Below are links to and brief descriptions of my 2018 publications on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.
Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx. 2018 210,675 words
Within the triadic framework of humanity-labour/production-nature, Critchley shows how Marx goes beyond the abstractions of ‘Man,’ ‘Reason,’ and ‘Nature’ to focus upon the specific social forms mediating the interchange with nature. mediation. Examining the nature and causes of the disturbance in the ‘metabolic interaction’ between humanity and nature, Marx identifies the alienated character of capital’s second-order mediations. Arguing for regulating this interchange in a ‘rational way,’ Marx shows what is required for the restoration of healthy growth in the relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature. I examine Marx's writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology to demonstrate the extent to which Marx offers a searing critique of environmental appropriation, enclosure, and commodation, giving us the tools by which to navigate our way to an eco-socialist future in alignenment with social and planetary boundaries.
Ethics, Essence, and Immanence. 2018 161,248 words
This book grounds Marx’s political commitments within a normative essentialist anthropology that is concerned with a healthy and mutual growth and development. Through a reconstruction of the conceptual underpinnings of Marx's thought, I demonstrate the extent to which an essentialist metaphysics underpins Marx's socialism as a vision of the immanent society. In the process, I reveal Marx to be a profoundly – and immanently – ethical thinker, with ethics conceived as a mode of life and action rather than an intellectualised code abstracted from social forms and practices. The argument underscores Marx’s debt to Aristotle and Hegel, showing Marx’s dialectics to be shot-through with an essentialist metaphysics, particularly with respect to the categories of law, form and substance, necessity, potentiality, and lines of development. I show how Marx, like Aristotle and Hegel before him, insisted on apprehending reality in holistic terms, seeing things in their inter-relation, realising their natures in a process of mutual growth and expansion.
God, Reason, and Reality: Marx and Homo Religiosus, 2018. 137,430 words
In God, Reason, and Reality, I argue the need for transcendent standards of truth and justice as against the prevailing conventionalism and social constructivism of the modern age, checking the descent into the self-cancelling relativism, subjectivism, nihilism, scepticism, and cynicism overcoming contemporary culture. I examines Marx’s hopes for a self-determining and free humanity in light of the moral and social implications of Nietzsche's ‘death of God.’ He argues that Marx sought to have his transcendent cake and eat it too – realising the most cherished philosophical ideals - failing to understand that once standards of truth and justice were abolished in being socially realized, they would become merely contingent and arbitrary, thoroughly historicised in time and place and hence absorbed within prevailing power relations. The critique of those power relations – so ably advanced by Marx – derives ultimately from transcendent sources. Abolish those sources, and power becomes unbound. Paradoxically, a self-authoring human freedom comes to licence the powerful, issuing in a collective unfreedom.
An Introduction to the Thought of István Mészáros: Beyond the State and Capital. 2018. 62,853 words
This book offers a concise and comprehensive introduction to his thought, paying particular attention to the state and capital as alienated social powers. The book is structured around Mészáros’ theoretical framework of humanity-labour/production and nature and his core concepts of capital system (as distinct from 'capitalism'), social metabolic reproduction and social mediation vs the alien external mediation of the capital form.