at the time of the Industrial Revolution.13<\/sup><\/a> Marx, for whom Engels\u2019s book was the starting point for his own epidemiological studies in Capital<\/i>, was on this basis to designate \u201cperiodical epidemics,\u201d along with the destruction of the soil, as evidence of capitalism\u2019s metabolic rift. In Germany, Engels\u2019s treatment of the etiology of disease in The Condition of the Working Class in England<\/i> exercised an influence that extended well beyond socialist circles. Rudolf Virchow, the German doctor and pathologist, famous as the author of Cellular Pathology<\/i>, referred favorably to Engels\u2019s book in his own pioneering work in social epidemiology.14<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

This understanding of the material conditions of capitalist class society as environmental, as well as economic, was evident in all of Engels\u2019s work. Moreover, in constantly seeking to merge materialist and dialectical perspectives of nature and society, Engels eventually arrived at the thesis that \u201cnature,\u201d of which human beings were an emergent part, was the \u201cproof of dialectics\u201d\u2014a statement that today is better understood if we say that ecology is the proof of dialectics<\/i>.15<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In Engels\u2019s developed evolutionary-ecological perspective, evident in his mature works such as The Dialectics of Nature<\/i> and Anti-D\u00fchring<\/i>, what distinguished human beings from nonhuman animals was the role of labor in transforming and mastering the environment, making it possible for \u201cman\u201d to become the \u201creal, conscious, lord of nature, because he now [in a future society] becomes master of his own social organisation.\u201d16<\/sup><\/a> Nevertheless, along with this tendency toward greater mastery of nature in some respects, already exhibited under capitalism, was concealed a systematic tendency toward expanding ecological crises, since all attempts at the conquest of nature in defiance of natural laws of limits could only lead, in the end, to ecological catastrophes. This could be seen first and foremost in the mid\u2013nineteenth century in the ecological devastation unleashed by colonialism. As he exclaimed:<\/p>\n

What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one<\/i> generation of very profitable coffee trees\u2014what cared they that the heavy tropical rain afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only with the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the often remote effects of actions to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.17<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Engels, the starting point for a rational approach to the environment was to be found in Francis Bacon\u2019s famous maxim that \u201cnature is only overcome by obeying her\u201d\u2014that is, by discovering and conforming to her laws.18<\/sup><\/a> Yet, in Marx and Engels\u2019s view, the Baconian principle, to the extent that it was applied in bourgeois society, was primarily treated as a \u201cruse\u201d for conquering nature so as to bring it under capital\u2019s laws of accumulation and competition.19<\/sup><\/a> Science was made into a mere appendage of profit making, viewing nature\u2019s boundaries as mere barriers to be surmounted. Instead, the rational application of science in society as a whole was only possible in a system in which the associated producers regulated the human metabolic relation to nature on an unalienated basis, in accordance with genuine human needs and potentials and the requirements of long-term reproduction. This pointed to the contradiction between, on the one hand, science\u2019s own dialectic, which more and more recognized our \u201coneness with nature\u201d and the associated need for social control, and, on the other hand, capitalism\u2019s myopic drive to accumulation ad infinitum<\/i>, with its innate uncontrollability and neglect of environmental consequences.20<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It was this deep, critical-materialist perspective that led Engels to stress the senselessness of the prevailing notion of the conquest of nature<\/i>\u2014as if nature were a foreign territory to be subjected at will, and as if humanity did not exist in the midst of the earth\u2019s metabolism. Such an attempt to conquer the earth could only lead to what he referred to, metaphorically, as the \u201crevenge\u201d of nature, as various critical thresholds (or tipping points) were crossed:<\/p>\n

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.\u2026 Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature\u2014but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.21<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Through conscious action in accord with rational science, human beings were capable of rising to a considerable extent above \u201cthe influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces,\u201d perceiving \u201cthe more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature.\u201d Yet, even with respect to \u201cthe most developed peoples of the present day,\u201d there could be seen to be \u201ca colossal disproportion between the proposed aims and the results arrived at,\u201d such \u201cthat unforeseen effects predominate and\u2026the uncontrolled forces are more powerful than those set in motion according to plan.\u201d Class-based commodity economies achieved \u201cthe desired end only by way of exception,\u201d more often producing \u201cthe exact opposite.\u201d Hence, a rational, scientific, and sustainable approach to the human relation to nature and society under capitalism was impossible.22<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It is significant that this same general standpoint on capitalism and ecology articulated by Engels was to be echoed a few decades later by Ray Lankester, who was Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Marx\u2019s close friend (and Engel\u2019s acquaintance), and the leading British biologist in the generation after Darwin. Lankester was a Fabian-style socialist who had read and been influenced by Marx\u2019s Capital<\/i>. In his 1911 book, The Kingdom of Man<\/i>\u2014which brought together his 1905 Romanes lecture at Oxford, \u201cNature\u2019s Insurgent Son,\u201d his 1906 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and his article \u201cNature\u2019s Revenges\u201d focusing on the African sleeping sickness\u2014Lankester insisted that the growing human dominion over the earth was giving rise, in contradictory fashion, to an increased potential for planetary-scale ecological disasters. Thus, in his chapter on \u201cNature\u2019s Revenges,\u201d he referred to humanity as the \u201cdisturber of Nature\u201d and thus as the creator of periodic epidemic diseases threatening humanity along with other species. \u201cIt seems to be a legitimate view,\u201d Lankester wrote, \u201cthat every disease to which animals [including the human animal] (and probably plants also), are liable, excepting as a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to Man\u2019s interference.\u201d23<\/sup><\/a> Moreover, this could be traced to a system dominated by \u201cmarkets\u201d and \u201ccosmopolitan dealers in finance\u201d who undermined any rational and scientific approach to reconcile nature and human production.24<\/sup><\/a> Lankester was later to develop this argument further, writing systematically on \u201cThe Effacement of Nature by Man.\u201d25<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Like the later Marx and Engels, Lankester saw the \u201cKingdom of Man\u201d as ushering in a permanent ecological knife-edge state for humanity, engendered by capitalism, that would, if natural conditions were trampled over by rapacious capital accumulation, lead to catastrophic human environmental decline. If it were not to destroy the very bases of its existence, humanity therefore had no choice but to control its production, superseding the narrow dictates of capital accumulation and adopting the dictates of a rational science in line with coevolutionary development.<\/p>\n

The Dialectics of Nature and History<\/h2>\n

Engels\u2019s ecological insights are inseparable from his inquiries into the dialectics of nature from which they arose. Yet, the very first principle of what came to be known as the philosophical tradition of Western Marxism was that the dialectic could not be said to apply to external nature, that is, there was no such thing as what Engels referred to as \u201cso-called objective<\/i> dialectics\u201d beyond the active realm of the human subject.26<\/sup><\/a> Dialectical relations, and even the objects of dialectical reasoning, were thus confined to the human-historical sphere, where the identical subject-object could be said to apply, since all nonreflexive (transfactual) reality outside of human consciousness and human action was excluded from the analysis.27<\/sup><\/a> But with the complete rejection of the dialectics of nature within the Western Marxist tradition, the extraordinary power of Engels\u2019s explorations in this area and the enormous influence they exerted on evolutionary and ecological thought within the natural sciences and on Marxism were lost, except to a relatively small number of left scientists and dialectical materialists. Unable to see dialectics as related to material nature, the Western Marxist philosophical tradition tended to relegate both natural science and external nature itself to the realm of mechanism and positivism. The result was to create a deep chasm between the dominant post-Second World War conception of Marxian philosophy in the West and natural science (and between Western Marxism and the materialist conception of nature) at the very moment, ironically, that the ecological movement was emerging as a major political force.28<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Restoring the insights of classical historical materialism in this area thus requires the recovery, at some level, of Engels\u2019s conception of the dialectics of nature.29<\/sup><\/a> This requires, in turn, rejecting superficial and often poorly conceived summary dismissals of Engels\u2019s approach to the dialectics of nature, usually polemicizing against his three broad dialectical \u201claws\u201d that he derived from G. W. F. Hegel and to which he gave new materialist<\/i> significance: (1) the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, (2) the identity or unity of opposites, and (3) the negation of the negation.30<\/sup><\/a> In writing on \u201cEngels\u2019s Philosophy of Science,\u201d Peter T. Manicas, for example, has complained of the \u201cvery nearly vacuous\u201d nature of these laws.31<\/sup><\/a> Yet, in Engels\u2019s analysis, these were not meant as narrow, fixed laws in the positivistic sense, but, rather, in today\u2019s terminology, as broad, dialectically conceived \u201contological principles,\u201d equivalent to such basic propositions as the principle of the uniformity of nature, the principle of the perpetuity of substance, and the principle of causality. In fact, Engels\u2019s approach to dialectics challenged in various ways the understanding of these very same principles as they were advanced by the science of his day.32<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Perhaps the most succinct and penetrating assessment of Engels\u2019s contributions to the dialectics of nature provided by a natural scientist can be found in a 1936 pamphlet entitled Engels as a Scientist<\/i> by the celebrated Marxist scientist J. D. Bernal, professor of physics and x-ray crystallography at Birkbeck College, University of London. Bernal depicted Engels as a philosopher and historian of science, one who could not \u201cbe said to have been an amateur\u201d given the range of the scientific contacts he had developed in Manchester, and who had reached a level of analysis that far exceeded that of the professional philosophers of science of his day, such as Herbert Spencer and William Whewell in England and Friedrich Lange in Germany.33<\/sup><\/a> Behind Engels\u2019s deep understanding of the historical development of science in his time, according to Bernal, was a dialectical perception in which the \u201cconcept of nature was always as a whole and as a process.\u201d34<\/sup><\/a> In this, Engels had borrowed critically from Hegel, recognizing that behind the latter\u2019s idealist presentation of dialectical change in his Logic<\/i> were processes that could be said to inhere objectively in nature, as captured in human cognition.<\/p>\n

In addressing the first of the three dialectical \u201claws\u201d or ontological principles that Engels had drawn from Hegel\u2014how changes in quantity can lead to qualitative transformations and its opposite\u2014Bernal emphasized its essential character for natural scientific thought. \u201cWith remarkable insight, Engels says:\u2014\u2018The so-called constants of physics are for the most part nothing but designations of nodal points where quantitative addition or withdrawal of motion calls forth a qualitative change in the state of the body in question\u2019.\u2026 We are only now beginning to appreciate the essential justice of these remarks and the significance of such nodal points.\u201d In this regard, Bernal stressed Engels\u2019s reference to Dmitri Mendeleev\u2019s periodic table as exemplary of qualitative transformations arising from continuous quantitative changes, as well as the relation of Engels\u2019s basic notions to discoveries associated with the rise of quantum theory.35<\/sup><\/a> Engels\u2019s approach, as the British Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy indicated, pointed to the concept of \u201cphase change\u201d as employed in modern physics.36<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Today, we know that this dialectical principle holds for biology as well. For example, increasing population density of microorganisms (a quantitative increase) can cause a change in genetic expression, leading to the formation of something new (a qualitative change). As bacterial populations increase, the signals (chemicals) emitted by each organism accumulate to a level that activates genes, leading to the production of a mucilaginous biofilm phase in which the organisms become embedded. Biofilms may be composed of a number of organisms and attach organisms to almost any surface, from water pipes to rocks in streams to teeth to soil roots.37<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Engels\u2019s second law, the interpenetration of opposites, was more difficult to define in an operational sense, but still of supreme importance for scientific inquiry. In Bernal\u2019s explanation, this stood for two related principles: (1) \u201ceverything implies its opposite\u201d and (2) there were \u201cno hard and fast lines in nature.\u201d Engels illustrated the latter point by referring to Lankester\u2019s famous discovery that the horseshoe crab (Limulus<\/i>) was an arachnid, part of the spider and scorpion family, a revelation that had startled the scientific world and threw previous biological classifications askew.38<\/sup><\/a> In his application of this dialectical principle to physics and to the question of matter and movement (or energy), Bernal contended, \u201cEngels approached very close to the modern ideas of relativity.\u201d39<\/sup><\/a> Engels\u2019s notion of the unity of opposites is often seen in today\u2019s Marxian dialectics in terms of the role of internal relations, in which at least one of the relata<\/i> is dependent on the other.40<\/sup><\/a> As Engels himself observed, the recognition that mechanical relations with \u201ctheir imagined rigidity and absolute validity have been introduced into nature only by our reflective minds\u2026is the kernel of the dialectical conception of nature.\u201d41<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The negation of the negation, Engel\u2019s third informal dialectical law, which, as Bernal noted, seemed so paradoxical in mere words, was meant to convey that, in the course of its historical development or evolution over time, anything within the objective world is bound to generate something different, a new emergent reality, representing new material relations and emergent levels, often through the action of recessive factors or residual elements, previously overcome, that still inhere in the present. Material existence as a whole could be seen as leading to a hierarchy of organizational levels, while transformative change often meant the shift from one organizational level to another, as in the seed to the plant.42<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The development of what are called \u201cemergent properties\u201d is now considered a basic biological and ecological concept. In an ecological context, it occurs when communities of species interact in ways that produce new characteristics, mostly unpredicted, arising from the behavior of the individual species in the community.43<\/sup><\/a> A four-acre farm field with a mixture of four different species (a polyculture) may lead to higher total yield than four acres devoted to only growing each of the individual species separately. This can occur for a variety of reasons: for example, better use of sunlight and water, and decreased insect damage in the polyculture field.<\/p>\n

Coevolution of organisms also produces new properties. For example, over evolutionary time, insects feeding on plant leaves lead to the development of numerous defense mechanisms in plants. These include producing chemicals that inhibit the insect\u2019s feeding and emitting chemicals that recruit organisms (frequently small wasps) that lay their eggs in the insect, which is then killed as the eggs develop. But the back and forth continues. In at least one instance, that of the tomato hornworm caterpillar, the wasp has also to inject a virus that deactivates the caterpillar\u2019s immune system to enable the wasp\u2019s eggs to develop. Evolution is constantly creating something different, sometimes dramatically, as organisms<\/i> interact. In some cases, this leads to fundamental changes in whole ecosystems and the rise of new dominant species in particular environments. As Engels wrote, emergence, in the sense of \u201cthe negation of the negation, really does take place<\/i> in both [plant and animal] kingdoms of the natural world.\u201d44<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

As a historian of science, Engels, according to Bernal, was remarkable in his insights into the three great scientific revolutions of the nineteenth century: (1) thermodynamics\u2014the laws of the conservation and interchangeability of forms of energy, and of entropy; (2) the analysis of the organic cell and the development of physiology; and (3) Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution based on natural selection by innate variation.45<\/sup><\/a> As Ilya Prigogine, winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was later to observe, Engels\u2019s great insight was to recognize that these three revolutions in physical science \u201crejected the mechanistic worldview\u201d and drew \u201ccloser to the idea of an historical development of nature.\u201d46<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In Bernal\u2019s account, among Engels\u2019s concerns was the pursuit of \u201cthe synthesis of all the processes affecting life, animal ecology, and [biological] distribution.\u201d47<\/sup><\/a> What made this synthesis possible was his conception of dialectical movement and change, emphasizing the complexity of material interactions and the introduction of new emergent powers, in a process of origin, development, and decline. \u201cThe central idea in Dialectical Materialism,\u201d Bernal declared, \u201cis that of transformation.\u2026 The essential task of the materialist dialectic is the explanation of the qualitatively new,\u201d uncovering the conditions governing the emergence of a new \u201corganizational hierarchy.\u201d48<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In this respect, Engels\u2019s pioneering achievement was to utilize his dialectical conception of nature to throw light on all four materialist problems of \u201corigin\u201d that remained after Darwin: (1) the origin of the universe<\/i> (which Engels insisted was a self-origin as envisioned in the nebular hypothesis of Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace); (2) the origin of life<\/i> (in which Engels refuted Justus von Liebig\u2019s and Hermann Helmholtz\u2019s notion of the eternity of life and pointed instead to a chemical origin focusing on the complex of chemicals underlying the protoplasm, particularly proteins); (3) the origin of human society<\/i> (in which Engels went further than any other thinker of his time in explaining the evolution of the hand and tools through labor, and with them the brain and language, anticipating later discoveries in paleoanthropology); and (4) the origin of the family<\/i> (in which he explained the original matrilineal basis of the family and the rise of the patriarchal family with private property).49<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In this way, Engels, Bernal insisted, had anticipated or prefigured many of the developments in materialist science. \u201cEngels, who welcomed the principle of the conversion of one form of energy into another, would equally have welcomed the transformation of matter into energy. Motion as the mode of existence of matter [Engels\u2019s great postulate] would here acquire its final truth.\u201d50<\/sup><\/a> As Bernal noted elsewhere, Engels \u201csaw more clearly than most distinguished physicists of his time the importance of energy and its inseparability from matter. No change in matter, he declared, could occur without a change in energy, and vice versa.\u2026 [The] substitution of motion for force which Engels battles for throughout was the starting-point of Einstein\u2019s own criticism of mechanics.\u201d51<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Yet, it was the broad perspective on ecology emanating from Engels\u2019s dialectics that constituted the most critical insight of the Dialectics of Nature<\/i> and is the reason why a return to Engels\u2019s way of reasoning remains so important. As Bernal argued, one of Engels\u2019s crucial contributions was his critique of notions of the absolute human conquest of nature. Engels had powerfully diagnosed the failure of human society, and particularly of the capitalist mode of production, to foresee the ecological consequences of its actions, tracing \u201cthe effects of undesired physical consequences of human interference with nature such as cutting down forests and the spreading of deserts.\u201d52<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Other leading British socialist scientists of the 1930s and \u201940s were equally impressed by Engels\u2019s ecological warnings. For the great biochemist and science historian Joseph Needham, Engels could be described as someone for \u201cwhom nothing escaped.\u201d Engels thus pointed out that, in Needham\u2019s words, \u201ca time may some day come when the struggle of mankind against the adverse conditions of life on our planet will have become so severe that further social evolution will become impossible,\u201d referring to the eventual extinction of the human species.53<\/sup><\/a> For Needham, such a critical standpoint, which rejected the crude hypothesis of linear progress, also served to illuminate the extraordinary waste and ecological destruction of capitalist society\u2014where coffee was grown to feed locomotive fireboxes. This raised the question of a \u201cthermodynamic interpretation of justice\u201d since the alienation of nature (including the alienation of energy), as Engels had intimated, was \u201csquandering\u201d real human possibilities in the present and future.54<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Biologist J. B. S. Haldane\u2014one of the two leading British figures (along with R. A. Fisher) in the neo-Darwinian synthesis, reconciling Darwinian biology with the revolution in genetics\u2014saw Engels as \u201cthe chief source\u201d of materialist dialectics. Comparing Engels to Charles Dickens in relation to the Industrial Revolution, Haldane emphasized that Engels saw deeper and further. \u201cDickens had a first-hand knowledge of these conditions [of poverty and pollution]. He described them with burning indignation and in great detail. But his attitude was one of pity rather than hope. Engels saw the misery and the degradation of the workers, but he saw through it. Dickens never suggested that if they were to be saved they must save themselves. Engels saw that this was not only desirable but inevitable.\u201d55<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The recognition of the importance of Engels\u2019s dialectics of nature has extended into our own times. Harvard biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin were to dedicate their now classic work The Dialectical Biologist<\/i> to Engels, drawing heavily, if somewhat critically at points, on his analysis.56<\/sup><\/a> Levins and Lewontin\u2019s Harvard colleague, paleontologist and evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, was to observe that Engels provided the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture coevolution\u2014that is, the best explanation of human evolution in Darwin\u2019s own lifetime, given that gene-culture coevolution is the form that all coherent theories of human evolution must take.57<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It was Engels\u2019s development of a dialectics of emergence that was ultimately to prove most revolutionary. The significance of this perspective\u2014ontologically, epistemologically, methodologically\u2014was captured by Needham in his own pathbreaking analysis of \u201cintegrative levels\u201d (or emergence) in Time, the Refreshing River<\/i> (a title that referred back to the great ancient materialist, Heraclitus):<\/p>\n

Marx and Engels were bold enough to assert that it [the dialectical process] happens actually in evolving nature itself, and that the undoubted fact that it happens in our thought about nature is because we and our thought are part of nature. We cannot consider nature otherwise than as a series of levels of organisation, a series of dialectical syntheses. From the ultimate particle to atom, from atom to molecule, from molecule to colloidal aggregate, from aggregate to living cell, from cell to organ, from organ to body, from animal body to social association, the series of organisational levels is complete. Nothing but energy (as we now call matter and motion) and the levels of organisation (or the stabilised dialectical syntheses) at different levels have been required for the building of our world.58<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Engels in the Anthropocene<\/h2>\n

It is widely recognized in contemporary science (though not yet official) that the Holocene epoch in geological time, extending back almost twelve thousand years, has come to an end, beginning in the 1950s, displaced by the current Anthropocene epoch. The onset of the Anthropocene was brought about by a Great Acceleration in the anthropogenic impacts on the environment, such that the scale of the human economy has now come to rival the major biogeochemical cycles of the planet itself, resulting in rifts in the planetary boundaries that define the Earth System as a safe home for humanity.59<\/sup><\/a> The Anthropocene thus stands for what Lankester had earlier called the \u201cKingdom of Man,\u201d in the critical sense in which this was meant: that is, humanity was increasingly the \u201cdisturber\u201d of the natural environment on a planetary scale. Hence, society had no choice but to seek the rational application of science, and thus the overturning of a social order in which science has been relegated to a mere means by which \u201ctreasure and luxury are opened to capitalists.\u201d60<\/sup><\/a> What this meant, in Engels\u2019s (and Marx\u2019s) more forceful terms, was that the condition for the rational regulation of the metabolism between humanity and nature, and hence the rational application of science, was the transformation of the mode of production and distribution. Any other course invited the accumulation of catastrophe.61<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It is in the Anthropocene that Engels\u2019s dialectic of ecology can be seen as finally coming into its own. It is here that his emphasis on the interdependence of everything in existence, the unity of opposites, internal relations, discontinuous change, emergent evolution, the reality of ecosystem and climate destruction, and the critique of linear notions of progress can all be seen as essential to the very future of humanity and the earth as we know it. Engels was acutely aware that in modern scientific conceptions \u201cthe whole of nature also is now merged in history, and history is only differentiated from natural history as the evolutionary process of self-conscious<\/i> organisms.\u201d62<\/sup><\/a> Insofar as humanity was alienated from its own labor and production process, and therefore from its metabolism with nature, this could only mean the destruction of nature as well as society. The quantitative growth of capital led to a qualitative transformation of the human relation to the earth itself, which only a society of associated producers could rationally address. This was related to the fact that a particular qualitative mode of production (such as capitalism) was associated with a specific matrix of quantitative demands, while a qualitatively transformed mode of production (as in socialism) could lead to a very different quantitative matrix.<\/p>\n

Engels argued that capitalism was \u201csquandering\u201d the world\u2019s natural resources, including fossil fuels.63<\/sup><\/a> He indicated that urban pollution, desertification, deforestation, exhaustion of the soil, and (regional) climate change were all the result of unplanned, uncontrolled, destructive forms of production, most evident in the capitalist commodity economy. In line with Marx, and Liebig, he pointed to London\u2019s enormous sewage problem as a manifestation of the metabolic rift, which removed the nutrients from the soil and shipped them one-way to the overcrowded cities where they became a source of pollution.64<\/sup><\/a> He underscored the class basis of the spread of the periodic epidemics of smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and other contagious diseases that were affecting the environmental conditions of the working class, along with poor nutrition, overwork, exposure to toxics at work, and workplace injuries of all kinds. He highlighted, based on the new science of thermodynamics, that historical ecological change was irreversible and that humanity\u2019s own survival was ultimately in question.65<\/sup><\/a> In terms of the current relations of production and the environment, he wrote of a society faced with ruin or revolution<\/i>. The social murder of workers in urban environments and the famines in colonial Ireland and India were seen as indications of the extreme exploitation, ecological degradation, and even wholesale extermination of populations just below the surface of capitalist society.66<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

On all these bases, Engels, like Marx, argued that the human metabolism with nature should be regulated by associated producers in conformity to (or in coevolution with) nature\u2019s laws as understood by science, while fulfilling individual and collective needs. Such a rational application of science, however, was impossible under capitalism. Nor was development itself controllable under capitalism, since it was based on immediate, individual gain. To implement a comprehensive, rational scientific approach in line with human needs and sustainable environmental conditions required a society in which a system of long-term planning in the interest of the chain of human generations could be put into operation.67<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Implicit in Engels\u2019s analysis from the very beginning was a notion of what we can call the environmental proletariat<\/i>. Thus, while capitalism was concerned with the \u201cpolitical economy of capital,\u201d the working class in its most oppressed and also in its most radical phases was concerned with the entirety of existence, always starting from elemental needs. To call the objectives of workers a \u201cpolitical economy of the working class,\u201d as Marx once did, may not be wrong, but it would be more correct in today\u2019s terminology to say that workers, in their more revolutionary struggles, are primarily striving to create a new political ecology of the working class<\/i>, concerned with their whole environment and basic living conditions, which can only be achieved on a communal basis.68<\/sup><\/a> It was this that was captured so well in Engels\u2019s Condition of the Working Class in England<\/i>, where he systematically exposed the pollution of air and water, the contaminated sewers, the adulterated food, the lack of nutrition, the toxics at work, the frequent injuries, and the high morbidity and mortality of the working class\u2014and saw the struggle for socialism as the only genuine way forward.<\/p>\n

Indeed, The Condition of the Working Class in England<\/i> raised issues that are now once again coming to the fore in the Anthropocene. For Marx, Engels\u2019s youthful work was to exert an enduring influence leading him to designate \u201cperiodical epidemics\u201d as a manifestation of the metabolic rift alongside the destruction of the soil. Many pages of Capital<\/i> were devoted simply to attempting to update Engels\u2019s epidemiological analysis decades later.69<\/sup><\/a> Today, in the context of the pandemic represented by COVID-19, these insights take on a renewed importance as a place from which to begin in the long revolution for an ecosocialist world.70<\/sup><\/a> Yet, to bring such analyses forward, it is necessary to explore a dialectical science (and art) rooted in a conception of the complex \u201coneness\u201d of humanity and nature.<\/p>\n

All Things Are Sold<\/h2>\n

Engels admired the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom he considered a \u201cgenius.\u201d He wrote in his youth of \u201ca tenderness and originality in the depiction of nature such as only Shelley can achieve.\u201d71<\/sup><\/a> In the opening stanzas of Shelley\u2019s Mont Blanc<\/i>, we find a materialist dialectics of nature and mind not unlike Engels\u2019s own:<\/p>\n

The everlasting universe of things<\/em>
\nFlows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,<\/em>
\nNow dark\u2014now glittering\u2014now reflecting gloom\u2014<\/em>
\nNow lending splendour, where from secret springs<\/em>
\nThe source of human thought its tribute brings<\/em>
\nOf waters\u2014with a sound but half its own72<\/sup><\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Shelley, who in Queen Mab<\/i> wrote of bourgeois society\u2019s alienation of nature along with love\u2014\u201cAll things are sold: the very light of Heaven \/ Is venal; earth\u2019s unsparing gifts of love\u201d\u2014Engels saw the deep need for the reconciliation of humanity with nature, which only a revolution could bring.73<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Notes:<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 459.<\/li>\n
  2. \u21a9<\/a> Paul Blackledge, Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory<\/cite> (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 16.<\/li>\n
  3. \u21a9<\/a> Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings<\/cite>, vol. 4, 1938\u20131940<\/cite> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402; Michael L\u00f6wy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin\u2019s \u201cOn the Concept of History\u201d<\/cite> (London: Verso, 2001), 66\u201367.<\/li>\n
  4. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 145\u201346, 153, 270; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question<\/cite> (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 142.<\/li>\n
  5. \u21a9<\/a> Locomotive boiler explosions due to defective and maladjusted safety valves were common in the mid\u2013nineteenth century. Locomotive engineers under time pressures often wedged or fastened down the safety valves, thereby jamming the safety valves on the train, which did not open, or which they were unable physically to open in time. See Christian H. Hewison, Locomotive Boiler Explosions<\/cite> (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1983), 11, 18\u201319, 36, 49, 54\u201356, 82, 85, 110.<\/li>\n
  6. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 459; John Bellamy Foster, \u201cCapitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review <\/cite>63, no. 7 (December 2011): 5\u20137; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA)<\/cite> IV\/31 (Amsterdam: Akadamie Verlag, 1999), 512\u201315.<\/li>\n
  7. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 167; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA)<\/cite> IV\/18 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), 670\u201374, 731 (excerpts by Marx); Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Ni\u00f1o Famines and the Making of the Third World<\/cite> (London: Verso, 2001); Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question<\/cite>.<\/li>\n
  8. \u21a9<\/a> On the notion of extreme productivism and, in this sense, Prometheanism, as well as its almost complete absence in Marx and Engels\u2019s thought, see John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 226\u201329.<\/li>\n
  9. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 269. For Marx and Engels, it should be noted, productive forces refer to more than simply technology. Thus, Marx insisted that the most important instrument or force of production was human beings themselves. Hence, expansion of the forces of production meant the expansion of human productive skills and powers. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 6, 211; Paul A. Baran, The Longer View<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 59.<\/li>\n
  10. \u21a9<\/a> Walt Rostow, The World Economy<\/cite> (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 47-48, 659\u201362.<\/li>\n
  11. \u21a9<\/a> On sustainable human development as a framework governing both Marx\u2019s and Engels\u2019s thought, see Paul Burkett, \u201cMarx\u2019s Vision of Sustainable Human Development<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34\u201362.<\/li>\n
  12. \u21a9<\/a> Eleanor Leacock, introduction to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State<\/cite>, by Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 245.<\/li>\n
  13. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 4, 394, 407; Ian Angus, \u201cCesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 70, no. 3 (July\u2013August 2018): 38; John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 182\u201395.<\/li>\n
  14. \u21a9<\/a> Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness<\/cite> (New York: Free Press, 1983), 71\u201372.<\/li>\n
  15. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 23; Foster, The Return of Nature<\/cite>, 254.<\/li>\n
  16. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 270.<\/li>\n
  17. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 463\u201364.<\/li>\n
  18. \u21a9<\/a> Francis Bacon, Novum Organum<\/cite> (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 29, 43.<\/li>\n
  19. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 461; Karl Marx, Grundrisse<\/cite> (London: Penguin, 1973), 409\u201310.<\/li>\n
  20. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 461.<\/li>\n
  21. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 460\u201361.<\/li>\n
  22. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 330\u201331, 461.<\/li>\n
  23. \u21a9<\/a> Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man<\/cite> (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911), 1\u20134, 26, 31\u201333; Foster, The Return of Nature<\/cite>, 61\u201364.<\/li>\n
  24. \u21a9<\/a> Lankester, The Kingdom of Man<\/cite>, 31; Joseph Lester, Ray Lankester and the Making of Modern British Biology<\/cite> (Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1995), 163\u201364.<\/li>\n
  25. \u21a9<\/a> Ray Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair<\/cite> (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1913), 365\u201369.<\/li>\n
  26. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 492. The criticism of Engels on the dialectics of nature had its origins in footnote 6 of Georg Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s History and Class Consciousness<\/cite>, though Luk\u00e1cs, as he later explained, never fully abandoned the notion of a \u201cmerely objective dialectics\u201d and was to promote such a naturalistic dialectic, based on Marx more than Engels, in his later thought. Nevertheless, the rejection of the dialectics of nature became axiomatic for Western Marxism beginning in the 1920s, taking a stronger hold in the post-Second World War period. Georg Luk\u00e1cs, History and Class Consciousness<\/cite> (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 24, 207. See also Russell Jacoby, \u201cWestern Marxism,\u201d in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought<\/cite>, ed. Tom Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 523\u201326; Foster, The Return of Nature<\/cite>, 11\u201322. On the general conflict regarding Engels within contemporary Marxism, see Blackledge, Frederick Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory<\/cite>, 1\u201320.<\/li>\n
  27. \u21a9<\/a> As Roy Bhaskar has argued, the necessity to consider the intransitive or the realm of transfactuality establishes the distinction between the epistemological and the ontological, against the tendency within much of contemporary philosophy, including the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, to promote the epistemological fallacy, characteristic of idealism, in which ontology is subsumed within epistemology. Adherence to the epistemological fallacy would make any consistent materialism or natural science impossible. Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom<\/cite> (London: Verso, 1993), 397, 399\u2013400, 405.<\/li>\n
  28. \u21a9<\/a> This can be seen in Alfred Schmidt\u2019s The Concept of Nature in Marx<\/cite>, published in 1962, the same year as Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring<\/cite>. Schmidt\u2019s work, a product of the Frankfurt School (influenced particularly by his mentors Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno) for the most part denied the dialectics of nature and any reconciliation of humanity with nature on the very cusp of the emergence of the modern environmental movement. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx<\/cite> (London: Verso, 1970).<\/li>\n
  29. \u21a9<\/a> This and the following six paragraphs are adapted from Foster, The Return of Nature<\/cite>, 379\u201381.<\/li>\n
  30. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 356.<\/li>\n
  31. \u21a9<\/a> Peter T. Manicas, \u201cEngels\u2019s Philosophy of Science,\u201d in Engels After Marx<\/cite>, ed. Manfred B. Steger and Terrell Carver (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), 77.<\/li>\n
  32. \u21a9<\/a> Craig Dilworth, \u201cPrinciples, Laws, Theories, and the Metaphysics of Science,\u201d Synthese<\/cite> 101, no. 2 (1994): 223\u201347. The principle of uniformity (or uniformitarianism), most closely associated with Charles Lyell, was challenged by Darwin\u2019s concept of evolution, though Darwin\u2019s gradualism downplayed the conflict. Stephen Jay Gould and paleontologist Niles Eldredge were to challenge uniformitarianism much more radically in their theory of punctuated equilibrium in the 1980s. See Richard York and Brett Clark, The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 28, 40\u201342. The traditional notion of the perpetuation of substance was challenged in Engels\u2019s day by the development of the concept of energy in physics. In relation to both of these ontological principles and the principle of causality, where he addressed the complex interchange of cause and effect, Engels\u2019s dialectical \u201claws\u201d or ontological principles not only captured the revolutionary changes taking place in the science of his day, but in various ways prefigured later discoveries. On Engels\u2019s views of causality, see Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 510.<\/li>\n
  33. \u21a9<\/a> D. Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite> (London: Labour Monthly Pamphlets, 1936), 1\u20132.<\/li>\n
  34. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 5.<\/li>\n
  35. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 5\u20137; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 359 (translation follows Bernal).<\/li>\n
  36. \u21a9<\/a> Hyman Levy, A Philosophy for a Modern Man<\/cite> (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), 30\u201332, 117, 227\u201328.<\/li>\n
  37. \u21a9<\/a> This paragraph was written by Fred Magdoff. See also Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 215.<\/li>\n
  38. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 326, 507; E. Ray Lankester, \u201cLimulus an Arachnid,\u201d Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science<\/cite> 2 (1881): 504\u201348, 609\u201349; Foster, The Return of Nature, 56, 249.<\/li>\n
  39. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 7\u20138, J. D. Bernal, \u201cDialectical Materialism,\u201d in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism<\/cite>, by Hyman Levy et al. (London: Watts and Co., 1934), 107\u20138.<\/li>\n
  40. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 7; Foster, The Return of Nature<\/cite>, 242.<\/li>\n
  41. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 7; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 14.<\/li>\n
  42. \u21a9<\/a> All three of Engels\u2019s informal laws of dialectics can be seen as related to emergence, particularly the first and the third. Engels\u2019s third informal law, negation of the negation, as Roy Bhaskar argued in Dialectics: Pulse of Freedom<\/cite>, \u201craises the issue of absenting absences<\/cite> and the reassertion of lost or negated elements of reality. Bernal developed an analysis of the negation of the negation in terms of the role of residuals that reemerge and transform relations through complex evolutionary processes.\u201d Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom<\/cite> (London: Verso, 1993), 150\u201352, 377\u201378; Bernal, \u201cDialectical Materialism,\u201d 103\u20134.<\/li>\n
  43. \u21a9<\/a> This and the following paragraph were drafted nearly in their entirety by Fred Magdoff.<\/li>\n
  44. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 126.<\/li>\n
  45. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 8\u201310; Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy<\/cite> (New York: International Publishers, 1941), 65\u201369.<\/li>\n
  46. \u21a9<\/a> Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos<\/cite> (New York: Bantam, 1984), 252\u201353.<\/li>\n
  47. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 4.<\/li>\n
  48. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, \u201cDialectical Materialism,\u201d 90, 102, 107, 112\u201317.<\/li>\n
  49. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 10\u201312. With respect to Engels on the origins of life, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin wrote that \u201cdialectical materialism has focused [necessarily] mostly on some selected aspects of realty. At times we have emphasized the materiality of life against vitalism, as when Engels said that life was the motion of \u2018albuminous bodies\u2019 (i.e. proteins; now we might say macro-molecules). This seems to be in contradiction to our rejection of molecular reductionism, but simply reflects different moments in an ongoing debate where the main adversaries were first the vitalist emphasis on the discontinuity between the inorganic and living realms, and then the reductionist erasure of the real leaps of levels.\u201d Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 103.<\/li>\n
  50. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, Engels and Science<\/cite>, 13\u201314.<\/li>\n
  51. \u21a9<\/a> D. Bernal, The Freedom of Necessity<\/cite> (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 362.<\/li>\n
  52. \u21a9<\/a> Bernal, The Freedom of Necessity<\/cite>, 364\u201365.<\/li>\n
  53. \u21a9<\/a> Joseph Needham, Time, the Refreshing River<\/cite> (London: George Allen, and Unwin, 1943), 214\u201315; Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach<\/cite>, 12.<\/li>\n
  54. \u21a9<\/a> Needham, Time, the Refreshing River<\/cite>, 214\u201315; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 46, 411.<\/li>\n
  55. \u21a9<\/a> B. S. Haldane, The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences<\/cite> (New York: Random House, 1939), 199\u2013200; Foster, The Return of Nature<\/cite>, 391.<\/li>\n
  56. \u21a9<\/a> Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist<\/cite> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).<\/li>\n
  57. \u21a9<\/a> Stephen Jay Gould, An Urchin in the Storm<\/cite> (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 111\u201312.<\/li>\n
  58. \u21a9<\/a> Needham, Time, the Refreshing River<\/cite>, 14\u201315. Engels wrote: \u201cIt is precisely the alteration of nature by<\/cite> men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought.\u201d Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 511.<\/li>\n
  59. \u21a9<\/a> See John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 13\u201318; Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Clive Hamilton,Defiant Earth<\/cite> (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).<\/li>\n
  60. \u21a9<\/a> Lester, Ray Lankester<\/cite>, 164.<\/li>\n
  61. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster, \u201cCapitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,\u201d 1\u20132, 15\u201316. Foster, The Return of Nature<\/cite>, 64, 286\u201387.<\/li>\n
  62. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 516.<\/li>\n
  63. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 46, 411.<\/li>\n
  64. \u21a9<\/a> Frederick Engels, The Housing Question<\/cite> (Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1975), 92.<\/li>\n
  65. \u21a9<\/a> On Engels\u2019s approach to thermodynamics, see John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth<\/cite> (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 137\u2013203.<\/li>\n
  66. \u21a9<\/a> On Marx and Engels on ecological degradation and extermination in colonial Ireland, see John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 64\u201377.<\/li>\n
  67. \u21a9<\/a> Engels made it clear that the rational regulation of the human relation to nature, and thus a rational application of science, was only possible with \u201ca complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production.\u201d Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 25, 462. On the alienation of science under capitalism, see Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Marx\u2019s Theory of Alienation<\/cite> (London: Merlin, 1975), 101\u20132. The role of science under capitalism is further clarified in Richard Levins\u2019s notion of the \u201cdual nature of science.\u201d Richard Levins, \u201cTen Propositions on Science and Antiscience,\u201d Social Text<\/cite> 46\u201347 (1996): 103\u20134. The uncontrollability of capital is theorized in Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros, Beyond Capital<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 713.<\/li>\n
  68. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, On the First International<\/cite>, ed. Saul Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 10.<\/li>\n
  69. \u21a9<\/a> See Foster, The Return of Nature<\/cite>, 197\u2013204.<\/li>\n
  70. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster and Istvan Suwandi, \u201cCOVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 3\u20134.<\/li>\n
  71. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 2, 95\u2013101, 497; vol. 4, 528. Engels\u2019s admiration for Shelley led him to attempt to translate Queen Mab<\/cite>, along with The Sensitive Plant<\/cite>, into German. See John Green, Engels: A Revolutionary Life<\/cite> (London: Artery, 2008) 28\u201329, 59. For a fascinating treatment of Shelley\u2019s revolutionary poetry and politics, see Annette Rubinstein, The Great Tradition in English Literature<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953), 516\u201364.<\/li>\n
  72. \u21a9<\/a> Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works<\/cite> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), 528.<\/li>\n
  73. \u21a9<\/a> Shelley, Complete Poetical Works<\/cite>, 773. Marx depicted Shelley as \u201cessentially a revolutionist,\u201d a view that Engels shared. Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, Shelley\u2019s Socialism<\/cite> (London: The Journeyman, 1975), 4.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    ________________________________________________<\/p>\n

    The author would like to thank Fred Magdoff for his help at several points in this article.<\/em><\/p>\n

    2020<\/a>, Volume 72, Issue 06 (November 2020)<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

    Go to Original – monthlyreview.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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