It is exactly twenty five years ago since I was accepted as a doctoral student at Manchester, so I’ve been looking back, with a mixture of pride - my work wasn't half bad at all - and sadness - that's a long time ago now, time I could have used doing other things. I’ve posted a link below to my first work in Manchester, Materialist Dialectics from 1997, and I shall spend some time discussing it here. (I have posted links to other work from my Manchester days, too).
Twenty five years is not a long time in politics, but it’s a lot of time for me, time I could have been putting to other use. Back in 1995, I was combined study on the accredited masters European Human Resources Management and Industrial Relations at Keele University with working on and off the building sites. My interests were, however, elsewhere. Ever the contrarian, I decided in 1990 to take a look at why so many were running away from Karl Marx, wondering why so many could have thought someone now considered so manifestly wrong to be so compelling in the first place. I read him without a political axe to grind and a dogma to serve. I had been put off him as an undergraduate by the rather assertive and aggressive tone of those who identified themselves as Marxists. The social sciences degree I had done at Liverpool was full of Marx and Marxism, but I chose other options. So from 1990 onwards I was reading Marx in the raw for the first time, and found him a compelling analyst of the problems of the modern world. From 1992 I started to send out proposals for a research degree, only to find them rejected one by one. The excuse was offered that there was no one able to cover the line of research I was proposing. I was a third of the way through the masters degree at Keele, top grading in economics – economics is easy, politics and ethics dressed up behind pseudo-science – when I received an invitation to join the Philosophy and Politics department at Manchester Metropolitan University. Jules Townshend had read the work I was proposing, liked the rather odd angle I was taking, invited me in for a talk. I discussed authors whom he had recently reviewed, Paul Hirst especially, and we shared the same views. I was offered a place, once I had hammered my proposal into formal shape. But I remember the interview, invitation, and acceptance very well. It was the 30th August 1995, Wednesday. I was wearing a rather fine cream shirt, made of quality material, and very soft on the skin. It was the day before my birthday. I remember walking around Manchester than early evening, positively glowing, thinking I’ve ‘made it.’ I’d had three years of rejection leading up to this acceptance.
Marx was neither the political nor the intellectual fashion in the 1990’s. This was the decade when we discovered that many Marxist academics were academics first and foremost and academics not at all. Accordingly, my early work was full of critical views of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and what I called the ‘academicization’ of Marxism. I’m not sure there is such a word, but it applied to the way that Marx’s activist conception to knowledge had come in time to take a passive, interpretive form.
It was the activist conception of knowledge, contained in the notion of praxis, that interested me most in those first two years at Manchester. I’ve been taking the time to look back twenty five years to that early work. I have to say, as rough and raw as it is, it is actually rather good, full of promising lines for further development.
The first work I post here had its origins in the progress reports I had submitted in the first two years of doctoral research at Manchester. I remember 1997 very well indeed. Jules Townshend, my Director of Studies, spent the year as Visiting Professor somewhere or other, so I didn’t see him. That gave me time to focus hard and summarise my view for when I was next scheduled to meet him – December 1997. I came to Manchester armed with a hefty manuscript. Personally, I thought I’d already done enough to earn the PhD, and even now, looking back having deepened my studies since these early days, I think there are insights here on dialectics, praxis, and active materialism, as well as the society-nature interaction, that hold up very well indeed. I’ll stand by my view that, with editing and a sharper focus and a greater textual analysis of Marx, the PhD was here. I think I overwhelmed Jules, and the work was read in pieces by various others. It has to be read whole.
In being pushed harder, I went deeper into the roots, and the research took a more philosophical line with respect to ‘rational freedom.’ In the process, the thesis grew into something else, taking a turn away from these early insights. But, looking back, I really do think I had something in those first two years, youthful efforts they may be. In this work, I make a critical comment on the limitations of new social agents and movements which, in lacking in structural capacity vis the process of production, are unable to engage in the transformative action their emancipatory demands require for their realisation. The best they can achieve is merely ratchet up the pressure of a disparate and abstract “we” in order to persuade/compel “government” to act as a rescue squad. It is basically a do-it-yourself reformism from below which shares the old reformist delusion that the imperatives of the capital system are at the behest of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I was saying so in 1997 and I’ve heard nothing in the twenty five wasted years of environmentalism as politics to change my mind. ‘Government’ is a key second order mediation within the capital system, and to expect it to act contrary to the process of accumulation, even to ‘save the planet,’ is the plainest institutional utopianism deriving from sociological illiteracy and political cowardice. The appeal to the ‘we’ via government is socially and politically irrelevant, then, in presupposing a social identity that does not exist, but which stands in need of creation via a transformation of social relations – ensuring a coincidence between short-term individual good and long-term social good. I don’t write much on this in the 1997 work, but I do comment on it with respect to the ‘loss of reality’ characterising ‘new politics’ and ‘post’ everything modes of thought. The loss of reality begins with the loss of the dialectics of nature and extends into society and the idea that there is ‘no necessary relation’ between socio-economic position and interest and political and ideological views. In such modes of thought, fashionable in the 1990s, and whose damaging consequences are still with us, it is pure coincidence why merchant bankers are not revolutionary socialists. Here we can see the confusion in which come come to appeal to the very forces complicit in climate crisis to save civilisation from eco-catastrophe. This wasn’t remotely the subject of my 1997 piece, merely a passing comment on the structural limitations of the new social movements and agents being proposed in place of the socio-economic issues and class dynamics of the ‘old’ politics. But it just goes to show how fertile this 1997 work was that this key point – which environmentalism as politics has still to grasp – was one of a number of themes going on in that work.
There are some other points I would like to make in this respect. You will still hear Marx described as an extremist state socialist. People of ‘moderate’ persuasion – opting for incremental reforms from above via government or below via lifestyle choices and grassroots activism – will denounce Marx and socialists generally as ‘extremist.’ Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s complete pants. I came to my conclusions after having avoided Marx as an undergraduate, admittedly having been put off by the rather aggressive mode of politics advanced by those proclaiming to be Marxists. I still find that mode off-putting, and in this 1997 work subject what I call the theoretico-elitist model of politics to rigorous criticism. I loathe vanguards, elects, elites, and revolutionary parties of all kinds. The activist conception of knowledge I develop via Marx’s revolutionary-critical praxis emphasizes individuals as knowledgeable change-agents in their own right. That’s a view I take from from Marx, and it is an inherently and actively democratic view. Sometimes, in face of big ‘global’ problems, deriving from the institutional and structural character of the prevailing social system, big transformative actions are required. That’s not ‘extremism,’ but a cool, rational appraisal of the causes of problems and what their resolution entails by way of human social action. Those who make a fetish of ‘moderation’ default time and again to a status quo that stands in need of transformation. It is not moderation, in other words, but intellectual and political pusillanimity.
But to elaborate on Marx’s cool and tempered look at problems and their solution, in this early collection of progress reports/researches, I go big on the dialectic. What’s the ‘dialectic’? Dialectics is basically a mode of thought which understands reality as a field of dynamic inter-relationalism and interweaving, something that bids our thoughts and practices to be in tune with an ever-changing, ever-emergent reality, emphasising fluidity and a ceaseless immanent activism. Dialectics thus stands opposed to all static, fixed, rigid, and reductionist concepts which are imposed on reality, short-circuiting its processes. I emphasize this conception throughout. In the manner of Marx himself, I focused on social reality and did precious little on nature. That doesn’t mean that Marx neglected nature, as many environmentalists allege. Marx referred specifically to the ‘universal metabolism of nature’ and ‘eternal natural conditions’ as irreducible conditions of all social life and activity. If Marx didn’t say more it was because he felt this truth to be trite, contained in ‘every children’s primer,’ and that the real issue lies in the specific forms of mediation by which the interchange between society and nature takes place. That was also my concern. But the emphasis on the metabolic interaction between humanity-society and nature was there in Marx, and also in my work of 1997.
In that work of 1997 I also note the loss of reality on the part of the post-structuralist and postmodernist thought which was at the time sweeping through the universities. I was well aware that I was swimming against the intellectual and political tides, but could see very clearly that these fashionable modes of thought and politics were shallow and without substance. To earn my spurs, I was told, I had to critically engage with contrary views, and subject them to cogent criticism. This is what the first part is about. I loathed reading Laclau and Mouffe and Lyotard and such like, but this is where it was at, and I am afraid the influence of such thought is still with us. I loathed it then as I loathe it now, and said at the time they would all be up a creek without a paddle, taking all who were inattentive (or stupid) enough to follow them in the same direction. We are here. The inability to muster the collective wit and will to address climate crisis is post modernism's revenge. The same with respect to ‘reformism’ and appeals to moderation in the context of a politics reduced to lifestyle and culture, the inflation of discourse (and evasion of the socio-economic structures of power and their contestation rather than mere protest).
The materialist dialectic, based upon a materialist (social and natural) ontology, entailed the reinstatement of reality. I use the term ‘materialism’ in recognition of the way that Marx used the term in transcending the old philosophical materialism by incorporating the ‘active side’ from idealism. By the 1850s-1870s, Marx and Engels were faced with the rise of a new scientistic materialism which scorned philosophy as such and idealist philosophy in particular. Hegel was treated with particular scorn. This led Engels to attempt to define the dialectical conception of materialism. His work was unfinished, in part reflecting the unfinishable nature of the dynamic, continuous unfolding, reality to which the dialectic applied. Engels has been criticized for the reversion to mechanical materialism in Marxism, but this charge is unfair. Engels was explicitly attempting to check such mechanical conceptions, but his work was never completed and came to be misinterpreted and misused. The result was a split between a Western Marxism, which confined the dialectic to society and denied it to nature, and a Second and Third International which expressed certain mechanical and reductionist conceptions, which fed into Soviet Marxism. Both sides were far from the materialist (social and natural) dialectic of Marx and Engels, and I spend several chapters on this and its damaging consequences with respect to the loss of reality. I make the point that a Marxism which is removed from practice tends to idealism. At the same time, I’m not sure the term ‘materialism’ quite represents what Marx’s dialectic is getting at, which is a critical relationalism and realism in history. A diachronic-dialectical relationalism and realism, then. Given that that is something of a mouthful, it is easy to see why people tend to stick with ‘materialism.’ This is acceptable, so long as the complex, fluid, and dynamic reality and mode of thought attune to it is understood.
It is the ways in which the metabolic interaction between society and nature is mediated that is crucial. I don’t do much on that here, but I do emphasise it, as against a Western Marxism that risked losing touch with reality with the loss of natural dialectics, opening up a world conceived purely as a human construction, a world of endless plasticity, endless in all senses of the word. I initially titled this collection of progress reports as the bland “Marx, Praxis, and Socialism from Below.” That really says nothing. On my birthday, twenty five years on from the start of my studies in Manchester, I have retitled it “Materialist Dialectics.” I think I am entitled to, as a reward for a quarter of a century hammering away on the keys. The work concerns Marx’s dialectical conception of materialism as a realism that transcends the conceptions of the old philosophical materialism and idealism, and replaces the passive conception of knowledge (which conceives reality as an objective external datum) with an activist conception of a dynamic reason, relationalism, and realism, one that is in intimate connection with the ceaseless creative unfolding of the universe.
I am currently reading John Bellamy Foster’s new book The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, and am making notes. The “return” in the title refers not to the cul-de-sac of “back-to-nature” but “the re-emergence of the natural-material or ecological realm within critical social analysis, where the complex, reflexive relation of nature to human production and reproduction has all too often been downplayed.” I can’t say that I went too big on this aspect of Marx’s thought in the 1990s, but I most certainly do discuss it. I don’t labour the point, for the reason that the society-nature interchange seems too obviously true to merit prolonged attention. Of course, human beings are a part of nature. What concerned Marx most of all, though, was the twin alienation of society and of nature – the reasons that human society is estrangement from nature lie precisely in the specific forms of social mediation. I therefore refer to the mediated interchange between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature, before concentrating on the specific forms of that mediation – opposing a social self-mediation (bounded by what Marx called “eternal natural conditions”) to capital’s alienated forms of mediation.
I shall be writing an appreciation of John Bellamy Foster’s book this week, time allowing (as it never seems to do, I have still not got my main computer back from repairs, nearly a month on, and my reserve computer has been written off.) John has done fine work on the metabolic thinking of Marx over the years. Those environmentalists who still claim that Marx has nothing to say on ecology are plain wrong, and their error explains in part the character of environmentalism as a political cretin standing on the shoulders of a scientific and technological giant. To repeat a point I have been making over and again these past twenty five years, science and technology cannot serve as politics and ethics. In the 1997 work I make precisely the point that there is a need to bridge the division between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the world, the realm of fact) and practical reason (ethics and politics, the realm of values in which human agents decide how to act). I argue that Marx’s dialectical conception of materialism reconciled the two great wings of the philosophical tradition, objectivity and subjectivity, (theoretical) reason and nature on the one hand and (practical) reason, will, and artifice on the other.
Twenty five years on, my first youthful effort on Marx stands up rather well. I had been back working on the building sites in the early 1990s, combining this with masters study at Keele in 1995. I think for two years research work, Materialist Dialectics is an incredibly good piece of work. Fertile. It needs to be edited down, of course, but these are really reports back from the outer limits rather than finished pieces. I get the main calls right.
I am still hearing environmentalists debate whether we have time left for “system change.” It seems that, after finally conceding that capitalism and socialism may be distinct after all, and that capitalism may well be implicated in the ecological crisis that is now upon us, environmentalists who have been big on the environmental ills of historical socialism are now beginning to see that those who have called for system change may well have a point. But they are reluctant to go any further. The timescales are against us. The transition to socialism requires a long-term transformation at a time when we have lost the long-term. In fine, in face of a converging social and environmental crisis which has identifiable systemic causes, we are being asked to limit demands to piecemeal, incremental reforms once more. But not. The huge demands being levelled upon ‘government’ to address climate change are ambitious and of a scale that indicates nothing less than system change. The idea that ‘government’ will legislate and enact such measures without any substantial transformation in the mechanisms of valorisation, realisation, and accumulation is not merely fanciful but fantastical. I can only think that many of those involved in raising such demands are not so naive, and believe some kind of austerian environmental regime the only hope for survival, seeking to mobilize pressure in the short run around incoherent slogans lacking in structural substance.
For the best part of a century and more, there have been a million reasons offered as to why “system change” - socialism - needs to be kicked into the long grass or abandoned altogether in favour of incremental reforms. Those reforms, we should now be able to see, can never scale to the level of transformation required to address the “collective” issues involved in a convergent social-ecological crisis. The simple point needs to be made bluntly and directly - there is no necessary opposition between short-term reforms and long-range transformation, and no socialist worthy of the name has ever made that opposition: those that do oppose the two do so because they have other political goals.
We are living through what David Held in 1987 (Models of Democracy) described as a crisis with transformative potential, that is, a crisis that involves more than accident and error hence cannot be resolved by piecemeal action, but who origins lie deeply in the fundamental institutions and structures of society. It is these institutions and structures that stand in need of transformation. To appeal to prevailing institutions to themselves lead this transformation of dominant structures is utterly incoherent, and explains the paradoxes of environmentalism as politics, the seeming radicalism of its demands and postures contradicted by the reformism of its measures.
In 1989 I bought Ralph Miliband’s newly published book Divided Societies. His conclusion on the long-term prospects for transformative struck me as fundamentally right, but referred to events of another age. I never imagined that that age would ever come. That age is now.
‘the conditions do not at present exist – and will not exist for some time to come in any advanced capitalist country – for the coming to power of the kind of government that would seek to bring about a radical transformation of the existing social order. But .. it is quite realistic to think that these conditions will come into being within the next ten, twenty, to thirty years – a long time in the life of an individual, but a mere moment in historical time. In this perspective, class struggle for the creation of democratic, egalitarian, co-operative, and classless societies, far from coming to an end, has barely begun.’
Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies 1989: 234
That is an awful long time in the life of an individual, and I do dearly wish that I could have the last twenty five years back. I have spent the time hammering a political and philosophical point that, in truth, I had stated clearly and concisely in 1997-2001. It is for others to grasp that point rather than for me to labour it. I would have gone back into the building trade, trained properly, as was the plan, and lived happily ever after, instead of writing ad nauseam. Ralph Miliband’s book and its conclusion made a big impression on me in 1989, and I have the book to this day, pencil lines underlining the key passages. How very strange to read that conclusion at the distance of that thirty years he wrote about, and how very disappointing to still find people, faced with the fierce urgency of transformative and systemic action, still pleading for ‘moderation’ as against the ‘extremism’ of system change. Such people need to grasp precisely the meaning of Aristotle's 'golden mean.' Their moderation is not Aristotle's moderation. Appropriate action is the watchword. If you think that a system based on exponential accumulation can be tamed by one of its second order mediations – government – then you are either a fool or a coward and maybe both. Either way, that’s a recipe for failure.
With respect to this work from 1997, I do think this notion of the dialectic grounded in a materialist (social and natural) ontology is right on the mark. I see no reason to change anything here. And I do feel like patting myself on the back for such quality work, just two years from the building sites (actually, I was still working in building on and off, to finance my studies). One thing I note is how much John Bellamy Foster integrates the analysis with natural science, with the biology of emergence and emergent properties. I don’t rest my argument on natural science, but I do refer to emergence, more as a description of the creative unfolding of essences embedded throughout Marx’s work, the continuous realization of potentials as actuals. Essentialism isn’t remotely fashionable these days, but I don’t remotely shy away from an essentialist metaphysics – form, substance, necessity, immanent lines of development in the process of actualisation, curvilinear advance rather than uni-linear (lines of development are frustratable). I’m standing by essentialism. Essences are not necessarily timeless and fixed, as critics argue. In fact, they are the very opposite, as I have argued over and again. Terry Eagleton returned to Manchester just as I finished. Within a couple of years he published After Theory (2004). Here, he stated that much that is written on essences as timeless and fixed is based on “philosophical amateurism and ignorance.” I agree, and had said as much. You may call it ‘emergence’ if you prefer the biological idiom. This is the dynamic dialectical materialism upon which Marx’s conception is based. I think it is rooted in Aristotle’s interconnection of theoretical reason – his biology and zoology, natural science – and practical reason – his ethics and politics. I notice that Alasdair MacIntyre, modern day Aristotelian, now accepts the need for Aristotle’s “biological metaphysics,” after years of rejecting it. I call it essentialism, and show it to run throughout Marx’s work. John Bellamy Foster rules out notions of teleology and transhistorical truths. That, I would argue, is perfectly in keeping with the way Marx saw his work, but may not be in keeping with that work. In time, it will become clear why I took the direction I took on ‘rational freedom’ and transcendent standards of truth and justice. I hold that to make good his normative and emancipatory commitments, Marx needs an explicit statement on those transcendent standards – a proper metaphysics, in other words. I hold that these standards are embedded in his work, and this is precisely what I came to argue on ‘rational freedom.’ Other than that, my work and that of John Bellamy Foster is incredibly close. He goes with Epicurus and Lucretius, I just go with Aristotle, Aquinas, and Dante.
But I I’d have quit here in 1997-2001 and done something else with the past quarter of a century …
That is indeed, as Ralph Miliband wrote in 1989, a long time in the life of an individual. I don’t know. My dad was very proud to have seen it all. He’d have loved to have been an intellectual. And I’d have loved to have been a builder.
Materialist Dialectics: Praxis and the Society-Nature Interchange (1997)
Marx and the Recovery of the Political (1997) (the final part of the above)
The Proletarian Public (1996) (my first effort, on socialism-from-below, before taking a more philosophical and sociological turn)
Marx, Reason, and Freedom (2000) (full notes, written up, over 1,000 pages)
Critical Studies in Rational Freedom (2001) (the final thesis, which didn’t quite say what I wanted it to say, but had the merit of being clear and concise, after I was made to cut 60,000 words).