This article examines Marx’s earliest writings, especially his doctoral dissertation on “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” and the notebooks he kept while preparing it. Previous commentators on this material have tended to take one of two approaches: either they have used it to associate Marx with an expansive and abstract Western Tradition of philosophical inquiry, or they have located it in the narrow context of the intellectual culture of the German Vormärz. Here I seek to (...) mediate between these extremes. These documents, I argue, suggest that Marx was less a part of a Western Tradition, or a set of abstract normative debates that ostensibly stretches from the ancients to modernity, than of what I call Latin Culture, or a Latin-speaking culture that was inscribed in practices, norms, and institutions, and that persisted in Europe from late antiquity into the nineteenth century. Placing Marx’s early writings in this context helps explain some of the tensions that characterise his thought and to clarify the practical consequences of what might otherwise appear as purely theological and metaphysical speculations. (shrink)

There is little agreement about Marx's aims, or even his basic claims, in his Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy and Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. Marx has been read as an idealist, or as a materialist; as praising Epicurus, or as criticizing him. Some have read Marx as using ancient philosophers as proxies in a contemporary debate, without demonstrating how he does so in detail. I show that Marx's dialectical reading of Epicurus's atomism aims at transcending the (...) dichotomy between idealism and materialism; that on Marx's reading Epicurus deserves praise for thinking through atomism to its “highest” conclusion, but criticism for not embracing this conclusion; and that Marx's intervention in contemporary debates takes the form of revealing a dialectical relationship between “liberal” and “positive” philosophers. I conclude that the importance of these texts is to be located in their original stance on the problematic of the relation of thought to reality, common to what Marx finds in ancient philosophy and in his contemporary environment. (shrink)

The main goal of this thesis is to provide a clear basis for the analysis of alternative currencies, such as Bitcoin, LETS, Local currencies, the WIR or Carbon currencies. It attempts to determine whether alternative currencies might constitute just and workable alternatives, either in the form of small-scale experiments or in the form of more radical reforms. The first chapter proposes a new way to classify currencies. The second examines the case in favour of monetary plurality. The third analyses the (...) claims in favour of restricting the use of money locally, within a community, or to certain goods. The fourth studies the link between money and the market. Finally, a post-scriptum focuses on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This thesis highlights that these currencies are drivers of several potential conflicts. Their widespread use might conflict with the adequate management of monetary policy, with social justice, and with liberal values. These conflicts are potential, for they would come into existence only if alternative currencies increased in scope. However, there is no reason to disregard potential conflicts when the case in their favour relies mostly on their potential benefits. (shrink)

Global climate change may result in a wide array of social and environmental harms, and this prospect has given rise to an international treaty, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Scientific uncertainties, nation state politics, and economic resistance had to be addressed before this landmark environmental agreement could be realized. However, questions remain about the foundations and core commitments of this agreement. Ellul's characterology of technique is applied to the task of building a critique of the current international (...) response to climate change and is allied to the proposition that ecological justice should guide the social response to climate change. It is argued that contemporary international efforts are directed at producing a “rational climate,” rather than a climate for ecological justice. (shrink)

Past debates surrounding wilderness have not led to constructive dialogue but instead have created a rift between dueling sides. Far from academic, this debate has important ethical, policy, and pr...

A consideration of Nietzsche and Marx on Epicurus, and focused on Epicurus as a philosopher in whom, as Nietzsche puts it, 'wisdom assumes bodily form'.

Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx and Engels’ works has been somewhat a common but rather unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a case in point. A bold line seems to shape the entire Engels debate and separate two opposite views in this regard: Engels the contaminator of Marx’s materialism vs. Engels the self-started genius of dialectical materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has (...) not enjoyed so far is a critical reflection upon the relationship between different layers of this text: authorial, textual, editorial and interpretational. Informed by a historical hermeneutic, inquiry into the elements that structure the debate on “Dialectics of Nature,” and into the different political and philosophical functions attached to it, makes it possible to relocate the meaning of “dialectics” in a more precise context. Engels’ dialectics is less complete than we usually think it is, but he achieved more than most scholars would like to admit. (shrink)

This contribution addresses the anthropocenic challenge from a dialectical perspective, combining a diagnostics of the present with a prognostic of the emerging future. It builds on the oeuvres of two prominent dialectical thinkers, namely Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Hegel himself was a pre-anthropocenic thinker who did not yet thematise the anthropocenic challenge as such, but whose work allows us to emphasise the unprecedented newness of the current crisis. I will especially focus on his views on (...) Earth as a planetary process, emphasising that the “spirit” of technoscience is basically monitoring the impacts of its own activities on geochemistry and evolution. Subsequently, I will turn attention to Teilhard de Chardin, a palaeontologist and philosopher rightfully acknowledged as one of the first thinkers of the Anthropocene whose oeuvre provides a mediating middle term between Hegel’s conceptual groundwork and the anthropocenic present. Notably, I will discuss his views on self-directed evolution, on the on-going absorption of the biosphere by the noosphere, and on emerging options for “sublating” the current crisis into a synthetic convergence towards the Omega point. I will conclude that, after disclosing the biomolecular essence of life, biotechnology must now take a radical biomimetic turn ; that reflection itself must become distributed and collective; and, that the anthropocenic crisis must be sublated into the noocene. (shrink)

The ontological and analytical status of Marxian social theory has been a matter of fierce controversy since Marx’s death, both within and without Marxist circles. A particular source of contention has been over whether Marxism should be construed as an objective science of the capitalist mode of production or as an ethico-philosophical critique of bourgeois society. This is paralleled by the dispute over whether Marxism ought to be considered a humanism or a structuralism. This article addresses both sides of this (...) debate. The argument is that, rather than Marx’s own social thought being split into incompatible poles, giving rise to ‘two Marxisms’, it forms a coherent unity. Marx’s social theory is neither humanist philosophy, nor structural science, but is in fact realist science, which synthesizes these apparent antinomies, and thereby transcends both. (shrink)

The process commonly referred to as business-as-usual has given rise to dangerous climate change, but its social history remains strangely unexplored. A key moment in its onset was the transition to steam power as a source of rotary motion in commodity production, in Britain and, first of all, in its cotton industry. This article tries to approach the dynamics of the fossil economy by examining the causes of the transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry in the (...) second quarter of the nineteenth century. Common perceptions of the shift as driven by scarcity are refuted, and it is shown that the choice of steam was motivated by a rather different concern: power over labour. Turning away from standard interpretations of the role of energy in the industrial revolution, this article opens a dialogue with Marx on matters of carbon and outlines a theory of fossil capital, better suited for understanding the drivers of business-as-usual as it continues to this day. (shrink)

The food regime concept is a key to unlock not only structured moments and transitions in the history of capitalist food relations, but also the history of capitalism itself. It is not about food per se, but about the relations within which food is produced, and through which capitalism is produced and reproduced. It provides, then, a fruitful perspective on the so-called ‘world food crisis’ of 2007–2008. This paper argues that the crisis stems from a long-term cycle of fossil-fuel dependence (...) of industrial capitalism, combined with the inflation-producing effects of current biofuel offsets and financial speculation, and the concentration and centralization of agribusiness capital stemming from the enabling conjunctural policies of the corporate food regime. Rising costs, related to peak oil and fuel crop substitutes, combine with monopoly pricing by agribusiness to inflate food prices, globally transmitted under the liberalized terms of finance and trade associated with neoliberal policies. (shrink)

This article attempts to assess Mario Bunge’s important but widely neglected criticisms of dialectics. It begins by providing a contextualized interpretation of Friedrich Engels’s metaphysics of the dialectics of nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of Leon Trotsky’s and contemporary “dialectical” scientists’ views on materialist dialectics. It argues that while some of Bunge’s criticisms are eminently sensible, the principles underlying the works of dialectical scientists are compatible with Bunge’s emergentist and systemic approach and can shed light on such issues (...) as the levels of organization, the diachronic and synchronic aspects of emergence, and the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma. This article also submits that dialectics is best interpreted as a guideline for a philosophy of change instead of a magical wand that liberates the investigator from study of facts. Understood as something that serves heuristic purposes, dialectics can be sensibly utilized by scientists to shore up or refine their methodological principles and thereby to facilitate empirical research. (shrink)

This article investigates the early modern history of dog labor in small-scale industrial production in Europe and the Americas as a paradigmatic example of the history of animal labor. The turnspit dog was the “product” of material conditions of production as they were forced to labor in butter-churning, knife-grinding, water-raising, sewing, and food industries. Furthermore, their bodies and labor tried to be “perfected” by selective breeding and violent methods of training, mechanical dressage, and labor discipline. The incorporation of dog labor (...) into mechanized industrial production developed hand-in-hand with certain ideas, ideologies, and mentalities, such as the mechanistic interpretation of bodies deprived of soul, mind, and sentience. (shrink)

The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world historiography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital. As a result, the material relations of slavery are reduced to the problem of profitability within national or colonial contexts, an approach that depicts the nineteenth-century nexus between slavery and capitalism as a transhistorical one. Against this backdrop, this essay proposes (...) that the rise and fall of slavery can be better understood by examining the changing material composition of capital as well as its equally changing cluster of global circuits. Based on critical value theory, it argues that industrialization consistently reshaped spatial and material relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering world geographies of accumulation that both fueled and challenged the reproduction of slave labor in the Americas. (shrink)

Kai Whiting, Aldo Dinucci, Edward Simpson, and Leonidas Konstantakos ABSTRACT: In Stoic theology, the universe constitutes a living organism. Humankind has often had a detrimental impact on planetary health. We propose that the Stoic call to live according to Nature, where God and Nature are one and the same, provides a philosophical basis for re-addressing ….

This paper addresses global bioethical challenges entailed in emerging viral diseases, focussing on their socio-cultural dimension and seeing them as symptomatic of the current era of globalisation. Emerging viral threats exemplify the extent to which humans evolved into a global species, with a pervasive and irreversible impact on the planetary ecosystem. To effectively address these disruptive threats, an attitude of preparedness seems called for, not only on the viroscientific, but also on bioethical, regulatory and governance levels. This paper analyses the (...) global bioethical challenges of emerging viral threats from a dialectical materialist (Marxist) perspective, focussing on three collisions: (1) the collision of expanding networks of globalisation with local husbandry practices; (2) the collision of global networks of mobility with disrupted ecosystems; and (3) the collision of viroscience as a globalised research field with existing regulatory frameworks. These collisions emerge in a force field defined by the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. Evidence-based health policies invoke discontent as they reflect the normative logic of a globalised knowledge regime. The development of a global bioethics or macro-ethics requires us to envision these collisions not primarily as issues of benefits and risks, but first and foremost as normative tensions closely entangled with broader socio-economic and socio-cultural developments. (shrink)

The defetishization thesis claims alternative markets can lead to a more honest, less mystified relationship with food production and, in turn, strengthen civil society. Drawing from Marxian political economic and environmental sociological theory, I make three general claims: capitalism is inherently ecologically and socially harmful; “ethical” commodities derived from alternative markets cannot fundamentally counteract the pervasiveness and scale of ; and, because of and, ethical consumerism does not defetishize the commodity form, but acts as a new layer of commodity fetishism (...) that masks the harms of capitalism by convincing society that the harms of capitalism can be rehabilitated with the commodity form itself. Prescriptively, I argue traditional, large-scale political tactics would be needed for “defetishization” to take place. (shrink)

We lay the foundations for a critical human ecology that combines the strengths of the biophysical human ecology tradition in environmental sociology with those of historical materialism. We show the strengths of a critically informed human ecology by addressing four key meta-theoretical issues: materialist versus idealist approaches in the social sciences, dialectical versus reductionist analyses, the respective importance of historical and ahistorical causal explanations, and the difference between structural and functional interpretations of phenomena. CHE breaks with the idealism of Western (...) Marxism, which dominated academic neo-Marxist thought in the latter half of the 20th century, and advocates instead the pursuit of a materialist, scientific methodology in dialectical perspective for the explanation of social and ecological change. In turn, this project also involves a critique of the ahistorical and functionalist tendencies of traditional human ecology, while sharing human ecology 's basic starting point: the ecological embeddedness of human societies. (shrink)

Eco-Marxism presents a debate between two theoretical schools: metabolic rift theory, developed by John Foster and others, and world-ecology, proposed by Jason W. Moore. The debate refers ultimately to ontology, more precisely to the relation between society and nature. Critical realism plays a central role as the philosophical underlabouring for metabolic rift theory and has implications regarding the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debate as well. Reviewing the debate through CR categories provides clarity about the specifically social character of the causes of ecological disruptions. (...) Using CR, metabolic rift theorists could explain the interdisciplinary character of their analyses. By distinguishing between real transfactual mechanisms and their actual interaction in open systems, I intend to show that neither metabolic rift theory, nor its interdisciplinary approach to the Anthropocene, involve Cartesian Dualism, as Moore claims. World-Ecology provides an alternative historical account of capitalism's environmental history, but it does not critically replace metabolic rift theory. (shrink)

Modernity is not only the basic theoretical horizon of Chinese and Western Marxism, but also their theoretical object. The understanding of modernity has resulted in the respective characteristic Chinese and Western Marxist theories of modernity. These two schools share three epistemological aspects in common: Marxist intellectual origins; the same analytical framework for understanding modernity; and the same understanding of the basic characteristics of modernity. However, they differ greatly from each other in terms of their social backgrounds, basic attitudes towards modernity, (...) and roles in reality. Their common features reveal similarities between all nation-states in world history and the universality of Marxism under specific historical conditions. Their differences reflect the particularities of Chinese and Western paths to modernization, and the diversity of Marxism in the present era. These two Marxist theories of modernity are destined to come into dialogue and be fused into a new Marxist theory of modernity for the 21st century. (shrink)

This article views capitalism not only as a mode of production, but also as a mediation of the reproduction of life, following the concept of ‘social metabolism’ that Marx employs to analyze the interaction between the individuals composing a society and their natural environment. Insofar as the ‘value-form’ is the distinctive social relation of capitalism, it appears necessary to ask whether the metabolic process of reproduction can be fully subsumed under this form. Marx takes for granted the idea that the (...) reproduction of labor-power consists only in the consumption of commodities resulting from abstract labor, thus omitting the appropriation of unpaid domestic work, mostly performed by women. Feminist criticism clarifies how capitalism always depends on some reproductive work being appropriated for the accumulation of surplus-value without being integrated in the value-form. Following Jason W. Moore, I attempt to indicate that the same logic is at work for the reproduction... (shrink)

This article attempts to assess Mario Bunge’s important but widely neglected criticisms of dialectics. It begins by providing a contextualized interpretation of Friedrich Engels’s metaphysics of the dialectics of nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of Leon Trotsky’s and contemporary “dialectical” scientists’ views on materialist dialectics. It argues that while some of Bunge’s criticisms are eminently sensible, the principles underlying the works of dialectical scientists are compatible with Bunge’s emergentist and systemic approach and can shed light on such issues (...) as the levels of organization, the diachronic and synchronic aspects of emergence, and the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma. This article also submits that dialectics is best interpreted as a guideline for a philosophy of change instead of a magical wand that liberates the investigator from study of facts. Understood as something that serves heuristic purposes, dialectics can be sensibly utilized by scientists to shore up or refine their methodological principles and thereby to facilitate empirical research. (shrink)

For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns to (...) more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 3-4, May - June 2019, Page 437-445.

En este trabajo busco exponer que la crítica de la modernidad de Walter Benjamin ampara una dimensión natural en tanto material residual y arruinado de la dialéctica sujeto-objeto. Para ello, primero, aludo la crisis racional moderna en función del empobrecimiento de la experiencia y el conocimiento, cuya consecuencia se traduce en la tristeza natural y un desbalance subjetivista. A continuación, exploro el materialismo benjaminiano en función de la configuración mercantil de los objetos en el marco del capitalismo. Finalmente, presento la (...) modalidad dual de la técnica y la cuestión de la historia natural. Así, espero mostrar que el materialismo benjaminiano no se detiene en la exposición de la objetividad arruinada, sino que abre una vía racional en la que la naturaleza derruida constituye una materia inacabada de la objetividad, índice de un conocimiento del porvenir no antropocéntrico y, por eso, fundamento para una experiencia histórica divergente. (shrink)

Technologies developed since the late eighteenth century differ from earlier forms of technology by being as dependent on world market prices of labour, land and other biophysical resources as on human inventiveness. Yet, whether their outlook is mainstream or heterodox, modern people tend to view technology simply as ingenuity applied to nature, while oblivious of the extent to which it is contingent on the asymmetric exchange of resources in global society. Although inextricably entwined in the real world, the phenomena studied (...) by economics and engineering are kept conceptually separate. This is achieved by disregarding the materiality of world trade. Modern technologies are not just instruments for solving problems but social strategies for redistributing time and space in world society, displacing work and environmental loads to sectors of the world system where wages are lower and environmental legislation less rigorous. Technology should not remain extraneous to social theory. A sociometabolic reconceptualisation of technology is particularly essential for critics of global capitalism. (shrink)

Following Hannah Arendt’s insights into the affinities between Marxism and the philosophy of life, this article reconstructs a theoretical position that we propose to call ‘vitalist Marxism’. This position conceives of life not only as an essential foundation of the production process, but also as a critical resource for resistance to the capitalist logic of exploitation. We highlight the role Georges Canguilhem (1904–95) played in developing this position, in particular by depicting tools and machines as ‘organs of life’. Drawing on (...) Canguilhem’s early writings as well as unpublished manuscripts, we show that this ‘organological’ understanding of technology was rooted in the increasingly anti-fascist reception of Marx in France during the 1930s. Against the background of today’s protests against climate destruction, racism, and anti-feminist violence, all of which invoke the defense of basic living conditions, we argue that the critical position of vitalist Marxism acquires remarkable topicality. (shrink)

Climate cuisine is about eating the future you want into being. In this article, I examine how seaweed recipes can be forms of climate fiction through the way that the reader is invited to participate in sustainable foodways. I examine several popularizations of seaweed aquaculture that imagine practices of eating and growing seaweeds. Their formal similarities center on participation: they include the direct address of the reader through the second person voice, and position themselves as instructional models. Bren Smith’s Eat (...) Like a Fish (Smith, Eat like a fish: My adventures as a fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer, Penguin, 2019) interpellates the reader as eater, invited to cultivate eating habits that, on a societal scale, would produce a more materially sustainable relation with the planet. The vignette “Ghost Bar,” which appears in Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Buck, After geoengineering: Climate tragedy, repair, and restoration, Verso, 2019), sensorily emplaces the reader in a future seaweed farm as a window into the kinds of livelihoods and forms of work that could be part of mitigating global warming. I trace the similarities between Smith's recipes and Buck’s interpellation of a reader, both of which use the second-person mode addressing an unmarked “you,” inviting this “you” to imagine and actualize the future dish or future scenario they sketch. While these texts have their own limitations at the level of the social imagination, such popularizations of seaweed aquaculture model an important way of understanding the intimacies of climate fiction and recipes. Recipes not only popularize the sustainable eating of seaweeds, but actively constitute a form of climate fiction through their intention to actualize more seaweedy futures. (shrink)

What do houses do to the people who live with them? In what sense are houses themselves living things? If they live and act, how to conceive of the relationship between built and natural landscapes, and between environment and life more broadly? This article considers three moments at which human geographers have attempted to answer these questions without submitting to visions of environmental causation and constraint favoured by determinists, who dominated the discipline into the early 20th century. The article begins (...) with the work of Carl Sauer, by 1925 the major American figure refuting environmental determinism at a theoretical level and recommending the study of housing as an articulate transcript of human action. It then looks back to the American writings of Friedrich Ratzel, one of several German scholars Sauer canonized, to illuminate a more vitalistic ontology of domestic architecture, and an urbanism, untapped by Sauer when filing his dissent. It then looks ahead to mid-century studies of vernacular architecture – by those of Sauer’s students friendlier to urban life than he was, and by the critic and publisher J. B. Jackson – to assess how this inheritance informed critiques of industrial modernity in the post-war United States. The article observes certain continuities, despite manifest tensions, between ‘old’ and ‘new’ cultural geographies. It also routes a long-standing set of debates concerning the relationship of materiality to meaning – and of spatial to social form – through the case of human geography, a peculiar interstice in the broader constellation of disciplines. (shrink)

La denominada “crisis ambiental” que advierte sobre los límites materiales del planeta ha dado lugar a una extensa producción teórica durante décadas. Producción que, como regla general, ha relegado la relectura de los textos clásicos de las ciencias sociales. El presente artículo rescata algunos debates contemporáneos relacionados con la lectura en clave ecológica de la obra de Marx. Obra que adquiere especial importancia al momento de comprender las formas que toma la explotación de la naturaleza bajo el sistema capitalista, problemática (...) resignificada en el marco de las discusiones actuales sobre sustentabilidad ambiental. (shrink)