This book is a contribution to the philosophical interpretation of Marx. It concerns the concept of nature, which appears at first sight to have a purely peripheral significance in Marx’s theory. The fact that Marx rarely referred in his writings to nature ‘in itself’ does not mean that nature has little importance for his theory of society but is the result of his particular approach.
The theory of society, as a critique of political economy, presents the process of the production of material goods as a ‘labour-process and, at the same time, a process of creating value’.1 In this theory, attention is mainly focused on the exchange-value of the commodity. The commodity as the embodiment of abstract human labour, expressed in units of socially necessary labour-time, is independent of any determination by nature.
The natural form of the commodity, called by Marx its use-value, only appears in the analysis of the process of creating value in so far as it is ‘the material substratum, the depositary of exchange-value’.2 Here, on the contrary, we are concerned primarily with the philosophical elements of Marxist theory, and the process of production will be considered above all in its historical movement, as a labour-process bringing forth use-values.
It is the socio-historical character of Marx’s concept of nature which distinguishes it from the outset. Marx considered nature to be ‘the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour’,3 i.e. he saw nature from the beginning in relation to human activity. All other statements about nature, whether of a speculative, epistemological, or scientific kind, already presuppose social practice, the ensemble of man’s technologico-economic modes of appropriation.
Natural phenomena and all consciousness of nature have been reduced in the course of history more and more to functions of objective social processes. Marx showed, however, that society itself was a natural environment. This was meant not only in the immediately critical sense that men are still not in control of their own productive forces vis-à-vis nature, that these forces confront them as the organized, rigid form of an opaque society, as a ‘second nature’ which sets its own essence against its creators, but also in the ‘metaphysical’ sense that Marx’s theory is a theory of the world as a whole.
The human life-process, even when understood and controlled, remains in a natural environment. Under all forms of production, human labour-power is ‘only the manifestation of a force of nature’.4 In his work, man ‘opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces’.5 ‘By acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.’6 The dialectic of Subject and Object is for Marx a dialectic of the constituent elements of nature.
The work here presented to the reader can be described as an attempt to present in its main aspects the mutual interpenetration of nature and society as it takes place within nature, conceived in its widest sense as the total reality comprising both moments. Its basic sources are the whole of Marx’s available works. The writings of Engels have been drawn on for the elucidation of Marx’s position, except where they are open to criticisms arising out of that position, as is the case in particular with Engels’s conception of the dialectics of nature.
Where the early writings of Marx have been used, the author’s intention has been more to present their genetic connection with specific themes in middle-period and mature Marx than, fashionably and mistakenly, to reduce the strictly philosophical thought of Marx to what is written in those texts, namely to the anthropology of the Paris Manuscripts of 1844.
In the conviction that Marx was by no means at his most philosophical when he made use of the traditional, scholastic language of the philosophers, his middle and later, politico-economic writings will be consulted much more than is customary in interpretations of Marxist philosophy. Particular attention has been paid to the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf), the preliminary draft of Capital, which is of the utmost importance for understanding the relation between Hegel and Marx, and which has so far hardly been used.
Apart from the sheer extent of the literature to be taken into account, considerable difficulties are involved in the attempt to delineate the concept of nature in dialectical materialism. There is no systematic Marxist theory of nature of such a kind as to be conscious of its own speculative implications. It was therefore necessary to develop our theme by bringing together often widely disparate motifs from the main phases of development of Marxist thought. In view of the extraordinary entanglement of these motifs, it was not possible wholly to avoid occasional repetitions, overlaps, and cross-references, so that the subjects dealt with in the individual chapters or sections do not always coincide precisely with what is announced in the headings.