Humans,nature and dialectical materialism

Introduction

This contribution to the symposium sets out three interrelated terrains. First, it critiques the application of dialectical reading of human–nature relations as articulated in the Foster–Moore debate in its own right. It is beyond the scope of this article to engage with every line of argumentation developed by the authors in their eloquent critiques of the state of green Marxism; Foster (2016) already offers an excellent dissection of the state of the debate, its main postulates, and points of disagreement. Rather, my focus here is on the reading and application of the dialectical materialism in an attempt to clarify, concreticise the theorisation of human–human and human–nature relations in the human–nature dialectic in the work of Foster versus its critique by humans-in-nature argumentation of Moore, set against the backdrop of decolonisation of Marxist epistemologies. Decolonisation effort sits in the refutation of anti-dialectical epistemologies by appealing to the relation between abstract and concrete and their conceptual variants, while acknowledging instrumentalisations of ‘naturalness’ of indigenous groups in the logic of colonial expropriation. Second, I rearticulate those readings through the lens of the dialectical biospheric analytics of late Soviet ecology, Vernadsky and – more recently – Petrashov. The third is where I invoke the dialectical cosmological thought of Evald Ilyenkov as developed from Marx, Engels and Lenin which was precisely directed at (mis)reading of dialectical materialism by the Soviet scholars that led to analytical mistakes not dissimilar to those that drive divisions in the green Marxism today. In doing so, I argue we can move beyond the artificially implanted nature–society dualism in Marxist thought (not by Marx!) that sparks the debates between ecological Marxism and radical social monism that Foster (2016: 398 et passim) documents. Through employment of Ilyenkov’s critique of the Soviet diamat, I show that there are no dualisms in dialectical materialism, cannot be. In connecting dialectical historical materialism as a philosophy of knowledge with the (post)Soviet biospheric analytics, I argue, we can arrive at open-ended, noospheric epistemologies and ontologies for the future societies, remedying the metabolic rift and prefiguring productive systems on preservationist and counter-entropic principles.

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There is a general consensus among (green) Marxists that goes along the lines of Kovel and Löwy (2001) declaration in ‘An Ecosocialist Manifesto’ that the end of capitalism can be the only hope for our and other species. ¹ Ecocidal capitalism/capitalism needs to be abandoned, but not the economic nor technological development (not to be confused but to be disentangled from ‘growth’ – see Latouche 2010). ² It yet needs to be done as an approach to ecosystem development/biospheric evolution, with mitigation and compensation inbuilt in it from the outset, as means of approximation to noosphere, that is, the sphere of reason (first introduced as a term by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 in his Cosmogenesis; then by Le Roy in 1927), which I discuss in more detail below. Noospheric thinking, it must be noted (and as other contributions in this volume show) has historically been present in the cosmological fabric of indigenous communities as manifested in their relationship with non-human species and elemental flows of their habitats inclusive of the inanimate elements of those. Similarly, and without romanticisation, multiple examples of (re)productive system collapses exist in history. What is important in the transition to noosphere is to build up on the knowledge, on epistemologies of the past and present if the future is to be. To make this economically viable, financial and intellectual access to the latest advances of science, technology and expertise needs to be treated as commons – which they are in essence – and be shared and distributed where necessary and with prioritisation by urgency, collectively decided and spatio-temporary contingent. By the same token, historical epistemologies pushed aside by colonialist essence of western science (and its purpose with its counter-dialectical, reality-denying split into ontology and epistemology, and its embedded alienating approach) must be brought to the fore, studied, embraced, included in the dialectic of the global philosophy of knowledge. Western fetishism of quantitative scientism downplays the importance of the unquantifiable and is, thus, methodologically counter-dialectical which makes it effectively inaccurate by default, that is, by limiting the epistemological spectrum it reduces, misrepresents and misinterprets the complexity of the social, the physical, of the thought-matter processes and of ontology to only a fraction of itself; not merely by engagement in abstraction – which is a necessary step in analysis, but in fetishising the quantified abstraction, treating it independently from its messy dialectical ontology. In such a way, quantitative positivism, that is the foundation of hegemonic western science, disrupts the existential connection of multiple ontologies and epistemologies, let alone attempts to comprehend the unity of the two, while any serious attempt at decolonised dialectical analysis should do precisely that. The unevenness inbuilt in the capitalist system, its naturally and socially exploitative essence, primacy of the quantitative economic growth and productivist systems of (re)production (historical example – Union of Soviet Socialists Republics (USSR) under Stalin) must be abandoned, metabolic rift(s) manufactured through humanity’s oblivion of its role and function in the universal circulation of matter and energy must be recuperated with careful invoking of complex and multivariate epistemologies, philosophies of knowledge and praxis from across the planet.

How to decolonise green Marxism is as much a question of who is responsible for the climate heating as it is a question of the kind of thinking and kind of systems of production, reproduction and consciousness that brought about, entrenched and perpetuate climate heating. As it is not a ‘natural’ but an anthropogenic and – more so – capitalogenic (Malm 2015, 2016; Moore 2015[2016])^3,4 phenomenon, so is the thinking and the systems behind it are socially constructed, in the dialectic power struggle with their competing alternatives and/or forms, mediated by and dispensed through state/society/capital complexes (Yurchenko 2018) ⁵ increasingly geared towards securing continuation of accumulation of capital at any social and planetary cost. Yet, one would be limited by fixating on capitalocene rather than productivist and/or ecocidal systems – something Foster argues, not least by appealing to the Soviet experience in both destroying and in preserving nature, their intellectual tradition of both including the materialism and in critiquing its dominance, the reflectiveness of late Soviet Marxist thought on mistakes made in the USSR experiment. Talking about ecocidal productive systems of Anthropocene is thus much more fruitful than talking about capitalocene alone – although capitalism indeed in the main driving force behind the sixth extinction/annihilation. One cannot imagine a better future for humanity if humanity is seen as the source of destruction by default. It is not who we are as a species, it is what we do that destroys the planet and – more importantly – what we do can be transformed.

The colonial essence of ecocide must be acknowledged; as should be the fact that it – as is much of the Anthropocene scholarship in its colonial amnesia – is racist (Françoise Vergès in Johnson & Lubin 2017) ⁶ and it never did nor now does care about those being exploited and affected worst being in the global south, space that has historically provided ‘tropical gifts’/resources (Patnaik and Patnaik 2017) ⁷ to the empire of capital (capital, not concrete simply countries who have been its historic bearers although they matter too) – this must be accounted for in the evolution of the noospheric approach outlined below. Acknowledged also should be the fact that there is an omission in the decolonisation approaches too and that is that they often revolve around the north–south relationship axis whereas everything in-between is somehow excluded. Unevenness that cuts across country borders needs to be articulated carefully along the lines of transnationalising class, not state-centric analyses (Yurchenko 2018). We are decolonising along the lines of historical northern empires, while they were not the only ones; nor was the empire of capital historically limited by state – or imperial – boundaries. Russian, Chinese and Japanese empires, for example, had own variants of relations of exploitation. So the many decolonisations need to occur somewhat differently; their cosmologies and philosophies need to be examined for us to have a better grasp of both historic and potential future shape of the dialectical relations between humans and nature. Epistemologies that legitimise humans being the coloniser of the ecosystems, of it animate and inanimate elements too must be questioned as colonial by default.

Dialectical materialism

Debates about human–human and human–nature relations are crucial and must necessarily address the historical context and the legacy of colonialism and Eurocentrism, ontological and epistemological. Analyses of climate change, ecocide and anthropogenic factors must necessarily be situated alongside the analyses of the capitalist transformation in human–human and human–nature relations. At the same time, we must go beyond fixating on capitalist relations alone; as undeniable as is the role of capitalist relations in the manufacturing of the metabolic rift, we must adopt a dialectical understanding of ecology, of human–human and human–nature relations that allow us to also go beyond the ‘capitalist’/‘non-capitalist’ dichotomised discourse. We need a different understanding of human – body and mind, non-Cartesian, and nature relations; understanding the role of prefiguration, of thought in that relationship.

Moore and Foster debate is a crucial focal point for green Marxism and for its future departures. Moore’s critique effectively highlights the reductionism of colonial epistemologies and their critics, modes of criticism, the obscuring that those inevitable do due to their analytical limitations (I turn to those in the section on Ilyenkov and the critique of positivism). Yet, one must not focus on capitalism alone as that omits other forms of productive and reproductive systems that can be entropy-accelerating or counter-entropic. Elsewhere, Foster documents that socialist systems, for example, USSR, have too exhibited entropy-accelerating, ecocidal tendencies as well as most progressive scientific conservationist movement in their ‘extraordinary set of historical ironies’ (Foster 2015a), ⁸ which are highly valuable to explore as an existing historical example of epistemological evolution of a society geared at communism even if with that road was travelled with some questionable turns. ⁹ In addition, there are numerous examples of communities, civilisations that have brought forward their own decline by driving metabolic rifts of some variety and which were pre-capitalist. These examples beg the question: if we are to move beyond criticising capitalism and towards prefigurative ecological Marxist thinking, what would it be?

Some interesting lessons are offered by the Soviet variety of dialectical materialism as a method of achieving precisely that sort of thinking when applied correctly, that is, without the fetishism of the material, dialectically, in the thought of Evald Ilyenkov. Ilyenkov was a Soviet scholar whose work has a lot purchase in its critiqued the Soviet diamat for its scientism and positivism, its materialistic reading of dialectics. He observed that ‘Matter, with a necessity inherent in its nature, constantly engenders thinking creatures, constantly reproduces . . . a thinking brain (2017: 65). ¹⁰ Following Engels who argued that ‘Matter in its eternal cycle moves according to laws which at a definite state . . . necessarily gives rise to the thinking mind in organic beings’ (Engels (1974[1883]: 475–476, ¹¹ quoted in Ilyenkov (2017[1979]: 165)). ¹² It is in this sense, Ilyenkov continues, that

dialectical materialism restores the simple and profound statement of Bruno and Spinoza in a rational form, that in matter, taken as a whole, development lies in their actual consummation of every finite moment of time; in matter, all the stages and forms of the necessary development are, simultaneously, found in their actual realisation. Taken as a whole, matter does not develop: not for a single moment can it lose a single attribute, nor can it acquire a single new attribute.

At the same time, we can study those attributes and learn to manoeuvre those in a noospheric sense to allow for counter-entropic development, ‘backward’ manoeuvres necessary to translate the metabolic rift into its opposite, in a manner that would de-alienate humans and nature.

Biosphere is a domain of the thought-matter dialectic. Human is an object and a subject of and in nature, shapes and is shaped by the ever transforming natural environment and their transforming matter and thought, by ideas about what to consume, how and in what quantities and combinations, what and how to produce change in humans and nature; those ideas emerge from the dialectic of matter and thought and brain as a thinking matter within, between and around humans and all biospheric organisms and matter in their relevant manner. Our analytical focus on the human is not due to anthropocentrism of this exercise but rather due to centrality, importance of destructive productive systems designed by humans who are driving the current ecocide and the metabolic rift overall. Acknowledgement of the anthropogenic origin of this biospheric metabolic rift is the first step towards accepting responsibility and identifying the loci and the essence of the destructive, entropy-accelerating behaviour.

Foster–Moore debate is peculiar in the human–nature dialectical sense. Moore accuses Foster in but declaring an attempt at dialectical reading of the relationship and in neglecting the history of natural slaves and/or naturales (Moore 2015[2016]: 27), capitalism, and the undeniable fact that humans are part of nature. Yet, it is difficult to find such denials in Foster, nor in Marx who Moore accuses of ‘dualist habits of thought’. Indeed, Moore’s (2015) criticism of ‘circulating capital [being] the forgotten moment in Marx’s model’ (p. 100) is defied by his own quotation of Marx’s discussion of the place of raw materials in production cycles (see Moore 2015[2016]: 100) in the same paragraph (!). Nature, animals, raw materials, and so on, find their expression in commodities and in machinery too – Marx (1990[1976]) starts Das Capital with the commodity that ‘ . . . satisfies human needs . . . as a means of subsistence . . . or indirectly as a means of production’ (p. 125) by no accident but to highlight its sublimated essence as a product of dialectical relationship of human and nature and of labour in a (capitalist) society. The commodity – the object and product of labour in any system of production, capitalist or not, due to its endemic use value – thus, also sublimates the contradictory purpose of the production process and its objects – to meet the basic needs and the excesses, to use little or much of natural resources, to replenish and/or to exploit, and so on, – and, thus, allows one to assess which productive systems are metabolically sustainable and which drive the metabolic rift.

In the dialectical materialist sense as articulated by Marx, Lenin and later Ilyenkov, discussion of whether we need to analyse ‘humans in nature’ or ‘humans vs nature’ then becomes one of a false premise as humans are part of the biosphere and part of the circulation of universal matter. Separation of humans and nature, thus, can only be but on the level of abstraction – as Foster too states in is work – with a necessary bearing in mind of the unity of abstract and concrete, matter and thought, human and nature. True, humans have produced varied productive and reproductive systems in a dialectical historical materialist sense, yet those, irrespective of when, how, by who and for what purpose they were designed, have never managed to escape being a part of the biosphere and its matter circulation. Depending on whether those systems are/were entropy accelerators or counter-entropic, their function in the circulation of matter would be different but their essence as a constitutive part is constant and without question. The separation is always only – if necessarily for analytical purposes – on the level of abstraction and in acknowledgement of both unity and autonomy of a human as part of nature, that is, one cannot claim a rock to not be part of natural world because it presents an object in its own right, neither can humans be identified as outside nature simply because we can identify them as objects and subjects.

When we uncritically accept ‘statements by representatives of science and technology’, one turns to positivism that leads away from Marx and Lenin’s dialectical materialism and towards idealism (Ilyenkov 2017[1979]) – Foster (2016: 401 et passim) too makes precisely such observations; and through idealism one can resolve challenges our biosphere faces. Monism that Foster criticises falls precisely into the idealist trap, circumventing – deliberately or nor, dialectical materialist foundations of Marxist scholarship. This idealism is also evidenced in the notion of ‘singular metabolism’ – ‘one characterized by a “nature-in-humanity” that is simultaneously a “humanity-in-nature”, constituting a “double internality”’ (Moore 2014: 12, 15; 2015a, quoted in Foster 2016). Yet, the latter can evidently be interpreted as a reproduction of the dualism in its apparent abandonment of the dialectical essence that needs not these limiting specifications; their logic is endemic in human–nature metabolism. In productive processes, through labour, humans,

. . . [appropriate] of what exists in nature [for their requirement]. It is the universal condition for the metabolic for the metabolic interaction (Stoffwechsel) between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. (Marx 1990[1976]: 290) ¹³

Through the reading of Marx, Engels, Lenin (2016 inter alia) and Ilyenkov – and Foster (op cit; 2015c; Foster and Clark 2018) – we can see that there is no contradiction nor dualism in the dialectical reading of human and nature relationship in which Moore accuses Foster and Marx by extension; the human–nature separation has always been on the level of analytical abstraction – while abstract and concrete are in unity, part of totality – and to highlight some historical junctures where human thought themselves against and/or above nature. That need not distract us from deliberation or inevitability of concrete types of human activity, that is, capitalist activity or any other entropy-accelerating productivist system, being determinately destructive, against nature, while all human (re)production systems can be deemed destructive, yet, are so out of necessity as humans rely on consuming other species to survive, provide them with energy. Indeed, (re)production can be destructive for nature, when replenishing for humans, yet in the long run always destructive for humans too, unless counter-entropic measures are in place. The accelerated nature of the destruction under capitalism calls for urgency, the degree of it being unnecessary gives hope. Foster argues (2016: 400), ‘for Marx, a major ecological contradiction such as anthropogenic desertification, arising from historical class society and continuing under capitalism, could be seen as “an unconscious socialist tendency”, demanding the revolutionary restoration of essential natural conditions’ (Marx & Engels 1975: vol. 42, 558–559) – this ties neatly with the noospheric extrapolation of Marxist dialectical cosmology. These complex historical relations in mind, I want to turn now to the discussion of dialectical materialism as (re)articulated by Soviet ¹⁴ scholars.^15,16 The latter are a peculiar juncture to explore in our project of decolonising the Eurocentric green Marxism for two main reasons. First, as Foster (2015a) shows, the west’s ideological and geopolitical counterweight USSR was a society that has attempted to build its (re)productive systems and epistemologies along the dialectical materialist wiring and have produced both accelerated ecocidal productivism and progressive conservationism. And second, their own hegemonic epistemological diamat positioning bore colonialist stamps due its materialistic lens and anthropocentricity which was challenged by Ilyenkov and the conservationists albeit on different terrains.

Whither green Marxism? Noosphere!

How do we envisage tomorrow? Beyond Eurocentric, anthropocentric and capitalocentric goggles of distortion? Important are the questions of this symposium and the ones Foster (2016) posed:

How are Marxian thinkers, and the left more generally, responding to the advent of the Anthropocene (i.e. the reality of a new anthropogenic rift in the Earth system), and how is this challenge related to changing historical conditions arising from human production? Indeed, what intellectual resources does Marxism have to offer with which to address these new conditions and new perils?

Here I want to draw on some of those, mainly on dialectical historical materialism of Marx, Lenin and Ilyenkov, biospheric analytics of Vernadsky and its later developments as a way to see beyond the colonial epistemologies and develop prefigurative approaches to biospheric dynamics, that is, aspire towards noosphere and counter-entropic systems of production and reproduction. Ilyenkov’s ‘phantasmagoria’ which suggests that noospheric evolution and counter-entropy will allow humans to see past the thermal death of the universe is not an evolutionary plan, nor a way out, yet, with its dialectical, noospheric and molecular vision that erases all binaries, concrete or abstract, it is a good place to start seeing beyond the capitalocene and productivism, its ecocidal tendencies. In order to approach the question of nature, society/humans and their dialectic, Vernadsky’s articulation of evolution of systems of planet earth from geosphere (inanimate matter) to eco/bio-sphere (biological life) to noosphere (the sphere of reason; first introduced as a term by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 in his Cosmogenesis; then by Le Roy 1927) ¹⁷ is most useful. Vernadsky developed his theory of the biosphere to refer to the collection of all living things as one ‘living organism’, a biosphere then is the ‘sphere of life that includes the totality of all living organisms on the planet and their habitat’; it spreads from the ozone layer, includes all hydrosphere and the top layer of the lithosphere (Petrashov 1998: 4–5; Vernadsky 1998[1926]). ¹⁸ The intelligent, sensible, ecological governing of the biosphere – noosphere – is to follow evolutionary.

More recently, Russian scholars (primarily Petrashov) have taken these concepts further to elaborate noocenology – a science of restoration, regeneration of ecosystems and creation of noocenoses (Petrashov 1993, 1998) In his Foundations of Noocenology, Petrashov (1998) states that the majority of interconnections in the ecosystems are unknown to humans and that is why they ‘cannot control those and thus their management is performed as if in the dark’. Only the overarching approach is acceptable in society–nature relations, one that taken into account all connections in the ecosystems. Noocenology offers precisely such an approach that is a necessary and sufficient condition of preservation of the environment vital for humans and the organic evolution of the biosphere into the noosphere (1998: 2, author’s translation).

Noosphere discourse may too seem anthropocentric as it places humans and their reason at the centre of the new phase, new sphere of biospheric development. Yet, there is more to it than meets the eye once viewed through the prism of dialectical analysis of the functioning of the ecosphere. The undeniable destructive, ecocidal impact of human (predominantly capitalist) activity on the biosphere – when seen as its inseparable, if malfunctioning, part – by default places the human (some more than the other in our decolinisation lens) at the centre of analysis aimed at rebalancing the biosphere and eradication of the metabolic rift. Noospheric analysis then offers avenue through which that can be achieved by ascribing anthropogenic, historically specific responsibility, while acknowledging the limitations of human understanding of the complexity of ecosystems and the biosphere, yet, aspiring at improving that understanding through careful and ongoing inquiry. And indeed, our knowledge of those is still largely patchy and imperfect as are the technology, data and ecosystem modelling. ¹⁹ As Vernadsky stated in 1944, ‘humanity as a whole is becoming a significant geological force. And before it, before its thought and labour, lies the issue of transformation of the biosphere in the interest of the free-thinking humanity as a whole’ – a noosphere is this condition of humanity. This process is the issue of humanity as an organic part of the biosphere that working in its own interest has to act in the interest of the biospheric balance as its habitat, its home. It needs to involve progress of science, development of new sources of energy, and so on, while accepting the ‘unbreakable links of humanity with(in) the biosphere’ (Vernadsky 1977: 24 et passim).

Decolonising epistemologies

Dialectic historical materialism is never a rectilinear process as many positivists and stagists assumed in their neglect or misreading of dialectics. Epistemologies that posit humans above nature, as bearers of rights to strip the planet of its last resources, are colonial in essence and are dragging the biosphere into an inevitable collapse alongside their inability to acknowledge, let alone begin to comprehend the complexities they arrogantly purport to have mastered in their economic and policy models which are as eloquent as they are impotent on the matters of biospheric survival. As Ilyenkov (2017[1979]) stated,

Where an actual crisis has matured in the development of knowledge, where concepts, schools and tendencies (but not ‘terms’) are essentially coming into collision, positivism sees only uncontradictory peace and tranquillity, only the ‘movement forward’. It has neither the ability nor the desire to examine this movement in all its real and dramatic complexity, with all its contradictions and zig-zags, with all its roundabout and often even backward manoeuvres and evolution.

Positivist fetishisms obscure multiple epistemologies that fall outside the canon of ‘acceptable science’ and effectively impoverish the collective human system of knowledge and its philosophy. Remedial biospheric action and potential evolution towards noosphere – a path expected to be with its own certain zigzags and backward manoeuvres – are only possible with abandonment of positivist obsessions and embracement of dialectical materialism with its multivariate epistemologies, including biospheric analytics of the Soviet origin.

The freedom of necessity (Marx & Engels 1975: vol. 25, 105; Lukács 1980: 120–125) of today, as Foster (2009, 2016) states, is ‘best exemplified by ecological revolution’ (p. 415). This ecological revolution, if guided by the principles of noosphere articulated by Vernadsky, will ‘necessarily reverse the “rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” between nature and society, and bring about the “restoration” of that essential relation’ (Marx 1990[1976]: 63–s68; 1981: 949 in Foster 2016: 416; Foster & Burkett 2016: 239–240) – ‘while meeting no-less-essential human needs . . . [by humanity facing] its greatest historical challenge’ (Foster 2016: 416) yet. Noosphere is that – scientifically enhanced intelligent coexistence, counter-entropic, decolonised by praxis of forfeiture of capitalist and productivist (re)production systems and the epistemological straightjacket that legitimates humans as colonisers of the ecosystems.