Dialectics of Nature-Camilla Royle

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98 Dialectics of nature

Engels and the science of the 19th centuryEngels was arguably one of the most impressive self-taught intellectualsof his (or any) day. He taught himself not just about social science andphilosophy but about anthropology, chemistry, mathematics and the arts.

He lived through a time when there were revolutionary changes in all ofthese fields. Perhaps most notably, Charles Darwin had published On theOrigin of Speciesin 1859 demonstrating that species of organisms, rather thanbeing fixed and separate entities, are able to evolve into new and radi-cally different forms. Both Marx and Engels read Darwins work and saw itas evidence of a conception of nature that changes through timeat leastanalogous to their own ideas about historical change in human societies.3

But it wasnt just biology that was revolutionised in the 19th century.In physics James Prescott Joule had shown that heat can be transferred intomechanical energy and vice versa. In geology Charles Lyell had discovered

the continual creation and destruction of strata within the earths crust.4

Alex Callinicos argues that Engelss insights must be seen in the contextof real developments in the physical sciences at the time when he waswriting. Science had previously been based on a modelrelated toNewtons lawswhere mechanical processes are reversible in time. In the19th century science started to take into account the nature of irreversibleprocesses such as evolution where nature does not just change but develops.5

Marxism has helped further our understanding of scientists and theirrole within society. However, Engels wasnt just interested in the social posi-tion of sciencehe also analysed debates withinscience. And his writings onthe subject make it clear that he was himself well informed enough to take partin those debates. Some of Engelss insights have since been proved correct.In The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to ManEngels arguedthat early humans erect posture freed up their hands and allowed them todevelop tool use, which took place alongside the development of larger brains.This idea has been praised by scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould as an earlyexample of what is now referred to as gene-culture coevolution.6

3: Marx and Engels famously described Darwins theories as providing, in the field ofnatural history, the basis for our viewsFoster, 2000, p197. Although the claim that Marxproposed to dedicate Capitalto Darwin is, unfortunately, false, the persistence of this myth

shows that it is plausible enough that people still believe it (see Blackledge, 2002, p11).4: Sheehan, 1993. The young Marx was also trained in geology having studied underJohann Steininger, who was himself a student of Abraham Werneran early exponent of thethen radical idea that the earth has a historyFoster, 2000, p117.5: Callinicos, 2006, pp210-211.6: Foster, 2000, p203.

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99International Socialism

However, the idea of a dialectics of nature remains controversialandthis isnt helped by the fact that Engels never lived long enough to finishwriting the book or to defend his project. In March 1883 Karl Marx died.Engels put his own work aside to take on the formidable task of preparing

volumes 2 and 3 of Capitalfor publication. But the manuscript of Dialectics ofNaturesurvived and was published in Russian in 1925 and in English in 1939.

J B S Haldane was responsible for the English version. He was an eminentscientist responsible for advancing our understanding of how evolution relatesto genetics, but also a committed Marxist and member of the CommunistParty. Throughout his life he became progressively more convinced of theexplanatory power of a dialectical approach, arguing in his preface to Dialecticsof Nature that had it been published earlier it would have saved him a lot ofmuddled thinking.7But publishing Engelss work wasnt an easy task: itwas basically a series of notes. Engels may have intended to edit or even to

leave out sections of the work.

Is it useful to call nature dialectical?To discuss whether Engelss ideas have any merit we need to also havesome idea of what dialectics is and what it is supposed to be used for. Thereis little point learning about dialectics if it is just a scholastic exerciseifwe learn about it in books and at conferences but then instantly forget itafterwards because it has no relevance to everyday practice. Marx agreed, inan afterword to Capital, that materialist dialectics is essentially a philosophyfor people who want to change the world. It is in its essence both criticaland revolutionary.8Marx based many of his ideas on those of the Germanidealist philosopher Georg Hegel, who lost his sympathy for revolutionarymovements, especially towards the end of his life. However, I would arguethat the materialist, Marxist version of dialectics only makes sense whenseen as central to the project of revolutionary change.

For many theorists the most important aspects of dialectics are changeand contradiction. It allows us to grasp the nature of a world that is con-stantly changing, an element that John Molyneux highlights and deals within his recent guide to Marxist philosophy.9Dialectics can be called a crit-ical philosophy because it calls into question the idea that our world hasalways remained the same and will carry on unchanged into the future. But

it also argues that change is not always gradualthat things can progress by

7: Sheehan, 1993, pp316-326.8: Marx, 1976, p15.9: Molyneux, 2012.



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leaps10what might be described as revolutionary change. In Dance of theDialecticBertell Ollman likens trying to understand this world to trying to

jump on to a moving carwould you want to try to jump into a car if youwere blindfolded and did not know what direction the car was moving in

and how fast? Ollman argues that the world around us is changing and weneed theory that can understand that.11Most theories take it for granted atthe outset that we can start by looking at the world as if it is static and thentry to explain any changes that we see. For dialectical thinkers the reverse istrue. Change is the default state of the universe; it is stasis that is unusual andrequires explanation.

The Marxist geographer David Harvey has also argued for severalyears that the method he uses in his work as a social theorist is a dialecticalone. Harveys approach is perhaps most easily explained by looking at whatit is not. He opposes Cartesian reductionism, which is based on the assump-

tion that we can study the world by dividing it up into separate things.Cartesians argue that the parts have their own properties that exist inde-pendently of the whole. We can analyse each in isolation and then look athow they relate.12So a geographer trying to understand cities on a Cartesianbasis might look at London (perhaps defined as everything within the M25motorway). They could ask who lives in London, what kind of housingthey live in, what kind of industries are present in different parts of thecity and many other questions. They could then go on to do the same foranother city, maybe New York. Only once they understood the attributesof each city as a separate entity would they attempt to compare the two.

A dialectical thinker would turn their sights to the processes that con-stitute those cities, processes such as migration into and out of cities, or thegrowth of neoliberalism in both the US and Britain. Cities are then consid-ered not as discrete things but as complexes of processes. Harveys way ofthinking questions whether we can consider a city without taking its contextinto account. To look at immigration into cities we also need to understandwhat is happening in the places outside the city where immigrants comefrom. But it also draws attention to the similarities between citiesso immi-gration in both London and New York might affect both in similar ways.Harveys dialectical approach turns our common sense way of thinking on itshead. He is effectively saying that there is no such thing as a thing. What

10: See John Molyneuxs article in the previous issue of International SocialismMolyneux, 2013.11: Ollman, 2003 (although the moving car metaphor had previously been used by LouisAlthusserthanks to Alex Callinicos for pointing this out).12: Harvey, 1996.



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we think of as solid objects are actually made up of processes. Different pro-cesses can come together temporarily to produce things but these are alwaystransitory. Things are always in the process of being created or destroyedallthat is solid melts into air. In this approach a thing could be an idea or concept

or something concretely existing like a city. Engels also argued somethingsimilar in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: Theworld is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, butas a complex ofprocesses, in which the things...go through an uninterruptedchange of coming into being and passing away.13

For Marx, and for many of his followers, dialectics is about contra-diction as well as change. The two are related, internal contradictions drivechange forward and lead to the dynamism that we observe. Everythingunder capitalism seems, and is, contradictory.14However, Harvey arguesthat thinking in terms of contradictions is compatible with his own

approach. If things are made up of shifting complexes of processes it standsto reason that some of those processes will be in opposition to each other.15Take the example of the Labour Party in Britaina bourgeois organisa-tion but one that maintains a mainly working class membership. To call itbourgeois and working class sounds like a contradictory thing to say. Thisis because it does refer to a contradiction. The key is to look at the diverseprocesses that caused the Labour Party to come into existence. At the timethe welfare state was becoming increasingly important to sections of capital,while workers were looking towards reformist ideas and reformist parties.The needs of workers and of capitalists are in opposition to each otherbut were able to coalesce at a particular point in historyin this case toform a very contradictory organisation. This approach to the question ofcontradiction recognises the real presence of contradictions but looks forthe concrete mechanisms by which they develop, through the processesby which things come into and out of existence. It is not enough simply tostate that everything is contradictory without asking why.

The dialectical biologistsIf dialectics helps Marxists understand something about human societycould it also be useful for natural scientistspeople trying to understandvery different aspects of the world? Few natural scientists have explicitly

argued that they are doing dialectical science, but there are a few notable

13: Engels, 1947, p52, emphasis in original.14: Ollman, 2003.15: Harvey, 1996.



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exceptions. In 1985 Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin published acollection of essays entitled The Dialectical Biologist. Both were (and still are)distinguished biology professors at Harvard in the US. As the name of thebook suggests, Levins and Lewontin avoided saying that they were trying to

apply dialecticstobiology.16This is not the dialectics of biology as they arenot philosophers approaching biology from the outside. Instead they arguethat they had adopted it as a method and incorporated it into their practiceas biologists. The book was dedicated to Engels, who got it wrong a lot ofthe time but got it right where it mattered.17Readers familiar with Levinsand Lewontin will be aware that between them they have a wide rangeof interests. They criticise some of the statistical methods used in biology,take on biological determinism (the notion that human behaviour is purelyexplainable by genetics) and advocate the rights of Latin American migrantworkers in the US.

However, one of the most innovative lines of reasoning Levins andLewontin develop is what they refer to as the idea of the organism as bothsubject and object of evolution.18Lewontin in particular points out thatclassical approaches within evolutionary biology have viewed organismsas the passive objects of forces beyond their control. Those forces maybe either internal to the organism or external.19Darwin saw organisms asresponding to changes in their environment. Individuals within a popu-lation vary in their ability to survive and reproduce but it takes externalpressures from the environment to act on that variation and determinewhich individuals will be the most successful. Those individuals pass ontheir genes to the next generation. When evolution is explained in thisway the environment is seen as presenting a species with a particular set ofproblems that it must find a solution to through a process of trial and error.For example, the environment of the humpback whale is cold and full ofnutritious krill and small fish. It solves the problem of how to live in thisenvironment by evolving blubber to survive the icy waters, a huge mouthand some impressive techniques for catching its food. The job of a large,cold-water-swimming krill eater is what ecologists refer to as a niche.

Where classical Darwinists see organisms as responding to forces

16: This discussion of the role of dialectics in biology is not intended to imply that there

is no role for dialectical thought in other areas of science such as physics. I chose biologybecause of the particular influence of Levins and Lewontin and also because it is the subject Iam most familiar with. For a useful overview of physics see McGarr, 1994.17: Levins and Lewontin, 1985.18: Levins and Lewontin, 1985; Lewontin, 1982.19: Levins and Lewontin, 1985, pp85-106, see also Clark and York, 2005.



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acting on them from the outside, genetic determinists look from the otherdirection. They argue that plants and animals respond to internal forcesoriginating from their genes. Richard Dawkins has repeatedly com-pared living things to robots: We are survival machinesrobot vehicles

blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.20In this view of biology organisms, including humans, develop along apredetermined path decided by the information coded in our genes.

This is not to say that either approach is wrong, or that they areincompatible with each other. Dawkins has consistently tried to defendevolution against creationists. But both approaches, the one emphasisingexternal factors and the other emphasising internal ones, only look at partof the picture. Levins and Lewontin argue that such approaches ignore therole that the organism itself plays in its own evolution.21The organism isseen as a passive site where genes and environment interact. The dialectical

biologists contend that an organism is also, in a way, not just the objectbut the subject of its own evolution.22Organisms define a niche aroundthemselves as they determine which aspects of their immediate surround-ings are most relevant. For example, a woodpecker might find the bark ofa tree relevant but not the stones at the base of the tree. Other birds thatuse those stones to smash snail shells will find them relevant and treat themas part of their environment.23We cannot know what a niche is in theabsence of the organism that inhabits it. There was never a job vacancy forsomething that lives in cold water just waiting for a humpback whale toevolve to fill it. That particular niche developed in a relationship with theevolution of the whale.

Levins and Lewontin have also drawn attention to the numerousexamples of ways in which organisms act on their environment as well as

just responding to it. Beavers build dams to make their immediate surround-ings more habitable for themselves; plant roots change the composition ofthe surrounding soil so that they can extract nutrients more easily. Livingthings have changed the planet on a spectacular scale, even altering theatmosphere irreversibly by adding oxygen. We are not merely objects to beacted on by external forces. Levins and Lewontin study the ways in whichorganisms actively relate to the environment around them implying thatneither organism nor environment can be understood without reference to

20: Dawkins, 1976, p.ix.21: Levins and Lewontin, 1985, pp87-89.22: Levins and Lewontin, 1985, p89.23: Levins and Lewontin, 1985, p99.



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the other. This is in direct contrast to Cartesian approaches that might tryto look at an organism in isolation. Furthermore, this relationship developsthrough time as the organism growsanimals and plants have a history.

Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge also applied a dialectical

understanding of processes that develop in a disjointed rather than smoothand gradual way. In their theory of punctuated equilibrium evolution ischaracterised by long periods of stasis interspersed with instances wherenew species evolve very quickly.24Gould admitted that the theory wasinfluenced by Marxist philosophy and argued that dialectical thinkingshould be taken more seriously by Western scholars.25But despite theclose similarity between punctuated equilibrium and dialectical insightsabout gradualness and leaps it has remained remarkably resilient as a theory.Steven Rose, a neuroscientist and popular writer on the philosophy ofbiology, cites the dialectical tradition as one of his influences.26His argu-

ment that complex systems have properties which cannot be explained bylooking at each part of the system in isolation does resemble some of theinsights of dialectical thinkers like Harvey.

Arguments against a dialectics of natureHowever, not all Marxists have accepted the idea that there are dialec-tical processes in nature in the way that the dialectical biologists have done.Engelss views on the subject have attracted controversy ever since Dialecticsof Naturewas first published, with his ideas distorted by both enemies andmany would be friends.27Perhaps part of the confusion is due to Engelssformulation of the three laws of dialectics. These lawsoriginally bor-rowed from the German idealist philosopher Hegelwere supposed byEngels to describe processes in both the social and natural worlds. Thelaws are the interpenetration of opposites, the transformation of quantityto quality and the negation of the negation. We often use examples fromscience and nature to explain these three laws. For the law of transforma-tion of quantitative change into qualitative people often mention that waterturns into steam once its temperature reaches 100C. A quantitative changein temperature leads to a qualitative change from one state to another.There is also the one about the chicken and the egg. When a chick hatchesfrom an egg it destroys that eggnegates itbut when it grows into a hen

24: Eldredge and Gould, 1972.25: Gasper, 2002.26: Rose, 1997.27: McGarr, 1994.



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that negates the chick so this is the negation of the negation.By choosing these particular examples we often take it for granted that

dialectical processes exist in nature. But this assumption is rejected by manyMarxist commentators. The triviality of some of these examples is one reason

that some have questioned the notion of a dialectics of nature. Ian Birchallrightly points out that making a revolution is...rather more complex thanmaking a cup of teaor even than breeding chickens.28The dialectics ofnature has also been criticised as an attempt to find convenient evidence for amore or less arbitrary set of laws. It should be possible to find evidence in thenatural world for laws such as the negation of the negation if you look hardenough and are willing to be selective about which examples you choose.This led Jean-Paul Sartre to comment that the only dialectic one will find innature is a dialectic that one has put there oneself.29

Some argue that Engels was fundamentally mistaken for suggesting

it. They say that he did not understand Marxs dialectical method or hadcorrupted it by extending its reach beyond social or historical questions.George Lichtheim, writing in the early 1960s when many Marxist academicswere seeking to rescue Marxism from associations with Stalinism, arguedthat Engels was the problem. For Lichtheim and others on the left theidea that there are laws in nature was irreconcilable with socialism frombelow. Laws imply that natureand consequently human historyfollowsa predetermined course. And if history is predetermined there is no role init for the conscious action of the working class. If we try to distil dialecticsinto a set of three laws we risk breaking its ties with the concrete reality it ismeant to stem from. Applying laws to nature would suggest a dualist distinc-tion between ideas and reality where one determines the other. How canthis be reconciled with a conception of Marxism that argues for a unity oftheory and practice? In the 1960s and 1970s it became accepted among leftwing academics of various tendencies that Engelss ideas were at the root ofthe Stalinist interpretation of socialismthat is, as something that could behanded down to workers by an elite at the top of society. Some have evencited Engelss comments on nature to dismiss his contribution to the Marxisttradition entirely.30More recently writers on gender, for example, have sim-ilarly found it much easier to accept Marxs nuanced position, whereasEngelss view is apparently scientistic and deterministic.31

28: Birchall, 1983.29: Sartre, 2004, p31.30: See Rees, 1994.31: Brown, 2012, p211.



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However, it seems unlikely that Marx and Engels disagreed funda-mentally with each other on questions of science and nature during theirlifetimes. In later life they employed a kind of division of labour in whichEngels dealt with science while Marx was concentrating on writing Capital.

But they visited each other often, especially after Engels moved to Londonin 1870, and would have regularly discussed their respective work in detail.There is nothing in the written correspondence between Marx and Engelsto suggest that they disagreed. This is not to say that Marx was ignorantwhen it came to science. In fact he often chose examples from chemistry andphysics to illustrate points in Capital. He uses the example of elliptical motionin physics to explain contradiction32and refers to organic chemistry. Marxexplains that making quantitative changes to the chemical structure of a com-poundadding carbon, oxygen and hydrogen in different proportionscanlead to those substances gaining qualitatively different properties.33

It is true though that Engelss Dialectics of Naturewas influential withinthe Soviet Union after it was published there in 1925. The version of dia-lectics the Stalinists employed was tied to a rigid application of Engelssthree laws. The laws were repeated by Stalin and his followers acceptedthe concept of a dialectics of nature, completely uncritically, it seems.Professors who had previously been leaders of institutions found themselvesreplaced by junior colleagues who had professed their allegiance to dialec-tical materialism, or a Stalinist interpretation of it. Many formerly respectedscientists found themselves imprisoned and even killed. Trofim Lysenko,who rejected genetics as a bourgeois deviation, was appointed head of theInstitute of Genetics. These attacks on science were part of a wider drivetowards Bolshevisation in all areas of intellectual life. It was partly aneffort to force science to catch up to the very particular needs of the SovietUnion to maintain itself as a global power. There was no longer time forpure science. Scientists had to justify their work by demonstrating its rel-evance to Stalins Five Year Plans for economic growth. But it was also partof an ideological effort to justify the existence of the Soviet Union, both toits own citizens and to potential sympathisers in the West, as a society runcompletely in the interests of the proletariat.34

So Engels may have unwittingly played a role in this appalling attemptto try to force science to be more dialectical. But taking a dogmatic

32: Marx, 1976, p70; Weston, 2012.33: Marx, 1976, p215.34: Sheehan, 1993. The proletarian science episode and Lysenko in particular are describedby the historian of science Loren Graham (1993) and also by Levins and Lewontin, 1985,pp163-196.



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approach to dialectics was the last thing Engels intended. And, of course,Dialectics of Naturewas an unfinished worka series of notes that Engelsmight well have revised considerably if he had published it himself. HelenaSheehan, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, argues that his work on the

subject should be viewed more as a pointer to areas that required furtherstudy rather than the final word on the matter.35This position is also sug-gested by Engelss own comments on science, again in Ludwig Feuerbach.Here he discusses the potential useful contribution of Hegels philosophy,from which he derived the three laws, and rejects some conservative inter-pretations of Hegel. Engels states: The whole dogmatic content of theHegelian system is declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dia-lectical method, which dissolves all dogmatism. Thus his revolutionary sidebecomes smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side.36

Here it seems he is saying that Hegels laws should themselves be

left open to being evaluated and reinterpreted. They are not a fixed set ofrules. However, this is not to say that he intended dialectics to be purelya method. It also seems clear that, at least as far as Engels was concerned,ways of thinking about the world cannot be separated from the real natureof the world we are intending to study.

Lukcs and the dialectics of societyThe work of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukcs was a particularlypowerful tool in the argument against a dialectics of nature. Lukcs was con-cerned with the practical application of Marxist philosophy, with dialecticsas a vehicle for revolution. Lukcss ideas famously changed throughout hislife and it would be impossible to cover his thought in detail here. However,his early approach to dialectical philosophy comes through most clearlyin his classic work History and Class Consciousness, which was published in1923 while he was in exile in Vienna. Lukcs had been a leading memberof Bela Kuns Communist Party, although the left was dominated by themuch larger social democratic party. He was forced to flee Hungary after thecountry was taken over by Admiral Horthy who banned the Communistsand executed and imprisoned thousands of their supporters.37

Lukcs argued that we cannot immediately grasp the real nature of theworld around us. We live and think in a bourgeois society that distorts our

ideas. Under capitalism many of the things most essential to us take the form

35: Sheehan, 1993.36: Engels, 1947, p16.37: Rees, 1998.



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of commodities that are exchangeable for money. The material propertiesof commodities, and their social origins, are therefore obscured as only oneproperty becomes relevant: their price on the market. Marx argued that cap-italist exchange of commodities follows its own logicand can give a sense

of inevitability. As Lukcs put it in History and Class Consciousness:

Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being

(the world of commodities and their movements on the market). The laws

governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so

they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power.38

So we think of the capitalist system as being made up of a series ofobjects which relate to each other but this obscures a much more complexreality. Lukcs argued that the working class is uniquely able to understand

the capitalist system in the way that the bourgeois class cannot. This is becausewe are ourselves central to keeping capitalism running. We sell our labourpower to capitalists for a price, so our ability to labour is, in a way, also objec-tified and turned into a commodity. The proletariat do not just observe howcapitalism works from the outside but act within capitalism. Lukcs followedMarx in seeing theory as a tool of class struggle and inseparable from practice:materialist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic,39a way of understanding theprocesses at work in the society we live in but also a tool for changing thatsociety. Lukcs was focused on the role of the working class in uncoveringthe reality of capitalist society. But he had little to say on the subject of nature,showing an almost exclusive concern with the dialectic in society.40Aspectsof the natural worldanimals, plants, stones, etcdont take on the sameunique role as both subject and object of history that the working class doesin capitalist society, according to Lukcs. They dont engage in class struggle.

Lukcs is often assumed to have dismissed the concept of a dialec-tics of nature entirely, an assumption which owes a lot to the followingpassage in History and Class Consciousness: The misunderstanding whicharises from Engelss presentation of dialectics rests essentially on the factthat Engelsfollowing Hegels false exampleextends the dialecticalmethod also to the knowledge of nature.41However, John Rees ques-tions whether Lukcs completely rejected the idea of a dialectics of nature.

38: Lukcs, 1971, p87.39: Lukcs, 1971, p2.40: Rees, 1998, p252.41: Lukcs, 1971, p24.



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Lukcs criticised Engels for equating the methodsby which we study societywith those by which we study nature. For Lukcs we cannot approach thestudy of society as a distanced, objective observer in the same way as we(supposedly) approach nature. We are part of society so we observe it from

within. It does not necessarily follow that there is no dialectics of nature.However, any dialectical processes occurring in nature without the con-scious intervention of humans would be different from that observed insociety.42It is also worth remembering that in 1923 Lukcs would not haveread Dialectics of Nature and so wasnt responding to that text in particular; ithad yet to be published.

What do we mean by nature?Later commentators have questioned whether it is possible to cordon offhuman society and treat it as separate from the natural world as Lukcs

appears to have done. Antonio Gramsci said of Lukcs that if his asser-tion presupposes a dualism between nature and man he is wrong.43Toassess whether there is anything in the idea of a dialectics of nature it wouldseem that we need to at least agree on some idea of what nature actu-ally means. This question is often left out of such arguments. The debate isgenerally focused on what dialectics isand this remains disputed. But theconcept of nature is just as difficult to pin down. Raymond Williams refersto it as perhaps the most complex word in the language.44So comingup with a definitive definition would certainly be beyond the scope of thisarticle. But we can at least question some of the more reactionary assump-tions about what the word nature refers to.

Some of the most insightful ideas about nature have been developedwithin my own discipline, geography. This is perhaps due to the history ofthe subject. Geographers were traditionally the people travelling the worldobserving different human societies and suggesting how the environmentspeople live in might influence those societies. For example early geographerspropagated the racist myth that people from hotter climates tended to bepoorer because the climactic conditions encourage laziness. Today (most)geographers are more critical of the notion that the environment influencessociety in such a simple and unidirectional way. But the interest in the rela-tionship between society and nature remains. Geography is often described

42: Rees, 1998, p252.43: Gramsci, 1971, p448.44: Williams, 1976, p219.



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as a bridging discipline, part social science, part natural science.45

One of the most prominent geographers to take an explicitly Marxistapproach to these questions was the late Neil Smith (whose doctoral thesiswas published as a book: Uneven Development).46Smith argued that many

of our ideas about nature can be linked to the ideology of class society,and of capitalism as a specific form of class society. His work aims to addsubstance to the partial insights Marx left as to his approach to nature. Wetend to see nature as something external to humanity. The natural worldis the wilderness beyond the edges of our cities, a paradise untainted byhuman intervention. These images of nature are central to the ideologyof many deep green environmental thinkers. Of course, lots of peoplewho consider themselves environmentalists are also deeply concerned forthe welfare of humans. However, the ideology of protecting an externalnature can be politically unhelpful. It has fostered the belief that the needs

of humans are in opposition to those of the natural world that can be seenin the persistent argument that we need to limit human population growthin order to protect nature. This is demonstrated by David Attenboroughsrecent remarks that humans are a plague on the earth.47The ideal of anature that can be kept separate from human society is also upheld by peoplewith much less interest in protecting it. Technocratic thinkers argue that wecan take control over nature. They suggest that we can solve all our envi-ronmental problems by developing ever more sophisticated technology. Wecan run our societies based on the same economic rules as before and simplytreat nature as an externality to be managed.48Whether nature is a paradiseor a resource for us to exploit, it is still defined by being external to society.These approaches are all predicated on this nature-society dualism.

Dualism also fosters the idea of an unchanging or universal nature.Bourgeois thinkers argue that as nature exists independently of society thenwhats natural must never change. Appeals to the authority of nature canbe used to justify some of the most conservative ideas about society. Humannature can never change. Institutions such as marriage, as an exclusivelyheterosexual endeavour, are also seen as part of the natural order of things.Capitalism stalks the globe looking for new ways to destroy natural resources,but its apologists insist that their way of life must be preserved for eternity.

If bourgeois thought sees nature as an untouched wilderness this only

45: Castree, 2000.46: Smith, 1990.47: Gray, 2013.48: Castree, 2000.



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serves to obscure the real situation. Human beings dont just exist in theworld but also impact on that world. Different types of society treat naturein very different ways. Capitalism tends to treat every aspect of nature assomething that could potentially become a commodity for exchange on the

market. There is no natural world outside its influence. Even by thinkingabout nature we are compelled to think about it in a particular way basedon the needs of whatever type of society we live in. But generally we arenot just contemplating the environment but finding new ways to turn itinto a source of profit or a dumping ground for our waste. Smith arguedthat in the form of a price tag, every use-value is delivered an invitation tothe labour process, and capitalby its nature the quintessential socialiteisdriven to make good on every invitation.49

This has become strikingly clear with the rise of carbon markets,which effectively put a monetary value on the air we breathe. For Smith

and others the theory of the production of nature has been an antidote todualist assumptions. To argue that nature is produced doesnt mean that wehumans literally create aspects of it; we dont build mountains. However, wedo literally produce new organisms (by genetic modification) and new eco-systems such as the heathlands created by deforestation. It could be said thatour actions produce a new nature within the old one. There are few partsof the world that are not impacted by humans. Marx argued that even in hisday there was very little wilderness left.50

Marx saw the ideological separation between society and nature as anaspect of class society, not as something that has always existed. To quoteSmith: The domination of nature idea begins with nature and societyas two separate realms and attempts to unite them. In Marx we see theopposite procedure. He begins with the relation with nature as a unity andderives as a simultaneously historical and logical result whatever separationbetween them exists.51

This approach to nature could also in itself be described as dialectical.In the method Marx developed and employed in Capitalhe uses what Ollmanrefers to as different levels of generalisation.52The whole of the universe is

49: Smith, 1990, p56.50: Marx refers to a nature separate from human history as no longer existing anywhere

except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent originFoster, 2000, p116.It could be added that humanity doesnt have much of an impact on outer space (besidesadding a few satellites and space junk) although for many followers of Smiths ideas on theproduction of nature these are academic questions.51: Smith, 1990, p48.52: Ollman, 2003.



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both complex and constantly changing. Everything is related to everythingelse. But it would be impossible to try to think about the whole universe atonce. Therefore Marx uses dialectics as a method to focus his attention ondifferent aspects of the world. Sometimes he refers to processes at the level

of capitalist society, sometimes class society more generally. Sometimes hebroadens the scope of his arguments still further by suggesting that what heis referring to relates to the whole of the natural world. It often makes senseto refer just to what happens among humans to make a particular point, forexample, to explain the relationship between capitalist and worker. Sometimesit makes sense to refer to the way capitalists and workers relate in a capitalistsociety but this relationship does not exist independently of the wider contextin which it exists. This, for Ollman, supports the argument that Marx, likeEngels, intended dialectics to be applicable to both society and naturenot

just society. Looking at the whole of the natural world, of which human

society is a part, is seeing things at a different level of generalisation than theone someone might use to make a particular argument about human society.The question for Marx and Marxists then is not so much about how

society and nature relate to each other. Instead we should question how thesetwo aspects of the whole ever got separated in the first place. This pointis taken up by John Bellamy Foster, who has revived Marxs concept of ametabolic rift.53Marx argued that human beings interact metabolically withthe world around us. It is our ability to workto use our labour powerthat facilitates this interaction. Capitalism commodifies labour power andturns it into a source of profit. It simultaneously creates a metabolic riftbetween humanity and nature. So the rift is a historically contingent one that,it is argued, developed with the development of capitalism. In a passage inCapitalVolume 3 Marx describes how the conditions produced by capitalismprovoke an irreparable rift in the independent process of social metabolism,a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.54Marx asserts in thispassage that there is such a thing as nature (and even goes as far as to suggestthat there are natural laws). He would not have seen nature as entirely sociallyconstructed in the extreme sense in which the term is sometimes used. Itwould be inconsistent with Marx and Engelss approach to focus entirely onnature/biology as if it is separate from society. But if the two are inseparable itwould also be problematic to focus ones attention entirely on the social side

of the equation and see nature as solely determined by society.If we produce nature our relationship with it is much more complicated

53: Foster, 2000.54: Marx, 1981, p949.



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than one of domination or management. However, it also means that we canchange the way we produce nature. We should continue trying to preventprocesses such as climate change and species extinction but should not imaginethat what we are doing is restoring the environment to some imagined natural

state before humans existed. Instead we should turn our attention to the waysin which nature is produced, towards what aims and in whose interests. NeilSmith rejected the pessimistic argument that humanity will always exploit theenvironment. He argued for a socialism based on control by ordinary peopleof the production of nature. If we see dialectics as existing only in society werisk reinforcing the view that nature is a separate realm entirely, the kind ofdualism that Neil Smith, John Bellamy Foster and others have argued against.Perhaps this dualism is why people such as Gramsci have questioned Lukcsstendency to try to separate nature and society. However, if Lukcs was wrongabout nature this is not to say that his ideas are useless for progressive environ-

mental politics. Recent thinkers, particularly geographers, have applied theideas of Marxist thinkers such as Lukcs, Gramsci and the French Marxist phi-losopher Henri Lefebvre to questions about the natural world.55

The debates over Dialectics of Nature have a wider significance forMarxist theory than the relationship between Marx and Engels or even theimportant question of our approach to nature. It gets to the root of ques-tions about what kind of philosophy Marxism is and what that philosophyis supposed to be used for. It seems like Engels was trying to understandsomething fundamental about the way the world works. He saw dialecticsas describing real material processes. When he says quantitative change leadsto qualitative change it doesnt just mean that it is useful as a method to treatthe world as if this happens or to think about the world in this way. Hemeans that it really does act in this way. Not all philosophers even agree thatthe world does exist outside of the mind of the person doing the thinking.And trying to understand something about how that world works is not auniversally accepted role for philosophy.56For many thinkers it is far tooambitious to try to argue that there are underlying laws or processes gov-erning reality and that we can understand these laws.

However, this materialist approach to philosophy is in line withMarxs approach to social questions. Marx agreed, in his Theses on Feuerbach,that the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated

from practice is a purely scholastic question.57If we are aiming to change

55: See for example Loftus, 2012.56: Molyneux, 2012.57: Marx, 1947.



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the world it stands to reason that we should agree that the world exists. Andwe have to take seriously the project of trying to understand that world.Marxism is, of course, about intervening in the world, not just interpretingit. But the two are, for Marx, inseparable. We interpret the world through

intervening in it and intervene based on our interpretation.

Why arent there more dialectical scientists?But if there are real dialectical processes at work in the natural world this raisesthe question of why only a few scientists studying nature openly acknowl-edge this. Why arent there more dialectical scientists? It could be counteredthat there are many arguments, not just in science, where Marxists feel thattheir ideas are correct but where the majority of people disagree. Why arentthere more economists who accept the tendency of the rate of profit to fall?

We often assume that science is neutral. In other words, we tend to

think that when scientists observe the natural world their methods of enquiryallow them to gain an objective understanding of the world that the rest of uscannot. However, scientists do not live outside of society. Their theories, aswell as the types of questions that are considered worthy of research, reflectthe type of society that they live and work in. So scientists could be said tobe observing the real world but through a social prism which distorts theirview.58Capitalism, as Lukcs recognised, needs to turn aspects of the naturalworld into commodities for exchange on the market. Researchers workingon increasing rates of photosynthesis in plants have focused on one enzyme ina plant leaf called rubisco. They are trying to make that enzyme work moreefficiently so that ultimately they can engineer a plant that will produce morecrops for farmers than existing varieties.59It is possible to see how such asystem might encourage science to see the world in a reductionist rather thana dialectical way. Phil Gasper argues that the tendency towards reductionismin capitalist science reflects the dominance of individualism is capitalist soci-ety.60It is not particularly helpful for these scientists to see the enzyme theyare trying to improve as a complex of processes or to view it as being in a his-torically developing relationship with its environment. They are much moreable to work on that one enzyme if they can deal with it as if it is separatefrom the rest of the plant.

John Parrington makes a similar point. He argues that reductionism,

the belief that a system is best understood by dissecting it into component

58: Parrington, 2013.59: Mackenzie, 2010.60: Gasper, 1998.



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parts and studying these individually, has provided a powerful tool in hisown research into the molecular biology of human fertility.61However,reductionism reaches the limits of its usefulness when trying to make senseof how its insights fit into a wider picture. It is particularly problematic when

used to try to interpret the social implications of biological researchwhenit goes from being a method to an ideology.

The dialectical biologistsLevins and Lewontin and a few otherssuch as Steven Rosecould all be accused of following a soft version ofdialectics. They dont explicitly take into account the infamous three lawsof dialectics. Chris Harman argued that if we do not recognise the evidencefor these Hegelian laws in nature, particularly the negation of the negation,we are missing something central.62Harman argued that organisms dont

just relate to their environments but are negated by those environments.The way they react back on those environments should be considered as

an example of the negation of the negation. For Harman, the ability to acton the environment is common to many types of living organism. But,unlike Levins and Lewontin, he argued that only those that have developedconsciousnessie humanscan be considered to go from being objects tobeing subjects. Only humans are able to control the world around us ratherthan just reacting to our environment with a blind response.63

Christof Niehrs, a German embryologist, explicitly noted the formalsimilarities between processes in biology and Hegels laws in a recent scientificpaper.64Niehrs looks at the way animal embryos develop in the very earlystages, long before they have gone from being a ball of cells to a recognisablefoetus. Chemicals called morphogens are released by cells at one side of theembryo. This side starts developing into what, in vertebrates, will become theside where the spinal cord is (the dorsal side). These then trigger the release ofdifferent chemicals at the opposite end that act against the production of thefirst group of morphogens (negate it). These are in turn negated at the dorsalside. This is one of the most important stages in animal development. It kicksoff the process that will eventually lead to the formation of an animal with ahead end and a tail end rather than a homogenous mass of cells. And it couldhardly be more similar to the negation of the negation.

However, noting interesting examples of Hegels laws in naturedoes not give much clue as to how, if at all, scientists can use these laws. If

61: Parrington, 2013, p104.62: Harman, 2007.63: Harman, 1988.64: Niehrs, 2011.



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scientists are expected to start from the idea that they go out and look forexamples of the laws in their work (which Chris Harman did not suggest),it risks turning dialectics into a scholastic exercise. All of the biologistsmentioned state that what they do when they go into a lab is the same science

using the same methods as anyone else. Dialectics is for them a way to inter-pret the results of their experiments rather than an excuse not to do thoseexperiments. Knowing the laws of dialectics is no substitute for a scientificunderstanding based on knowledge of specific material phenomena.

ConclusionWe often explain dialectics using examples from science and naturebut thenotion that dialectics is relevant in these areas is not universally accepted.Many Marxists would completely reject the idea of a dialectics of nature. Butthere is also a tradition of Marxist approaches that see the separation of nature

from society as part of capitalist ideology. If we question the divide betweensociety and nature and agree that dialectics shows us something about society,can we then consistently argue that it has nothing to say about nature?

The dialectics of Marx and Engels is a materialist philosophy. It treatsthe world as if it is changing because it does change, and as contradictorybecause it is contradictory. The natural world really is changing. Recentlythe concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts permillion for the first time since measurements began in 1958. The levels of thegas in the atmosphere fluctuate but it is possible that they will soon reach levelswhere they will cause irreversible changes. If the Siberian permafrost starts tomelt, scientists speculate that this could lead to the release of methane heldwithin the frost. Methane is also a greenhouse gas and is much more potentthan carbon dioxide, so it could lead to much more warminglikely to feedback and melt more of the frost. It not as though the earth has never been thiswarm beforeit is not unnaturalbut it will have devastating consequencesfor the people who have to live with the effects. Humans are causing thesechanges to our environment and they cannot be understood in any sensibleway without reference to our societies.

Dialectics is a tool for understanding the reality of the world that welive in. As Engels argued, it is about matter in motion. If we try to treat theworld as if it can be divided up into separate elements and as if everything in

it stays the same we risk letting something important slip from our grasp. ButMarxists dont just interpret the world; we also change that reality. Dialecticalapproaches see our current problematic rift with nature as an aspect of classsocietyand, like all things, as something that can be changed.



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Documents

Dialectics of Nature-Camilla Royle