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Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism

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 IN

A NEW MATERIALIST MARXISM

THOMAS NAIL
 A
Introduction

S
A rebirth of Marxism is occurring today. For many people Marx never
faded away, but for the rest of the world Marx made his most recent
return to the public eye during the financial collapse of 2008. After the
U
financial meltdown, international book sales of Capital exploded for the
first time in decades. Marx’s face and ideas appeared all over the world, in
newspapers, on television, and on the internet. Universities and occupa-
tion teach-ins hosted public events in which Marxists were asked, for the
first time in a long time, to speak out widely on capitalist crisis and “the
idea of communism.”1 Everyone, it seems, was reading Capital again.
The reason for the return to Marx is obvious: taxpayer bailouts of
P

banks “too big to fail,” government austerity, student-loan debt, millions

displaced from their homes by the collapse of subprime mortgages, his-
torically large income inequalities between the 99 percent and the 1 per-
cent, record-breaking migration, and human-induced climate change all
appeared to be inextricably connected to global capitalism. As the most his-
U

torically foundational and systematic critic of capitalism to date, Karl Marx

remains our contemporary. “Marxism,” as Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “re-
mains the philosophy of our time because we have not gone beyond the
circumstances which engendered it.”2
Every era after Marx has reinvented his ideas to fit its needs. The pre-
O

sent era, inaugurated by the 2008 financial crisis, is no exception. There

is not one Marx forever and for all time, just as there is not one theory of
capitalism, materialism, or communism for all time.3 There are a thousand
Marxes. In fact, one of the greatest insights and contributions of Marx’s
work is that it treats theory itself as a historical practice. Marxism is not

Marx in Motion. Thomas Nail, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197526477.001.0001
2

just an interpretive activity but a creative one. As our historical conditions,

including new knowledge in physics, economics, ecology, culture, and so
on, change, so do the kinds of questions we pose and the kinds of answers
we find. Marx in Motion is a contribution to a twenty-first-century return
to Marx.
The return found in this book, however, is not a “return to Marxism,”
which focuses on Marx’s historical reception. This book is a return to the
writings of Marx read again through the lens of the pressing philosophical

A
and political problems of our time, most notably ecological crisis, gender
inequality, colonial appropriation, and global mobility.
The aim of this book is not to “supplement” or “correct” the apparent
deficiencies or anachronisms of Marx’s writings or even to make his theory
“relevant” by “applying” it to contemporary issues. These interventions

S
have their place, but they are not the focus here. Rather, my aim in this
book is to return to the writings of Marx himself and to read them again as
if they were absolutely contemporary. The outcome is neither an update of
an old Marx nor a new application, but a different Marx altogether.
More specifically, this book reads Marx as a philosopher of movement
U
and motion, inspired by his earliest dissertation writings. From this unique
perspective, I argue that Marx was not a historical determinist, reduc-
tionist materialist, anthropocentric humanist, or structuralist, and he did
not hold a labor theory of value. These bold claims strike at the heart of
well-trod interpretations of Marx and motivate my rereading of him as a
process philosopher of motion and a new materialist avant la lettre. The aim
of this introduction is to contextualize this intervention and introduce the
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theses, methods, and consequences of this project.

I wrote this book on the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, but I would
like to begin by diagnosing the cause of his apparent “death.” For it is only
in his death that he can be born again.4 It is only in the movement of the de-
cline of Marxism that a swerve to a twenty-first-century Marx is possible.
U

THE DECLINE OF MARXISM

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, Marxism as a political ideology had been
O

in decline since the 1970s. There are many reasons for this.5 However, three
reasons stand out as major criticisms upon which Marxism declined but
now makes its return.6 These well-established criticisms come not only
from outside but also from within Marxism itself.
Historical determinism: The first axis of criticism is that Marxism
subscribes to a deterministic theory of history. Various Marxisms endorsed

[2] Marx in Motion

 a theory of human history that was not only entirely deterministic but also
headed toward a pregiven end: communism, the destiny of humanity. This
idea did not work out. We do not need to go back too far in recent history
to see that World War II, the unplanned political revolutions of 1968, the
threat of global nuclear war, global climate change, and other events do not
fit at all into any clear historical pattern of development or liberation. If an-
ything, the opposite is the case. Today, our future seems bleaker than ever.
There is even less evidence that anything like the lockstep necessity

A
of communism, whatever that might look like, is on the immediate ho-
rizon. As in all great developmental historical narratives, which not coin-
cidentally tend to be told from the perspective of their present historical
“achievement,” the future happens. The rise of Soviet socialism came to an
end.7 The predictions of socialist historical determinism did not come to

S
pass, and the ironclad laws of economic necessity, the falling rate of profit,
and other factors failed to hold. The supposedly universal laws of historical
development and capitalism changed.
Furthermore, the creation of a socialist state, party, and vanguard did
not result by historical necessity in revolution or communism. At worst,
U
these entities led to new forms of militarism, patriarchy, imperialism, and
authoritarianism. This is not to say the opposite—that such political forms
necessarily lead to their worst outcomes—only that the forms of the party
and state did not dictate in any deterministic way the results that followed.
Reductionism: The second axis of criticism of Marxism is that it
subscribed to a falsely reductionist model defined by strictly economic
causal laws. Everything, some argued, can be deduced and explained by
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the one-directional causal connection of an economic “base” (the forces

of production) to the cultural “superstructure” of ideas, feelings, and
sensations of the world: ideology, which is the strict product of reducibly
economic modes of production. Even social relations such as race, gender,
sexuality, animality, and nature are categories constituted by the capitalist
U

mode of production, not the other way around. All phenomena are reduc-
ible to economic phenomena. This reductionism, however, simply assumes
what needs to be explained in the first place—namely, the noneconomic
conditions for the emergence of economic conditions themselves.
Although economic relations are undoubtably important aspects of re-
O

ality, historically they have not always played an strictly determining role
in political struggle. For example, many post-1970s liberation movements
and twenty-first-century political struggles have been focused on the
intersectionality of gender, race, sexuality, animal rights, ecological, indig-
enous, and decolonial issues.8 These are certainly related to the capitalist
mode of production but are hardly completely determined by it in a any

INTRODUCTION [3]
4

reducible manner. It is not at all clear how or if such disparate movements

can be understood by economic analysis alone. This led Marxism to various
“supplemented” versions of Marx that “add on” critiques of nature, gender,
race, and other factors.9
Furthermore, the very possibility of “ideology critique” or “revolution”
must also entail the fact there can be no strictly reducible relation between
base and superstructure, or else one could never think or do otherwise
than what is determined by such a base. In other words, critique would be

A
pointless if determinism were actually true.
Another aspect of the critique of reductionism is leveled against Marx’s
materialism. Reductionist materialism says that there are reducibly dialec-
tical laws of all matter and nature. Economic laws are only one expression
of a larger set of natural laws that matter follows. In this version of dia-

S
lectical materialism, there is a natural developmental or evolutionary pat-
tern followed by all matter, conceived of as discrete, actual particles. What
is reductionist here is not only that everything is made of actual discrete
particles, but also that matter itself is reducible to eternal “laws of motion”
known and knowable to science.
U
This classical thesis, however, is no longer a tenable description of matter
by the standards of twenty-first-century physics. In quantum theory,
matter is not discrete particles, but vibrating fields. Matter is not reducibly
empirical or entirely knowable; much less are there any so-called universal
mechanical laws of its motion below the Planck scale.10 Furthermore, the
very idea that matter is something knowable independent of its observation
(not just human observation) is not possible because of quantum entangle-
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ment.11 Where Marxist science has yoked its materialism to a nineteenth-

and even twentieth-century idea of mechanistic materialism and so-called
universal laws, it encounters the limit of quantum systems.12
Anthropocentrism: Insofar as Marxism grants methodological or even
ontological privilege to human beings or human social and economic
U

structures above others, it remains incapable of dealing with one of the

most important events of the twenty-first century: global climate change,
the “Copernican revolution” of our time.13 Anthropocentrism in all its
varieties remains at least partly complicit in the human-centric focus that
has led to the current ecological catastrophe. However, there are at least
O

three major variations on the theme of anthropocentrism in the history of

Marxism that I should mention here.14
The first is the straightforwardly productivist version, which emphasizes
the human effort to subordinate nature through technological innova-
tion. What it means to be a human being, in this version, is to appropriate
as much of nature as possible for the benefit of humanity regardless of

[4] Marx in Motion

 the ecological consequences. Supposedly no other animal has this unique
ability. Humans are special in their consciousness of their own domination
of nature, hence the anthropocentrism of the term “Anthropocene.”
The second version is more humanist in orientation and defined prima-
rily by the sensuous enjoyment of nature. What it means to be human is
to be that animal that knows itself to be experiencing the aesthetic en-
joyment of nature. In this version, too, animals do not have this unique
capacity, and ecological problems remain fundamentally human problems

A
vis-à-vis their limits to the strictly human enjoyment of nature.
The third version is constructivist. Constructivism is antihumanist in-
sofar as it rejects the idea of a human essence, in the place of which it puts
human structures. The human being, for Marxist constructivists, is not a
primarily ahistorical essence but rather a historical product of social, polit-

S
ical, psychological, economic, and linguistic structures. All human know-
ledge of nature is thus limited strictly by these structures. What nature
really is, however, remains ultimately a “thing in itself” beyond the limits
of all human structures. Nature and matter are what exceed or are left out
of our structures, and this lack or failure is our only, albeit paradoxical,
form of knowledge.15
U
***

Given the practical and theoretical success of these criticisms of

Marxism, it is not surprising that their textual origins, Marx’s writings,
have suffered the same fate. Considering the volumes of criticism on
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Marxism, is it still possible to return again to Marx and his work to find
new ideas? My argument is that it is not despite the success of these
criticisms but precisely because of their success that the answer today is
“yes.” The decline of Marxism makes possible a declination or swerve to-
ward something new. In fact, this has already happened more than once
U

in the history of Marxism: once when the humanist “young Marx” of

the 1844 manuscripts was discovered in the 1950s (to swerve away from
Stalinism) and again when the “pre-Capital Marx” of the Grundrisse was
discovered in the 1970s (to swerve away from the young humanist Marx
of the 1950s and 1960s).
O

The argument of this book is that it is time for yet another swerve,
this time to the least read of all Marx’s works: the “first Marx” of his doc-
toral dissertation (to swerve away from both the humanisms of the 1950s
and the constructivisms of the 1970s). Each shift was not exclusive but
operated as a lens through which the other works were reread and returned
to. One always returns from somewhere, depending on the previous turns.

INTRODUCTION [5]
6

Through the lens of contemporary physics, ecology, politics, economics,

and Marx’s doctoral dissertation, it is possible to return to Marx again and
find new answers to the questions of our time. If Marxism is going to be re-
sponsive to the issues of today, it is going to have to move beyond the three
criticisms just discussed. And I think it can.

THE UNDERGROUND CURRENT OF KINETIC MATERIALISM

A
Marxism is not a static doctrine of theses but a continuously flowing cur-
rent of theoretical practice. It is something taken up anew and transformed
by each generation. Therefore it is crucial to understand Marx today as
part of a larger and longer tradition of philosophical materialism, of which
Marxism is a subset. By explicitly taking up the tradition of ancient mate-

S
rialism in his doctoral dissertation, Marx saw himself as putting forward a
new materialism, irreducible to all previous materialisms both ancient and
modern, including their vitalistic and deistic versions.16
Marx saw himself as putting forward a contemporary materialism for his
U
time through an original reading of Epicurean atomism. Long before Marx
had ever read Hegel, his first and original philosophical engagement was
with Epicurus. Before there was the Hegelian Marx, there was the Epicurean
Marx. And since a major source for his knowledge of Epicureanism was
Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, one could say there is a Lucretian Marx as well.
Marx’s intervention and contribution to philosophy can be situated
within the longer tradition of an underground current, starting with
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Lucretius. This is the current of “kinetic” or “process” materialism.17

Lucretius was the first to interpret Epicurus in a completely new way, just
as Epicurus had done to Democritus (as Marx was the first to show).18
Lucretius’s novelty was that he replaced the discreteness of the Greek
atom with the continual flow and kinetic flux of matter. This was not an
U

insignificant move. Matter, for Lucretius, was not some thing in motion, as
it was for modern materialists such as Francis Bacon and even Friederich
Engels. Matter, for Lucretius, was not subject to the kind of deterministic
laws and empirical reductionism that defined most modernist versions of
atomism, including classical physics. Although separated by more than a
O

thousand years, what Marx and Lucretius have in common is that they both
read Epicurus in the same unique way, stressing the continually flowing,
non-discrete, and kinetic features of matter, as I discuss in chapter 1.
Within this larger tradition of materialism, Marx was the first to
herald a “new materialism” that gave historical-ontological primacy to
the stochastic motion of matter opposed to its discrete interpretation in

[6] Marx in Motion

 Democritus, Newton, and others.19 One of the arguments of this book is
that Marx held a very contemporary theory of matter, on a par with recent
new-materialist ones. Unfortunately, most of what is commonly known
about Marx comes not from Marx but from what other people have said he
said—hence the oft-cited claim by Marx, “What is certain is that I myself
am not a Marxist.”20
It is impossible to give a full history of the diverse reception of Marx in
this introduction. However, not to provide at least a brief one would fail to

A
properly contextualize the main interventions of this book. Thus, in the
short sections that follow I describe three major revolutions in the inter-
pretation of Marx’s work and their connection to the three main criticisms
previously described. My intention is to identify where Marxism is today
and foreground what problems need to be overcome.

S
The First Revolution: Soviet Marxism

The first revolution of Marxism occurred during the early twentieth cen-
U
tury alongside the rise of Soviet communism. Soviet Marxism drew on the
work of Marx and Engels to provide a single set of universal principles or
foundations for all future knowledge and social policy. The theory of “dialec-
tical materialism” or Diamat, as it was formalized, was drawn from Engels’s
Dialectics of Nature and provided a synthetic and reductionist theory of all
matter and nature. The law of a universal dialectic was formalized thus:
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1. The law of the unity and conflict of opposites.

2. The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes.
3. The law of the negation of the negation.

The metaphysical view of nature was interpreted from Engels’s Anti-

U

Duhring thus:21

1. The unity of the world consists in its materiality.

2. Never and nowhere has there existed, or can there exist, matter without
motion.
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In short, the aim of Soviet Marxism was to produce universal philosoph-

ical doctrines for Marxism that secured it as a fixed theoretical document
and a doctrine of state governance.22 In doing so, however, Soviet Marxism
fell prey to all three of the criticisms described previously.23 The Soviets
interpreted Engels’s theory in Dialectics of Nature as universal laws of

INTRODUCTION [7]
8

historical evolution and social development. They saw Soviet socialism as

the final stage of world-historical development. They reduced the histor-
ical philosophy of nature to metaphysical propositions about the being of
nature forever and all time. In doing so they reduced the activity and cre-
ativity of matter to a passive servant of metaphysical laws. Above all, they
followed an aggressively productivist anthropocentrism, especially under
Stalin. Nature was industrialized and treated as a mere storehouse of raw
materials.24

A
The Second Revolution: Humanist Marxism

The second revolution of Marxism occurred during the early twentieth cen-

S
tury as a response to the Soviet appropriation of Marxism for determin-
istic and reductionist ends. For many years Marx had been criticized in
France because of his association with Soviet authoritarianism. However,
in the 1930s Marxism began to return again under the aegis of the re-
cently published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, written by
U
the young Marx. This occurred alongside the rise of French Hegelianism
championed by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite. Students of this
return, such as Henri Lefebvre, Lucien Goldmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, found in the young Marx none of the rhetoric of
economic determinism and historical reductionism. Instead, they found a
new discussion of “human being” and “social alienation” uncontaminated
P

by economic formulas, historical doctrines, and Stalinist political terror.

The more humanist and anti-Soviet writings of György Lukács, Karl
Korsch, and Herbert Marcuse circulated widely. The new existential and
phenomenological traditions in France and Germany from the 1930s to
the 1960s were increasingly combined with Hegelian Marxism in the works
U

of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin,

and others associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.
However, the Frankfurt school differed from the existential and phenome-
nological interpretations and took up a position against any kind of bour-
geois or socialist “human essence,” historical “universalism,” and unilateral
O

relation between the base and superstructure.25

This second revolution, although split between widely differing
interpretations, decidedly rejected the deterministic and metaphysical
Marxism of Engels and the Soviets in favor of an approach grounded in
sensuous human practice. The nature of human existence was to be free
from any deterministic laws of nature, history, or matter. Although,

[8] Marx in Motion

 human existence also tended to find itself everywhere constrained by so-
cial structures that alienated it from itself.
In this way, humanist Marxism overcame the problem of determinism.
However, although it rejected economic reductionism, it still held onto an
existential and psychoanalytic reductionism in which the relation between
base and superstructure was merely reconfigured around human-centric
social psychology. Even if they differed on the question of humanism, phe-
nomenological and Frankfurt school style Marxism both made little at-

A
tempt to conceal their overt anthropocentrism.26

The Third Revolution: Post- Structuralist Marxism

The third revolution of Marxism occurred during the 1960s and 1970s as a

S
response to the humanist neglect of the larger structural conditions of cap-
italism and the hierarchical centralization of the communist party itself. In
Italy, for example, the autonomist Marxists emphasized the idea of “living
labor” as the heart of political and social (not just economic) life. Living
labor has the power not only to work but to play, to live and self-organize
U
outside the structure of the factory, union, and party. Autonomism created
social movements distinct from and in contrast to political parties. Their
revolts were against authoritarian socialism as well as contemporary rep-
resentative democracy.
The 1970s also saw the rise of third world Marxisms, in which the divi-
sion between colonizers and colonized became the main axis of struggle
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and analysis. Class division was not fundamental but derived from colonial
relationships first and foremost. At the end of Capital Marx suggested that
one should expect to see in the projects of colonization the geographical re-
birth of primitive accumulation and the historical techniques of capitalism
again and again. Third world Marxism takes this seriously as the starting
U

point of critique and resistance and not class antagonism.

Feminist Marxism during this time rejected the male-worker-centric
interpretation of Capital by emphasizing the assumption that only waged
male workers were laborers. In fact, Women’s cheap or free work is funda-
mental to the capitalist mode of production and thus cuts to the heart of
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where value comes from.

In French Marxism, Louis Althusser initiated a new “return to Marx” and
began to reread the later Marx of Capital. His reading focused on the “rela-
tions and forces of production,” against the young Marx of the manuscripts,
which focused on human essence and alienation.27 Althusser, Étienne
Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière, and Pierre Macherey copublished

INTRODUCTION [9]
01

Reading Capital in 1965, which emphasized the nondeterministic and

nonreductionist nature of the structure of capitalism but also the way in
which capital itself shapes and produces the human subject.
Most famously, Althusser argued that there was an “epistemological
break” between Marx’s earlier work, influenced by German idealism and
classical political economy, and his later work, which introduced an en-
tirely new philosophical system centered around the production of know-
ledge. Knowledge, Althusser argued, was produced through “problematic”

A
or “conjunctural” historical sites, entirely independent from the ideolog-
ical superstructure. Althusser definitively broke with the deterministic and
reductionist Marx as well as the humanist Marx. Later, post-structuralist
Marxists such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Francois Lyotard, Alain
Badiou, and Michel Foucault were all influenced by Althusser but also

S
diverged from him in significant ways that I cannot address here.28
With respect to the major axes of criticism described here, however, the
important commonality was that Althusser, the post-structuralist Marxists,
autonomists, postcolonial Marxists, and feminists all largely returned to a
definitively new Marx without historical determinism, economic or mate-
U
rialist reductionism, or humanism. The human subject was something that
was completely dissolved into the various social, linguistic, unconscious,
historical, political, geographical, gendered, and economic structures. The
human became simply the site or terminal of an intersection of one or
more interlocking social, gendered, or geographical structures.
However, and importantly, all these social structures (gender, race, pol-
itics, etc.)—or “assemblages,” “apparatuses,” “relations of forces,” and so
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on—are human structures, outside of which nothing can be said or thought.29

In the post-structuralist treatments of Marx, then, Marx remained an an-
thropocentric social constructivist of one variety or another.30
U

MARX AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOTION

Each of these revolutions overcame a problem posed by the previous

interpretations, but only by introducing another problem. The aim of this
book therefore is to provide a reading of Marx that tries to overcome all three
O

of the problems previously described without having to go outside Marx’s

own writings. In particular, the charge of anthropocentrism has proven to
be the most entrenched in all three major interpretive revolutions. It has
thus become the focus of much recent criticism from such new-materialist
philosophers as Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, and Rosi
Braidotti. New materialists even interpret post-structuralist Marxism

[ 10 ] Marx in Motion
 as hopelessly “old-materialist” and anthropocentric, alongside the three
criticisms already discussed.31
However, Marxists have also been quick, and right, to point out the polit-
ical limitations of any sort of “new materialism” that would leave Marx and
political economy behind altogether.32 Despite their apparent incompati-
bility, I think these two traditions have much to gain from each other. This
book is the first attempt to bring Marxism and new materialism together in
the hope of revitalizing Marxism for the twenty-first century.33

A
Efforts have already been made in this direction.34 To my knowledge,
however, this is the first book-length work on this topic. At the same
time, this book is also meant to make an important contribution to the
broader return of Marx to the popular political imagination. In short,
I hope to make the case for a new materialist Marxism—nondeterministic,

S
nonreductionist, and nonanthropocentric.
In particular, what this book adds to the long tradition of underground
kinetic materialism in general and to the recent interest in Marx and new
materialism in particular is a reinterpretation of Marx as a philosopher
of motion. If taken seriously, this simple, and for some intuitive or naive,
U
approach is the methodological key to overcoming the three criticisms of
Marxism previously listed. For some, Marx’s interest in motion might even
appear to be so obvious that it is not worth saying much more about, but
that is precisely the problem. It is all too well-known that Marx “is always
talking about movement and motion,”35 and that dialectics is the “science
of movement.”36 However, what is not so well-known (or at least not agreed
upon) is exactly what Marx meant by motion and why it was the key to his
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new materialism.
At the core of all three axes of interpretive criticism discussed previ-
ously is a particularly problematic interpretation of motion that I argue
does not accurately reflect Marx’s own theory of kinetic materialism.
Accordingly—and this is the most ambitious claim of this book—each in-
U

terpretive revolution has fallen prey to the historical criticisms mentioned,

in part because it has not sufficiently theorized the nature and primacy of
motion in Marx’s work.
When I first began researching this topic, I was shocked to discover an
almost complete lack of scholarship on the topic of movement, motion, and
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mobility in Marx. Why had an almost ubiquitous theme in Marx’s work,

such as movement, not been the primary object of at least a few studies?
I think there are at least three major reasons for this lacuna, which I ad-
dress in this book.
Engels: First of all, Marx’s theory of motion has been neglected because
of its historical association with the more metaphysical and scientific theory

INTRODUCTION [ 11 ]
21

of matter-in-motion associated with Engels’s Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of

Nature. Unlike Marx, Engels adopted a specific historical theory of matter-
in-motion along the lines of nineteenth-century classical physics, which
was committed to a mechanistic theory of discrete, particle-like bits of em-
pirical matter. There has thus been a tendency in at least recent scholarship
to avoid this topic in favor of less metaphysically burdened ones.37
The Soviets: Second, and relatedly, Marx’s theory of motion has been
neglected because of its doctrinal appropriation by Soviet Marxists. The

A
Soviets, perhaps more than anyone else, were responsible for adopting
Engels’s theory of matter-in-motion and insisting it was also Marx’s when
it was not. In principle, this is only a theoretical error, but practically and
historically Stalin tied this interpretation directly to his practice of terror
and authoritarianism. After this, no humanist or post-structuralist Marxist

S
wanted anything to do with such metaphysical and Soviet-tainted theories
of motion and matter.
The doctoral dissertation: Third, Marx’s theory of motion has been ne-
glected because hardly anyone reads or writes about Marx’s doctoral disser-
tation and his notebooks on Epicurean philosophy. However, they provide
U
the single most-concentrated theory of matter and motion in his oeuvre.38
Unfortunately, Marx’s doctoral dissertation and Epicurean notebooks re-
main among the least-read and most marginalized of all his works for sev-
eral reasons. The dissertation was unpublished during Marx’s lifetime, was
missing its last two chapters, was only published in German as recently
as 1927, and was only published in a complete English translation in the
collected works as late as 1975.39 Only recently, in 2004, was an abridged
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English translation made available at an affordable price. Therefore, the ne-

glect of Marx’s theory of motion is in part a result of the late arrival and
inaccessibility of its primary source material.
However, even after the doctoral dissertation and Epicurean notebooks
were published, there was a lack of interest in them and even an active
U

burying of anything in Marx’s oeuvre that smacked of metaphysical ma-

terialism, German Naturphilosophie, Soviet-style doctrines of nature,
and so on.
Furthermore, lack of interest in the doctoral dissertation might also be
attributable to the fact that it is so different from Marx’s other writings
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that it is not obvious at all how it has any connection to the privileged
early manuscripts and mature Capital that dominate the humanist and
post-structuralist traditions, respectively. The technical details of Greek
and Latin classical philology hardly seem relevant to the imperatives of the
class struggle, ecological collapse, colonialism, or anything else.

[ 12 ] Marx in Motion
 Even when Marxists have returned to Marx’s theory of nature, matter,
and motion, they have tended to either avoid the doctoral dissertation, as
the Frankfurt humanist Alfred Schmitt does in The Concept of Nature in
Marx (1962), or reject Marx’s conclusions altogether, like post-structuralist
Gilles Deleuze. For example, Deleuze explicitly subordinates matter and
motion to force in his book on Nietzsche, contrasting himself and Nietzsche
with Lucretius’s and Marx’s kinetic materialisms.40

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THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK

The thesis of this book is that Marx’s theory of kinetic materialism is

the key to overcoming the three major problems of Marxism previously
identified. This is a bold claim that will require the length of the book to

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demonstrate, but in place of a full defense of my interpretation, I give the
reader here the short version of three core contentions to be proven.
Kinetic dialectics: Marx’s theory of motion rejects deterministic
theories of nature and society. Matter does not follow mechanistic, vi-
talistic, classical, or any other deterministic laws of motion. History is
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not predetermined, linearly developmental, progressive, or teleological.
Furthermore, there is no historical necessity for party, state, or vanguard
politics nor any necessity for their absence for revolutionary praxis. In con-
trast to deterministic or law-governed motion, Marx proposes, first in his
doctoral dissertation and then throughout his work, a pedetic or stochastic
theory of what I call “kinetic dialectics.” Pedesis is a kind of physical motion
that is neither strictly necessary nor strictly random. Each new motion is
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directly related to the previous one but is not determined by the history of
motions leading up to it or even strictly by the motion immediately prior.
Pedetic motion has no teleological end goal. For Marx, there are no uni-
versal laws of nature that matter passively follows. Matter itself is active
and creative. Laws are emergent tendencies in nature.
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Historical materialism: Marx’s theory of motion also rejects the eco-

nomically reductionist division between “base” and “superstructure.” Not
only is there no merely causal relationship between the two, but there is
also no “interaction” between them. There is, strictly speaking, no material
division between them at all. The transformations and co-productions of
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the two domains are collectively self-caused or self-moved. There is only a

kinetic transformation and redistribution of the whole historical situation.
Furthermore, Marx’s theory of motion is in conflict with any reduc-
tionist theory of matter. Marx’s theory of motion in his doctoral disserta-
tion and Epicurean notebooks provides a rejection of all atomistic theories

INTRODUCTION [ 13 ]
41

of matter. There are no discrete particles following universal natural laws.

Marx’s theory of motion completely conflicts with both crude mecha-
nistic and strictly empirical theories of matter as well as contemplative
or speculative metaphysical theories. Marx has no metaphysics of matter
or motion. Unlike typical interpretations of Greek atomism, Marx was
the first modern thinker to reject the discrete interpretation of matter in
favor of continual and pedetic flows. Unlike other modern interpretations
of atomism that treated atoms as eternal and unchanging (Bacon) and

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reintroduced God (Gassendi) or vitalism (Cavendish), Marx was the only
one who dared to treat matter as a kinetic process and thus reject any reduc-
tionist or substance-based theory of what matter “is.”
Marx thus provides a decidedly anticlassical theory of matter much
closer to contemporary quantum theories than most Marxists have hith-

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erto considered. Matter, for Marx, is not reducible to actual, observable,
empirical matter, not because it is speculative or ideal (as in Democritus)
but precisely because matter is in motion and flux. Matter is not reducible
to sensuous things or substances because it is the condition for sensation
itself as a process. The irreducible primacy of motion at the heart of matter
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persists throughout Marx’s work and resists all forms of reductionism.
Historical ontology: Marx’s theory of motion is not an ontology of
matter or of motion; it is a historical ontology. Marx grounds his kinetic
materialism neither in a metaphysical theory of matter “in itself” nor in
a strictly anthropocentric or social practice of how matter is “for us.” For
Marx, there is no ontological division between nature and society. Marx’s
theory of matter instead is strictly grounded in praxis, but praxis is not
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something only humans do. Human theoretical practices of describing na-

ture are always embodied and historically situated. Philosophy relies on the
material conditions of its inscription. But so do nonhuman practices.
In other words, this position is distinct from two common positions in
contemporary Marxism. On one side, it is distinct from anthropocentric
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constructivism or “social monisms,” which argue that human descriptions

of matter are antirealist and can say nothing about matter or nature “in it-
self” outside capitalism. On the other side, it is distinct from metaphysical
theories of how nature or matter is “in itself” forever and all time. Between
anthropic constructivism and naive realism, this book argues that Marx
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was a nonanthropocentric realist.

Human descriptions of nature are nature describing and changing itself
in one way or another. But other natural beings are also entangled with
one another in a transformative way. Nature really constructs itself. Marx’s
ontology is thus historical in the sense that it is a real description/transfor-
mation of nature from a certain region of nature. In the future, matter will

[ 14 ] Marx in Motion
 change, and new positions will open new regions of nature. Marx provides
us with an ontology that is entirely regional and yet also realist at the same
time. For Marx, there is no ontological dualism or interaction between
humans and nature; nor is there a simple monism, either. Rather, there is a
multiplicity of folds or knots.
Marx does not give us a “flat ontology” in which the agency of matter
is equally distributed horizontally, like the fraternal relations of bourgeois
liberalism and various new materialism political theories. Rather, he gives

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us a twisted ontology in which different regions of matter are unevenly
developed and circulated. This book therefore presents neither a humanist
Marx nor an antihumanist Marx but rather a new-materialist Marx of un-
even material agencies: an entangled and kinetic Marxism.
These are some of the main claims this book aims to prove in its return

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to Marx. I do not expect that the reader will find these theses to be imme-
diately obvious. If they were, there would be no need to write this book.
However, since it is my aim to refrain from merely supplementing Marx’s
work with other theorists, I ask for the reader’s patience and goodwill
until I can demonstrate whether these theses sink or swim through a close
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reading of the texts themselves. Especially if the reader is not well-versed
in Marx’s doctoral dissertation, I think some very surprising discoveries
and unexpected connections to Marx’s later work await them. I am not
arguing that Marx’s dissertation is the key to the “true Marx,” only that it
is an important missing piece of his philosophy that may help us resolve
some contemporary difficulties in Marxist theory more generally.
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METHOD

This book is structured along four methodological lines.

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Close Reading

First and foremost, this book is structured by a close reading of volume 1,

chapter one of Capital, in which Marx puts forward his intended and fully
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edited core theory of value, upon which his whole theory of the capitalist
mode of production rests. However, in preparation for this close reading,
I first look at his theoretical framework of motion and kinetic materialism,
initially put forward in his doctoral dissertation and Epicurean notebooks.
Once I have identified this guiding methodological thread throughout sev-
eral of Marx’s books, I use this method to read a number of key concepts

INTRODUCTION [ 15 ]
61

in Capital from this new perspective. In other words, motion is not a local
dispute or something that hinges on a line or two in one of his books. I am
arguing that it is something completely integral to the entire core of Marx’s
thought and touches upon every aspect of it. It is what makes Marx’s work
and methodology so absolutely original and heretical in the history of
Western philosophy.
The aim of my close reading is not to pick and choose quotes favorable to
the arguments of this book but to confront difficult and contrary passages

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head on. My aim is also not to provide a creative reinterpretation that
merely floats above Marx’s text but to go line by line and show the nuance
and consistency of my interpretation in chapter one of Capital. These aims
are achieved by staying as close to the core text as possible and supporting
it with relevant material from his collected works.

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Translation

This leads to my second methodological line: translation. This book offers

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not only a fresh interpretation of Marx but also a few novel interventions
regarding the English translation of the German text. In general, I have
tried to pay special attention to the kinetic valences of Marx’s vocabulary,
especially where the English translation does not show this plainly enough.
Since I cannot comment on all these interventions here, I simply draw the
reader’s attention to a few of the most important and interrelated German
words that guide my translation and interpretation.
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The first translation intervention is that I have highlighted a kinetic and

conceptual connection between three important and interrelated German
words in Marx’s vocabulary: zusammenhängen, wechsel, and verkehr. Marx
uses these three words extensively throughout his works to describe
the continual process of kinetic entanglement among different matters.
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Zusammenhängen literally means “to hang together” in mutual and

interrelational support but is unfortunately translated as “connection” or
“conglomerate,” which covers over the idea of mutual intra-action. Wechsel
means “to continuously change or fold” and is used to describe the “con-
tinuous flux or fold of matter” or Stoffwechsel, which is often translated as
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the more technical scientific term “metabolism.” Marx also uses the word
wechsel to emphasize when actions or effects (Wirkungen) fold back into
each other in a kind of immanent feedback loop or continual transforma-
tion of the whole (Wechselwirkung). Finally, the term Verkehr is an “inter-
change or intercourse,” and Marx uses it in such a wide variety of contexts
(economic, military, semantic, and sexual) that it seems to be connected to

[ 16 ] Marx in Motion
 the “process of mutual transformation” previously mentioned. Throughout
this book I have tried to show how these three words and their important
kinetic meanings function as a guiding preoccupation in Marx’s work from
the doctoral dissertation to Capital.
My second translation intervention is that I have tried to develop all the
interpretive valences included in the rich German verb tragen. Although
typically translated as “to bear,” tragen also means to support, maintain,
carry, give birth, bear fruit, wear clothing, take, and drag. This is an impor-

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tant set of meanings because Marx places them at the heart of his theory
of value. “In the form of society to be considered here, they [use-values] are
also the material bearers [Träger] of exchange-value” (C, 126). Marx says
that before the creation of value, there must be use-values that support
and maintain the material conditions of value. In other words, the material

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bearer (Träger) supports and maintains (tragen) value. Bearing is not only an
active and kinetic term (indicating the birth origins of value-in-movement)
but also refers directly to the constitutive labor of nature, women, animals,
and slaves. This is the supportive activity that is appropriated by capitalism.
This idea is crucial for reinterpreting Marx’s theory of value as continuous
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with his theory of primitive accumulation.

Argumentation

There is also an argumentative method followed by this book. Marx did not
follow Engels’s approach to the dialectics of nature but had his own mate-
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rialist dialectics. Marx’s dialectics was quite different and based on an orig-
inal philosophy of motion. After Lucretius’s reading of Epicurus, Marx was
the first to give the movement of matter historical-ontological primacy,
untethered by the static constraints of the typical interpretations of Greek
atomism. Such a controversial thesis, I admit, is not immediately trans-
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parent and will entail more than a few battles with prevailing paradigms
of contemporary Marxism. This book therefore contains a number of argu-
mentative lines of reasoning alongside its more close readings and transla-
tion interventions, not from a love of polemic but to show at each step the
novelty and force of the readings and translations that support the larger
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theses of this book.

However, there is a limit to this method of tying close reading with
argumentation. The core theses of this book remain tied strictly to the
close readings. In other words, this book does not attempt to extend its
arguments beyond the texts considered, although I believe it is possible to
do so, just not in a single book.

INTRODUCTION [ 17 ]
81

My reading will not and cannot be extended here because of the length
and depth necessary to textually support arguments of this kind. How
far it can be extended must remain an open question for future work.
The arguments presented here are therefore not universal or synthetic
arguments that speak for the whole of Marx’s corpus or aim to reinter-
pret or defend everything Marx has ever written. With the exception of
identifying a movement-oriented methodology through his works, the
scope of most of the arguments of this book pertains, at least for the mo-

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ment, exclusively to chapter one of Capital, although I have also drawn in
support from the rest of the collected works to show that such an argument
could in principle be extended and elaborated more broadly.

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History

The fourth and final methodical line of this book is historical. My argumen-
tative thesis allows me to demonstrate a new historical resonance that has
recently emerged between Marx and the present. Every new epoch changes
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the conditions in which the past is understood. New lines and legacies are
drawn up constantly. In particular, the current historical conjuncture at the
turn of the twenty-first century (postcolonial global migration, ecological
collapse, global feminism) makes a new reading of Marx both possible and
urgent.
Marx is not a relic of history. All that was solid has now fully melted into
air, just as Marx had anticipated. The world is more mobile today than ever
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before and more than Marx could have imagined. Thus Marx continues to
speak to us as a contemporary of a world in motion. It is now time to return
his work to the surface of our world and allow the underground current of
materialism to erupt once again.
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[ 18 ] Marx in Motion

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