My Notes on ‘The Return of Nature’

Part I. Lankester and Morris

Those who said Marxism ignored ecology are immediately destroyed.

Ecological Marxism and ecological socialism run like a thread right through the history of Marxism and socialism, and through scientific-intellectual history more broadly. Demonstrated here in the British case, which was a center of the initial development of Marxism and Darwinism (and of capitalism!). A key link from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to later (J. D. Bernal/Joseph Needham/J. B. S. Haldane) is E. Ray Lankester. And of course Marx and Engels’s engagement with Charles Darwin (and natural science in general) is a key basis for this link.

Lankester’s concept of degeneration is very useful for criticizing teleological notions of progress. This is a condition for a critical approach to capitalist material and social reality. Value relations have clear degenerative tendencies ecologically. (See my Marx and Nature [Chicago: Haymarket, 2014].)

Morris is clearly a Marxist (historical materialist) in orientation especially as his thinking and activism developed. He enriches historical materialism culturally and ecologically in terms of alienation and de-alienation vis-à-vis artistic craftsmanship and its relations with nature materially and aesthetically.

General comment: the book’s whole orientation is to develop an intellectual history that can shed light on the question of ecological revolution historically and today. In this sense, it is a very practical book.

Part II. Engels

Engels’s ecological perspectives developed in tandem with Marx’s but in relatively autonomous fashion due to their personal circumstances and their intellectual-political division of labor; plus, Engels outlived Marx and had to edit/publish Marx’s work and serve in the socialist movement politically post-Marx. This included connections with socialist women, which affected his outlook. Marx and Engels were close partners but not identical. But the anti-Marx Engels view is completely groundless. They were in basic agreement on all major methodological and substantive questions. (See Hal Draper [Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 1, State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 24] on this too, and the recent piece in MR [Paul Blackledge, “Engels vs. Marx?,” Monthly Review 72, vol. 1 (May 2020)].)

Engels’s ecologically relevant work includes not only Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, but also his draft on Ireland [the opening chapters of his intended History of Ireland] and his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels provided foundations for a strongly pro-ecological form of what has become known as social reproduction theory, combining the development of family/kin relations with social production as a whole—an organically joint historical-materialist treatment of gender and class relations. He treats the nuclear family as the cell form of class-exploitative relations, the first form of private/public divide in social production/reproduction. Women’s oppression based on private status of domestic labor, as production of surplus products became more broadly socialized with the division of labor etc. (husbandry and agriculture first of all, later manufacturing becomes more important in itself). Engels develops all this in terms of a consistently metabolic-ecological concept of human labor, i.e., labor as an evolving part of the evolving universal metabolism of nature (as Marx put it). (I was the first to point out Marx’s use of the universal metabolism concept in my rough drafts for Marx and Nature.)

So Engels unifies the treatment of class-based production and household-based reproduction, and both of these with the state, into one general conception that is ecologically and gender conscious while consistently materialist and non-teleological. This explains why Engels and Marx got so excited about Darwin. They were evolutionary before Darwin, but Darwin reinforced and helped them clarify their conception and its differences from crude materialist and idealist forms of evolutionary theory, which infected even some of Darwin’s followers.

All this was shaped by Marx and Engels’s use and development of dialectics, and here is where both G. W. F. Hegel and Epicurus become crucial. Dialectics emerges as the way in which Engels in particular engaged with historical and contemporary scientific developments. The notion of Engels as a simplistic, reductionist thinker compared to Marx is completely destroyed here, together with the various “distortions of Marx” that Engels was supposedly guilty of. If the dialectics of nature are interpreted in emergentist, non-teleological (contingent, Epicurean) terms, then this whole critique of Engels falls apart completely. The contingency aspect highlights the role of praxis in all its forms; hence the dialectic of freedom and necessity. This view of Engels is completely opposed to mechanistic interpretations. Engels emerges as a central figure in the history of ecological Marxism. The emergentist ecological tradition first clearly and publicly inaugurated by Engels was then picked up and further developed (if in idiosyncratic and at times distorted and politically softened ways) by Lankester, Lancelot Hogben, Arthur Tansley, etc. in their battles against mechanistic-positivist materialist science on the one hand, and idealist-holist ecologies (J. C. Smuts, etc.) on the other. This includes struggles against eugenicism and misogyny (the latter not always consistently). Hence in the end, Engels’s perspective continued to indirectly shape a developing undercurrent of “intersectionality” and ecological analysis/consciousness in British scientific and social thinking. This whole connection is missed by those who reduce Engels’s influence to the distorted appropriations of Engels by official (including Stalinist) Marxisms.

Side note: the critical perspective the book offers on Smutsian “holism” may be applicable to Jason Moore and other “Latourian” thinkers. But I have not read that stuff enough to say for sure.

Part III.

The need to relate alienation/de-alienation of art with that of science is very important. This connects directly with Morris and with elements in E. P. Thompson as well as with the innovative aspects of Christopher Caudwell’s thinking, which are normally missed by orthodox Marxists of various stripes.

The dialectics of nature cannot be separated from human perception and evolution. This is an organically co-evolutionary perspective on the dialectics of nature debate that takes the discussion from Georg Lukács (for example) to a brand new level and connects it with Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and with Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin’s uncompromisingly dialectical view of nature and science. All this is integrated historically in the book, which means dealing with the unevenness of the intellectual developments due to generic human-political failures co-evolving with the economic and political context including imperialism, colonialism, racism, world wars, and the Cold War. It’s a fascinating story.