the dialectics of ecology福斯特

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DOI: 10.14452/MR-075-08-2024-01_1 REVIEW OF THE MONTH
The Dialectics of Ecology

An Introduction
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER
All nature is in a perpetual state of flux.… There is nothing clearly de-

fined in nature.… Everything is bound up with everything else.
—Denis Diderot1
As Harvard ecologist and Marxian theorist Richard Levins observed,

“perhaps the first investigation of a complex object as a system was the
masterwork of Karl Marx, Das Kapital,” which explored both the econom-
ic and ecological bases of capitalism as a social-metabolic system.2 The
premise of the dialectics of ecology, as it is addressed in this article, is that it
is above all in classical historical materialism/dialectical naturalism that
we find the method and analysis that allows us to connect “the history of
labor and capitalism” to that of the “Earth and the planet,” enabling us to
investigate from a materialist standpoint the Anthropocene crisis of our
times.3 In Marx’s words, humanity is both “a part of nature” and itself “a
force of nature.”4 There was, in his conception, no rigid division between
natural history and social history. Rather, “The history of nature and the
history of men [humanity]” were seen as “dependent on each other as
long as men exist.”5
In this view, the relation of labor and capitalism to the earth’s metabo-
lism is at the center of the critique of the existing order. “Labour,” Marx
wrote, “is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by
which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls
the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials
of nature as a force of nature.”6 However, with the advent of “capitalist
production,” a systematic disturbance and displacement occurs in “the
metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” creating a metabolic
rift, or ecological crisis, severing essential natural relations and not only
“robbing the worker but…robbing the soil.”7
Today, this ecological rift in the metabolism of society and nature can be
seen as having reached an Earth System level, creating what scientists have
called an “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the entire
planet, resulting in what Frederick Engels referred to metaphorically as
the “revenge” of nature.8 In the classical historical-materialist perspective,
This is the introduction to John Bellamy Foster, The Dialectics of Ecology: Society and Nature
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024).
1
2 MONTHLY RE V IE W / J an u ary 2024
this contradiction can only be resolved by reconciling humanity and na-

ture. Such a reconciliation requires overcoming not simply the alienation
of nature, but the self-alienation of humanity itself, manifested most fully
in today’s destructive, commodified society. What is necessary in such an
analysis is recognition from the start of the “corporeal” nature of human
existence itself, which is tied to production. Hence, if a “new universal
history of the human” is necessary in our time, it is here, within the his-
torical-materialist tradition, that the necessary materialist, dialectical, and
ecological method is to be found. For Marx, “Universally developed individ-
uals, whose social relations, as their own communal relations, are hence
also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of na-
ture, but of history.”9 However, human history is never detached from “the
universal metabolism of nature,” of which the social metabolism based in
the labor and production process is an emergent part.10
In such a dialectical-ecological perspective, there are no fixed answers
applicable to all of history, since everything around us in natural history
and social history—constituting, as Marx said, the “two sides” of a single
material reality—can be seen as in a state of constant flux.11 Nevertheless,
it will be argued here that the method of dialectical ecology, rooted in
historical materialism and aimed at transcending the alienation of hu-
manity and nature, provides a basis for uniting theory and practice in
new, revolutionary ways. This constitutes the necessary dialectical nega-
tion or overcoming of the material conditions of our current alienated,
divided, and dangerous world, itself the product of human historical de-
velopment. Such a view assumes that there is a contingent, ever-changing
historical process in which each new emergent reality bears within it an
incompleteness and various contradictory relations, leading to further
transformative developments. As Corrina Lotz indicates, dialectical nega-
tion properly embraces “absenting (Roy Bhaskar’s term), removal, loss,
conflict, interruption, leaps and breaks,” often understood in terms of the
general concept of emergence, or the qualitative shift to higher organiza-
tional levels, which, as Engels said, always carries within it the potential
for annihilation.12 The structure of history, including natural history, thus
always contains within it crises and catastrophes, along with the possi-
bility of something qualitatively new, drawn from a combination of re-
siduals of the past (previously negated realities) interacting in contingent
ways with the present as history and generating transformative change.
History, whether natural or human history, is thus not linear, but rather
manifests itself as a spiral form of development.
The notion of human historical development, a relatively recent con-
ception that scarcely precedes the capitalist era, is a product of the chang-
R eview of the M onth 3
ing relation of human beings to nature as a whole. As Marx recognized,

Epicurus in Hellenistic antiquity saw the origins of natural philosophy or
natural science as tied to an overriding sense of danger that the natural
world represented in the daily lives of human beings.13 In Epicurean phi-
losophy, there was no rational answer to be found to this existential con-
dition, other than reconciliation with the world through forms of con-
templative self-consciousness and the development of a sense of oneness
with nature, or ataraxia, by means of enlightenment/science.
The enormous historical development of the productive forces, sepa-
rating antiquity from the modern world, and the emergence of modern
science in this context was to alter fundamentally the relation between
humanity and its natural environment. Bourgeois society, as a result of
this “progress” and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century,
would revel in the “domination of nature” provided by Enlightenment
science. The realm of natural necessity was seen in this conception as
being forever pushed back and even transcended.14 This, however, gave
rise to the conceit, as Engels noted, of “human victories over nature” in
the manner of “a conqueror over a foreign people,” a view that, because
of its lack of foresight and its narrow objectives, led to human-generated
ecological catastrophes.15
As a result of the historical process, humanity finds itself once again
confronted with an overarching sense of danger emanating from the
forces of nature. Yet, behind this existential threat to humanity and life
lies human labor, itself a force of nature, now generating planetary-level
catastrophe. The alienation of nature under capitalism is such that mon-
ey is fetishistically mistaken for existence, while private extraction and
expropriation, the robbery of the earth, is confused with real wealth. In
the historical-materialist view, the contradiction between humanity and
the earth can be transcended before it proves fatal, but only if the two
sides of human self-alienation—alienation from humanity and alienation
from nature—are transcended through the “revolutionary reconstitution
of society as a whole” and the creation of a world of substantive equality
and ecological sustainability.16
The development of such an approach based on classical historical-ma-
terialist grounds cannot consist simply of a theoretical reconstruction
of the analysis of Marx and Engels in this area, involving a synthesis of
their contributions to an ecological-materialist dialectics. At best, the
only thing such an approach can generate is a more critical method in
analyzing the present, although it is the actual overcoming of the pres-
ent as history that is the overriding concern. Above all, it is necessary
to address the rapidly developing ecological crisis of the Anthropocene
Epoch in human history, which marks the rise of anthropogenic, as op-

posed to nonanthropogenic, factors as the main driving force of Earth
System change. Here we must confront the current financialization of
nature, the new phase of planetary extractivism, questions of human sur-
vivability, and the revolutionary struggle to create a society of planned
degrowth and ecological civilization geared to sustainable human de-
velopment. All of this, however, depends on the recovery, development,
and unification in theory and praxis of the dialectical-ecological critique
of capitalism, which is an indispensable and indisputable legacy of clas-
sical historical materialism.
The D u a l N e gati o n o f Di a l ec t i c a l Mat erialism
So v ie t M a r x ism a nd t he Di a l ec t i c s o f Nature
The reconstruction of Marxian ecology based on classical historical ma-

terialism is a very recent and still very incomplete development, largely
confined to the present century and to the rise of ecosocialism. Both of-
ficial Marxism associated with the Soviet Union of the late 1930s and af-
ter, which removed the critical element within philosophy together with
Marx’s ecological analysis, and the Western Marxist philosophical tradi-
tion, which rejected dialectical naturalism altogether, presented enor-
mous obstacles to the further development of the historical-materialist
ecological critique. This, then, constituted a dual negation of the dialec-
tics of nature emanating from the Cold War antagonism between East
and West. But it is one that has been increasingly transcended in recent
decades as material conditions have changed.
Soviet philosophy, as originally conceived under the leadership of
V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Nikolai Bukharin on the occasion of the
launching of its original flagship publication, Under the Banner of Marx-
ism, in 1922, was intended to bring together the materialist perspectives
of both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks (representing, respectively, the rela-
tively reformist and revolutionary tendencies within Russian Marxism),
mechanists and dialecticians, and philosophers and natural scientists,
with the object of the concretization of a wider and internally differen-
tiated philosophy of dialectical materialism. This was a term introduced by
the working-class philosopher Joseph Dietzgen and owed its influence
mainly to the work of the founding Russian Marxist (and Menshevik)
Georgi Plekhanov.17
Lenin set the tone in his 1922 letter to Under the Banner of Marxism,
which was published as an article titled “On the Significance of Militant
Materialism.” Here, he insisted that it was necessary to bring “material-
ists of the non-communist camp” together with revolutionary material-

ists in order to promote a mutually engaged philosophical discussion.
The object was to develop a fundamentally Marxist “militant material-
ist” view and at the same time guard against rigid dogmas. “One of the
biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally
by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of
a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolu-
tionaries alone.” Rather than excluding leading Menshevik philosophers
such as the talented Liubov Isaakovna Akselrod (a former assistant to
Plekhanov) and Abram M. Deborin from the new journal, Lenin insist-
ed on the necessity of their inclusion. To protect against mechanistic
materialism or mechanism (today more often called reductionism), he
declared as essential the critical incorporation of Hegelian dialectics, de-
spite its idealist basis, within the purview of the journal. Thus, Under the
Banner of Marxism should, in his words, “be a kind of ‘Society of Material-
ist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics.’”18
Soviet philosophy was from the start aimed at developing dialectical
materialism as a general theoretical view applicable to both philosophy
and science, based proximately on the work of Engels, Plekhanov, and
Lenin, but rooted more fundamentally in the work of Marx, G. W. F. He-
gel, and Baruch Spinoza. (Marx’s philosophical discussions in his early
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were at that time unknown.)
Engels’s Anti-Dühring and the incomplete Dialectics of Nature provided a
guiding thread that, in its most succinct expression, revolved around the
three ontological principles or “laws,” derived from Hegel, of the (1) trans-
formation of quantity into quality, and vice versa; (2) the identity or unity
of opposites; and (3) the negation of the negation.19 The first of these
was meant to capture what are often called in today’s scientific language
phase changes or threshold effects, in which quantitative changes lead
to new qualitative realities. Through such qualitative transformations,
which can be observed both in nonhuman nature and in society, a “new
power,” Marx and Engels observed, emerges that is “entirely different
from the sum of its separate forces.”20 The second ontological principle
addresses the contradictions that arise due to incompatible developments
within the same relation intrinsic to all processes of motion, activity, and
change. The third ontological principle of the negation of the negation
refers to how the processes associated with the first two principles set
the stage for dialectical negations, that is, the negation of the previous
negation, and a process of Aufhebung (referring simultaneously to tran-
scendence, suppression, preserving, overcoming, and superseding), giv-
ing rise to sharp reversals and transformations, establishing qualitatively
new emergent realities arising at a higher level, and a complex “spiral

form of development” in which negation is never mere negation, but
contains within it the positive (and vice versa).21
“The ‘dialectical moment,’” Lenin wrote in his Philosophical Notebooks,
“demands the demonstration of ‘unity,’ i.e., of the connection of negative
and positive, the presence of this positive in the negative. From assertion
to negation—from negation to ‘unity’ with the asserted—without this,
dialectics becomes empty negation, a game, or scepsis [skepticism].”22 Al-
though it has been common to reduce dialectics to the unity of opposites,
such an approach would be completely barren, in Lenin’s view, since it
excludes dialectical negation.23
In 1924, a major debate broke out between the mechanists, who were
associated with figures like Akselrod and the militant mechanist-atheist
Ivan Ivanovich Skvortsov-Stepanov, and the more dialectically oriented
thinkers under the leadership of Deborin and his Institute of Red Profes-
sors.24 The mechanists were tied more directly to natural science and to
such leading theorists as Bukharin, and before him Plekhanov, both of
whom had displayed mechanistic tendencies, though neither were en-
tirely averse to dialectical analysis.25 The dialecticians, in contrast, were
far more removed from natural science and focused on Hegelian idealism
as critically mediated by the materialist tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach,
Marx, Engels, and Lenin.26
The main theoretical dispute dividing the mechanists and the Deborin-
ists revolved around the proposition of the former that both organic and
inorganic nature could be reduced simply to mechanical properties. This
ran counter to a dialectics predicated on the existence of irreducible or-
ganizational forms, associated in particular with Engels’s analysis in An-
ti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, the latter being published for the first
time in 1925.27 Deborin, as well as most other Soviet philosophers, ar-
gued that it was impossible to reduce in its entirety a qualitatively higher
form, such as organic life, to a lower form, such as inorganic matter.
Commenting on William Robert Grove’s The Correlation of Physical Forces
(1846), Engels wrote: “Chemical action is not possible without change of
temperature and electric changes; organic life [is not possible] without
mechanical, molecular, chemical, thermal, electric, etc. changes. But the
presence of these subsidiary forms does not exhaust the essence of the
main form in each case. One day we shall certainly ‘reduce’ thought ex-
perimentally to molecular and chemical motion in the brain; but does
that exhaust the essence of thought?”28 In this view, higher organization-
al levels, such as mind/thought, could not be reduced simply to lower
organizational levels, even though the former were dependent on the
latter. It was the distinction between different qualitative forms/levels/

planes within material existence, Engels explained, that was the basis
for the division of the various sciences, separating, for example, biology
from chemistry and physics.
Nevertheless, the mechanists, representing the then dominant scien-
tific outlook, challenged Engels’s view that qualitative forms/levels dif-
ferentiated reality, as well as thought. Thus, Skvortsov-Stepanov declared
that Engels’s claim that higher forms of material existence could not be
explained simply by lower ones, and thus that mechanical forms of mo-
tion could not account in their entirety for the human psyche, had to be
rejected outright.29 Reductionism, in conformity with modern mechanis-
tic science, was seen as a general principle applicable to all of existence,
in line with positivism. Thus, it was often said that “the mind was a mere
secretion of the brain”—a proposition first put forward by Pierre Jean
Georges Cabanis in 1802 and even seemingly accepted by Charles Dar-
win.30 In contrast, the Deborinist philosophers based their analysis on
the dual critique of Hegelian idealism and of mechanistic materialism.
On the issue of reductionism, they relied heavily on Engels’s notion of
quantitative change leading to qualitative transformation.
It soon became clear that neither side had the upper hand intellectu-
ally, since this was in large part a division between positivist natural sci-
ence and dialectical philosophy. Yet, despite the philosophical stalemate,
the Deborinists managed to triumph over their rivals through purely po-
litical means by 1929, using their superior control over the main institu-
tions of Soviet philosophy to exclude the competing view.31
The Deborinist triumph, however, proved to be short-lived since,
within a year, they were placed on the defensive due to an attack from a
more powerful political quarter: the Communist Party hierarchy itself.
This represented the direct intervention of the so-called Bolshevizers
of the party hierarchy into the struggles on the philosophical front.
Although not directly defending the mechanists, considered a “right de-
viation,” the party hierarchy decided that it was necessary to rein in the
Deborinists as a “left deviation.” The Deborinists were variously accused
of being Mensheviks, idealists, vitalists, and weak in their criticisms of
Trotsky and other left deviationists. The crushing blow, however, was Jo-
seph Stalin’s official declaration in December 1930 that the Deborinists
were “Menshevizing Idealists.” Deborin himself was denounced based
on his Menshevik past of some three decades prior, while the dialecti-
cians were also charged with being associated with the brilliant Marxist
economist I. I. Rubin, author of Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, who was
executed in 1937.32
The suppression of Soviet philosophy in the 1930s was inscribed in

stone with the publication of Stalin’s “Dialectical and Historical Mate-
rialism” in 1938, as part of the official History of the Communist Party of the
USSR—Bolsheviks: Short Course (often referred to as simply The Short Course).33
In the rigid, dogmatic formulation provided in Stalin’s “Dialectical and
Historical Materialism,” the notion of the negation of the negation, fun-
damental to the critical thought of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, was formally
excluded. Historical materialism was reduced to a separate area subordi-
nate to dialectical materialism. All categories were frozen. Marx’s Econom-
ic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, first published in 1932, were treated
as belonging to a pre-Marxist stage in his thought and were generally
ignored or downplayed.
Soviet natural science, particularly the life sciences, including ecology,
suffered a similar fate to that of philosophy. Bukharin had provided a cru-
cial link between dialectical-materialist philosophy and natural science,
working with agronomist, botanist, and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, phys-
iologist and biologist B. Zavadovsky, and historian of science-physicist
Boris Hessen. All of these thinkers, together with other leading Marxist
scholars such as the philologist David Riazanov, editor of a critical edition
of Marx and Engels’s Works, were purged. Bukharin himself was executed
in 1938. The revolutionary dialectical insights that had emerged in the
USSR in natural science and philosophy were replaced with narrow for-
mulas that excluded critical thought.
As a result of these developments, the official doctrine of dialectical
materialism was reduced to a crude mechanistic monism and positivism,
opposed to a tendentious, if somewhat more critical, neo-Kantian dual-
ism that was to pervade Western Marxism.34 Nevertheless, a genuine dia-
lectical materialism continued to exist in the recesses, refusing to be buried.
As Galileo Galilei, caught up in the Inquisition, is reported to have said of
the earth, no doubt apocryphally: “And yet it moves.”35
Western Marxism and the Negation of Dialectical Materialism

In contrast to official Soviet Marxism, what came to be known as West-
ern Marxism, or the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, followed
a radically different course. In this perspective, the dialectics of nature
and, with it, the notion of dialectical materialism, was invalidated on the
basis that dialectics required the identical subject-object—that is, the
notion that human beings were both the subjects and objects of their
own actions—and thus was not applicable to external nature, where the
human subject was not present. With the exclusion of the natural realm
insofar as it was separate from and even prior to human history, West-
ern Marxism thus severed any direct relation of historical materialism

to natural science and the universal metabolism of nature, effectively
relegating the natural world to the realm of positivism. The result was
a dualistic, two-world conception in which dialectics related simply to
human history, not natural history (the realm of the Kantian thing-in-
itself ), and in which Marxism was confined exclusively to the social.36
Historical materialism was then robbed of any connection to nature
as a force in itself, reducing the notion of materialism within Western
Marxism simply to denaturalized political-economic relations. Western
Marxist thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno railed
against the Soviet Short Course and Stalin’s “Dialectical and Historical Ma-
terialism,” but also frequently went beyond that, as in the case of Ador-
no and Lucio Colletti, to reject the transformative dialectics of Engels
and Lenin, and even in some respects that of Marx and Hegel, gravitating
instead toward Immanuel Kant.37
Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, often viewed today as one of the greatest
contributions of the Frankfurt School within Western Marxism, had as
its object the rejection of the “negation of the negation,” and thus the
positive moment in the dialectic. As Adorno wrote in the preface to his
work: “Negative Dialectics is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato,
dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the
thought figure of a negation of negation later became the succinct term.
This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without
reducing its determinacy.”38
In Adorno’s conception, “Marx was a Social Darwinist” in the sense
that he saw natural history as the realm of natural necessity (also im-
pinging on social history), to be transcended in human history by a leap
to the realm of freedom. Marx’s concept of nature was then, according
to Adorno, ultimately the Enlightenment one, in which nature was sim-
ply there to be conquered and transcended by social praxis. For all their
discussions in Dialectic of Enlightenment concerning “the domination of
nature,” Max Horkheimer and Adorno acquiesced to the view, which
they imputed to Marx himself, of the “wholesale racket in nature”—
that is, a kind of Hobbesian and Darwinian state of nature or war of all
against all, seen as characterizing all of Enlightenment thought. Marx
himself was said to have shared these views, simply seeing freedom as
the transcendence of necessity.39 As Adorno opined: Marx “underwrote
something as arch-bourgeois as the program of an absolute control of
nature.”40 Moreover, by specifying at the outset of his book Negative Di-
alectics that the object of his analysis was to exclude the negation of the
negation, and thus the positive element in the dialectic, in a manner
that ironically paralleled the dogmatic elimination of the negation of

the negation within Stalin’s “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,”
Adorno cast a light on his own negativity with respect to the prospect
of revolutionary change.
Alfred Schmidt—who worked under Horkheimer and Adorno in writ-
ing his thesis and magnum opus, published in 1962 as The Concept of Nature
in Marx—observed that Marx’s notion of the social metabolism between
nature and society raised the issue of the dialectic of nature, or “nature’s
self-mediation,” in an entirely defensible way. Schmidt, however, later
disavowed this on the grounds that Marx saw such self-mediation of na-
ture as restricted to human action, and then only in traditional commu-
nal societies, no longer applicable to modern bourgeois society, in which
first nature, that is, nature in and of itself, had been largely subsumed
by second nature, the social realm. “It is only the process of knowing na-
ture,” Schmidt declared, “which can be dialectical, not nature itself.”41
This formulation retained the neo-Kantian dualism between nature and
society, arguing that dialectical mediation was impossible without an ac-
tive human subject, which was confined to the historical-social realm.
Such views pushed dialectics, as envisioned in Western Marxism, in the
direction of idealism.42
Given the systematic exclusion of nature/ecology from dialectical
thought within Western Marxism, it was often contended, even within
Marxist circles, that the philosophy of praxis had nothing to contribute to
ecological analysis. This was codified in Perry Anderson’s influential 1976
Considerations on Western Marxism, which claimed that “no major figure
in the third generation of classical Marxism,” which Anderson narrowly
associated with Western Marxism and its rejection of the dialectics of
nature, was affected by “developments in the physical sciences.”43 In his
1983 work, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Anderson declared that
“problems of the interaction of the human species with its terrestrial
environment [were] essentially absent from classical Marxism”—a propo-
sition that would have been seen as absurd on its face even then, if it had
not been for the fact that the entire domain of the dialectics of nature had
already been systematically absented from Western Marxism, while clas-
sical Marxism’s ecological critique was simply treated as nonexistent.44
Hence, both the Soviet conception of the “dialectics of nature” in the
1938 Short Course, centered on Stalin’s rigid separation of dialectical mate-
rialism and historical materialism, and the Western Marxist rejection of
the dialectics of nature altogether, fell prey to narrow conceptions of real-
ity. They thus failed to embrace what Engels called the totality of bodies,
from the stars to the molecules, including the human mind and human
society. “In effect, the problem of the dialectics of nature,” critical-real-

ist philosopher Roy Bhaskar wrote, “reduces to a variant of the general
problem of naturalism, with the way it is resolved depending on whether
dialectics is conceived sufficiently broadly and society sufficiently natu-
ralistically to make its extension to nature plausible.”45
Th e St r u ggle fo r Mat eri a l i s t Di a l ec t i cs
D ia le c t ic a l Mat eri a l i s m Red ux
Still, it would be a mistake to think that the classical Marxist notion

of the “dialectical conception of nature,” as Engels referred to it, was
brought to a dead end, reduced to nothing without a remainder, either in
the Soviet Union or in the West.46 Rather, materialist dialectics constantly
reemerged in all sorts of unexpected ways in changing historical circum-
stances. This can be seen most distinctly in the famous visit of Soviet
natural scientists and philosophers to the Second International Congress
of the History of Science in London in 1931, where Bukharin, Vavilov,
Zavadovsky, Hessen, and others presented the results of Soviet dialectical
natural science and philosophy.
In the audience at this historic meeting were world-renowned sci-
entists and socialist thinkers, including Joseph Needham, J. D. Bernal,
Lancelot Hogben, and Hyman Levy. (J. B. S. Haldane was not present but
would take up the new ideas partly under the impetus of the same event.)
In the course of the Soviet presentations, Bukharin sought to generate
a dialectical-humanist conception of Marxist analysis, conducive to nat-
ural science, rooted in Marx’s “Notes on Adolph Wagner,” where some
of Marx’s underlying ontological conceptions were made evident, along
with the integration of biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of
the biosphere. Recognition of the reality in which human beings could
be seen as “living and working in the biosphere” demanded, Bukharin
insisted, an integrated materialist-dialectical view of process and interac-
tion, contradiction, negation, and totality, in which both external nature
and society participated. Hessen presented for the first time a sociology
of science embodying materialist dialectics that explained Newton’s dis-
coveries as they related to a bourgeois mechanistic view of the world.
Vavilov provided an account of the Soviet discovery, through historical
and materialist investigations, of the original geographical locales (now
known as the Vavilov centers) of the world’s germplasm from which the
major agricultural crops had arisen.47
For Needham, it was Zavadovsky’s critique of both vitalism and mech-
anism from a dialectical-naturalist perspective in his article on “The
‘Physical’ and ‘Biological’ in the Process of Organic Evolution” that was

to have the greatest impact in the development of his own approach
to dialectical emergence in his famous theory of “integrative levels.”
Zavadovsky argued that “biological phenomena, [although] historical-
ly connected with physical phenomena of inorganic nature, are none
the less not only not reducible to physico-chemical or mechanical laws,
but within their own limits as biological processes display varied and
qualitatively distinct laws,” that have “relative autonomy” from those of
inorganic, physical forms. The “dynamic connection” between the inor-
ganic and the organic in the biological sphere was captured, he argued,
by the concept of metabolism, linking higher biological forms to their
physical-inorganic preconditions.48
It was this concept of metabolism, seen as the material phenomenon
connecting the physical-chemical and the biological through exchanges
within nature, that was to become the basis of ecosystem analysis. In the
new ecological systems analysis, biological order as a form of emergent
organization was irreducible to the various elements of which it was con-
stituted. “Translated into terms of Marxist philosophy,” Needham wrote,
“it is a new dialectical level.” The core idea of dialectical naturalism was
“that of transformation. How do transformations occur, and how can we
make them occur? Any satisfactory answer must also be a solution to the
problem of the origin of the qualitatively new.”49
The British Red scientists of the 1930s and ’40s were themselves
products of a materialist tradition that was emergentist and ecological
in its orientation. Most of these figures had also embraced socialism,
particularly Marxian socialism. Needham recalled the influence of the
“legendary” British zoologist E. Ray Lankester, who had been Darwin’s
and Thomas Huxley’s protégé and a close friend of Marx, as well as the
foremost representative of Darwinian evolutionary theory in Britain
in the generation after Darwin and Huxley.50 Lankester developed a
systematic approach to the natural world with his concept of “bion-
omics,” which was the original term for ecology in Britain. (He also
helped introduce the term œcology into the English language through
supervising the 1876 translation of Ernst Haeckel’s History of Creation.)
He focused on the complex interrelationships between organisms and
their environments and on humans as disturbers of global ecological
relations, developing a critique of “the effacement of nature by man”
rooted in the critique of capitalism.51
It was Lankester’s student Arthur Tansley, the foremost plant ecolo-
gist in England in the early twentieth century, who introduced the con-
cept of ecosystem, based in part on the wider systems theory of Levy. As
depicted by Tansley, the ecosystem concept included both the inorganic

and organic realms and encompassed human beings themselves as both
living within and major disturbers of ecosystems. The ecosystem notion
was rooted fundamentally in the concept of metabolism, which had been
the basis of early ecological systems analysis, and the treatment of nutri-
ent cycling, a subject that occupied German chemist Justus von Liebig,
Marx (in his concepts of social metabolism and the metabolic rift), and
Lankester.52 Tansley’s ecosystem concept was thus to play a crucial role in
the development of modern systems ecology.53 Levy developed the notion
of phase changes along with a unified systems theory rooted in histori-
cal-materialist conceptions in his The Universe of Science (1932) and A Philos-
ophy for a Modern Man (1938).
Haldane was both the codiscoverer, alongside the Soviet geneticist A. I.
Oparin, of the modern materialist theory of the origins of life on Earth,
and was a major figure in the modern Darwinian synthesis, to which
he later applied Marxian conceptions. Bernal, influenced by Engels’s di-
alectics of nature, developed an analysis of the negation of the negation
within material processes in terms of the action of residuals, leading to
new combinations and novel emergent developments, representing qual-
itatively new powers. Hogben applied critical materialist and dialectical
methods to disprove the genetic theories underlying biological racism.54
Other closely related figures included the literary and science critic Chris-
topher Caudwell, who sought to bring together the dialectics of art and
science (and who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War); the historian of
ancient philosophy Benjamin Farrington, who built on Epicurean philos-
ophy and its relation to Marxism (inspired in part by Marx’s dissertation
on Epicurus); and the novelist, cultural theorist, and poet Jack Lindsay,
whose 1949 Marxism and Contemporary Science was an exploration of ways
in which to develop a broad dialectical and emergentist method encom-
passing nature and society.55
Despite the suppression of the mechanists and the Deborinists, im-
portant work was still being done in Soviet philosophy in 1931, as ev-
idenced by A Textbook of Marxist Philosophy, prepared by the Leningrad
Institute of Philosophy under the direction of Mikhail Shirokov and
published in English translation in 1937.56 This work, which influenced
Needham, was engaged in the critique of both mechanism (reduction-
ism) and vitalism—a view that assumes some mysterious life force
added to material reality that explains evolution.57 A Textbook of Marxist
Philosophy stood out at the time, since it relied on the conception of emer-
gence as the key to materialist dialectics. As Shirokov wrote in a passage
that was later singled out by Needham:
A living organism is something that arose out of inorganic matter. In it

there is no “vital force.” If we subject it to purely external analysis into its
elements, we shall find nothing except physico-chemical processes. But
this by no means denotes that life amounts to a single aggregate of these
physico-chemical elements. The particular physico-chemical processes are
connected in the organism by a new form of movement, and it is in this that
the quality of the living thing lies. The new in a living organism, not be-
ing attributable to physics and chemistry, arises as the result of the new
synthesis, of the new connection of physical and chemical movements. This
synthetic process whereby out of the old we proceed to the emergence of
the new is understood neither by the mechanists nor the vitalists.… The
task of each particular science is to study the unique forms of movement
characteristic of a particular degree of the development of matter.58
According to Shirokov, in the ancient philosophy of Epicurus, which

had attracted Marx, “emergence is the uniting of atoms; disappearance
their falling apart.” This served to explain a process of self-generation,
“the origin and development of the universe, the movement of the hu-
man soul, etc.” Out of this had arisen the fundamental materialist view.
In materialist dialectics, there is “ceaseless emergence and annihilation
of the forms of…movement,” which continue to reproduce themselves
“in ever new movement and in ever new qualities.”59
However, all such advancements in materialist dialectics and science
were shut down completely in 1938 with the publication of Stalin’s “Dia-
lectical and Historical Materialism.” What remained of Soviet philosophy
consisted of a formalistic and mechanistic presentation of rigid “dialecti-
cal laws” conceived as a world outlook, rather than a critical philosophy.
It was this that formed the background against which the more creative
thinkers had to work. Nonetheless, in the next generation, the USSR pro-
duced major dialectical philosophers, most notably Evald Ilyenkov, whose
dialectical logic was rooted not only in the Hegelian and Marxian tradi-
tions but also in the work of the pioneering psychologist Lev Vygotsky,
who argued that human cognitive abilities in general were substantially
the result of activity and mediation with the social and cultural environ-
ment. Ilyenkov’s philosophy was directed primarily at challenging, on
materialist-dialectical grounds, the dualistic “two-worlds” epistemology
of British empiricism, Cartesianism, and neo-Kantianism that dominated
the bourgeois philosophical outlook.60
Ilyenkov saw Marx’s epistemology as one in which human activity or
praxis creates the ideal world of thought through human production—
that is, attempts to transform the world.61 Hence, there is a real identity
of humanity and nature at the base of human cognition that is root-
ed in real activity. The “ideal,” in Ilyenkov’s sense, is not properly seen
as something apart, an abstract entity, but is the basis of conceptions,
knowledge, and information emanating from the dialectical process of

human-social encounters with the material world, of which human be-
ings themselves are a part. Dialectics is thus itself a manifestation of
this active mediation with totality, arising “out of the process of the
metabolism between man and nature.”62 However, despite, or perhaps
because of, the power of his analysis, Ilyenkov had trouble getting his
work published. At the time of his death, half of his handwritten publi-
cations—including his much-celebrated Dialectics of the Ideal—remained
on his desk, unpublished.63
Despite the purge of some of the leading figures, there continued to
be remarkable developments in Soviet science based on dialectical analy-
sis up through the 1940s. This includes, notably, Vladimir Nickolayevich
Sukachev’s concept of biogeocoenosis in his work on forest ecology, rep-
resenting a concept parallel to ecosystems but directly integrated with
biogeochemical cycles and the entire biosphere in the sense pioneered by
Vernadsky, thus pointing to a dialectical Earth System analysis.64
Of even greater importance was the work of I. I. Schmalhausen in
his Factors of Evolution: The Theory of Stabilizing Selection, first published in
the USSR in 1947 and quickly translated into English in 1949. Theodo-
sius Dobzhansky called Schmalhausen “perhaps the most distinguished
among the living biologists in the USSR.”65 Schmalhausen, like the Red
geneticist C. H. Waddington in England, developed a theory of the triple
helix of gene, organism, and environment that provided a dialectical
evolutionary and ecological view, one that constituted a sophisticated
alternative to Lysenkoism with its anti-geneticist (or anti-Mendelian
genetics) basis. Schmalhausen’s dialectical approach was particularly
evident in his notion of hierarchies or integrative levels structuring bi-
ological evolution, and in his explanation that latent, assimilated ge-
netic traits that were accumulated during long periods of stabilizing
selection would come to the surface only when organisms faced severe
environmental stress or certain thresholds were crossed, resulting in a
process of rapid change.66
Following Engels, Schmalhausen saw heredity as both negative from
an evolutionary standpoint, insofar as it blocked the historical evolu-
tion of organisms, and positive, in that it preserved organization and
created new organizational forms.67 The significance of what came to
be known as Schmalhausen’s Law of stabilizing selection, according to
dialectical biologists Richard Lewontin and Levins, was that it indicated
that “when organisms are living within their normal range of the envi-
ronment, perturbations in the conditions of life and most genetic dif-
ferences between individuals have little or no effect on their manifest
physiology and development, but under severe or unusual general stress

conditions even small environmental and genetic differences produce
major effects.” The result is that normal evolution of species is charac-
terized by stabilization punctuated by periods of rapid change, in which
latent traits are mobilized in relation to environmental stress.68 What
sometimes appeared as a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired character-
istics was actually a process of “genetic assimilation, the process where-
by latent genetic differences within populations are revealed but not
created by environmental treatment and therefore become available for
selection” when certain thresholds are reached.69
Factors of Evolution came out, however, just prior to Trofim Lysenko’s
political triumph in Soviet biology/agronomy in 1948. Soon after his book
was published, Schmalhausen was denounced for promoting genetics
and denying Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics in his
work on evolutionary ecology. As a result, Schmalhausen was dismissed
from his posts as director of the Institute for Evolutionary Morphology at
the Academy of Sciences and as head of the subdepartment of Darwinism
at Moscow University. This was only reversed around the time of Stalin’s
death in 1953, when Sukachev led the way in combating and defeating
Lysenko. As a result, Schmalhausen was eventually able to resume his
career.70 The final decades of the Soviet Union saw important new devel-
opments in Soviet environmental thought, including the introduction of
the concept of ecological civilization based on classical historical materi-
alism, incorporating Marx’s concept of social metabolism.71
Th e St r u ggle f o r a C ri t i c a l Di a l ec t i c s of Nature in the We st

Within Marxism in the West, parallel struggles occurred, challenging
the dominant Western Marxist philosophical tradition. Georg Lukács,
a giant presence, was universally viewed as having generated Western
Marxism as a distinct theoretical tradition, based on a brief footnote
in History and Class Consciousness in which he had raised doubts about
Engels’s argument with respect to the dialectics of nature.72 Yet, con-
trary to myth, Lukács did not reject the dialectics of nature altogether
in History and Class Consciousness, since in a later chapter in that work he
referred, in a manner akin to Engels, to the “merely objective dialectics
of nature” of the “detached observer.”73 Moreover, several years later,
in his previously unknown and only recently published Tailism manu-
script, Lukács defended the notion of the “dialectics in nature” on the
basis of Marx’s concept of social metabolism, representing the dialec-
tical mediation of nature and humanity through production.74 Lukács
worked under David Riazanov at the Marx-Lenin Institute in 1930, help-
ing to decipher the text of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

of 1844. These manuscripts greatly affected his subsequent analysis.
This change in viewpoint was highlighted in his 1967 preface to History
and Class Consciousness and in his later Ontology of Social Being.75 The latter
was based on Marx’s social metabolism concept, seen as forming a di-
alectics of nature and society rather than expressly following Engels’s
approach to the dialectics of nature. Although examining with great
depth Marx’s metabolism analysis in Capital, Lukács failed to address
Marx’s notion of the metabolic rift, or ecological crisis.76 Neverthe-
less, the social-metabolic ontology that he derived from Marx served
to further undermine the negation of the dialectics of nature within
the Western Marxist tradition that History and Class Consciousness had
inspired. It is significant that Lukács’s later work was largely disowned
by the Western Marxist tradition, becoming so invisible that references
to him in the West identified him almost entirely with what he had
written in 1923 or before, largely excluding the almost five decades of
work that were to follow.
If the dominant philosophical tradition within Marxism in the West
was primarily defined by its rejection of the dialectics of nature, not all
Western Marxist philosophers agreed. In 1940, the prominent French
Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre published his Dialectical Materialism.
In this work, Lefebvre sought to challenge the interpretation provided
in Stalin’s “notorious theoretical chapter in the History of the Communist
Party of the USSR,” reestablishing the dialectics of nature as a critical out-
look while rejecting the simplistic view of dialectical materialism derived
merely from reified “laws of Nature,” viewed apart from the mediation of
self-conscious thought. As Lefebvre wrote: “It is perfectly possible to ac-
cept and uphold the thesis of the dialectic in Nature; what is inadmissible
is to accord it such enormous importance and make it the criterion and
foundation of dialectical thought.”
A crucial aspect of Lefebvre’s argument was directed at the refusal
of “institutional Marxism…to listen to talk of alienation.” In Lefebvre’s
conception of dialectical materialism, it was necessary to integrate
Marx’s theory of alienation within the general conception of the me-
tabolism of nature and society. He drew heavily on Levy’s dialectical
systems theory as presented in A Philosophy for a Modern Man in order
to capture the reality of emergence. “Man’s world,” Lefebvre wrote in
a passage that was to prefigure much of his later thought, “appears as
made up of emergences, of forms (in the plastic sense of the word) and
of rhythms which are born in Nature and consolidated there relatively,
even as they presuppose the Becoming in Nature. There is a human
space and a human time, one side of which is in Nature and the other
independent of it.”77
Lefebvre’s subsequent work proceeded in an increasingly ecological
direction. In the early 1970s, he began to reflect on what is now known
as Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. As he wrote in Marxist Thought and
the City, drawing on Marx, the growth of the capitalist urban structure
“disturbs the organic exchanges between man and nature. ‘By destroy-
ing the circumstances surrounding that metabolism, which originated
in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it compels its systematic
restoration as a regulative law of social production and in a form ad-
equate to the full development of the human race’.… Capitalism de-
stroys nature and ruins its own conditions, preparing and announcing
its revolutionary disappearance.” Testifying to a kind of “reciprocal
degradation” of the urban and the rural, external nature and society,
he continued, “a ruined nature collapses at the feet of this superficially
satisfied society.”78
On December 7, 1961, six thousand people crowded into a Paris auditori-
um to hear a debate on the topic “Is the Dialectic Simply a Law of History
or Is It Also a Law of Nature?” On the side of those who rejected the dia-
lectics of nature were the existentialist Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre and the
left Hegelian philosopher Jean Hippolyte; on the side of those defending
it were the French Communist philosopher Roger Garaudy and the prom-
inent young physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier. Sartre, Hippolyte, and Garaudy
had all written extensively on the issue of the dialectics of nature, while
Vigier’s views on dialectical materialism were less well known and stood
out since directly related to natural science.
Vigier argued that notions of the dialectics of nature long preceded
historical materialism and could be traced back hundreds and thousands
of years. “Every day,” he declared, “science further verifies the profound
saying of Heraclitus which is at the root of the dialectic: everything is
flux, everything is transformed, everything is in violent movement.”
Such dialectical movement was the product of “the assemblage of forces
that necessarily evolve along opposing lines, [and] illustrate the notion
of contradiction.” Moreover, “the unity of opposites,” at the core of most
conceptions of the dialectic, has to be “understood as the unity of the
elements of one level which engender the phenomena of a higher lev-
el.” This was in accordance with the “abrupt rupture” of the preceding
equilibrium and emergence of new integrative levels and novel forms,
which constitute new “totalizations,” or “partial totalities.” In this sense,
“qualitative leaps of the dialectic are found precisely on the borderlands
where one passes from one state of matter to another, for example from
the inorganic to the organic.” In ecological terms, the problem, as Bernal

had stated, is one of determining the “order of succession” arising from
the metabolism, or material exchange, within nature (and society). “The
very practice of science, its progress, the very way in which today it has
passed from the static analysis of the world to the dynamic analysis of
the world, is what is progressively elaborating the dialectics of nature
under our eyes.” In Vigier’s view, “with Marx, science broke into phi-
losophy.”79 Vigier’s work reflected the rapid development of dialectical
conceptions in science in the twentieth century with the rise of systems
theory, often seen in dialectical terms, overtaking the contributions of
dialectical social science.80
E c o s o c ia lis m a nd t he Di a l ec t i c s o f E c ology
In a dialogue with Hegel on dialectics on October 18, 1827, Johann Wolf-
gang von Goethe commented: “I am certain that many of those made
ill by dialectics would find healing in the study of nature.” Goethe’s
statement makes sense only if dialectics is seen as simply something
apart from nature, merely “the systematized spirit of contradiction that
we all have inside of us,” as Hegel defined it on that occasion.81 Yet, in
the Hegelian idealist conception—as in the classical Marxian materialist
one—there can be no rigid separation between a dialectics of society
and a dialectics of nature. Notions of the dialectics of nature and or-
ganicist forms of materialism precede Marxism by thousands of years
(not only in the work of the ancient Greeks, but also in Chinese philoso-
phy, beginning in the Warring States Period during the Zhou Dynasty).82
Nevertheless, Marxism has been able to bring new dialectical tools of
analysis to bear on deciphering human society as an emergent form of
nature, which is now, in its current alienated form, pointing toward its
own annihilation.
Criticism and self-criticism are essential in the development of sci-
ence. In the case of Marxism, this requires that the contradictions and
divisions that arose over the dialectics of nature—contradictions and di-
visions that largely emanated from political realities—have to be healed
in a new synthesis of theory and practice. Ecosocialism, which first
emerged as a definite theoretical and political movement in the 1980s,
matured in this century largely through the recovery of Marx’s theory
of metabolic rift, which has enabled a more complete understanding of
the ecological crises of our time. But ecological materialism cannot go
forward on the basis of Marx’s now-famous metabolism analysis alone.
It requires the recovery and reconstruction of classical Marxism’s no-
tion of dialectical naturalism, which constituted the second foundation
of Marxism and has played a crucial role in the development of critical

ecology from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the
present day. This means overcoming the divisions that have developed
within Marxism, in which both official Soviet Marxism and Western
Marxism reduced nature to positivism while negating the negation of
the negation.
Since the ecological crisis has placed the question of the dialectics
of ecology front and center, it is significant that one of the bases from
which today’s ecosocialist/ecological Marxist critique stems is natural
science. This is most clearly evident in the work of figures like Levins,
Lewontin, and Stephen Jay Gould, who pushed forward a dialectical
critique of reductionist science in the context of the developing cata-
strophic relation of capitalism and the environment. Intrinsic to this
was a recognition of the weaknesses in much of Marxian theory due to
the abandonment of the dialectics of nature. Levins was inspired from
his youth by such figures as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bernal, Needham,
Haldane, Caudwell, Oparin, Schmalhausen, and Waddington. He was
explicit about the failure of the Western Marxist tradition to unify its
analysis with that of the Red scientists, and thus its inability on this
basis to develop a meaningful analysis of the ecological crisis.83 Writing
in “A Science of Our Own” in Monthly Review in 1986, he stated:
In the quest for respectability many Western European Marxists, especially
among the Eurocommunists, are attempting to confine the scope of Marx-
ism to the formulation of a progressive economic program. They therefore
reject as “Stalinism” the notion that dialectical materialism has anything
to say about natural science beyond a critique of its misuse and monopo-
lization.… Both the Eurocommunist critics of dialectical materialism and
the dogmatists [those who reduce dialectical materialism to mere formal-
ism], accept an idealized description of science.84
A Marxist approach to science, Levins argued, required recognizing the

importance of critical dialectical materialism in combating reduction-
ism and positivism, as well as attention to how science itself had often
been corrupted by capitalism, damaging the human relation to the earth.
Levins and Lewontin published their seminal work The Dialectical Biologist
in 1985, bringing back dialectical materialism as the basis of a critique of
reductionism in biology, ecology, and society. This was followed in 2007
by Biology Under the Influence, which advanced a dialectical systems ecolo-
gy. A key proposition was that “contradictions between forces are every-
where present in nature, not only in human social institutions.”85
Gould, like Levins and Lewontin, consciously employed the dialectical
method in all of his work on evolutionary theory, focusing in particular
on (1) “emergence, or the entry of novel explanatory rules in complex sys-

tems, laws arising from ‘nonlinear’ or ‘nonadaptive’ interactions among
constituent parts that therefore, in principle, cannot be discovered from
properties of parts considered separately”; and (2) contingency, which
meant that phenomena in nature, particularly those at higher emergent
levels, had to be examined historically.86 Gould warned that Earth as a place
of species habitation would recover in hundreds of millions of years from
the worst that humanity could deliver in terms of global thermonuclear
war (or climate change)—but humanity itself would not.87 Levins, Lewon-
tin, and Gould all rejected some of the crudities of the official diamat in
Soviet thought while seeking to rescue the dialectics of nature as crucial
not only to the Marxian critique, but to a theoretical-practical orientation
to the world as a whole. Other dialectical biologists, such as John Vander-
meer and Stuart A. Newman, have followed along in the same tradition.88
Analysis of the two most important works in Marx’s hitherto unpub-
lished intellectual corpus resulted in major developments in material-
ist dialectics in István Mészáros’s two pathbreaking works, Marx’s The-
ory of Alienation (1971) and Beyond Capital (1995). Mészáros was Lukács’s
close colleague prior to the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which
compelled him to leave the country. In Marx’s Theory of Alienation,
Mészáros showed that Marx’s basic ontological conception in the Eco-
nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts embraced both the alienation of labor
and the alienation of nature, tied together in Marx’s ontological notion
of human beings as the “self-mediating beings of nature” and their
self-alienation under capitalism.89 In Beyond Capital, which drew on
Marx’s Grundrisse, he argued that the planetary ecological crisis was the
product of capitalism’s inability to accept even the boundaries of the
earth itself as a limit on uncontrolled accumulation, and that the eco-
logical crisis was thus a core aspect of the structural crisis of capital.90
Utilizing Marx’s concept of metabolism, Mészáros presented capital as
an alienated form of social metabolic reproduction based on second-or-
der mediations of labor and nature. This analysis was to play an im-
portant role in the development of ecological Marxism, undermining
narrow conceptions of Marx’s dialectic and providing a systems theory
rooted in Marx that bridged the ecological and social divide and helped
reunify revolutionary theory and practice, impacting Hugo Chavez and
the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.91
Another key development in dialectical thought, bridging the gulf be-
tween the crude formalism of official Soviet thought and Western Marx-
ism, was provided by the dialectical critical-realist philosophy of Bhas-
kar, which sought to renew ontology on materialist/realist foundations
by reintegrating the question of naturalism into Marxian philosophy

and ultimately developing a dialectical critical realism. It represented
a full-scale attack on both neo-Kantian dualism, along with two-world
dualisms in general, and on what Bhaskar called “the epistemic fallacy”
that had subsumed ontology (the theory of the nature of being) within
epistemology (the theory of knowledge). This went hand-in-hand with
Bhaskar’s rejection of the “anthropic fallacy,” or the exclusive “defini-
tion of being in terms of human being.”92
Bhaskar’s work started from naturalist, realist, and materialist foun-
dations, and working from there systematically developed a dialectical
ontology conducive to a transformative praxis. In Dialectic: The Pulse of
Freedom, this led to a dialectical critical realism that incorporated on
multiple planes Engels’s three ontological principles of the transforma-
tion of quantity into quality and vice versa, the unity of opposites, and
the negation of the negation. In Bhaskar’s analysis, the first of these
principles was represented by the dialectics of emergence, the second
by the dialectics of internal relations, and the third by what Bhaskar
was to call the absenting of absence, incorporating the reality of past, pres-
ent, and future potentials and possibilities in the understanding of the
dialectic of continuity and change.93
Bhaskar’s dialectical naturalism, like that of Marx and Engels, led him
in the end to a consideration of ecological crisis. As he explained, “The
limit at the plane of material transactions with nature”—Marx’s social
metabolism—“comes from the fact that human beings are natural be-
ings. Nature is not apart from us; we are a part of it. The destruction of
nature is not only murder but suicide and must be treated as such.” From
this it could be adduced that there “is a double impossibility theorem: it
is not possible [at this stage] to have growth and ecological viability, and
because it is not possible to have capitalism without growth, it is also
not possible to have ecological viability with capitalism.”94 It followed
that “at the level of material transactions with nature…it is absolutely
unarguable that what we need is, from the point of view of the climate
as a whole, less growth, that is, degrowth, and degrowth coupled with
a radical redistribution of income.… This idea of degrowth would be as-
sociated with the idea of a simplification of social existence.”95 For Bhas-
kar, there was never any question about the necessity of a conception
of the dialectics of nature, only about the conceptions currently held,
leading him to develop his dialectical critical reason and ultimately re-
sulting in his advocating for a revolutionary praxis of degrowth.
Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, or his theory of ecological crisis,
was fully recovered only in the twenty-first century.96 It derives its im-
portance from its materialist dialectical conception of the alienated

metabolism of nature and society under capitalism, a system that is
now exploiting the world’s population as never before while expro-
priating the earth on which humanity depends. This is the one critical
perspective that fully encompasses both the social and extrahuman di-
mensions of the environmental crisis, seeing the class and ecological
contradictions of capitalism as two sides of a single dynamic. The social
metabolism represented by production mediates the material relation
of humanity to ecological systems all the way from local ecosystems up
to the Earth System.
This accords with Earth System science itself, which focuses on the
disruption of the Earth System metabolism resulting in the anthropo-
genic rift in the biogeochemical cycles of the planet, creating the pres-
ent habitability crisis. The result of this recovery of Marx’s metabolic
rift theory has been a formidable array of explorations of the social di-
mensions of the Earth System crisis, stretching from the metabolism of
the soil to the climate to Earth System analysis.97 Nevertheless, Marx’s
conception of the metabolic rift is only truly useful insofar as it pro-
vides us with a more active understanding of the social metabolism of
human beings and the earth in all of its complexity as part of an overall
materialist dialectics. For this, what is necessary is both a dialectics of
society and a dialectics of nature, forming the basis of a new global
environmental praxis.
Today, the world is faced with two opposing tendencies. One is the
attempted acceleration of capital through the financialization of nature
based on market forces and associated with processes of so-called de-
carbonization and dematerialization. The goal here is to subsume the
world within the abstract logic of money as a substitute for real-world
existence—an alienated logic that can only lead to total disaster, the
barren negation of humanity itself. The other is the emerging strug-
gle for planned degrowth and sustainable human development aimed
at shifting power from global capital to workers on the ground and
in their communities throughout the planet, representing the poten-
tial new power of an emerging environmental proletariat. This neces-
sitates the merging of the economic and environmental struggles of
the exploited and expropriated populations throughout the world in
a new, broader form of cooperation. People at the grassroots are being
driven to defend not just their work, but also their environments and
their communities, and indeed, the habitability of the planet itself, con-
ceived as a home for humanity and all other species. For this, however,
we need a new, revolutionary dialectics of ecology.
N ot e s
1. Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew in Philosophical Essays (1887; repr., 1991), 34–41; Yakhot, The Suppression
and D’Alembert’s Dream (London: Pen- Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), 293; of Soviet Philosophy in the USSR, 22–26.
guin, 1966), 181. Georgi Plekhanov, Selected Philosoph- 28. Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
2. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, ical Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress vol. 25, 527.
Biology Under the Influence (New York: Publishers, 1974), 421.
29. Yakhot, The Suppression of Philoso-
Monthly Review Press, 2007), 185–86, 18. V. I. Lenin, “On the Significance of phy in the USSR, 29–30.
at 110. Militant Materialism,” in Yehoshua Yak-
30. William Seager, “A Brief History of
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate hot, The Suppression of Philosophy in
the Philosophical Problem of Conscious-
of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: the USSR (Oak Park, Michigan: Mehring,
ness,” in The Cambridge Handbook of
University of Chicago Press, 2021), 173, 2012), 233–40.
Consciousness, ed. Philip David Zelazo,
205. 19. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thomp-
4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: vol. 25, 110–32, 492–502, 606–8. son (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Penguin, 1976), 283; Karl Marx, Cri- 20. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Press, 2007), 23, 27. See also Georgi
tique of the Gotha Programme (New vol. 25, 117; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 443. Plekhanov, “Marx,” in Essays on the His-
York: International Publishers, 1938), 2; 21. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, tory of Materialism, marxists.org.
Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Pen- vol. 25, 313; István Mészáros, Marx’s 31. Bakhurst, Consciousness and Revo-
guin, 1974), 328. Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, lution in Soviet Philosophy, 45.
5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Col- 1975), 12. 32. Yakhot, The Suppression of So-
lected Works, vol. 5 (New York: Interna- 22. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 38 viet Philosophy in the USSR, 43–76;
tional Publishers, 1975), 28. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), Bakhurst, Consciousness and Revolution
6. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 283. 227–31. in Soviet Philosophy, 47–51; George
23. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 38, Kline, introduction to Spinoza in Soviet
7. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637.
226; Mikhail Shirokov, A Textbook on Philosophy, ed. George Kline (London:
8. Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grine- Routledge, 1952), 15–18; Helena
Marxist Philosophy, ed. John Lewis (Lon-
vald, “Was the Anthropocene Antici- Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy
don: Left Book Club, 1937), 364–68.
pated?” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 of Science (Atlantic Highlands: Human-
On the narrow interpretation of Lenin’s
(2015): 6–7; Marx and Engels, Collected ities Press, 1985), 191–96; I. I. Rubin,
dialectics as limited in comparison to
Works, vol. 25, 461. Essays in Marx’s Theory of Value (Delhi:
Engels’s dialectics, see Z. A. Jordan, The
9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Pen- Evolution of Dialectical Materialism (Lon- Aakar, 2008). It is worth noting that
guin, 1973), 162; Marx, Early Writings, don: Macmillan, 1967), 226–27. Georg Lukács, who was in the Soviet
389–90. Union in 1930 working under David
24. Yakhot, The Suppression of Philoso-
10. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Riazanov, was not very sympathetic to
phy in the USSR, 21–41.
vol. 30, 62–63. the Deborinists at the time, consider-
25. Bukharin’s Historical Materialism ing some of the criticisms of them to
11. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, was based on a mechanistic theory of be correct. Georg Lukács, “Interview:
vol. 5, 28. equilibrium. He subsequently attempt- Lukács and His Work,” New Left Review
12. Corrina Lotz, “Review of John Bella- ed to develop a dialectical approach to 68 (July–August 1971): 57.
my Foster’s The Return of Nature,” Marx philosophy and science, in many ways
33. Joseph Stalin, “Dialectical and His-
and Philosophy, December 16, 2020; transcending the debates of his time.
torical Materialism,” in History of the
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. His last effort of this kind, his Philosoph-
Communist Party of the Soviet Union—
25, 123; Evald Ilyenkov, Intelligent Ma- ical Arabesques, which engaged with
Bolshevik: Short Course, Communist
terialism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018), ecological conceptions, was written in
Party of the USSR (Moscow: Foreign
27; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure 1937 in prison prior to his execution in
Languages Press, 1951), 165–206.
Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- 1938, with the manuscript long remain-
ing in Stalin’s safe and only being re- 34. Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialec-
sity Press, 1997), 304.
leased to Stephen Cohen under Mikhail tical Materialism (London: Macmillan,
13. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1967), 252.
Gorbachev. See Nikolai Bukharin, Philo-
vol. 1, 30, 102, 407–9; Benjamin Far-
sophical Arabesques (New York: Month- 35. Mario Livio, “Did Galileo Truly Say
rington, The Faith of Epicurus (London:
ly Review Press, 2005). ‘and Yet It Moves’?,” Scientific American
`Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).
26. Alex Levant, “Evald Ilyenkov and (blog), May 6, 2020, blogs.scientifi-
14. William Leiss, The Domination of camerican.com.
Creative Soviet Marxism,” in Dialectics
Nature (Boston: Beacon, 1974).
of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative 36. Karl Jacoby, “Western Marxism,” in
15. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Soviet Marxism, eds. Alex Levant and A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom
vol. 25, 460–61. Vesa Oittinen (Chicago: Haymarket, Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983),
16. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 2014), 12–13. 523–26; John Bellamy Foster, The Re-
The Communist Manifesto (New York: 27. David Bakhurst, Consciousness and turn of Nature (New York: Monthly Re-
Monthly Review Press, 1964), 2. Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From view Press, 2020), 16–21.
17. Joseph Dietzgen, “Excursions of a the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov (Cam- 37. Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism
Socialist in the Domain of Philosophy,” bridge: Cambridge University Press, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1958), 143–45; Theodor Adorno, Neg- 44. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of tion of the Negation,” which is entirely
ative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, Historical Materialism (London: Verso, excluded in the latter.
1973), 355; Lucio Colletti, Marxism and 1983), 83. 59. Shirokov, A Textbook of Marxist
Hegel (London: Verso, 1973). 45. Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality Philosophy, 137, 328. On Epicurean-
38. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, xix; (London: Routledge, 2011), 122. ism and emergence, see A. A. Long,
Robert Lanning, In the Hotel Abyss: An 46. Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach From Epicurus to Epictetus (Oxford: Ox-
Hegelian-Marxist Critique of Adorno and the Outcome of Classical German ford University Press, 2006), 155–77;
(Leiden: Brill, 2014), 174. The contra- Philosophy (New York: International A. A. Long, “Evolution vs. Intelligent
dictions and limitations of an exclu- Publishers, 1941), 59. Design in Classical Antiquity,” Berkeley
sively idealist conception of dialectics 47. N. I. Bukharin et al., Science at the Townsend Center, November 2006;
“does not cardinally change,” Ilyenkov Crossroads (London: Frank Cass and Co., John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and
writes, “if the emphasis is made on the 1971), 7; Foster, The Return of Nature, Richard York, Critique of Intelligent De-
‘negative,’ while ‘successes and achieve- 358–73; Sheehan, Marxism and the Phi- sign (New York: Monthly Review Press,
ments’ are ignored as it is done today by losophy of Science, 206–9. 2008), 49–64.
the distant descendants of Hegel such 48. B. Zavadovsky, “The ‘Physical’ and 60. Bakhurst, Consciousness and Rev-
as Adorno or Marcuse. Such change the ‘Biological’ in the Process of Organic olution in Soviet Philosophy, 17–22,
of emphasis does not make dialectics Evolution,” in Science at the Crossroads, 236–43.
more materialist. Dialectics here begins 75–76. Translation follows Needham’s 61. Bakhurst, Consciousness and Rev-
to look more like the trickery of Mephis- version, which substitutes different for olution in Soviet Philosophy, 111–16,
topheles, like the diabolical toolbox for varied. Joseph Needham, Time: The 236–43.
the destruction of all human hopes.” Ily- Refreshing River (London: George Allen 62. Evald Ilyenkov, Dialectics of the Ide-
enkov, Intelligent Materialism, 50. and Unwin, 1943), 243–44; Joseph al (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), 78.
39. Ironically, the passage in Marx most Needham, Order and Life (Cambridge,
63. Andrey Maidansky interviewed by
often cited in defense of this interpreta- Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1968), 45–
Vesa Oittinen, “Evald Ilyenkov and Sovi-
tion ended not with the domination of 46; Richard Levins and Richard Lewon-
tin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, et Philosophy,” Monthly Review 71, no.
nature as if a foreign enemy, but rather 8 (January 2020): 16.
with the rational regulation of the social Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 180. 64. John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in
metabolism between humanity and na- the Anthropocene (New York: Month-
ture by the associated producers, in line 49. Needham, Order and Life, 44–48.
ly Review Press, 2022), 316–23; V. N.
with the conservation of their energies 50. Joseph Needham, foreword to Mar- Sukachev and N. Dylis, Fundamentals
and the development of human capac- cel Prenant, Biology and Marxism (New of Forest Biogeocoenology (London:
ities: a model of sustainable human York: International Publishers, 1943), v. Oliver and Boyd, 1964); V. N. Sukachev,
development. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 51. Foster, The Return of Nature, 24–72. “Relationship of Biogeocoenosis, Eco-
(London: Penguin, 1981), 959. 52. Peter Ayres, Shaping Ecology: The system, and Facies,” Soviet Soil Scientist
40. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 244, Life of Arthur Tansley (Oxford: Wiley- 6 (1960): 580–81; Levins and Lewontin,
355; Max Horkheimer and Theodor Blackwell, 2012), 43. The Dialectical Biologist, 184.
W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 53. Foster, The Return of Nature, 65. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1949 fore-
(New York: Continuum, 1944), 254; Al- 300–57. word to I. I. Schmalhausen, Factors of
fred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Evolution: The Theory of Stabilizing Se-
54. Foster, The Return of Nature, 337–
Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971), 39, 350–51, 390, 475, 367–412. lection (Chicago: University of Chicago
156; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Press, 1949, 1986), xv–xvii.
55. Foster, The Return of Nature, 417–
Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: 66. David B. Wade, 1986 foreword to
56, 526–29; J. D. Bernal, “Dialectical
Monthly Review Press, 2020), 196. Factors of Evolution, v–xii; Lewontin and
Materialism,” in Farrington, The Faith
41. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of of Epicurus; Jack Lindsay, Marxism and Levins, Biology Under the Influence,
Nature in Marx (London: Verso, 1971), Contemporary Science (London: Dennis 75–80. The term triple helix is taken
164–66, 175–76, 195. Schmidt’s rever- Dobson, 1949). from Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix:
sal was a direct response to the famous 56. M. Shirokov, A Textbook of Marxist Gene, Organism and Environment (Cam-
debate in France between Jean Hip- Philosophy, ed. John Lewis (London: bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univer-
polyte and Jean-Paul Sartre, as critics Left Book Club, 1937). sity Press, 2000).
of the dialectics of nature, and Roger 67. Schmalhausen, Factors of Evolution,
57. Needham, Time, 242.
Garaudy and Jean-Pierre Vigier as its xix; Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
defenders. Schmidt clearly lined up with 58. Shirokov, A Textbook of Marxist vol. 25, 492.
Hippolyte and Sartre, distancing himself Philosophy, 341, emphasis added to the
word emergence, all other emphases in 68. Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under
from his earlier professed views. the Influence, 77; “Macroevolution,”
original. The sharp difference between
42. See Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Ma- the 1931 Shirokov text and the official New World Encyclopedia, newworlden-
terialism (London: Verso, 1975). view propounded by Stalin’s 1938 “Di- cyclopedia.org; Levins and Lewontin,
43. Perry Anderson, Considerations alectical and Historical Materialism” is The Dialectical Biologist, 169.
on Western Marxism (London: Verso, evident in the fact that the fourth part 69. Lewontin and Levins, The Dialectical
1976), 59. of the former is devoted to “The Nega- Biologist, 187.
70. Georgy S. Levit, Uwe Hossfeld, and “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” 89. Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alien-
Lennart Olsson, “From the ‘Modern Syn- as “dogmatic and mechanistic,” 151. ation, 162–64.
thesis’ to Cybernetics: Ivan Ivanovich 80. Carles Soriano, “Epistemological 90. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital
Schmalhausen (1884–1963) and his Limitations of Earth System Science (New York: Monthly Review Press,
Research Program for a Synthesis of Evo- to Confront the Anthropocene Crisis,” 1995), 170–77, 874–77.
lutionary and Developmental Biology,” Anthropocene Review 9, no. 1 (2020): 91. István Mészáros, The Necessity of
Journal of Experimental Zoology 306B 112, 122. Social Control (New York: Monthly Re-
(2005): 89–106; Foster, Capitalism and 81. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and view Press, 2015); John Bellamy Fos-
the Anthropocene, 323–24. G. W. F. Hegel, quoted in Johann Peter ter, “Mészáros and Chávez: ‘The Point
71. A. D. Ursul, ed., Philosophy and Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe from Which to Move the World Today,’”
the Ecological Problems of Civilisation (London: Penguin, 2022), 559–60. Monthly Review 74, no. 2 (June 2022):
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983); 82. Joseph Needham, Within Four 26–31.
Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, Seas: The Dialogue of East and West 92. Roy Bhaskar, Plato Etc. (London:
331–32, 449–51. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Verso, 1994), 251, 253.
72. Georg Lukács, History and Class 1969), 27, 97. 93. Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse
Consciousness (London: Pluto), 24. It 83. Richard Levins, “Touch Red,” in Red of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993),
became customary in Western Marxist Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist 150–52.
thought to refer to Lukács’s footnote as Left, eds. Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro 94. Roy Bhaskar, “Critical Realism in
a “critique.” But even considering the (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Resonance with Nordic Ecophilosophy,”
common watering down of the notion 1998), 264; Lewontin and Levins, Biolo- in Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis,
of critique, it could hardly be said that gy Under the Influence, 366–67. ed. Roy Bhaskar, Karl Georg Hoyer, and
a critique of Engels on the dialectics 84. Richard Levins, “Science of Our Peter Naess (London: Routledge, 2012),
of nature could be carried out, even by Own: Marxism and Nature,” Monthly 21–22.
Lukács, in what in English comes to a Review 38, no. 3 (July–August 1986): 5.
mere 110 words. 95. Roy Bhaskar, The Order of Natural
85. Levins and Lewontin, The Dialectical Necessity (Gary Hawke, 2017), 146.
73. Lukács, History and Class Conscious- Biologist, 279; Lewontin and Levins, Bi-
ness, 207; Marx and Engels, Collected 96. The two works that initiated this
ology Under the Influence. analysis were both published in 1999:
Works, vol. 25, 492.
86. Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (Chicago:
74. Georg Lukács, A Defense of History the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox (New Haymarket, 1999, 2014); John Bellamy
and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the York: Harmony, 2003) 201–3; Richard Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,”
Dialectic (London: Verso, 2000), 102–7; York and Brett Clark, The Science and American Journal of Sociology 105, no.
Foster, The Return of Nature, 16–20. Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould (New 2 (September 1999): 366–405.
75. Lukács, History and Class Conscious- York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 97. The major contributions of met-
ness, xvii; Lukács, “Interview: Lukács and 95–96. abolic rift theory are too numerous to
His Work,” 56–57. Riazanov was purged 87. Stephen Jay Gould, interviewed in enumerate here. A few key works, relat-
from his position later in 1931 and exe- Wim Kayzer, A Glorious Accident (New ed especially to the dialectics of nature,
cuted in 1938. York: W. H. Freeman, 1997), 83, 99–100, include: John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s
76. Georg Lukács, The Ontology of So- 104. Ecology (New York: Monthly Review
cial Being 2: Marx’s Basic Ontological 88. John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfec- Press, 2000); John Bellamy Foster, Brett
Principles (London: Merlin, 1978), 95; to, Ecological Complexity and Agroecol- Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological
Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social La- ogy (London: Routledge, 2018); John Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press,
bour 3: Labour (London: Merlin, 1980). Vandermeer, “Ecology on the Heels of 2010); Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropo-
77. Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materi- the Darwinian Revolution: Historical cene (New York: Monthly Review Press,
alism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), Reflections on the Dialectics of Ecolo- 2016); John Bellamy Foster and Paul
13–19, 142. gy,” in Science with Passion and a Moral Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Chicago:
Compass: A Symposium Honoring John Haymarket, 2016); Kohei Saito, Karl
78. Henri Lefebvre, Marxist Thought
Vandermeer, Publication no. 1, Ecology Marx’s Ecosocialism (New York: Month-
and the City (Minneapolis: University of ly Review Press, 2017); Fred Magdoff
and Evolutionary Biology, University
Minnesota Press, 2016), 121–22, 140; of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2020; John and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecolog-
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637–38; John Bel- Vandermeer, “Objects of Intellectual ical Society (New York: Monthly Review
lamy Foster, Brian M. Napoletano, Brett Interest Have Real Impacts: The Ecology Press, 2017); Stefano Longo, Rebecca
Clark, and Pedro S. Urquijo, “Henri Lefe- (and More) of Richard Levins,” in The Clausen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy
bvre’s Marxian Ecological Critique,” En- Truth Is the Whole: Essays in Honor of of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries,
vironmental Sociology 6, no. 1 (2019): Richard Levins, eds. Tamara Awerbuch, and Aquaculture (New Brunswick, New
31–41. Maynard S. Clark, and Peter J. Taylor Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015);
79. Jean-Pierre Vigier, “Dialectics and (Arlington, Massachusetts: Pumping Carles Soriano, “Capitalocene, Anthro-
Natural Science,” in Existentialism Ver- Station, 2018), 1–7; Stuart A. Newman, pocene, and Other ‘-Cenes,’” Monthly
sus Marxism, ed. George Novack (New “Marxism and the New Materialism,” Review 74, no. 6 (November 2022):
York: Dell, 1966), 243–57. Vigier made Marxism and the Sciences 1, no. 2 (Sum- 1–29; and Foster and Clark, The Robbery
a point in his text of criticizing Stalin’s mer 2022): 1–12. of Nature.
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monthlyreviewarchives.

The Dialectics of Ecology

All nature is in a perpetual state of flux.… There is nothing clearly de-

As Harvard ecologist and Marxian theorist Richard Levins observed,

this contradiction can only be resolved by reconciling humanity and na-

ing relation of human beings to nature as a whole. As Marx recognized,

Epoch in human history, which marks the rise of anthropogenic, as op-

The D u a l N e gati o n o f Di a l ec t i c a l Mat erialism

The reconstruction of Marxian ecology based on classical historical ma-

ists of the non-communist camp” together with revolutionary material-

new emergent realities arising at a higher level, and a complex “spiral

latter. It was the distinction between different qualitative forms/levels/

The suppression of Soviet philosophy in the 1930s was inscribed in

Western Marxism and the Negation of Dialectical Materialism

ern Marxism thus severed any direct relation of historical materialism

that ironically paralleled the dogmatic elimination of the negation of

society. “In effect, the problem of the dialectics of nature,” critical-real-

Th e St r u ggle fo r Mat eri a l i s t Di a l ec t i cs

D ia le c t ic a l Mat eri a l i s m Red ux

Still, it would be a mistake to think that the classical Marxist notion

‘Physical’ and ‘Biological’ in the Process of Organic Evolution” that was

depicted by Tansley, the ecosystem concept included both the inorganic

A living organism is something that arose out of inorganic matter. In it

According to Shirokov, in the ancient philosophy of Epicurus, which

knowledge, and information emanating from the dialectical process of

physiology and development, but under severe or unusual general stress

Th e St r u ggle f o r a C ri t i c a l Di a l ec t i c s of Nature in the We st

ing to decipher the text of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

the inorganic to the organic.” In ecological terms, the problem, as Bernal

of Marxism and has played a crucial role in the development of critical

A Marxist approach to science, Levins argued, required recognizing the

on (1) “emergence, or the entry of novel explanatory rules in complex sys-

by reintegrating the question of naturalism into Marxian philosophy

portance from its materialist dialectical conception of the alienated

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