At 25/06/01 14:02 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote:
>No kidding.
>Geez, I did not know that.
>Recent reading has convinced me that it is time to reconsider dialectical
>materialism, the unjustly maligned attempt by Marx and Engels to provide a
>unified analysis of society and nature.
That is not what dialectical materialism is.
>an
>updated version can provide insights into the environmental crisis that
>historical materialism simply can not.
Always assuming the update is accurate and not an adaption of something else.
>(By the
>way, there's an essay by this guy named Michael Perelman titled "Marx and
>Resource Scarcity" in there as well. It's pretty gosh-darned good.)
>Vaillancourt singles out Engels's "Anti-Duhring" and the "Dialectics of
>Nature" for special consideration since they are more directly concerned
>with nature and ecology than any of the previous writings of Marx and
>Engels. They are also considered bulwarks of dialectical materialist
>thought. The "Dialectics of Nature" contains the famous chapter "The Role
>of Work in Transforming Ape into Man."
I cannot comment on the work by Vaillancourt but Louis Proyect dwells on
this particular article by Engels to imply that the "Dialectics of Nature"
is an ecological work.
It is not.
It is the last of a collection of articles with titles about Motion, Heat,
and Electricity. It is followed by other notes and fragments covering
themes like Mathematics, Mechanics and Astronomy, Physics and Chemistry.
The last fragment, Biology, might be most likely to portray an ecological
perspective if that was a general theme of this work, but it does not.
The article known as "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition form Ape
to Man" is an extremely creative work which is rightly quoted to show the
compatability of marxism with ecological concerns but it would be quite
wrong to go away with an unquestioned assumption that "the Dialectics of
Nature" is about ecology. The particular article was originally written as
an introduction to a more extensive work entitled "The Three Basic Forms of
Slavery" but this was not completed.
After one of the most famous passages Louis Proyect goes on to quote the
next passage:
>"And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better
>understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate
>and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional
>course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the
>natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a
>position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural
>consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more
>this progresses the more will humanity not only feel but also know their
>oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and
>unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, humanity and nature,
>soul and body, such as arose after the decline of classical antiquity in
>Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity."
If Louis Proyect had continued still further, he would have read:
"But if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to
learn to some extent how to evaluate the more remote *natural* effects of
our actions directed towards production, this has been even more difficult
in regard to the more remote *social* effects. ... The men who in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laboured to create the steam engine
had no idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than any
other was to revolutionize social conditions throughout the world.
Especially in Euorpe where it helped to concentrate wealth in the hands of
a minority and to make the huge majority propertyless, this instrument was
destined, first to give social and political domination to the bourgeoisie,
but then to give rise to a class struggle between bourgeoise and
proletariat which can end only in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the
abolition of all class antagonisms."
Louis Proyect does not understand that the previous chords were to prepare
for this key change. Instead he dwells on Engels' formulation about our
"oneness with nature".
[Apologies Michael, if this is a characterisation. Apologies to Lou if this
is a *false* characterisation, but how can one argue against a serious
misreading of an important text if one cannot say how one thinks it has
been seriously misinterpreted?]
>When Engels states we will know our "oneness with nature", he is really
>hearkening back to the classical materialist roots of Marxism. After all,
>Marx wrote his PhD thesis on the philosophy of nature in Democritus and
>Epicurus. These philosophers are in the materialist tradition begun by
>Parmenides and Heraclitus, who lived a century before. This tradition is
>continued in the philosophy of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, who
>are the forerunners of the science of nature and even of scientific ecology
>itself. The opposed philosophical tradition of Plato, which posits a
>duality between mind and nature, is certainly at the root of Christian
>theology itself which Engels attacks.
The danger of this sort of formulation is that it can reduce dialectical
materialism to a sentimental oneness with nature, and an opposition to the
duality between mind and nature, which, latter, is fortunately opposed by
many people.
Dialectical materialism is much more than this. Its importance was very
much stressed in the Thirties by not only Stalin and Mao, but also by
Trotsky in his last polemics against Burnham and Shachtman's compromises
with Burnham. Whatever you think of the three great controversial names,
the subject of dialectical materialism deserves better treatment than Louis
Proyect has given it here. Nor is the important cause of ecological
struggle helped by this sort of theoretical muddle.
Dialectical materialism is an approach to the whole of reality (that is the
meaning of 'Nature' in Dialectics of Nature). It posits materialism, not
idealism, as the basis of reality, and it approaches it dialectically. To
quote from the Dictionary of Marxist Thought "What the component of
dialectics asserts is that concrete reality is not a static substance in
undifferentiated unity but a unity that is differentiated and specifically
contradictory, the conflict of opposites driving reality onwards in a
historical process of constant progressive change, both evolutionary and
revolutionary, and in its revolutionary or continuous changes bringing
forth genuine novelty."
Louis Proyect goes on blandly and confidently to claim that
>In reality, both Marx and Engels oscillated between an anthropocentric and
>a nature-centric perspective.
While oscillation may be necessary for some political purposes, this is a
serious charge. Evidence please?
In particular the idea that Marx and Engels were "nature-centric" after the
1860's is a monumental confusion based, one suspects, on an entirely
secondary reading of the "Dialectics of Nature". What is does not grasp is
that there was a change over the decades in the relative prominence that
Marx and Engels gave to dialectics as an overt method. That is a wholly
different question.
>When they discover Darwin after 1860, the
>nature-based perspective begins to hold sway as well it might. The tension
>between the two poles can best be explained by the lingering impact of
>Hegel, whose philosophy emphasized historical and socioeconomic factors and
>incorporated a deeply-felt humanism.
Marxism is neither sentimental humanism nor sentimental naturism.
>In the late 20th century, we have begun to understand that nature can not
>simply a act as a faucet for the unlimited supply of raw materials and as a
>drain for noxious industrial waste that results from the transformation of
>raw materials into commodities by labor. Engels's comments on the
>despoliation of the Alps have been written large as we see huge sections of
>the planet being wasted by a profit-starved lumpen-bourgeoisie today.
True, except that the bourgeois is not lumpen. What is gained rhetorically
by the use of this word, is more than lost in scientific accuracy.
>Human beings are not immune from this process, which takes place at the
>level of matter itself. That is why the project that Engels began with
>Dialectics of Nature is worth understanding and building upon.
Except that an essay based on one untypical article in the Dialectics of
Nature does not define "the project" that Engels began with the Dialectics
of Nature, because that is about dialectical materialism, and anyway
dialectical materialism did not *begin* with the Dialectics of Nature,
which was published long after Plekhanov first coined the term.
>We are not
>apart from the natural world, since we are composed of matter ourselves
No kidding!
> All of the processes are
>dialectically interwoven.
True, but dialectical materialism is more than that.
>The class struggle has been understood by Marxism as having purely a social
>dimension, but it is high time that we developed a much richer and deeper
>understanding of the natural underpinnings of the class struggle.
Marx is clear that wealth consists not just of the products of labour but
of naturally occuring use values.
> Economics
>is not simply a function of labor; the natural world is intimately
>involved.
But where does the law of value appear in this?
>The socialism that we have to create must attack all of these problems
>because they are interrelated. You can not satisfy the economic
>expectations of people living in Brazil or Indonesia unless you are
>prepared to satisfy the overall needs of the planet to remain economically
>viable, which requires first of all clean air and clean water. To come up
>with these answers, we have to develop an ecosocialism that is
>scientifically informed.
True.
I look forward to a programme of reforms and a willingness to make tactical
and strategic alliances, combining unity and struggle (dare I
say?) dialectically. Otherwise we will just swing over and think that
because of all these true points about the environmental crisis, we just
become eco-socialists.
>It also must be theoretically grounded as well.
>This means developing an appreciation for what Engels was trying to do in
>Dialectics of Nature and expanding upon it as well.
It would be more impressive if Louis Proyect had demonstrated a familiarity
with some of the basic concepts of dialectical materialism.
Chris Burford
London
