The continuing multiple crises of the capitalist mode of production continues to produce ideas about how to solve them by one means or another. Many of the means advocated are those which envisage a stage of human social evolution which goes beyond the present system of unlimited growth and unlimited consumption. Among those ideas currently being revived as offering solutions to the ecological aspects of the crises within the capitalist mode of production are those connected with Karl Marx and Lenin. I have covered the ideas and practical measures of Lenin and his loyal disciple Stalin in considerable detail in Revolutionary-Humanism and the Anti-Capitalist Struggle and this can be downloaded from the file ‘free downloads’ under the banner photo. I have covered the contributions Karl Marx has made in five previous articles ‘Understanding Marx’ also available on this blog and I offer another assessment of Marx’s contribution in the remainder of this article, and in a part 2 to follow.

When we consider Marx, we should remember a few important historical factors. First, he wrote in the 19th century and we are now well in to the 21st century. Second, as brilliant as his economic and social analysis is, we should understand that he initially assumed that the hierarchical  mass society form of human social aggregation would continue to be essential for humanity and the rest of life on earth. His admiration for the collective feats of civic and industrial engineering in the modern bourgeois period of hierarchical mass societies, and his admiration for the art and philosophy of the ancient Greek period of hierarchical mass societies, are just too firmly asserted and frequently repeated to deny. Spanning over ten thousand years in Europe, in which different modes of production progressed from the asiatic despotic regimes to the medieval fuedal kingship rulers and through to the modern industrial and financial capitalist hierarchies, it does seem that the success of the human species in its hierarchical mass society form – in every field of endeavour – was something spectacular.

Taking a one-sided, on the surface view of history, this could appear to be the case, even when taking into account its numerous destructive and exploitative sides such as frequent wars, slavery, racism and mysogeny. Moeover, in the 19th century it seemed logical to practically everyone on the left, who seriously thought about it, that ‘the material conditions of life’ (described as ‘Civic Society’ by Hegel and others), that the human species would continue to dominate nature from within mass society aggregates, but in a more humane and collectively equal way. These ‘material conditions of life’ which Marx began to study during his stay in Paris, were the starting point and the basis of his materialist conception of history. Thus when Marx wrote;

“In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political super structures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” (Marx. Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’.)

We should not confuse the ‘relationships’ he refers to (ie those relationships between human beings) with the relationships between the human species and other species of life on earth (or nature in general). Whilst the above extract is an accurate material starting point and logical sequence for studying the capitalist mode of production, it is notable that this study is deliberately focussed predominantly  upon the existence of human productive relations exclusively within human communities. Marx, during his life time was operating within an existing intellectual paradigm of socio-economic study based almost entirely upon an anthropocentric understanding of life on earth. So when Marx goes on to note that ‘the mode of production determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life’, we should not assume it is ‘life on earth’ in general that he is focussed upon. His focus clearly remains primarily upon the ‘civic life’ of the human species within hierarchical mass societies as dominated by capital.

The conflict between the ‘material forces of production’ with the ‘existing relations of production’ that he then goes on to deal with are not the escalating conflicts and contradictions between humanity and the rest of life on earth. They are not concerns about ecological balance between the billions of evolved species but upon the sociological balance between humans. The contradictions he is motivated to explore and expose are those occuring entirely within the social evolution of human species during it’s post hunter-gatherer phase of social organisation. Humanities biological evolution, like the slow bio-chemical evolution of all other species, had reached a stage of relative refinement intellectually identified by the classification of humans as Homo sapien. When Marx formulated the following excerpt concerning the working class, this single species focus becomes clear.

“The community from which the worker is isolated by his own labour is life itself, physical and mental life, human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature…The disastrous isolation from this essential nature is incomparably more universal, more intolerable, more dreadful, and more contradictory, than isolation from the political community. Hence to the ‘abolition’ of this isolation…” (Marx. Collected Works Volume 3 page 205.)

This community he refers to is unequivically the human community; this ‘life’ he is considering is human life within human societies; the isolation from this “essential nature” he is referencing is not nature, or life in general, but the specific communal nature of humanity before human socialised alienation took place within hierarchical mass societies. In the contradictions between the ‘general interests’ and the ‘private interests’ that Marx also refers to later are not the contradictions between the general interests of life on earth as a whole and the private interests of individual humans, but between the general interests of human communities and the private interests of individuals within them. Even when in the first volume of of his unrivaled in depth analysis of the capital mode of production he writes;

“Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.” (Marx. Capital Volume 1 chapter 15.)

It is only the sapping of the soil and the labourer – which Marx describes as the original sources or wealth – that he identifies. Why is this sapping of life on earth so limited by Marx?  I suggest it is because at the time he wrote it the soil and human labour were the only commonly understood supportive aspects of nature which he and others recognised as being sapped by elite directed human activity. But of course both of these factors, including ‘wealth’ are exclusively or primarily human anthropocentric concerns. Humanity likes to flatter itself that it is the key stone species of life on earth and that perspective permiated all classes of humanity. Indeed, the human species and their internal social relationships remained Marx’s primary focus throughout his life, with only occasional side-bar type references to the other species if life on earth.

“…life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things…..Therefore, in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its implications and to accord it it’s due importance…The production of life, both of ones own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the cooperation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. ” (Marx. ‘The German Ideology’. Section 1 History.)

In these and other such references by Marx, we can see how close he came to grasping the relative importance of life on earth (nature) in general as sources of nutrition and habitation, to humanity but the discovery of the absolute importance of bacteria to digestion, to T cells for immunity, to plant cell photosynthesis for food chains was largely unknown. A resort to Engels who outlived Marx fares no better as in the preface to ‘The origin of the Family, Private property and the State’ Engels goes no further than the 1844 manuscripts and the ‘German Ideology’ stating that; “..the determining factor in history, is in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life”. The production and reproduction of immediate life is actually the determining factor of all life on earth, not just in the history of the human species. But the detailed inter-dependent connections beteeen life cycles on the planet were not being referenced, because at the time they were not fully understood.

A more detailed understanding had to await the invention of electron scanning microscopes and much else, before anthropocentric assumptions about nature (life on earth) could be questioned and these historically determined ideas superceded by life on earth based understandings. The problems that human productive activity poses to life on earth in general is a 20th and 21st century phenomenon. Even in debates between Marx and the anarchists, for example, these discussions were never primarily over the mass society form itself and its relationship to nature but only about the existence of a hierarchical alienating structure within human societies. Only later in his life did Marx return to his earlier concepts regarding nature in the 1844 manuscripts and begin to doubt the common anthropocentric assumption concerning the inevitability of future hierarchical mass societies. For example;

“Man is directly a ‘natural being’. As a natural being he is on the one hand endowed with ‘ natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being, a limited creature, like animals and plants…But man is not merely a natural human being he is a human natural being…therefore he he is a species being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing.” (Marx 1844 Manuscripts. Emphasis added. RR.)

Yet even in this case of repeated stress on ‘natural’, it is in the qualifying clause of; “not merely a natural human being, he is a human natural being”that reveals anthropocentric tendencies.  It is  in the later sentence where Marx indicates a reversal of the actual real life presidence between ‘nature’ and ‘human’, between a natural human being and a ‘human’ natural being. That subtle, but notable linguistic juxtaposition blurs an important biological difference between life on earth as a whole (which is the foundation of all past, present and future human societies) and life in human societies in particular. Even in the 21st century most of the human species are continuing to put their own species (and nations) first and the rest of humanity and nature into various tiers or levels below them. Anthropocentric ideological assumptions even permeate the modern ecological perspective as the following example indicates. A panel of scientists collaborating with the Stockholm Resiliance Centre concluded;

“…..that Earth is now well outside the safe operating space for humanity.”

Despite the pressing dangers to the entire life on earth system, in the 20th and 21st centuries, the focus of even the more radical intelligentsia in the 21st century is still firmly on creating a ‘safe operating space’ for the human species. I suggest that if continued obsession with ‘self’ is an indicator of an individual level of serious psychological imbalance, then any continued obsession with our own single species out of the billions of other species of ‘life on earth’ that we rely upon  is a serious form of psycho-social imbalance.

Roy Ratcliffe (March 2024)