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Nature
in György Lukács and Alfred Schmidt: Marxist reflections on the beginning of
the Anthropocene
A natureza em György
Lukács e Alfred Schmidt: reflexões marxistas no início do Antropoceno
Murillo van der LAAN
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7613-4051
State
University of Campinas, Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Department
of Sociology,
Postdoctoral
Researcher Programme, Campinas, SP, Brazil
e-mail: murillovanderlaan@hotmail.com
Abstract: This paper critically
contrasts György Lukács’ and Alfred Schmidt’s 1960s interpretations of Marxist
reflections on nature. It argues that Schmidt’s position on nature produces a
literal constructivism that Lukács’ ontological perspective avoids. It also argues
that Lukács generalises Marx’s theory of value in a way that hinders the
historical analyses of different social metabolisms, in contrast to Schmidt's
more historicised interpretation of value, which draws out important
considerations regarding capitalism’s relationship with nature. It further
argues that both positions, in analysing the Marxist perspective of an
emancipated society, not only depart from Marx’s positions but also fall into
what environmental sociology has termed exemptionalism.
Finally, it demonstrates how the theorising of István Mészáros and the
so-called Metabolic Rift School skilfully reframe the positive aspects and
limitations of Schmidt and Lukács’ interpretations.
Keywords:
Marxism. Ontology. Nature.
Resumo: O artigo apresenta uma contraposição
crítica de duas interpretações sobre as reflexões marxianas acerca da natureza
nos anos 1960, feitas por György Lukács e Alfred
Schmidt. Argumenta que as posições de Schmidt sobre a natureza incorrem, em
última instância, em um construtivismo literal que a perspectiva ontológica de
Lukács foi capaz de evitar. Por outro lado, o texto argumenta que Lukács faz
uma generalização da teoria do valor marxiana que obstaculiza a cognição
histórica dos diversos metabolismos sociais, diferentemente da interpretação
mais historicizada do valor feita por Schmidt, que tece importantes
considerações sobre a relação capitalista com a natureza. Argumenta ainda que
ambas as posições, ao voltarem-se para a perspectiva marxiana de uma sociedade
emancipada, não apenas se afastam das colocações de Marx, mas incorrem no que a
sociologia ambiental classificou como isencionalismo.
Por fim, busca mostrar como as teorizações de István Mészáros
e da chamada Escola da Ruptura Metabólica reenquadram proficuamente os aspectos
positivos e as limitações das interpretações de Schmidt e Lukács.
Palavras-chave: Marxismo. Ontologia. Natureza.
Introduction
|
Y |
ear
after year, extreme weather events and environmental catastrophes have made
headlines and become part of the daily lives of an increasing number of people,
especially in the Global South. This is happening while a wealth of scientific
data, accumulated and refined over more than two decades, has repeatedly
emphasised the anthropogenic nature of such calamities. Despite this, and
various mobilisations aiming to contain climate change and environmental
destruction, the course of events points to a deepening of the human impact on
the planet, driven by globalised capitalist production.
With
reference to the Anthropocene, diverse perspectives within philosophy and the
human sciences are seeking a theoretical framework that can account for the
current state of the relationship between humans and nature. Within Marxism,
those elements calling for eco-socialism are revisiting historical
controversies concerning the very idea of nature
and its relationship with humanity. In light of these
recent climatic developments, this text turns to one of these controversies:
the brief correspondence in the 1960s between Alfred Schmidt, a leading figure
at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and author of a classic book on
the idea of nature in Marx, and the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, who in the 1960s
was engaged in his final effort to construct a Marxist ontology.
The
argument presented here is that Schmidt and Lukács have distinct theoretical
concepts of nature, with scopes and limits that, to a certain extent,
complement each other. Lukács’ ontological perspective on nature is valuable in
proposing a substantive movement of nature, represented by the proposal for a
critical dialogue with the natural sciences, while Schmidt’s theorising
encounters a constructivism that loses sight of the objectivity of the natural
world.
Lukács
advances a generalisation of Marx’s theory of value to include all social
beings that constitutes an understanding of the historicity of the various
forms of ‘metabolism’ between humans and nature. While Schmidt presents an
interpretation of Marx’s theory of value that emphasises its roots in
capitalism and draws from its important reflections on interactions with nature
under capitalism.
When
reflecting on a communist society based on Marxist theorising, both authors set
out a development of labour and an imposition on the natural world that loses
sight of the dimension of natural limits and environmental crisis. This
undermines the positive aspects of each of the theories and reveals, in terms
of environmental sociology, the exemptionalism
of both. That is because, ultimately, they see human interaction as exempt
from the constraints and impacts of its actions on the extra-human natural world.
Finally,
argue how István Mészáros and, later, the so-called school of metabolic rift,
reframe the positive aspects of both Schmidt and Lukács for a more fruitful
perspective on both the contemporary environmental crisis and the reflection on
an emancipated society that establishes a qualitatively distinct and
sustainable relationship with the extra-human natural world.
Ontology, nature, and metabolism
Shortly after the 1962 publication of his doctoral thesis entitled The
Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt (2014) sent it to the Hungarian
philosopher György Lukács. As is evident from the title of the work, Schmidt
was seeking to understand the way in which nature appears in Marxist thinking.
In 1963, he received a complimentary response from Lukács, saying that it
represented an important scientific advance, especially because it engaged in a
processual interpretation of Marxist reflection, and was not simply a contrast
between a young and an old Marx (Lukács, 1963).[1]
Unable, at the time, to go into the details of Schmidt’s argument,
Lukács limited himself to just one observation “of principle [prinzipielle]”:
[...] however much you [Schmidt] emphasise in several
places the objectivity of reality, the analysis of the metabolism between
society and nature has in several places a fatal similarity [fatale Aehnlichkeit] with History and Class Consciousness.
This appears particularly sharply when you reproach old Engels for considering
nature in an ontologically objective way – supposedly in opposition to Marx’s
method. I, however, consider that the concept of metabolism with nature, which
is of central importance, is based on the ontological objectivity of nature
itself independently of society [Lukács’s emphasis]. Only on this basis
can labour, social activity and society itself be consistently understood from
a philosophical point of view. All of Marx’s considerations are based on this
method. Since I, with History and Class Consciousness, am primarily to
blame for the wrong method, I consider it my duty to express this conception
quite clearly (Lukács, 1963, unpaginated).
The question of principle raised by Lukács relates to the core of
Schmidt’s concerns, that is, the place of nature in Marxist thinking and, more
generally, in historical-dialectical materialism. In his letter Lukács (2003)
makes critical reference to the way in which he himself, forty years earlier,
in History and Class Consciousness, had shrunk the importance of the
extra-human natural world within society by reducing nature to a “social
category” whose form and content would always be, in various ways, socially
determined (Haug, 2021, p. 108-113).
Schmidt's position, which Lukács criticised was, however, less radical
than that expressed in History and Class Consciousness. In Marx’s
Concept of Nature, Schmidt (2014) indicated more clearly the existence of
an extra-social natural world beyond social determinations. He emphasised that
it would only be possible to speak of this extra-human dimension from the point
of view of the socially and historically determined relationship that we
establish with it, especially through work, and without extrapolating it to a
discourse on its existence independently of society.
Nevertheless, the closeness of Schmidt's position, and Lukács’ position
in History and Class Consciousness, lies in them both rejecting a
realistic ontological perspective on nature. For both, human cognition and
actions regarding the natural world are always permeated by social
determinations, which implies always considering them from a social perspective.
Both approaches contrast with that of Engels (2020), insofar as he engaged in a
theoretical project that sought to establish a connection between the natural
sciences in order to theorise about a dialectic of
nature, its laws of movement, the development of being, etc., which have an
independent existence beyond social determinations.
For Schmidt (2014), Engels’ effort constitutes a “naive realism” that
assumes an ahistorical and anti-dialectical position by seeking to construct an
ontology of nature. This is problematic because, according to Schmidt, it
implies a supra-historical approach; both because it seeks to realistically
grasp the existence of a nature without human mediation, and because it results
in a worldview with ahistorical dimensions, which ends up also naturalising the
social world, reducing it to a general objective law of development.
According to Schmidt (2014), a genuinely dialectical perspective should
not concern itself with a positive explanation of the structure of being but
should assume the critical historical function of considering the
contradictions between human beings in their praxis and their historical
actions.
Schmidt’s view (2014) is that Marx would have positioned himself
differently from Engels. He would not have resorted to a worldview or to a
positive principle to ontologically explain non-human reality. On the contrary,
nature would appear in his thinking as always mediated by interaction with
human beings, only through the ‘forms of social labour’ and, therefore, be
historically rooted.
This interpretation presents Schmidt with some problems. The first
relates to his attempts to separate the reflections of Marx and Engels
regarding an ontological and realistic position on nature. This conflicts with
the records in letters and books where the positions of both converge on the
issue (Foster, 2020).
Secondly, and more importantly, Schmidt’s interpretation is at odds with
the moments in which Marx refers to an ontological discourse when dealing with
nature. Schmidt’s (2014) solution is to indicate that although Marx does, at
various moments in his theorising, point to a relationship beyond the
interaction between human beings and nature, he does not do so in a positive
way, and does not theorise this relationship abstractly and ahistorically.
In Marx there is, what Schmidt (2014) calls, ‘negative ontology’, moments in
his output in which there is a recognition of ‘supra-historical’
determinations, but which are not theorised positively.
Schmidt’s interpretation places Marx in a position of greater scepticism
and distance in relation to the natural sciences, which becomes particularly
problematic when he turns to the analysis of the idea of metabolism in Marxist
thinking. Despite recognising Marx’s interest in the natural sciences, Schmidt
(2014) understands that his use of the term is analogical and speculative, a
heuristic resource for thinking about social relations and for critical
reflection on political economy (Saito, 2021, p. 105-114).
Schmidt’s departure from both an ontological perspective and the
substantive importance of the natural sciences also leads to problems in his
interpretation of Marx’s thinking on the contours of an emancipated society.
Schmidt’s (2014) understanding is that the mature Marx assumed a sober and
instrumental position in relation to nature, one which would promote, within
communism, technological development increasingly focused on its external
domination, with repercussions also on the internal nature of individuals. The
extra-human natural world would always remain a non-identical moment of the
social, but its capacity for ‘revenge’ on human beings, in Engels’s terms
(2020), would be increasingly undermined by a growing tendency towards human
domination.
The problem with Schmidt’s interpretation is that by refusing a positive
ontological exposition of nature based on the natural sciences; neglecting
Marx’s research on metabolism, also in a scientific sense; and referring to a
perspective in which humans increasingly dominate nature, he assumes a position
that comes close to what Anna Petterson (1999; Malm, 2018, p. 35) called
literalist constructivism: the idea that human praxis constructs nature (Haug,
2021, p. 107).
In Schmidt’s case, however, this occurs in a more nuanced way, in the
sense that nature itself figures in his theoretical framework subsumed by human
praxis. That is, even if his perspective, derived from a particular
interpretation of Marx, does recognise an irrepressible ‘non-identity’ of the
extra-human natural world, such a natural world would be faced with a
unilateral advance of human labour and production. Extra-human nature would not
figure in Schmidt’s interpretation as having its own objective dimension which
impacts the social world.
Years after the publication of The Concept of Nature in Marx,
when reflecting on the possibility of ‘ecological materialism’, Schmidt
recognised this problem. In the preface to his 1993 work, he indicates the need
to recognise more substantively the action of the extra-human natural world on
the social (Haug, 2021, p. 107; Saito, 2021, p. 113).
Schmidt’s observations shed light on the importance, from an ecological
point of view, of the substantive and autonomous materiality of extra-human
nature. Theorising that adopts a literalist constructivism can, by neglecting
the substantive action of the extra-human natural world on the social, lose
sight of the idea of natural limits and unforeseen consequences of human praxis. More
recently, this literalist constructivism appears in theorising that, by
claiming an inseparable intertwining between nature and society, ends up
defending the very idea of an ‘end of nature’, it having been subsumed to human praxis, or of the ‘production of
nature’ advanced by capitalism (Malm, 2018, p. 29–37).
Alongside this more literal concept of the construction of extra-human
nature, there are other theories that adopt idealist constructivism – following
Petterson’s classification – that reduce the natural world to ideas or
language. Since thought and discourse constitute an inescapable dimension of
our cognition of nature, the natural world is the result of the ideas and
narratives that we present regarding it. There are multiple epistemic
communities regarding this view. By removing a proper and autonomous ontological
referent of the natural world, these perspectives can, more radically, open a
dangerous opportunity for the various denials of the current serious
environmental crisis (Malm, 2018, p. 21-28).
Some time ago, another theoretical movement emerged that opposed
constructivist perspectives on nature, but at the same time brought with it
significant problems. Called New Materialism, this movement criticised the
centrality that various theories, including Marxism, give to praxis or human
ideas and discourses, and neglects the agency of the multiple beings involved
in social interactions. Contrary to a human/social focus, what this New
Materialism proposes is something characterised as a ‘flat ontology’, which
indicates that all objects have agency, whether they are organic or
inorganic (Malm, 2018, 78-118).
When thinking about contemporary environmental problems such as, for
example, climate change, New Materialism insists on shifting the focus of
analysis from social relations that organise the particularity of our
metabolism, such as capital, to recognising the agency of the various
beings in this process: coal, oil, carbon dioxide, methane, oceans, etc. (Malm,
2018, 78-118).
Within the Marxist tradition, this attribution of agency to
inorganic objects is characterised as fetishism (Malm, 2018, p. 110; Hornborg,
2019, p. 177-192). It becomes particularly problematic because there is an
intrinsic link between agency and responsibility, which is
crucial for the diagnosis of contemporary ecological problems. Instead of
shedding light on the specificity of the anthropogenic dimension of the
profound environmental problems that we experience today, under capitalist
relations, New Materialism claims, as fundamental, the distribution of agency
across networks of humans and non-humans (Malm, 2018, p. 110-112).
Given these different perspectives on nature, the brief exchange between
Schmidt and Lukács takes on interesting characteristics. Schmidt’s rejection of
Engels’ objective ontology of nature, independent of society, clashes with
Lukács's development of an ontology of social being, an idea which occupied the
final decade of his life.
As Lukács explains in his letter, he distances himself from the
influential position he had advanced in History and Class Consciousness
forty years earlier, which reduced nature to a social category. In the preface
to his 1967 work (2013, p. 14–28) he notes that the correct understanding of
labour and social being depends on an ontological foundation independent of and
beyond the social world.
With his ontology, Lukács’ aim was, through a return to Marx, to develop
an interpretation that could contribute to a rebirth of Marxism, amidst the
distortions of Stalinist thinking. This return to Marx was, to a considerable
extent, and particularly in relation to our concerns here, a return to Engels.
Although Lukács had criticised Engels’ generalisations about dialectics
in the 1960s, his ontology is based on a perspective of the immanent
development of being that is close to his proposal of a dialectic of nature. In
a certain sense, Lukács’ ontology has its ‘beginning’ there, in an outline of a
natural objectivity, characterised as a ‘self-movement that rests upon itself’.
A universal, dynamic metabolism that becomes more complex, in interactions also
marked by contingency, and composed of three large spheres that interpenetrate
each other: the inorganic being, the organic being, and the social being
(Lukács, 2012; 2013).
Lukács saw himself as a dilettante within natural sciences (Lukács,
1969, p. 19). He points to the possibility, as Engels had done before, of a
critical dialogue with the most diverse sciences to philosophically trace the
determinations, the imbrications, and the complexifications of being. He
indicated the processes of ontological continuity and discontinuity; the
specific interactions between inorganic being that gave rise to the emergence
of life, of organic being, and, later, of germs of consciousness from which,
finally, the social being emerged. The emergence of each new sphere represents
a qualitative leap that brings continuities and discontinuities with the
preceding spheres and a necessary relationship between them (Lukács, 2012;
2013).
The novelty introduced by the social being according to Lukács’ ontology
lies in the emergence of a qualitatively distinct consciousness, capable of
initiating teleological processes of a complexity unparalleled by organic
being. Referring once again to Engels, Lukács highlights the role of work in
the achievement of the metabolism between human beings and nature. From here he
derived the basic categories of human praxis, constantly in contact with an
objectivity that is both modified by teleological acts and which modifies and
determines human subjectivity and the social being (Lukács, 2013).
There is a unity of consciousness and objectivity in these processes,
but it does not translate into an identity. Human beings always act constrained
by the objectivity of the extra-human world, they have the capacity to affect
nature as a whole and, from this objectivity, create entirely new objects, but
this extra-human world always remains a “[...] self-movement that rests upon
itself [...]” (Lukács, 2013, p. 48), it is never completely subsumed by the
social being.
Human action on such objectivity, moreover, is always limited. In the
complex tangle of causalities and contingencies that constitute reality, the
intervention of the social being is always finite, incapable of grasping all
the consequences of its actions. There is always a ‘period of consequences’, in
which it is necessary to deal with the unforeseen results of human action on
the world (Lukács, 2013, p. 70-75). On these foundations, Lukács’ ontology
presents the process of development of the social being, which points to a
continuous ‘moving away from natural barriers’, the basis of a growing
‘socialisation of the social being’, and an overcoming of the constraints
immediately posed by the extra-human natural world (Lukács, 2013, p. 159).
In the process of development of the social being, Lukács was not
particularly interested in an ‘ecological materialism’, and he ignored the
issue of environmental destruction and its impacts on the social being.
However, by continuing with Engels’ project — which is marked by ecological
traits (Foster, 2020) — as the basis for his reflection on the social being,
Lukács opens the way for a materialism that manages to escape the problems of
other theorisations, see above.
This perspective had the potential – ultimately frustrated – to not fall
into a literal constructivism, whether in the more radical version advanced by
himself in History and Class Consciousness, or in the more nuanced
perspective of a negative ontology and domination of nature by Schmidt.
By proposing a realist ontology, based on a critical dialogue with the natural
sciences, Lukács places the idea of metabolism into a substantive and not just analogical sense, although he
recognises its limitations here. Furthermore, by proposing a general
perspective of the unfolding of the inorganic, organic and social being, and
the specificities of each of these spheres, Lukács refers to the substantive
materiality of the real, without assuming the fetishistic
positions of New Materialism.
So, we find Lukács’ perspective a useful theoretical framework for
diagnosing contemporary environmental crises. By proposing a realistic ontology
that considers the unity and interconnection between the various dimensions of
being without losing the specificity of each of its spheres, Lukács’ proposal
deviates from what environmental sociology has characterised as exemptionalism – the criticism that various concepts
of the social world view it as exempt from the impact it has on the environment
(Catton; Dunlap, 1978, p. 42-43).
Lukács’ proposal faced
this problem in a surprising way: his analysis of Marx’s theory of value as a
support for the ‘removal of natural barriers’
and the development of the social being. On this specific point, Schmidt’s
statements are more interesting, even though both end up suffering exemptionalism.
Value, nature, and emancipation
On the objective basis of the extra-human ‘self-movement that rests upon
itself,’ Lukács thinks about the development of the social being as being
primarily based on the process of ‘moving away from natural barriers’.
To revive Marxist reflections, he bases his argument on a peculiar
generalisation of the theory of value. With this, he advances a problematic
link between labour and the social forms that organise it, which contrasts with
Marx’s theorising.
On more than one occasion at the end of the 1960s, Lukács (2012, p. 359;
2012, p. 421; 2008, p. 138) took a position on this generalisation of the
labour theory of value as being ‘implicitly’ present in pre-capitalist works
producing use values, and also in communism even when the production and circulation of goods
ceased (Mészáros, 2002; Hudis, 2012; Van Der Laan, 2020).
This contrasts with the historicity attributed by Marx (1985a, p. 56;
2012) and Engels (1987, p. 294-295) to the theory of value. Lukács, however,
remains theoretically consistent with such a generalisation, which occupies a
prominent place in his ontology by ‘animating’ the development of the social
being. There is, in this, a trans-historical law of reduction of socially
necessary labour time, which is achieved by the meeting of the various
teleological acts in production, even if the various individuals involved in
this process are not aware of this result. A law to which individuals must
adapt ‘under penalty of ruin’, regardless of what they think about it. Even
though variations may occur when faced with such a law, it necessarily ends up
imposing itself (Lukács, 2013, p. 113-114).
As such, Lukács ends up explicitly generalising a set of categories that
are typical of capitalism: a compulsory reduction of working time, the indirect
social production of capitalism, the opacity of economic valuations, and
socially necessary working time itself (Van Der Laan, 2020, p. 104-134). All
these categories are specific to the uncontrollable movement of capital, but in
Lukács’ theory they are, together, transposed to the entire social being.
Lukács sees in this movement the multiple processes of estrangement of
individuals, in the most distinct social complexes. In a way, he inserts an
optimistic view of this law into the economic sphere, because despite it being
achieved through the degradation, and even the sacrifice of individuals,
ultimately it is responsible for the development and enrichment of individuals
and even of the human race as a whole (Lukács, 2013,
p. 580-581).
Schmidt (2014), on the other hand, is more precise in his historical
delimitation of Marx’s labour theory of value and, from there, draws important
conclusions regarding the capitalist organisation of the metabolism between
human beings and nature (Burkett, 1997, p. 166-168). The separation between
direct producers and means of production, the generalisation of the commodity
form, the work conducted privately that is confirmed post festum in the
process of exchange in the market, generate a peculiar form of relationship
with nature, when compared to pre-capitalist societies.
In this context, the value-form that guides capitalist production, based
on abstract labour as the substance of value, does not consider the extra-human
natural dimension. As with any mode of production, the capitalist cannot do
without nature and, in fact, takes it as a prerequisite. However, the natural
world does not figure, in its concreteness, dynamics, and finitude, in the
abstract relationship of the value-form (Schmidt, 2014).
This is further complicated by the fetishisation and reification of
capitalist production. They establish a double process of mystification: both
social relationships between human beings and their relationships with nature
do not appear as direct relationships but are subsumed under a distortion of
the commodity form and the capitalist market (Schmidt, 2014). The result is a
specifically capitalist, compulsory law to reduce socially necessary labour
time, organised around a supposedly infinite accumulation process that, in
Schmidt’s terms (2014), imposes itself on a non-identical, but passive,
extra-human nature.
Despite the differences between Lukács and Schmidt, their
interpretations overlap to a certain extent when they deal with Marx’s
perspective of human emancipation. Here the exemptionalism
of both authors appears more explicitly and, consequently, so do the limits of
their approaches to nature.
A privileged viewpoint for considering this convergence comes from Marx,
in the third volume of Capital, where he briefly deals with an
emancipated society. In them is his famous distinction between a ‘realm of
necessity’ and a ‘realm of freedom’, highlighting the intractable importance of
the metabolism between human beings and nature.
‘Marx (1986) states that the realm of freedom “[…] in fact only begins
where the act of working ceases, which is determined by necessity and external
utility; therefore, by the nature of the thing, it lies beyond the sphere of
properly material production” (Marx, 1986, p. 272-273). In the realm of
necessity,
[…] Freedom in this field can only consist in
socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their
interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of
being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the
least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy
of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains
a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy, which
is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which,
however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The
shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite (Marx, 1986, p. 273).
Lukács and Schmidt recognise the inescapable otherness of
extra-human nature. An emancipated society would not completely subsume the
natural world into the social world. On the contrary, the dimension of freedom
within it depends on a process of communist reorganisation of the metabolism
between human beings and nature. Both authors interpret freedom in the realm of
necessity from a narrow conception of what Marx called ‘the rational regulation
of metabolism’.
Lukács (2013, p. 531) uses Marx’s passage to reaffirm his ahistorical
view of the law of labour-value for all human sociability. The rational
regulation of metabolism, as well as ‘community control’ and ‘least possible
effort’ would be in the ‘pure language of economics, whose essence is a
constant pressure to reduce socially necessary labour time — which would
continue to exist in a communal society.
Instead of an organising principle of production in a communist society,
the ‘most dignified and most adequate conditions of human nature’ mentioned by
Marx are interpreted by Lukács as the introduction of a ‘fissure’ in the
economy, which will continue to be governed by the constant ‘pressure’ for
increased productivity. Regarding extra-human nature in an emancipated society,
beyond the indication of its otherness, Lukács says no more than that “[...]
the enormous expansion of knowledge of nature through work and the sciences
arising from it can only intensify the metabolism between the two, elevating it
to unimaginable heights” (Lukács, 2013, p. 530).
In turn, Schmidt’s (2014) interpretation of Marx on an emancipated
society is close to Lukács’, since his employment of the idea of a negative ontology
also claims an irrepressible otherness of extra-human nature. Marx, according
to Schmidt (2014), argues that communism would intensify, and capitalism would
accelerated, the trans-historical tendency of human domination over nature, and
that this would be done to the detriment of the extra-human natural world for
the benefit of human beings alone, with the help of immense technological
resources, and with the least possible expenditure of time and immense and
diverse consumption (Burkett, 1997, p. 170-173).
What Lukács values positively, Schmidt laments in terms of the domination of extra-human
nature. Both converge, however, in the characterisation, supposedly supported
by Marx, of a growing imposition on a passive nature. And Schmidt adds a
further tone of pessimism: in dialogue with psychoanalysis, he argues that the
domination of external nature implies a suppression of the ‘internal’ nature
of human beings.
What Lukács and Schmidt lose sight of in their interpretations of
Marxist reflections is, principally, the idea of ‘metabolic rift’ (Marx, 2013, p. 572-573). Marx and
Engels’ repeated dialogue with the natural sciences, particularly in their
struggle against Malthusianism, led them not only to an apology for
technological and scientific development but also to the recognition of natural
limits and the potential destructiveness of labour on the human world. Marx’s research on
capitalist agriculture pointed to the possibility of there being an
‘irremediable rift in the metabolism between human beings and nature. Marx’s
studies on metabolism in the final decade of his life also referred to climate
change, the horrors of animal farming, and deforestation resulting from the
impact of human production in various historical periods, but especially that
which occurred under capitalism, with its demand for an increasingly shorter
time for capital turnover (Saito, 2021; 2023).
In the final decades of his life, Marx also studied pre-capitalist
societies and other modes of organising the metabolism between society and
nature, pointing to the possibility of resisting capital and for a
revolutionary transition based on pre-capitalist communal property. There are
indications that the study of natural sciences from an ecological perspective
and the investigation of pre-capitalist societies are connected, moving towards
an emancipated and sustainable social formation (Saito, 2021, p. 326-329; Saito
2023).
What appears clear is that the Marxist position of transition and
emancipation avoids ‘blind’ productivism and indicates the potential to
mobilise science and productive forces in a direction different from that which
it took under the law of labour-value. It is interesting to note, as an
example, how in one of the drafts of the well-known letter to Vera Zasulich, in which Marx alludes to the possibility of
Russian village communes making the transition to socialism without going
through capitalism, he indicates that the capitalist crisis “[...] will end
with its own elimination, with the return of modern societies to a higher
form of the ‘archaic’ type of collective property and production” (Marx,
1881, unpaginated). In our view, such a statement indicates neither a
romanticised return to a pre-capitalist life, nor a blind belief in the
development of productive forces.
The fundamental issue here, however, is that the idea of a ‘rational
regulation of metabolism’ between human beings and nature mentioned by Marx is
a counterpoint to his diagnosis of a ‘metabolic rift’. This
means that from the perspective of an emancipated Marxist society there is no
narrow rationality that subsumes everything under a ‘blind’ expansion of
productivity and consumption. Marx (1985b, p. 265) insisted on the need to
preserve the conditions of metabolism for future generations. The qualitative
character of the transformations in a communist society does not, therefore,
have at its core a merely quantitative reduction of working time and an
expansion of consumption by technological means, but brings with it the need
for another relationship with extra-human nature.
By ignoring these issues, the fruitful aspects of both Lukács’ and
Schmidt’s theorising are lost.
The substantive
materiality of Lukács’ ontology of extra-human nature, which points to its own
movement, to the limitations of labour’s intervention, the period of
consequences, etc., ultimately ends up encountering exemptionalism by only indicating the intensification of the action of labour,
science, and technology on nature and ignoring its destructiveness, including
of the human world. Schmidt’s useful theorising on the relationship between the
value-form and nature, although more historically rooted than Lukács’
generalisation, is undermined because Schmidt also ends up projecting a
unilateral tendency to impose labour on the extra-human natural world that ends
up mimicking capitalist productivism.
Final considerations
The exchange between Schmidt and Lukács and their reflections, emerged
at a time that, decades later, would be classified as the Great Acceleration. A
period, beginning in the 1950s, when the production of capital took a dizzying
leap, as evidenced by figures for economic growth, population growth,
production, and energy consumption. The period was also marked by increasing
human impact on nature: increased carbon dioxide emissions, reduction of the
ozone layer, acceleration of species extinction, deforestation, etc. This is
the period informally called the Anthropocene, a time when the activity of
capital became a force, with such a profound impact on the planet that it would
rival other natural forces, destabilising the interactions of the Earth System
(Angus, 2023). It is not surprising, therefore, that Lukács and Schmidt,
despite their opposing assessments, identify the unilateral advance of science,
technology, and work over extra-human nature.
Alongside this immense growth in capital production,
with its impact on the natural world becoming increasingly evident, regarding
its global scale and its natural limits, the 1960s also marked the emergence of
the modern environmental movement.
It is in this context that István Mészáros advanced
another revisiting of Marx that reframes the problems we address here in
Schmidt and Lukács. Considered to be Lukács's great intellectual heir, Mészáros
(2006) published The Theory of Alienation in Marx in 1970. In it, he
highlights the various processes of estrangement from their roots in Marx’s
works. He also briefly emphasises the estrangement of the relationship with
nature: that science and technology subsumed to the imperatives of capital, act
towards the destruction of extra-human nature.
Over the following decades, these considerations by
Mészáros (1987; 2002) would deepen and form an important framework for his
theorising. He would explicitly return to an ontological approach to argue
about what he called first-order and second-order mediations. The first-order
being the concrete imperative of the metabolism between human beings and
nature, present in any society; and the second-order mediations being imposed
by capital — from the separation of direct producers from control of production,
to the State, through money, the world market, etc. —, and which led to the
organisation of a hierarchical system, which expands in a compulsive,
uncontrolled and uncontrollable manner.
Mészáros’ (2002) diagnosis is that the socio-metabolic
order inaugurated by capital will activate absolute limits, and that its
‘blind’ expansionism cannot be contained within the parameters of the capital
system itself. Importantly, Mészáros (2002) also affirms the presence of
second-order mediations imposed by capital in post-capitalist societies that
describe themselves as socialist. Inspired by Marxist positions, and as a
counterpoint to this, he defends a perspective of human emancipation that substantially
resumes control of social production for associated producers and a social
organisation that respects both the autonomy of individuals and sustainability
in the relationship with the extra-human natural world — a sustainability that
is certainly impossible under the socio-metabolic order of capital (Mészáros,
2002).
Mészáros, thereby, developed an
important and pioneering reframing of both the compulsive, uncontrollable and
destructive movement of capital, and the need for an emancipated society to
break with such determinations.
In
the early 2000s, the so-called Metabolic Rift school, inaugurated by Paul
Burkett (2016) and John Bellamy Foster (2000), recognised Mészáros’ pioneering
approach to the socio-metabolism inaugurated by capital and its destructiveness
of the extra-human natural world. In its more than two decades of existence,
this school would take steps forward that, in their own way, would concretise
Mészáros’ considerations. It would, for example, conduct a much more
substantive and critical approach to the natural sciences than that alluded to
by Mészáros (Angus, 2023). It would demonstrate in more detail how Marxist
materialism was close to the natural sciences and the importance that both Marx
and Engels attributed to the dangers of capital’s destructiveness on the
extra-human natural world (Foster 2000; Burkett, 2016).
In
an even more concrete form than Mészáros, the school of Metabolic Rift succeeds
in both retaining the useful aspects of Lukács and Schmidt’s theorising whilst
avoiding their problems. The fruitful dimensions of a substantive ontology of
the natural world, defended by Lukács, are taken up again on the more solid
basis of critical dialogues with contemporary advances in the natural sciences.
In turn, the historicity of the theory of value and its relationship with the
extra-human natural world, theorised in an informative but incipient way by
Schmidt, is developed in a much deeper, more diverse, and broader way by
Mészáros and the school of Metabolic Rift (Burkett, 1997).
Both these dimensions, the substantive ontology of extra-human nature
and the historicity of the law of value, are found in the indication of natural
limits to the uncontrollable expansionism of capital, which allows Mészáros and
the school of Metabolic Rift to avoid the exemptionalism that both Schmidt and
Lukács encountered. All of this has as its counterpoint the project of an
emancipated society, distinct from a quantitative imposition of science,
labour, and technology on nature, which is guided by a qualitative change in
the way in which the metabolism between human beings and nature takes place.
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________________________________________________________________________________________________
Murillo
van der LAAN
Graduate in Social Sciences from the
Universidade Estadual de Londrina (2010). Masters and
Doctorate in Sociology from the Universidade Estadual de
Campinas (Unicamp). Doctoral scholarship
recipient from the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
(Fapesp). Visiting researcher at the University of Oldenburg, Germany,
in 2017. Currently undertaking post-doctoral study on the Sociology programme
at Unicamp. Member of the research group, Mundo do Trabalho e suas Metamorfoses,
and of the editorial council of the journal Mundo do Trabalho, published by
Boitempo, both coordinated by Professor Ricardo Antunes.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Responsible Editors
Ana Targina Ferraz – Chief Editor
Camilla dos Santos Nogueira – Thematic
Editor
Submitted on: 23/9/2024. Accepted on: 23/10/2024.
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