The dialectical method (especially when it has been set on its feet again) cannot consist in treating individual phenomena as illustrations or examples of something which already exists and is provided by the movement of the concept itself; it was this which led to the degeneration of the dialectic into a state religion.
(from Philosophie der neuen Musik, by T. W. Adorno)
The debate on the question whether the dialectic is solely a law of history, or can also be derived from nature, may well have made it evident for the first time to people not fully conversant with the present state of philosophical discussion on Marx and Marxism that this is a genuine problem and not an invented one. The extent of the problem has been concealed by Soviet Marxism, conceived within the closure of a world outlook, and also by the Western critics of that system, with their largely Thomist orientation. The latter have taken Diamat’s ontological claims seriously and frequently intimate with satisfaction how little these claims have in common with Marx’s position.1 The present-day Diamat ontology can be discussed without any reference to Marx’s works, and is no longer essentially concerned with the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Soviet philosophers are concerned with the dynamic structure of the world in general, and have increasingly lost sight of the dynamic structure of men which was Marx’s original interest. For them, the concrete nature of social relations evaporates into ‘matter’s highest form of motion’. In view of this retranslation of originally critical concepts into a dogmatic world outlook, nothing is more called for than reflection on the field of validity of the dialectic. The Paris controversy initiated this reflection, although the decisive point of view by which it was determined was not sufficiently articulated during it. The subject of discussion was not the ‘validity’ of the dialectic as such beyond the philosophical and extra-philosophical opposition between idealism and materialism, but the answers to the following two questions:
1. Can there be a materialist dialectic of nature, seen as being-in-itself, in the strict sense of these terms?
2. Must not (as has been repeatedly asserted)2 materialism and dialectics become incompatible if nature is understood to mean what the exact sciences make of ‘nature’?
In what follows I shall endeavour to show that the answer to the first question must be no, and to the second, yes. I am fundamentally in agreement with the position adopted by Sartre and Hyppolite against Garaudy and Vigier, and will follow Sartre’s Critique de la Raison Dialectique3 in taking the view that existentialism has no theoretical contribution to make to authentic Marxist thought, since it is merely one moment of Marxism which has made itself independent of the rest. Existentialism can at most play the part of a corrective to present-day Soviet orthodoxy, by restoring the credit of a subjectivity long suppressed in the latter’s objectivistically curtailed conception of dialectics.4 Moreover, Sartre’s mode of argument is not exclusively based on his existentialist doctrine, but just as much on positions which had been reached within the framework of Marxism itself long ago, but could not come to the fore for purely political reasons. It is unquestionably Lukács who deserves recognition as the first to oppose Engels’s fateful attempt to extend the dialectic to cover pre-human and extra-human nature, by pointing out how important it is precisely for materialism to restrict the dialectical method to the socio-historical areas of reality. As early as 1923, in History and Class Consciousness,5 Lukács dared to dispute with Engels. Whatever the weaknesses of that work, and whatever criticisms Lukács himself may subsequently have made of it, it still brings out with great emphasis the essentially historical character of Marxist theory, which undermines any tendency towards fixing extra-human reality in an ontological fashion: ‘Nature is a societal category. That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it takes, i.e. nature’s form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned.’6 It is of course possible to add to this that the converse holds as well. Society is always a category of nature, in so far as society’s current form and also the segment of nature appropriated by it remain within the still largely unpenetrated total reality, nature. But the concept of nature as the whole of reality also remains within the field of human history; we can only speak of this concept in relation to the particular stage of mastery over nature which has been attained. Only a thought which has assimilated this basic consideration on the relation between nature and history and presupposes it in any specific analysis, has genuinely abandoned claims to provide a dogmatic world outlook, and fulfils the contemporary requirements of a critical understanding of Marx. The dialectic is not an eternal law of the world; when men disappear, it too disappears.
For Marxist materialism, the dialectic is only possible as a historical method.7 This is already stated in the German Ideology: ‘We know of only a single science, the science of history. History can be viewed from two sides, can be divided up into the history of nature and the history of mankind. The two sides must not thereby be separated; as long as men exist, the history of nature and the history of men condition each other mutually.’8 Consequently, in opposition to the later Engels, Marx always expressed himself very cautiously on the subject of nature ‘in-itself’. All statements about nature relate to the particular stage reached in its appropriation by society. Moreover, owing to changes in the constellations in which men are linked to one another and to nature, a uniform dialectical structure cannot be ascribed to human history in general. The dialectic of productive forces and relations of production is by no means the law of motion of history, although many of Marx’s own formulations appear to support this interpretation. ‘All collisions in history,’ he wrote in the German Ideology, ‘have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse.… These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: in the place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals – a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another.’9 The ‘coherent series of forms of intercourse’ later, in the famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, became the necessary succession of progressive epochs of the economic social formation, from the Asiatic mode, via the classical and the feudal, and from there to the bourgeois mode of production. It is not difficult to show that here Marx was far too willing to follow the scheme of development set out in Hegel’s philosophy of history, and that the real course of history is much more complicated. However, Marx himself took account of this in his particular analyses, without for that reason simply abandoning his general conception. The theoretical content of these analyses goes far beyond the assertions in Marx’s programmatic forewords and postscripts, which previous interpreters, including Sartre, have overvalued in the belief that they could understand historical materialism in isolation from the content of political economy.
Confronted as he was with an immense mass of socio-historical material, Marx felt compelled to a large extent to leave aside his historico-philosophical principle of construction and, both in Capital and in the Grundrisse, to introduce important differentiations into the concept of a historical dialectic.
The critique of political economy first presents the labour-process only in its simple and abstract elements, namely ‘purposive activity’, ‘the object of labour’, and the ‘means of labour’,10 and indeed as ‘the eternal natural necessity of human life, and therefore independent of any particular form of this life, being on the contrary common to all forms of society’.11 Marx was concerned here not only with a methodologically useful abstraction, which would oppose the labour-process as such to its concrete historical forms, but also with the distinction between the pre-bourgeois stages of production and the bourgeois mode of production. For measured against the concrete determinacy of the labour-process as a specifically capitalist phenomenon, there is something peculiarly unhistorical and nature-like about the forms which preceded it; their distinctions are blurred, and the transition from one to the other is no longer unmistakably determined by the contradiction between growing productive forces and stagnating relations of production. The dialectic has, so to speak, an ‘elemental’ character. It was not for nothing that Marx repeatedly used the expression ‘metabolism’ when he had in mind the labour-process which takes place solely between man and nature, and that he applied this characterization equally to all forms of development. It is true that each specific form of this process extends its material foundations. But the parallel ‘retreat of nature’s barriers’12 remains merely quantitative, and human activity a merely natural function entangled in nature. Only with the transition to capitalism does the mastery of nature take on a new quality; only at this point does the labour-process, which Marx initially stated was identical in its general determinations for all stages of society, become a strictly social process. Now, as he himself said,13 those general determinations no longer suffice, and therefore, precisely in their abstractness, turn out to be characteristic of the particular stages of pre-bourgeois production. Therefore capitalist cooperation in the labour-process does not appear vis-à-vis the peasant economy and the independent handicraft industry historically replaced by it, ‘as a particular historical form of cooperation, but cooperation itself appears as a form peculiar to the capitalist process of production and specifically distinguishing it’.14 As far as pre-capitalist cooperation is concerned, we can only speak of it from the perspective of capitalist cooperation: ‘It is based, on the one hand, on ownership in common of the means of production, and, on the other hand, on the fact that in those cases each individual has no more torn himself off from the navel-string of his tribe or community than each bee has freed itself from connection with the hive.’15 Correspondingly, what Marx called the natural (naturwüchsig) division of labour within a tribe or a family is based on differences of sex and age, i.e. on a ‘purely physiological foundation’.16 The division of labour gradually starts to receive a truly social basis to the extent that individuals, the particular organs of an abstract because ‘directly interrelated whole’,17 become progressively separated from each other, i.e. first become individuals in the true sense. The introduction of the exchange of products with communities in other places is the reason for this disintegration of the natural connection between men, to which the theses of certain sociologists are far more applicable than they are to capitalism. The exchange of products is made possible by the fact that different communities find different means of production and nourishment in their ‘natural environment’: ‘It is this spontaneously developed difference which, when different communities come into contact, calls forth the mutual exchange of products, and the consequent gradual conversion of those products into commodities.’18 In this way, the connection between individuals is restored, but as a socio-historical connection. However, as long as the greater part of production is for the needs of the community itself – for instance in the case of the small, archaic communities of India – there is scarcely any commodity-production. A particular division of labour, once legally fixed, continues to operate over great periods of time with the ‘inviolability of a law of nature’, and the community leads an as it were unhistorical existence: ‘The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name – this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the immutability of Asiatic societies, an immutability which contrasts so strikingly with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the basic economic elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky.’19
This nature-like and unhistorical character of pre-bourgeois history is made particularly clear in that theoretically important section of the Grundrisse which deals with the economic formations which precede capitalist production.20 As this section shows, and as Hegel himself intended, the dialectic must become absorbed in the actual writing of history if it is not to decay into an empty schema.
As his point of departure Marx took the historical conditions for the formation of the capital-relation. Capital presupposes, on the one side, free labour and its exchange against money, which is thereby reproduced and converted into values, and, on the other, the separation of the individual, briefly discussed above, from the natural immediacy of the community.
In Marx’s view, this original natural immediacy was based on the similarly natural ‘unity of labour with its material prerequisites’,21 whether this unity was realized in the form of free petty landownership or of communal landed property: ‘In both these forms the relationship of the worker to the objective conditions of his labour is one of ownership.… The individual is related to himself as a proprietor, as master of the conditions of his reality. The same relation holds between one individual and the rest … either in the form of joint ownership … or as when the others are independent owners coexisting with him.…’22 The individuals are not yet ‘labourers’, since they are active as members of a community which is endeavouring simply to maintain itself and not to create value. Since Marx proceeded from the assumption that pastoralism was the ‘first form of maintaining existence’, the tribal community appeared to him to be the precondition rather than the result of the (initially of course temporary) appropriation of the soil. Once men become settled, the degree to which this original community is modified is dependent on a large range of external natural factors, as well as on the natural and anthropological characteristics of the tribe itself. Whether they are nomads, hunters, or agriculturalists, it is always ‘the herd … the community of blood, language, and customs’23 which forms the most important prerequisite for the appropriation of the ‘objective conditions of their life’. What is decisive here, as we have said, is that men act in relation to these conditions unreflectingly, as if to an extension of their own bodies: ‘The earth is the great laboratory, the arsenal which provides both the means and the materials of labour, and also the location, the basis of the community. Men’s relation to it is naïve: they regard themselves as its communal proprietors, as members of the community which produces and reproduces itself by living labour. Only in so far as the individual is a member … of such a community does he regard himself as an owner or possessor.’24
This fundamental relationship remains unaffected in forms such as oriental despotism, where the small, more or less autarchic communities are the components of an ‘all-embracing unity’ which appears as the superior, or indeed the sole proprietor, so that the village communities are reduced to the level of hereditary possessors. The individual is thus, legally speaking, without property. In other words, property is represented to the individual as mediated ‘by means of a grant from the unity of the whole – as represented by the despot in his capacity of father of the many communities – to the individual through the agency of the particular community’.25 However, tribal or communal property remains the basis of the self-sustaining community, part of whose surplus labour must naturally be put at the disposal of the ‘higher community’, which ultimately exists as a person. This situation is expressed by the rendering of tribute, or as Marx put it in a manner reminiscent of Durkheim, ‘by common labour for the glorification of the unity, in part of the real despot, in part of that imagined tribal entity, the god’.
Where the starting-point is free, petty landownership, and thus a more dynamic, historical life of the original tribes, the community is still the first prerequisite. In this case, however, not as ‘the substance, of which the individuals are mere accidents, or of which they form the mere naturally-given parts’.26 Here it is no longer the country but the town which appears as the seat and centre of the owners of the land. Whereas in the original form of communal property the village was a mere appendage of the country, here the fields form part of the territory of the town. As the earth itself presents no obstacle, despite the efforts men must make to cultivate it, the difficulties encountered by the community can arise only from other communities which have either already occupied the land or disputed the community’s right to it. War is therefore ‘the great … communal labour, and it is required either for the occupation of the objective conditions for living existence or for the protection and perpetuation of such occupation. The community, consisting of kinship groups, is therefore in the first instance organized on military lines, as a warlike, military force, and this is one of the conditions of its existence as a proprietor.’27
The prerequisites for the individual ownership of land, whereby the community is organized as a state defending this land externally and guaranteeing it internally, increase the more individual property ceases to be utilizable only through communal labour, the more the tribe loses its natural qualities because of historical development, and the more ‘its communal character tends to appear, and must appear, as a negative unity’. Under tribal conditions of absolutely natural origin, the individual is related to those conditions, in the production of his life, in the very way that he is related to the materials of the earth, i.e. to his Other, since in both cases we are dealing with the natural conditions of production. In this new situation, however, his relation, both to nature and to the social union whose ‘nature’ is already to a greater degree something historical and temporal, takes on more dialectical animation: his relationship with his private property in the land is necessarily accompanied by a relationship with his ‘existence as a member of the community’,28 and his maintenance as a member of the community is the maintenance of the community, and vice versa. The community, ‘which is here not merely a de facto product of history, but is known to be such, and therefore had an origin’, is the precondition of property, i.e. of the relation of the working Subject to the natural conditions of his labour. But this property is mediated ‘through the existence of the state’, just as, inversely, the state is mediated through the particular form taken by the ownership of the objective conditions of labour.
There follow two important insights on Marx’s part, which are vital for the question of the dialectical structure of pre-bourgeois stages of society:
1. In all forms where landed property and agriculture form the basis of the economic order, the individual relates to the earth as to the ‘inorganic nature of his subjectivity’,29 i.e. a condition of labour which does not itself appear as the product of labour, but is provided in advance.
2. This practical attitude of the individual, who (as opposed to the proletarian of a later era) never appears merely in abstraction as a labourer, but always has an ‘objective mode of existence’30 in so far as he has the land at his disposal, is mediated from the outset through his existence as a member of a whole already more or less subject to history. However, this whole is ultimately unable to step outside its entanglement in nature and to that extent is ‘lacking in history’.
For Marx, therefore, the unity of the human producers with the conditions of their metabolism with nature did not require explanation; however much this unity may have undergone modification in the course of pre-bourgeois development, it was not a result of history. Its various phases remained external to its essential nature. What the critique of political economy was concerned with, and what it wished to explain, was rather that typical phenomenon of bourgeois society, ‘the separation of these inorganic conditions of human existence from that existence, a separation which is only fully completed in the relation between wage-labour and capital’.31
Slavery and serfdom know of no separation of labour from its inorganic conditions, owing to the fact that the active Subject possesses an ‘objective mode of existence’ at these stages of production. The two moments merge to form an undifferentiated, uniform natural basis for the slave-owner or the feudal lord, who conquer the slave and serf as an ‘organic accessory of the land’32 and reduce them to the level of an inorganic factor of production: ‘The slave stands in no sort of relation to the objective conditions of his labour. It is rather labour itself, both in the form of the slave and of the serf, which is placed among the other living things as an inorganic condition of production, alongside the cattle or as an appendage of the earth.…’33 In contrast to this, the labourer in the capitalist mode of production is literally deprived of his own nature, converted into ‘a purely subjective force of labour, without objective existence’,34 which sees its negation in the alienated, objective conditions of labour ‘as a value existing for itself’.35 For capital, the labour does not constitute a condition of production but rather the support of labour, which is appropriated by means of exchange. And yet this whole, re-established through the process of exchange, which rests precisely on the complete isolation of individuals from each other, ‘in the essential coherence which accompanies their lack of coherence’,36 represents an advance over the limited local totalities based on nature and on relations of personal dependence.
Marx therefore had no intention of transfiguring the natural life-process of the pre-industrial stages of society in the irrationalist manner of the neo-romantic ideologists. Nor was he concerned to hypostatize the ‘elemental’ interaction of the moments, i.e. ‘nature’s self-mediation’ (which was the form necessarily taken by labour at that stage), so as to create a world outlook of a nature-monism. It is still almost impossible to reach a final decision on the undoubted speculative moment37 of Marx’s description of the labour-process in its naturally-determined form, which is occasionally reminiscent of Hegel’s and indeed even of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. The concept of a ‘dialectic of nature’, if it can be meaningfully applied at all, is valid for those precapitalist processes which are bound up with the history of landed property, and which are not structurally dissimilar to the processes through which the plant or animal organism has to go in its conflict with its environment. In this way nature announces human subjectivity as its higher truth. Before the advent of capitalism, although nature is split into two parts, the working Subject and the Object to be modified, it remains ‘present to itself’ in this division. Man appears as a mode of nature’s organic existence; nature appears, from the very outset, as ‘the inorganic existence of man himself’.38 This abstract identity of man and nature, as it is constituted by the ‘pure natural existence’39 of labour, is so lacking in specifically social content that labour must be performed even by completely unsocialized man as ‘the expression and maintenance of his life’. Even an ‘abnormally isolated man’40 would be dependent on the identity of man and nature, as it exists in labour. He would admittedly have no property in the land. But, like the animals, he could ‘nourish himself from it as his own substance …’.41
Marx’s intended meaning is this: every interaction between man and nature which goes beyond the embryonic animal stage occurs within the framework of a definite social form, but not every one of these forms is a ‘society’ in the sense of bourgeois society, society par excellence. He therefore avoided using this concept to refer to pre-bourgeois relations. When the word does occur, it is as the result of a momentary mental slip. As we have seen, he preferred to use the terms ‘community of natural origin’, ‘kinship-group’, or ‘tribe’. The distinction between what is naturally given and what has historically evolved may perhaps be valid for the individual phases of pre-bourgeois history, although Marx repeatedly pointed out that all naturally-given forms are also ‘the results of a historical process’.42 However, the distinction between Asiatic despotism, the slave economy of classical antiquity, and medieval feudalism (three forms of social relationship which are all determined by landownership) fades into insignificance in face of bourgeois society, whose emergence constitutes a decisive rupture in world history. For this reason, Marx was able to make the following succinct comment in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘In all the forms of society in which landownership prevails, the natural relationship is predominant. In forms where capital is predominant, the prevailing element is of socio-historical creation.’43 In pre-bourgeois times, the relation between the natural and the historical element formed part of the vast context of nature. In the bourgeois epoch, this relation forms part of history, even as far as unappropriated nature is concerned. Marx conducted his investigations into landownership in accordance with this principle. He compared a series of geographically separated varieties of landownership, that is to say the Oriental, South American, Slavic, Germanic, and Classical types, thrusting the question of the temporal succession of these forms entirely into the background. Like Hegel’s forms of nature, the different forms of the pre-capitalist community stand beside each other as indifferent, unconnected forms of existence. Only through the eyes of theory does the modification of a form, without itself arising from that form, prove to be its higher stage of development. For Marx, therefore, the course of history is far less linear than has commonly been assumed; it does not proceed in accordance with a uniform interpretative Idea, but is composed of constantly changing individual processes.
The bourgeois social formation has a methodologically decisive role in dialectical materialism in that it provides the starting-point for disclosing both the past and the possibilities of the future. Marx was the very opposite of a simple evolutionist. In itself, the historically higher stage is grounded in the lower; but the qualitative distinction between the lower form and the higher form which has proceeded from it can only be comprehended when the higher form is fully developed and has already become the object of an immanent critique: ‘The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. But the intimations of a higher animal in lower ones can only be understood if the higher animal is already known. The bourgeois economy furnishes the key to the economy of classical antiquity, etc. But not with the method of the economists, who blot out all historical differences and see bourgeois society in every social formation.… The so-called historical development rests on this basis, that the last form considers its predecessors as stages leading up to itself, and always conceives them one-sidedly … as it is seldom … capable of self-criticism.… Thus the bourgeois economy first came to understand the feudal, the classical, and the Oriental economies as soon as the self-criticism of bourgeois society had begun.’44
The exceptional position of capitalism as the principle of explanation for past and future history is a result of the circumstance that history itself now finally casts off its ‘first’ origins in nature, and passes over into the ‘absolute movement of becoming’.45 Pre-bourgeois development had a peculiarly unhistorical character because in it the material prerequisites of labour – the instrument as well as the material – were not themselves the product of labour, but were found already to hand in the land, in nature, from which the active Subject as well as the community to which it belonged did not essentially differentiate themselves. Under capitalism, however, these subjective and objective conditions of production became something created by the participants in history. Relationships were no longer determined by nature, but set up by society. Thus even agriculture was transformed into a branch of industry. The landowner, having become a capitalist, transformed ‘work on the land, which appears to be a direct source of subsistence by its very nature, into an indirect source of subsistence, dependent purely upon social relations’.46 The social form of the labour-process, which first becomes relevant in the bourgeois economy, has repercussions on its material content, which originally appeared to be equally inherent as such in all social formations, but now shows itself to be specifically pre-bourgeois in its abstract and natural determinacy. Inversely, the abstract materiality of the process of production, common to all forms of production, becomes identical with the self-movement of the capital which constitutes its content. That is to say, the appearance itself manifests itself for its part as appearance.47
As we have said, Marx did not glorify the subjective and objective dependence of the pre-capitalist modes of production on nature. He realized that they necessarily correspond ‘only to a level of development of human productive powers which is limited and must in principle be limited’.48 Despite all the negativity of the capitalist system (and of course Marx did not overlook this) it signifies, precisely in this negativity, ‘a total revolution in, and development of, material production’.49 The price to be paid for this is that nature ceases to be recognized ‘as a power for itself’, and that it becomes ‘a mere object for men, a mere thing of utility’.50
If the earlier modes of human intervention in nature were fundamentally modes of nature’s ‘self-mediation’, since the mediating Subject (individual or community) remained a part of immediately natural existence, under capitalism the mediation of nature became something strictly historical, because social. Nature is the self-determined material of human labour and is therefore still not reducible to (social) subjectivity. However, nature’s in-itself now only concerns the productive apparatus, which transforms the process of nature into a scientifically-directed technological process and, distorting it beyond recognition, amalgamates it with the machinery, thereby bringing about an extraordinary growth of the productivity of labour.51 Subjectively, this radical destruction of nature’s qualitative characteristics corresponds to the reduction of the worker to existing as a producer of exchange-value, which involves ‘the complete negation of his natural existence’, i.e. the fact that he ‘is entirely determined by society’.52 Labour becomes something utterly ‘lacking in objectivity’, something which while coinciding with the ‘immediate corporeality’ of the worker, constitutes the ‘objective form of the absence of objectivity’.53 This ‘absolute deficiency’, this ‘negativity in relation to itself’, is nevertheless the precondition for the all-round development of human aptitudes and needs.
The expanded reproduction of capital takes place on the basis provided by capital itself: once it is historically developed, it is related to its prerequisites as to ‘the preliminary historical stages of its becoming’.54 These stages are then ‘superseded in its being’.55 What originally appeared as the foundation for capital’s growth now appears ‘as posited by capital – not as the pre-condition of its origin but as the consequence of its own reality’.56 Since the systems which historically preceded capitalism have thus vanished in the capitalist system, and the latter therefore develops on its own basis, the classical bourgeois economists find it that much easier to regard capital as the eternal, natural form of human production. In so far as they are aware of its historically limited character, they are inclined to present the conditions of its origin as the conditions of its present-day realization, i.e. they imply that the conditions characteristic of the fully formed bourgeois economy are the same conditions as those under which the capitalist is not yet able to act as such. In this they are expressing the difficulty of reconciling capital’s prevailing practice with its theoretical understanding of itself. What particularly interested Marx in this connection, however, was the methodologically vital fact, which we have already noted, that past and future history could be illuminated by performing a series of intellectual oscillations backwards and forwards from the established bourgeois system, whose emergence marked a qualitative leap. Sartre is therefore right to refer to Marx’s ‘progressive-regressive method’,57 a method which is of course of Hegelian origin. The same analysis both determines the given situation as relative to a past lying behind it and shows that it is equally relative to a ‘movement of becoming’58 which transcends it: ‘While the pre-bourgeois phases appear for their part as merely historical, i.e. superseded prerequisites, the present conditions of production appear as self-superseding and hence as positing the historical prerequisites for a new social order.’
It should have emerged from the above analysis that there are, strictly speaking, only two truly historical dialectics for Marxist theory (whose primary task is after all not to reconstruct mankind’s whole history but to track down modern society’s economic law of motion): the dialectic of the transition from the classical-feudal to the bourgeois epoch, a transition more or less revolutionary according to national peculiarities, and the dialectic of the cataclysmic and liberating transition from the bourgeois epoch to that of socialism. The latter transition is of course the more heavily stressed.
In the centuries of ‘primitive accumulation’, already in themselves dominated by the transformation of money and commodities into capital, there arose within the womb of feudal society (and later of the feudal system in its absolutist reconstruction) the capital-relation characteristic of bourgeois society as a historical form of life. This capital-relation rests on the abstract separation of the worker (as a class) from the means of production, the material prerequisites of labour. Once this separation has come into effect, the basis is provided for ‘the becoming and, still more, the being of capital as such’,59 since the separation is reproduced ‘on a constantly increasing scale’,60 as Marx tried to show. In historico-philosophical terms: the highly abstract, ‘elemental’ dialectic of the pre-industrial development is concretized into the dialect of productive forces and relations of production, the dialectic which is ultimately decisive for Marxism.61 In other words, the historical dialect as it structures capitalism more closely arises out of a long history. This process is the ‘becoming’ which only goes over into ‘existence’ when the objective antagonisms which constitute its content have reached such a pitch that there is a real possibility of their supersession, or, in the sense of the Hegelian Logic, when ‘becoming’ has reached its highest stage of ripeness, the stage ‘in which its destruction begins’.62 Only at that moment is a critique of political economy possible as a critique of alienation, commodity fetishism, and ideology: the becoming (itself already capitalist) of the capital-relation has vanished into a system which can now be contemplated in its pure immanence.63 In a somewhat obscure passage of the Grundrisse, Marx added to this the idea that ‘the dialectical representation is only correct when it knows its own limits’.64 If we take as strict a view of the concept of ‘representation (Darstellung)’ as Marx did, i.e. if we do not just view this in a literary sense, his meaning here is that the concept of a dialectic of historical materialism is only valid for fully-developed bourgeois society and for pre-bourgeois society in so far as exchange relations are anticipated in it.
All the attempts made, right up to the Soviet Marxism of the present day, to prove that nature is in itself dialectically structured, derive originally from Engels’s reflections on the subject. It is very difficult to make an accurate judgment of Engels’s thought, however, because two concepts of nature coexist in it, in part without connection, in part confusingly intertwined. One concept is that of nature concretely mediated through society, the other is that of metaphysical materialism. We must therefore emphasize at the outset that despite any criticism of Engels it cannot simply be a question of the replacement of his conception with Marx’s. In any case, this is only possible to a limited degree, since any critique of Engels must always have recourse to arguments derived from the position jointly worked out by both Marx and Engels in their earlier days.
Nevertheless, their ways parted earlier than is commonly assumed. During the early forties, they both showed a lively interest in the French materialism of the eighteenth century. However, whereas Marx praised Helvetius as a materialist because he conceived materialism ‘in its relation to social life’,65 Engels from the beginning laid more emphasis on the metaphysical side. In an article which appeared in 1844 he described materialism as ‘the summit of the science of the eighteenth century’, ‘the first system of natural philosophy’, and as the result of a ‘perfection of the natural sciences’.66 Later on, too, in his writings on nature, i.e. in the essay on Feuerbach, in Anti-Dühring, and in the Dialectics of Nature, Engels stuck to the idea (which was developed in detail in Holbach’s System of Nature) that there was a watertight connection between natural phenomena, with the intention, however, of no longer defining this connection in a limited mechanical way. Romantic philosophies of nature are also important for the understanding of Engels’s conception, in particular that of the young Schelling, whereas Hegel’s philosophy of nature, as we shall show, was less significant in this context than his logic of being. Finally, evolutionist theories played an important part in Engels’s thought. In part these theories were implicit in the Romantics’ speculations about nature, but Engels was chiefly influenced by the Lamarckian and Darwinian concept of a ‘history of nature’, which was in its turn already heralded in the work of Buffon and other French scholars of the eighteenth century.
When, at the end of the 1850s, Marx and Engels turned to Hegel’s philosophy for the second time, the impact of Hegel on Marx was very different from Engels’s reception of him. Marx, whose theme was political economy, endeavoured to bring this science ‘through criticism to the point where it could be dialectically presented’.67 As we have seen, he was well aware while doing this of the objective historical limits of such a representation. In contrast to this, Engels interpreted the finished results of modern natural science by means of dialectical categories, and did not enter into the factual problematic of the sciences themselves. He could not reshape the natural sciences – as Marx reshaped political economy – and had to content himself with systematizing the materials provided by them. He gave the following programmatic formulation of his task: ‘Empirical research into nature has heaped up such an immense mass of positive knowledge that the necessity of ordering it systematically and according to its internal logic in each individual area of investigation has become absolutely imperative.’68
The general intellectual situation, on the basis of which Engels attempted to carry out his programme, was characterized by the final emancipation of the natural sciences from philosophy. This was expressed in the dispute over materialism around the middle of the 1850s, when there was a wild profusion of simple mechanistic writings, either of the positivist or the vulgar materialist variety. Precisely because he fundamentally accepted the materialist standpoint, Engels had to draw a critical line between himself and vulgarizers of materialism such as Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott, and he made this distinction by introducing the dialectic into the materialist conception of nature. This raises the question, which the participants in the Paris controversy correctly viewed as decisive, of whether dialectical determinations such as ‘totality’, ‘contradiction’, ‘productivity’, ‘immanent negation’, can in any sense be ascribed to nature when the latter is reduced to abstract matter. In other words, is subjective reflection (even if only as a single moment) inescapably posited by any dialectical theory?
In view of Hegel’s statement, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, that the bud disappears as the blossom bursts forth, and the fruit supplants the blossom as the truth of the plant,69 one might be tempted to interpret the process described here as the actual dialectic of the plant. However, Hegel was really referring not to the unconscious life of the plant but to the life of the plant’s concept. As so often, Hegel illustrated his dialectic here by referring to organic, natural processes, and since these processes took place at an inferior level he did not allow them a constitutive role in the movement of the Concept. In its immediate existence, the plant does not achieve a being-for-itself; it ‘only touches the boundary of individuality’.70 The plant only appears as dialectically structured to a ‘rational’ thought, which comes upon it as an object already divided into bud, blossom and fruit by the abstract understanding, and converts these merely intellectual concepts into ‘elements of an organic unity’,71 i.e. translates them into the Concept. However, to comprehend nature rationally is to comprehend it as reason submerged in materiality: ‘Since the internal essence of nature is nothing other than the general, when we have thoughts we are at home with ourselves in this internal essence of nature.’72 Hegel’s philosophy of nature is nourished by his confidence that ‘in nature concept speaks to concept, and the true shape of the Concept, which lies concealed behind the fragmentation of the infinite number of separate forms, will reveal itself to nature’.73
As a materialist of a natural-scientific orientation, Engels had to forego precisely this confidence. It is true that like Hegel in his ‘rational physics’,74 Engels was dealing with the empirically reached discoveries of the natural sciences, and therefore with a General which is to be presented as a whole in its ‘own immanent necessity’.75 But there is this essential difference between Engels and Hegel, that the former could not bring these discoveries to the level of their dialectical ‘Concept’ if he wished to remain strictly scientific, because this would ultimately involve their reduction to the emanations of a divine Logos. In the nature of things, then, Engels could only provide a systematic treatment of the most general results of the empirical sciences along the lines of a positivist ‘unified science’. He dealt throughout with something already subjected to intellectual operations, dependent on the historical situation, and therefore totally different from the ‘in-itself’ of nature. Engels’s use of dialectical categories had to remain ineffective and merely assertive: facts fixed by the intellect were brought into a new context of merely external reflection. Instead of undertaking a genuine dialectical reconstruction, as Marx did, and as could be done, Engels prefixed dialectical forms of motion with a materialist sign, and ‘applied’ them to natural phenomena without being at all concerned with their speculative implications. In this way, he arrived at arid definitions of the following kind: ‘The cell is Hegel’s “Being-in-itself” and its development undergoes exactly the Hegelian process, resulting finally in the “Idea”, i.e. the particular completed organism.’76 Or, for example, he described geology without qualification as ‘a series of negated negations’, which was meant to be identical with the statement that geology is ‘a series of successive disintegrations of old and deposits of new rock formations’.77 Hegel’s consciously idealist philosophy of nature gained its bad reputation precisely through the many artificialities, empty constructs and curiosities contained in it. In the case of Engels, the same constructions had a still more repellent effect, if that is possible, since his materialist tendency to maintain contact with the empirical field of the individual sciences was irreducibly opposed to his dialectical aim of presenting a totality structured in itself. Hegel could blame the obvious deficiencies of his undertaking on nature itself, asserting that nature’s ‘impotence’ consisted in its ‘externality’,78 its ‘unreconciled contradiction’,79 which escapes the rigour of the Concept, although the latter provides it with its ‘internal construction’.80 Engels no longer had this line of retreat.
Whilst Hegel endeavoured to supersede empirical physics in speculative physics, but always maintained the distinction between them, Engels wanted to send all philosophies of nature packing and to anchor the dialectic in nature as it existed independently of any theoretical reflection. He was therefore forced to present the pre-philosophical procedure of the natural sciences as itself dialectical. The processes and laws discovered by the natural sciences are used by Engels as ‘demonstrative examples’ of his theory, which tends in the direction of a dogmatic world-outlook. For him, therefore, ‘the unity of all motion in nature … is a fact of natural science’.81
Let us look more closely at the way in which Engels determines this motion of nature in individual cases. Although he asserted that this motion was not ‘merely change of place’ but ‘also a qualitative change in the supra-mechanical fields’,82 it can be shown that he had to make far-reaching concessions to precisely the kind of mechanicism he wanted to relativize dialectically. Dialectics is secretly transformed here into a mechanicism of evolution which is at best more flexibly interpreted than the old mechanicism; for it is limited to providing ‘a causal nexus for the advance from the lower to the higher, which maintains itself through all zigzag movements and momentary setbacks …’.83 In particular, the Dialectics of Nature goes beyond the purely causal relationship and towards the conception of a ‘universal interaction’84 which Engels saw as that knowledge which it was impossible to go beyond, ‘because nothing knowable lies behind it’.85 With this remark, however, he himself conceded that his view of nature was ultimately pre-dialectical. It is true that, in comparison with mechanical causality interaction is a higher, because a richer category. Yet, as Hegel said, it still stands ‘on the threshold of the Concept so to speak.… If a given situation is viewed merely from the standpoint of interaction, this is in fact an attitude entirely lacking in conceptual content; one is then concerned merely with a dry fact and the demand for mediation … remains unsatisfied.’86 Engels consciously left out of account ‘the impact of men on nature’,87 i.e. the appearance of that particular form of mutual interaction in the natural context, called social labour. However, since labour’s needs are subject to historical change, the faculty of knowledge, in order to be sure of the individual natural phenomena, must destroy their total context and return again and again to the isolated causal relationship. Only in that way can nature’s necessary processes be reconciled with human aims. A materialist theory requires that the concrete dialectic be brought into operation only by the activity of social production, which determines the mental and the real transition from causality to interaction and vice versa, as well as the transition from interaction to teleology.
Thought which sees the limits of the mechanistic mode of interpretation is not per se dialectical, and the dialectic cannot be identified with a ‘historical conception of nature’,88 as Engels asserted. This is precisely because the evolutionist theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were in no sense dialectical, being rather an attempt to apply the quantitative, mechanical point of view which had been successfully adopted in physics long before, to the organic world and its development in time. In Lamarck’s natural-historical materialism the evolution of biological species was conditioned by the mechanical intervention and alteration of environmental factors. In the series of living things, he said, there are only purely quantitative gradations, minute changes, and not sudden leaps. There appear to be qualitative differences simply because certain intermediate members of the series are not known to science. This line is also taken, in essence, by Darwin.
Even more than empirical research, romantic speculation demonstrates the impossibility of a dialectic of nature such as Engels had in mind. In his Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (1799), Schelling expressly taught a kind of natural history which he endeavoured to deduce as ‘a dynamic series of stages’89 from nature considered as ‘absolute activity’.90 The word ‘dynamic’ referred here to a philosophy which would redeem nature from its subjection to dead Mechanicism, and make it possible to embark on a free development. Nature is absolutely productive, he said, but simultaneously infinitely limited through the fact that originally opposed tendencies are operative within it. In none of nature’s products do these tendencies coincide. Therefore each of nature’s products is also the drive beyond itself, an infinite productivity – ‘the absolute product, which is always becoming and never is’.91 Nature is neither productivity nor product, but the constant transition from one to the other. Since Schelling (here related to the natural scientists mentioned above), despite his idealism, accepted the individual scientific findings available in his day, he too gave an external description, in the manner of a philosophy of reflection, rather than conducting an immanent dialectical elaboration of the tension between productivity and product, or fluidity and rigidity. There can be no question here of a transitional leap from one quality to another: ‘One must not be misled by the apparent lack of continuity. These interruptions of the natural stage exist only in respect of the products, for reflection, not in respect of productivity, for intuition. The productivity of nature is absolute continuity. We shall therefore present that succession of stages of organization not mechanically but dynamically, i.e. not as a succession of stages of products but as a succession of stages of productivity. There is only one product, which lives in all products. The leap from the polyp to the human being appears of course immense, and this transition would be inexplicable were it not for the existence of the members of the series intermediate between the two.’92
A brief comparison of this aspect of Schelling’s conception of nature and the corresponding conception in Hegel is of value because it brings out the ‘bad’ contradiction inherent in the philosophy of nature as Engels resuscitated it: either it retains the temporal emergence of natural forms from each other, in which case it loses its dialectical character, or it retains the dialectic and must therefore (as in Hegel) deny the existence of a history of nature. This is how Hegel put it: ‘Nature must be regarded as a system of stages, of which one necessarily proceeds from the other …: not however in the sense that one is naturally created out of the other, but rather in the internal idea, which constitutes the ground of nature.… It was a crude notion of the older (and also the more recent) philosophy of nature … that the transition from one natural form to a higher one … was seen as a case of external, real production, located in the darkness of the past. Externality is precisely characteristic of nature. It allows distinctions to disintegrate … and to appear as indifferent existences; the dialectical concept, which brings forth the stages, is the internal essence of nature.’93
Hegel’s dialectic teaches the unity of the logical and the genetic, but in nature, which ought indeed to be nothing other than the ‘externalization’ of logic, this genetic process is a timeless logical becoming. The metamorphosis is limited to the Concept ‘whose changing is the sole development’.94 In so far as the Concept exists in nature as a living individual, it is the individual which undergoes development and not the species. Hegel’s dialectic of nature expresses an internal order, but no real history, for real history can only arise in the mental sphere: ‘It must not be thought that such a dry series is made dynamic, or philosophical, or more conceptual, or what you will, by the use of the notion of emergence.’95
It would be very cheap to mock Hegel here for his denial of natural history in the interests of a speculative dialectic precisely at the moment when the idea of development was beginning to spread throughout biology, and even in philosophy itself. In fact, however, this was how Hegel was able to guard against the levelling of the qualitative distinction between the natural and the historical world, which inevitably went very far in the case of Engels, because his theory of development claimed to be both ‘dynamic’ in Schelling’s sense and ‘dialectical’ in Hegel’s. Thus at the mercy of the above-mentioned ‘bad’ contradiction, Engels sought a way out by turning towards Hegel’s Logic, in particular the logic of being, rather than to his Philosophy of Nature which, significantly, was still dealt with in the Propaedeutic under the title ‘ontological logic’. Engels greeted the theorem of the ‘nodal line of quantitative relationships’ with enthusiasm, since this appeared to allow the real process to be conceived as simultaneously continuous and discrete. The different stages, which in the Philosophy of Nature are part of a timeless order, are presented in the Logic as qualitative leaps in a quantitative series.96 Hegel himself had in mind, both in the Logic and in the Philosophy of Nature, structural and not primarily developmental connections. This is partially concealed by the use of numerous ‘examples’, of the kind he normally despised, in order to show the transformation from quality into quantity and vice versa with reference to the chemistry of his own time. Engels, whose interest from the outset was in evolution rather than logic, followed the examples given in the notes, rather than Hegel’s text. However, if the ‘nodal line of measures on a scale of the more or the less’97 is applied directly to natural history, and the transition from quantitative to qualitative changes is understood as a ‘general law of development’, this must, as Habermas has rightly pointed out, lead to a ‘mechanical pseudo-dialectic of quantitative increase’ which ‘has more in common with the quantitative differentiation in Schelling’s philosophy of nature’98 than with a genuine dialectic such as would transcend the dualisms and polarities which stand in the centre of Schelling’s discussion. Since Engels conceived the material unity of the world metaphysically rather than practically, his later views were somewhat analogous to the ‘natural-philosophical formalism’ with which Hegel (himself guilty in this respect) reproached Schelling.99
Engels’s reaction to the logic of being was the same as his reaction to Hegel’s philosophy as a whole: he closed the door to the idealist meaning Hegel attached to his own categories. Therefore, when Hegel spoke of ‘objective logic’, Engels immediately tended towards a natural-scientific interpretation of this objectivity. In Hegel, the objectivity of being only exists in that being returns into the essence as to its ground, to emerge finally as the ‘Concept’, i.e. absolute subjectivity. Instead of applying the Hegelian categories in a concrete, materialist way by redefining them in social terms, Engels applied them externally to particular scientific facts, which are dependent for their existence precisely on their abstraction from that which would bring them into dialectical motion: historical practice. They are supposed to be valid for the world in general, and Engels naïvely assumed that the conclusions of research into the world referred to its pure being-in-itself.
In fact the main difficulty, as outlined by Hyppolite, was that Engels’s historicization of nature (and still more Soviet Marxism’s) led to a naturalization of human history. This did not occur in the manner of Social Darwinism, whose social function and origin were spotted by both Marx and Engels. Here the naturalization of history means that Engels reduced history to the special area of application of nature’s general laws of motion and development. In this way he cleared the way for the institutionalized division of theory into dialectical and historical materialism, which is characteristic of Stalinist ideology but meaningless from the Marxist point of view. In Engels’s view, the fact that human history is made by beings endowed with consciousness is nothing more than a factor which tends rather to complicate the matter. As he laconically expressed it: ‘Now the whole of nature is dissolved into history, and history is distinguished from natural history only because it is the process of development of self-conscious organisms.’100 However, when Marx wrote of the ‘natural laws’ of society, of the critique of political economy’s conception of the development of social formations as a ‘process of natural history’ in which persons have become the ‘personification of economic categories’,101 this had the critical meaning that men are subjected to a system of material conditions which is outside their control and triumphs over them as a ‘second’ nature. This is not to say that Engels lost sight of this critical impulse; indeed he put the same point particularly clearly in Anti-Dühring. But because he proceeded from nature’s ‘value-indifferent’ laws of development to those of society (although, with Marx, he had followed precisely the opposite path in the 1840s) it followed that some of his formulations could be interpreted affirmatively. On the one side, Engels had a clear awareness that the objectivity of historical laws is merely apparent, that they can only be the laws of men’s ‘own social action’;102 on the other, the force of this critical insight was lessened by his view that under socialism these laws would be ‘applied with a full understanding of their nature, and therefore controlled’. While Marx wanted these laws to vanish through being dissolved by the rational actions of liberated individuals, Engels naturalistically identified the laws of man within those of physical nature, which can of course only be applied and controlled.
Stalin himself and Stalinism as a whole drew from this the dogma of the absolute objectivity of historical laws, which act independently of man’s will and differ in no respect from the laws of nature.103 It is no accident that the official ideology was able for years to unite this aconceptual objectivism with the crassest subjectivism expressed in the so-called cult of personality around Stalin: the two sides of this ideology are complementary. What in Marx is the object of a critique, is in Stalinism raised to the rank of a scientific norm. Subjects are capable at most of investigating these laws and bearing them in mind in their actions. These laws would simply not exist without human action, but this fact lies entirely outside the purview of a doctrine which is only concerned to ‘reflect’ already in fact completely reified relations in the interests of the ruling powers.
Dialectical laws of development and categories which should have equal validity for nature, society, and thought, were at least left by Engels in the field of the formation of concepts in the natural sciences. Stalin and Mao Tse Tung in particular took a further step towards the conversion of an originally critical and radical historical theory into an ontology by separating these dialectical laws and categories from the natural-scientific problematic itself and pronouncing them to be direct assertions about the nature of being. Hence there is an axiomatic certainty, before any specific investigation of an object, that contradictions are inherent in it, as in all other things in the world. This tendency was accentuated still more in the post-Stalin era. Authors such as V. B. Tugarinov use the concept ‘ontology’ in a positive sense and endeavour to construct a system of categories reminiscent of the philosophy of Hartmann. The dialectic is hypostatized into a general world-outlook,104 yet simultaneously shrinks into a catalogue of principles which change in accordance with the temporary political conjuncture, and are imposed on the content as empty husks and schemata.
Let us turn now to the way in which Marx approached the problem of the dialectic. It is apparent first of all that unlike Engels he did not fall into the trap of codifying it, and assigning to its forms of motion nature and history conceived as two distinct areas of subject-matter. From the beginning, Marx had a really critical relationship to the dialectic. Although he considered it to be ‘absolutely the last word of all philosophy’ in his lifetime, he always emphasized the necessity of ‘freeing it from the mystical appearance it possesses in Hegel’.105 It was clear to him that this task could not be accomplished by making the dialectic into a medley of philosophical declarations, but only by showing in individual cases how it inhabits human historical processes. He therefore rejected ‘the abstract natural-scientific materialism which excludes the historical process’,106 and which was supposed to provide for the first time a perspective for comprehending the existing problems and findings of research.
Nature only appears on the horizon of history, for history can emphatically only refer to men. History is first, and immediately, practice. The concept of practice, as attained in the Theses of Feuerbach, is precisely the most important theoretically of Marx’s concepts. One must always return to the concept of practice in order to clarify what Marx meant by materialism, and with what justification his materialism can be called dialectical. Authentic Marxism, unlike all its Soviet Marxist presentations, is not a naturalized Hegelianism which simply replaces one ontological substratum, Spirit, with another, Matter. Nor is Marxism a ‘synthesis of the Hegelian dialectic and Feuerbachian naturalism’, as Plekhanov wrote in his attempt to situate it in the history of philosophy. It goes without saying that Marxism has nothing in common with the mystical cosmology developed by Bloch as a ‘philosophy of identity’. The essence of Marxist materialism is missed if it is merely interpreted as an alternative internal philosophy, or even world outlook, to idealism in any of its forms. It is in fact the critique, and the supersession, of philosophy as philosophy – although this critique itself is still philosophically motivated. Because of his attitude to the history of society as a whole, Marx was able to raise himself above philosophy and see the derivative and mediate nature of philosophical questions, without for that reason denying their factual content. Thus, what Engels described in his esssay on Feuerbach as the ‘highest question of the whole of philosophy’,107 i.e. ‘the relation of thought to being, of the spirit to nature’, loses much of its importance when it becomes clear that concepts such as ‘thought’ and ‘being’, ‘spirit’ and ‘nature’, as well as natural-scientific modes of explanation, are products of practice, and that, with their help, men seek to solve not eternal problems but historically limited ones.108
It is true that material being precedes every form of historical practice as extensive and intensive infinity. But in so far as it is meaningful for men, this being is not the abstractly material being presupposed in its genetic primacy by any materialist theory, but a second being, appropriated through social labour. Throughout his whole development Marx insisted on the socially mediated character of what has at different times been called nature, and he was less concerned with the changing content of the picture of nature than with the historical conditions of this change.
In one of his last works, the marginal notes to Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie, he stated that only a ‘professorial schoolmaster’ could view the ‘relations of men to nature as not practical relations, i.e. relations founded in action, but theoretical relations …’.109 Men are not confronted first with the external means to the satisfaction of their needs as with ‘things of the external world’, i.e. they do not stand in an epistemological relation to them. ‘Like any animal, they begin by eating, drinking etc., and therefore do not “stand” in a relationship, but take up an active attitude, asserting control through their actions over certain things of the external world, and thus satisfying their needs. They begin, therefore, with production.…’110 These formulations are not to be understood in the sense of practicist enmity towards theory. Historical practice is in itself ‘more theoretical’ than theory, as indeed it was in Hegel (although in his case of course it was determined in the last analysis as a mode of knowledge). Practice has already accomplished the mediation of Subject and Object before it becomes itself the theme of reflection. At this point we can see once more that Engels took up the problem of the dialectic too late. In his view the ‘materialist conception of nature’ meant nothing more than ‘a simple conception of nature just as it exists, without alien ingredients’.111 This marked a naïve-realist regression in comparison with the position both he and Marx had reached in their polemic against Feuerbach in the German Ideology. ‘Nature just as it exists’ is by no means an abstractly quantitative product of the laboratory, divested of all anthropomorphic elements, but a qualitatively rich world of matter, to be appropriated through collective labour. Of course, the progress of industrialization makes the natural-scientific reduction of all qualities to quantity technologically decisive, and natural science itself becomes a productive force.
Hence, it is only the process of knowing nature which can be dialectical, not nature itself. Nature for itself is devoid of any negativity. Negativity only emerges in nature with the working Subject. A dialectical relation is only possible between man and nature. In view of Engels’s objectivism, in itself already undialectical, the question whether nature’s laws of motion are mechanical or dialectical is distinctly scholastic. ‘Even the animal,’ as Hegel wrote, ‘no longer has this realistic philosophy, because it consumes things and thereby proves that they are not absolutely independent.’112 Human labour is also a consumption of the immediately given of this kind, but is something more, both for Marx and for Hegel: ‘Consumption of consumption itself; in the supersession of the material, supersession of this supersession and hence the positing of the same.’113 This shows the inadequacy of the dictum particularly frequent in Thomist literature, that Marx was an epistemological realist. He was a realist in considering that any productive activity presupposed natural material existing independently of men, but he was not a realist, in that for him men did not persist in Feuerbachian contemplation of the immediate, but continuously transformed it within the framework of nature’s laws.
Labour is in one and the same act the destruction of things as immediate, and their restoration as mediate. Because things existing independently of consciousness have always been filtered through historical labour, they represent something which has become what it is precisely in this independence of consciousness, an in-itself translated into a for-us. This also removes the primitive notion of knowledge as a reflection where consciousness and its object are placed in flat opposition to each other and the ultimately constitutive role of practice for the object is left out of account. The objective world is no mere in-itself to be reflected, but largely a social product. What appears on the side of this product ‘as a static property, in the form of being’,114 should not obscure the fact that it is an addition to nature as originally given, and previously appeared on the side of the labourer, ‘in the form of motion’, i.e. purposive activity. Therefore consciousness always enters as an active spirit into the reality reproduced by it. It is the task of knowledge not to capitulate before reality, which stands around men like a stone wall. Knowledge, by revivifying the human historical processes which have been submerged in the established facts, proves that reality is produced by men and hence can be changed by them: practice, as the most important concept of knowledge, changes into the concept of political action.