Ideology and Hypocrisy Amid Slavery and Democracy - Strange Bedfellows from Time Immemorial

By Stephen Joseph Scott

The history of the existence of slavery as an institution in antiquity and beyond is one of the most common; and, at the same time, one of the most complex tales to be told. Virtually every society, touching almost all the continents of the world, has had its own form of enslavement. The implication being that, nearly, every group of humankind whether racially, ethnically, or culturally categorized as diverse, unattached, or essentially separate, has been marked by the legacy and tradition of human bondage geographically and/or ancestrally. This work will be focusing on the origins and culturally supportive underpinnings of ancient Greek identity, its philosophy, law, ideology, and ethnicity; and, those extant essentialist elements, such as class, that not only made slavery in the ancient Greek world possible but normalized its place within a societal hierarchy that helped define who and what an ancient Athenian was - pitched against a broader Mediterranean ethos. Beyond that, this work will address how ancient Greek thought, as to what essentially constituted a slave versus a free person, later ignites a heated counterpoint which asserts hypocrisy lies at the core of ancient Greek thinking when it comes to the fundamental differences: physical, psychological, and emotional, that inexorably lie between free-persons and human-beings in captivity – made evident by how that debate rages to this day in contemporary historiography….

It is best that we start at the beginning with Homer: ancient Greek storyteller and legendary poet, who lived as early as the 8th century BCE; and, is still considered one of the most celebrated and influential writers of antiquity - for good reason. Homer is brought to the fore because his illustration as evidenced below reveals the essential deleterious effect of human bondage, which, poignantly foreshadows the debate mentioned above by millennia, ‘For Zeus who views the wide world takes away half the manhood of a man, that day he goes into captivity and slavery’ (Homer, Odyssey 17.367-9). Homer is explicitly defining the enslavement of a man as the diminishment, in a purely ontological sense, of one’s inherent human dignity. Aristotle, on the other hand (ancient aristocratic Greek philosopher and polymath extraordinaire), who penned his work in the latter 4th century BCE, some four hundred years after Homer, sets a foundational opposition and enduring precedent of his very own when it comes to the quality, status, value, and condition of enslaved persons.

Aristotle, as is broadly known, defined an enslaved person (doulos), that is, a human-being held in bondage, as ‘a live article of property’ (Aristotle, Pol. 1253b33). The great thinker himself, speaking on behalf of his class interests, goes on to define the value he derived from such persons defined as property, ‘Of property, the first and most indispensable kind is that which is … most amenable to Housecraft; and this is the human chattel.’ He then goes on, with a decisively imperialist tone, ‘Our first step therefore must be to procure good slaves (doulous)’ (Arist. Oec. 1344a23-26). Aristotle makes clear his essentialist views which not only defined a slave as property, but goes further, stating that the value, status, utility, and material condition of persons classified as slaves is not only a useful one, but a natural one:

These considerations therefore make clear the nature of the slave and his essential quality; one who is a human being (anthrôpos) belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a human being belongs to another if, although a human being, he is a piece of property (ktêma) (Arist. Pol. 1254a14-18).

Aristotle’s proposition is an important one given this work’s purpose which is to bring forth these precise notions, or conflicting theories, that have significantly undergirded, influenced and/or reinforced conceptions of class, personhood, value, and status interwoven within western thought throughout the ages.

Which brings us inevitably to the longstanding property versus domination argument spearheaded, in modern scholarship, by Orlando Patterson in his 1982 book entitled Slavery and Social Death. Patterson delivers a scathing rebuke to Aristotle’s customary formulation of slavery in terms of property. He unequivocally argues that slavery, from his learned vantagepoint, is, in fact, ‘the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons’[i]. Which poignantly parallels Homer’s description that human beings, held in captivity against their will, are not only persons dominated physically, but are individuals essentially diminished morally, emotionally, and psychologically. The conventional view, as presented by Aristotle, is unsound, according to Patterson based on two distinct factors. Firstly, Patterson argues, ‘to define slavery … as property fails as a definition, since it does not really specify any distinct category of persons.’ Because everyone, whether ‘beggar or king, can be the object of a property relation.’ One can only construe that what Patterson is saying, when it comes specifically to slavery, is that the term ‘property’ obscures, diminishes or diverts one’s attention away from the overt and brutal nature of an enslaved person’s everyday lived experience. Secondly, Patterson contends that the term property is inconsistent in substance when it comes to diversity of culture - meaning many societies, however archaic, lacked the very concept of ownership. Denoting that slavery has accompanied mankind through time immemorial, from primitive village societies to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, where, he argues, the laws and social mores of any given society didn’t precisely match that of Aristotle’s definition of property – therefore it generally fails as a classification of slavery [ii].

David M. Lewis counters Patterson’s argument on the ‘property point’ as stated above by proclaiming that during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, the evidence clearly demonstrates in abundant detail, that the circumstance between slave and master, in legal terms, was ‘a relationship based on the fact that the slave was the property of his or her owner’-exhibiting all the elementary features necessary, per legal theory, to reach the standard of ‘property’ [iii]. Lewis challenges Patterson’s stance further by stating:

[The popular] view that esteems private property rights to be an advanced development of Roman legal theory ignores the findings of almost a century of legal anthropology, which has observed private property systems in a variety of tribal social systems that were far less advanced in terms of technological and social complexity than even the society imagined in Homer’s epics [iv].

While Lewis’ examination proves ‘slavery as a form of property’ in a legal context, there is still validity in Patterson’s position given the fact that persons in bondage (from a humanist perspective) reduced to the level of property in a solely ‘legal sense’ nullifies their individual agency and all that essentially makes them human.

In fact, slavery, and democracy, in ancient Athens and beyond is a multidimensional and multifaceted story of innate human capacity and agency, dignity, adaptability, fortitude, and resistance. Meaning, ‘…slaves were not passive objects, whose identity and existence was completely dominated by their masters.’[v]  As described by Xenophon (Greek military leader and philosopher), there were without a doubt slaves forced into strenuous domestic work: ‘baking, cooking, spinning’ and scrubbing under their owner’s will (Xen. Oec. 9.9). That said, we are also told of others that gained valuable skill-sets outside the home, coinciding with their inherent intelligence and creativity, from potters to builders to bankers and shoemakers (Hyperides, 3.1-9; and Aeschines, 1.97)[vi]. These slaves participated in communal undertakings (such as workshops and spiritual associations) together with other free and enslaved persons. Even Aristotle, who had little love (agape) for the underclasses, had to acknowledge, albeit cautiously, the inherent democratic nature (and/or threat thereof) made evident by the sheer numbers of this uniquely collective phenomenon - what the great theorist himself branded as koinônia, simply defined as fellowship of the masses. But the politikê koinônia (he warns) was specifically formed for the benefit of its members (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1160a4-6). Influenced by his celebrated teacher, renowned philosopher Plato, who argued that the limits of citizenship and its influence correlate with ‘the precise form of constitution and law’ in place (Plato, Laws 714c) - Aristotle’s well-known anti-democratic discourse on ‘mob-rule’ and the necessity for the ‘rule of law’ as fundamental to ‘the natural order of things’ thus becomes most evident. While in agreement with Pericles’ famed proclamation on the importance of the ‘rule of law’ in the ancient Greek city-state; when it came to what Pericles professed as the virtues of democracy defined, the two-men parted ways in dramatic fashion. In what is considered the ideal of a democratic philosophical vision, Pericles outlines demokratia (in his famed funeral speech of 431 BCE), as follows:

Its administration favors the many instead of the few…equal justice to all…class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way. The freedom which we enjoy in our government…[teaches] us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly as regard [to] the protection of the injured (Thucydides, 2.37).

On the contrary, Aristotle’s depiction of a ‘democratic regime’ and/or constitution is one with an inherent propensity toward ‘license and lawlessness.’ He defines, ‘radical democracy,’ in that of Athens for example, as having two critical flaws: firstly, the influence of the demos can potentially supersede the law (Arist. Pol. 1292a4ff.); and secondly, the demos hold the power to impeach magistrates for wrongdoing (such as malfeasance) which Aristotle intimates are both a step too far (Arist. Pol. 1292a30, and cf.1298a29-35). That said, as threatening as he might have interpreted it, the concept of koinônia permits us to observe enslaved persons actively utilizing their intrinsic agency within a broader collective milieu.

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Returning to the question as stated at the outset of this work, Lewis’ focus on the laws of ancient societies, in lieu of the contention outlined above, is immensely valuable when it comes to understanding the conventions per Athenian slave society and their ramifications. Broadly viewed as a protection mechanism for slaves, given a singular example, the Greek law on ‘hybris,’ in ancient Athens, expressly defined as the negation of the deliberate implementation of violence to humiliate, demean, or degrade - is not as straightforward as it might appear. Yet again, hypocrisy abounds as evidenced: to presume that the Athenian law pertained to an owner’s mis-conduct toward his ‘property’ obliges us to disregard the ‘abundant proof’ of regular and generally habitual violence toward slaves by their masters.[vii] Beyond that, it is difficult to correlate the law as ‘protectionary’ given this evocative assertion by Plato, ‘[a slave] when wronged or insulted, is unable to protect himself or anyone else for whom he cares’ (Plato, Gorg. 483b). The following statement is as definitive as it gets when revealing the underlying deceit interwoven within Athenian law itself when it came to enslaved persons and their standing, ‘[the] law included slaves [simply] because the lawgiver wished to curtail the spread of hubristic [or anti-social] behaviour among the citizens tout court … the hubris law was designed to engender respect and orderly conduct among citizens not to protect slaves’ [viii] [ix]. Meaning, that the Athenian lawgivers were not overly concerned with the physical wellbeing of persons classified as slaves, but perhaps were more intent on curtailing their judicial workload.

The reality was that the right of masters to physically abuse their slaves in ancient Athens was, if not absolute, certainly extensive. Xenophon affirms the practical necessity on behalf of owners to punish their slaves, but simply asks for them not to do so in a state of rage (Xen. Hell. 5.3.7; cf. Hdt. 1.137). Demonstrating that, violence toward persons in bondage in ancient Athens was perfectly acceptable if it was executed in a manner of equanimity. According to Xenophon, however, slaves should never resist. He goes on to say, that masters could, or should, ‘clap fetters on them so that they can’t run away’ (Xen. Mem. 2.1.16). Hence, so it is argued, in summary, that what helps clarify, or defend, Aristotle’s assertion that ‘the slave [is] an article of property imbued with a soul’ (Arist. Pol. 1253b32), is justified due to the fact that ‘this view of the slave as an article of property’ was a generally held belief of society at large when it came to the status of enslaved persons within the ancient Greek ethos [x].

That said, when it comes to hypocrisy, the law and excessive abuse – domination, as defined by Patterson permeates the historical record.  A poignant example of the common acceptance in ancient Athens of emotional and physical abuse (or the threat thereof) cast upon slaves, and the like, is provided by Lysias, where he describes in detail the testimony of a plaintiff in an Athenian court recounting the brutal (and pervasive) threat of torture (and even death) that hung over the heads of enslaved mill workers - commonly known ‘as mill-roaches’ (Lysias 1. 18-22). In addition, owners of enslaved persons were generally granted legal leeway, under the authority of judges, to sexually abuse their slaves.[xi] Signifying that when a slave was purchased, they were in fact the owners’ possession to do with as they desired - which helps lend even more credence to Patterson’s analyses of domination as described.

A question of further importance is what defined, or signified, a slave and their station in ancient Athens? Was it one of ideology or innate difference that helped delineate the distinction between a Greek and a non-Greek? As understood in the broadest sense of the term, barbarian is the word used to describe not only a non-Greek speaking immigrant, but in fact, a definitional term which explicitly portrayed an enslaved person of foreign origin, as, ‘non-Greeks imported from foreign lands via the slave trade’[xii]. An Athenian essentialist view, as noted, between native slave and foreign slave, (that is, between natural born Greeks and outsiders) is underscored by Aristotle’s description of an enslaved Greek as ‘an accident contrary to nature’ (Arist. Pol. 1255a1). These Greek essentialist views, of one people’s ethnic superiority over another, are noteworthy because they significantly impact western thought and societal conditions throughout the ages – emphasizing race and class as inherent points of difference develop into a clear normative of class hierarchy.

Fast forwarding to the 18th century Anglo-world for example, Francis Hutcheson (elite 18th century British moral philosopher) proclaimed that permanent enslavement should be ‘the ordinary punishment of … idle vagrants.’ ‘Idle vagrants,’ being defined as most anyone with what Hutcheson considered, ‘slave like attributes,’ from the idle poor and indigent to confiscated and subjugated human cargo - principally Africans [xiii]. Conversely, in something of a confessional, Thomas Jefferson (slave owner, philosopher, and 18th century American statesman) recognized and voiced the odious elements of the dominion argument, as defined, some two hundred years prior to Orlando Patterson, ‘[the] commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of … the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’ He then goes on in a revelatory tone, to inform just how these elite classes, throughout the millennia, bequeathed attitudes of dominion from one generation to the next. Stating that, the children of the elite were thus ‘nursed, educated and exercised in the daily art of tyranny.’ Virginia’s slave plantations as he describes, were by their very nature, ‘schools of iniquity and domination’[xiv]. Consequently, Aristotle’s, early, and pervasive, theory of the ‘natural order of things,’ when it comes to class and ethnicity, is made brazenly evident (Arist. Pol. 1252a-1253b).

Finally, how common place was slave society in the ancient Greek world and what was its magnitude? It is said that the importation of slaves was a lasting one, being that Greek slave society lasted enduringly throughout both the archaic and classical periods until its absorption by Rome in 146 BCE. Although the Roman slave trade surpassed that of the Greek numerically, given Rome’s imperial might over the Mediterranean world, it is said that ‘the Greek slave system was both the elder and the longer-lived.’ The Greeks had helped set a historic precedent by perfecting their own imperial prowess through the conquering of their neighbors [xv]. But, where in fact were these subjugated and enslaved persons extracted from and how common were they in ancient Greece? Ancient Greek inscriptions help make evident that enslaved peoples, represented a wide breadth of humanity throughout the known world at the time. These people included men, women, and children in a variety of hues, from such far-off places as Thrace, Phrygia, Syria, Caria in southwest Anatolia, Illyria on the western Balkan Isthmus, Scythians from eastern Iran; and, Colchians from the eastern Black Sea [xvi] - depicted by Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE, as a ‘dark-skinned and woolly haired’ people (Hdt. 2.104.2). What Herodotus’ quote helps to highlight for us is an ancient Athenian social construct. That being, the prevalent belief (when it came to the stature of imported slaves), of a clear and innate delineation based on race (and/or phenotype), accentuating a natural taxonomic classification or difference between indigenous Greeks and all others – especially slaves.

When it comes to how common slaves were, Josiah Ober estimates the slave population of fourth-century BCE Athens to be around 35 per cent of the total population of roughly 227,000 [xvii]. Which made slavery quite pervasive throughout ancient Athens and helps to explain the essentialist Greek/Other dichotomy as such. As Vincent Rosivach makes evident, ‘[When] Athenians thought about slaves, they habitually thought about barbaroi, and when they thought about barbaroi they habitually thought about slaves’[xviii]. Suggesting that this was commonplace in classical Athens - legislatively undergirded by the proposed law of Pericles of 451 BCE which confined citizenship solely to persons of Athenian birthparents on both sides. Ultimately defining in ethnocentric terms, an essentialist difference (between Greeks and others), based on birth lineage and cultural origin (Arist. Const. Ath. 26.3). In paralleling slave societies throughout the epochs, ‘the slave system of the fourth-century Greek world was of roughly the same numerical magnitude as that of the United States ca. 1800.’ By the early 19th century, in the South, ‘30-40 percent of the population’ was made up of chattel slavery under the brutal control of concentrated wealth and political power, land, and resources… [xix]. Both societies (separated by millennia) became indulgently rich and hegemonically powerful in their respective spheres of influence – primarily based on the wealth created by their slave societies thus implemented. As mentioned, due to the commonality of the everyday interaction between slave and non-slave, and its oblique dangers in ancient Athens, elite class interests reinforced ‘the construction of local and wider Hellenic ethnicities, as well as of non-Greek ethnicities, must have been fundamentally imbricated with the ideological needs of the slave trade…’[xx] [xxi]. The main point being that the possibility of a unifying or coming together of freeborn citizens, of lower-class status, and slaves, posed a direct structural (and numerical) threat to the established order of things. Ideology, woven within Greek identity, plays a key role in the hegemonic control of social norms, but not an absolute one.

The understanding by the masses (and a small number of elites alike) that extreme concentrations of wealth played a destabilizing role in the Athenian political and social realms, when it came to privilege, power and class, is made obvious by the following quote from Demosthenes, ‘for the demos to have nothing and for those who oppose the demos to have a superabundance of wealth is an amazing and terrifying (thaumaston kai phoberon) state of affairs’ (Ober, 1990, 214; Dem. Ex. 2.3). Which helps make evident an ancient Athens as not only the well-known paradigm of direct democracy (or rule by the many), but also its intrinsic contradictions (or threats thereof) when it came to status, class, and wealth – which has echoed, as argued, throughout the centuries. As presented, Lewis and Canevaro, bring to the fore, a carefully crafted top-down societal prejudice designed to sow division amongst the masses using class distinctions and/or differences as its exclusionary tool of choice:

Since it was in fact slaves who were more naturally associated with manual labor—they were the prototypical manual laborers— elitist writers and reformers found in this proximity a productive avenue for attacking their suitability for political participation—for having a voice. For elite Greeks and Romans this was a productive strategy for denigrating and dehumanizing ‘the poor’ in political as well as daily life [xxii].

Paradoxically, these notions of disdain toward the poor (or the slavish), defined (mostly) by the ancient Greek elite as, ‘anyone who had to work for living’ (Arist. Pol. 1277b5-7; 1255b23-38), were not limited to the Athenian upper classes. In fact, as Lucia Cecchet suggests, due to the sheer force of elite ideological thought and its pervasive influence (in the 4th and 5th centuries), even within the jury courts of democratic Athens, the repulsion of poverty (including slaves) became commonly offered as a widely conventional view, ‘a communis opinio that the rich and poor shared alike’ [xxiii]; attitudes that permeate western societies to this day, making evident, the powerful effects of elite capture through hegemonic cultural influence in ancient Athens and beyond.

In conclusion, throughout western history, ancient Athens has been viewed as the ultimate model of democracy in a political, ideological, philosophical, and ethical sense – as presented in this work. At the same time, hypocrisy, pertaining to these epitomes of democracy (demokratia – or rule by the many – as outlined by Pericles), adversely permeated its upper classes and beyond with lasting ramifications. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon, for example, were all critical of democracy, focusing their ire upon the populous; the possibility of its bad decision making; and (what they believed to be), as ‘the [intrinsic] ignorance … of the demos, demagoguery and civil strife’ [xxiv]. Again, these great theorists thought of democracy not as the rule of the many (which was the general Athenian ideal of demokratia), but they portrayed it in a more threatening or hostile sense, such as, ‘the rule of the poor or the mob,’ which helps taint Athenian demokratia within recorded history with a prejudicial top-down class perspective throughout the millennia [xxv]. The proximity between, slave and poor within the democratic confines of ancient Athens, made them susceptible, in both high-level institutional deliberation and, sometimes, in daily collaborations, to manipulative stratagems which ‘aimed to denigrate and even disenfranchise them by stressing the “slavish” nature of their occupations, as incompatible with the virtue required for political participation’ [xxvi]. Furthermore, enslavement, as implemented in ancient Athens and across time, populations and locations could differ enormously or, in fact, possess significant similarities. As is inferred, by ancient Greek scholars throughout this work, the characteristics which helped mold Greek slave culture and its expansion comprised, but were in no way limited to, the amount of prosperity slavery added to the fundamental aspects of that society’s supposed wellbeing, especially its economic growth and military strength. In most instances, throughout the ancient world and beyond, the capturing and subjugation of persons classified as salves was meant to possess, chastise, and/or diminish an economic rival. Thus, as noted, chattel slavery was quite widespread throughout the ancient world and beyond. That said, the agency and humanity, as offered by Orlando Patterson, of subjugated persons, and their relentless struggle for freedom, permeates the historical record (from Athens to Virginia) - which cannot and should not be ignored. Enslaved human beings left behind a powerful legacy of opposition and struggle to free themselves and the family members they so loved. Through the common bond (of unrelenting misery) they forged powerful alliances of resistance and revolt, despite the cultural forces arrayed against them – their historical age or geographical setting.

Stephen Joseph Scott is an essayist associated with The University of Edinburgh, School of History; a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist – a self-taught musician, and performer. As a musician, he uses American Roots Music to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.

Notes

[i] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982), 13.

[ii] Patterson, 20–21.

[iii] David M. Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, First edition. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 34.

[iv] Lewis, 39.

[v] Kostas Vlassopoulos, “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 195.

[vi] Edward E. Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1992), 61–109.

[vii] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 43.

[viii] Mirko Canevaro, “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

[ix] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 42–43.

[x] Lewis, 54.

[xi] Lewis, 42.

[xii] David M. Lewis and Mirko Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” in A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), ed. Claire Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2022), 14.

[xiii] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995), 324.

[xiv] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022), 249.

[xv] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 7.

[xvi] Lewis and Canevaro, 4.

[xvii] Josiah Ober, “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models,” in Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, ed. George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 129–129.

[xviii] Vincent J. Rosivach, “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129.

[xix] Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 242.

[xx] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 15.

[xxi] Thomas Harrison, “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade,” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

[xxii] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

[xxiii] Lucia Cecchet, “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013, 61, https.

[xxiv] Ober quoted in Mirko Canevaro, “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy,” Annals HSS 73, 2019, 3.

[xxv] Mogens Herman Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93 (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 8.

[xxvi] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

Bibliography 

Canevaro, Mirko. “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy.” Annals HSS 73, 2019.

———. “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

Cecchet, Lucia. “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013.

Cohen, Edward E. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy. Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005.

Harrison, Thomas. “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade.” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition. Notes on the State of Virginia. Yale University Press, 2022.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Lewis, David M. Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC. First edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Lewis, David M., and Mirko Canevaro. “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity.” In A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), edited by Claire Taylor. Bloomsbury, 2022.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1995.

Ober, Josiah. “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models.” In Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, edited by George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis, 125–46. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017.

———. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People. Second print., with Corrections. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Rosivach, Vincent J. “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129–57.

Vlassopoulos, Kostas. “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 115–30.

Engels and the Second Foundation of Marxism

By John Bellamy Foster

Republished from Monthly Review.

On the opening page of The Return of Nature, I referred to the “second foundation” of socialist thought as follows:

For socialist theory as for liberal analysis—and for Western science and culture in general—the notion of the conquest of nature and of human exemption from natural laws has for centuries been a major trope, reflecting the systematic alienation of nature. Society and nature were often treated dualistically as two entirely distinct realms, justifying the expropriation of nature, and with it the exploitation of the larger human population. However, various left thinkers, many of them within the natural sciences, constituting a kind of second foundation of critical thought, and others in the arts rebelled against this narrow conception of human progress, and in the process generated a wider dialectic of ecology and a deeper materialism that questioned the environmental as well as social depredations of capitalist society. [1]

The origins and development of this second foundation of critical thought in materialist philosophy and the natural sciences and how this affected the development of socialism and ecology constituted the central story told in The Return of Nature. The initial challenge confronting such an analysis was to explain how historical materialism, in the dominant twentieth-century conception in the West, had come to be understood as strictly confined to the social sciences and humanities, where it was divorced from any genuine materialist dialectic, since cut off from natural science and the natural-physical world as a whole.

Explorations of the dialectics of nature by Frederick Engels along with Marxian contributions to natural science were commonly treated in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition as if they simply did not exist. The natural-physical world was seen within the dominant view of Marxism in the West as outside the domain of historical materialism. The realm of biophysical existence was thus ceded to a natural science that was viewed as inherently positivist in orientation. This was so much the case that, with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, it never occurred to those on the left who wrongly charged that Marxism had contributed little or nothing to the development of ecological analysis, to look beyond the social sciences to socialist contributions in the natural sciences, out of which today’s systems ecology arose. The irony was that not only had socialism engaged with the natural environment, but it had, in fact, from the very beginning played a pivotal role in the development of a critical ecology within science and materialist philosophy.

Part of the problem was that the entire tradition of “dialectical materialism,” associated with Soviet Marxism in particular, was declared by the Western Marxist philosophical tradition to be erected on false foundations. The dialectics of nature, as opposed to the dialectics of society, it was claimed, needed to be rejected since it lacked an identical subject-object and thus absolute reflexivity. But in rejecting the dialectics of nature, Western Marxism was compelled to absent itself from the natural world almost entirely, except insofar as it could be said to impinge on human psychology or human nature or to have an indirect impact via technology. This then encouraged a shift toward a more idealist interpretation of Marxism. [2]

To be sure, the classical Marxism of Karl Marx and Engels in the mid-nineteenth century had its origin in the critique of social science. As Engels wrote, “classical political economy” was “the social science of the bourgeoisie” and, as such, the enemy of socialism. [3] Marx’s critique of classical political economy was aimed at uncovering the “hidden abode” of class-based exploitation and expropriation on which the capitalist mode of production was based. [4] It was this critique, therefore, that constituted the initial foundation of Marxism. But from the first, the materialist conception of history in critical social science was inextricably tied to the materialist conception of nature in natural science. No coherent critique of political economy was possible without exploring the actual biophysical conditions of production associated with what Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.” [5]

Human beings themselves were seen by Marx as corporeal beings, and thus objective beings, with their objects outside of themselves. There was, then, in the end, only a “single science” looked at “from two sides,” those of natural history and human history. [6] It was necessary, therefore, to go beyond philosophy and social science to engage in the critique of bourgeois natural science as well. Indeed, as a theoretical method, the philosophy of praxis could not be confined to the realm of social sciences and humanities, that is, it could not be divorced from natural science, without undermining its overall critique.

The fact that natural science and social science, nature and society, are bound inextricably together in any attempt to confront the current mode of production and its consequences is dramatically demonstrated to us today by the current Anthropocene Epoch of geological history, in which capitalism is generating an “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System, endangering humanity along with innumerable other species. [7] In these circumstances, the role of Marxian ecology in understanding our current environmental predicament is of crucial importance. It is here that the second foundation of Marxian theory within materialist philosophy and natural science proves to be indispensable to the development of a revolutionary praxis.

The Second Foundation

Marx and Engels did not see science, or what they called “scientific socialism,” in terms of the narrow conceptions of science that prevail in our day, but rather in the broader sense of Wissenschaft, which brought together all rational inquiries founded on reason. [8] Reason as science had its highest manifestation in the application of dialectics, which Engels defined in the Dialectics of Nature as “the science of the general laws of all motion,” contending “that its laws must be valid just as much for motion in nature and human history as for the motion of thought.” [9] Indeed, a consistent materialist dialectic was not possible on the basis of social science alone, since human production and human action occurred “in society, in the world and in nature.” [10]

Engagement with natural science became a more urgent necessity for Marx and Engels as their work proceeded. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, in Marx’s words, was “the basis in natural science for our view.” Engels depicted Darwin as the leading “dialectical” thinker within natural history. [11] Revolutions in natural science, such as Justus von Liebig’s soil chemistry, allowed Marx to develop his theory of metabolic rift. The emergence of anthropology as a result of the revolution in ethnological time pulled Marx and Engels into this new realm having to do with prehistory. [12] They incorporated the new revolution in thermodynamics within physics into their political-economic critique.

However, there were also negative developments that compelled the founders of historical materialism beginning in the 1860s to shift their research more in the direction of natural science, and the second foundation of Marxist theory. The defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Germany in particular had encouraged the growth of a mechanistic philosophy of science in a line extending from the later Ludwig Feuerbach to thinkers such as Ludwig Büchner, Carl Vogt, and Jacob Moleschott. At the same time, Friedrich Albert Lange had introduced neo-Kantianism as a dualist philosophical perspective aimed at circumscribing a one-sided mechanical materialism, which was then separated off from an equally one-sided social/ideal realm. Coupled with this was the spread in Germany of irrationalism in the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, who saw materialism and dialectics, principally G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, as the enemy. [13] Eugen Dühring entered into all of this with an eclectic mix of neo-Kantian, pseudoscientific, and positivistic ideas that targeted Marx. Agnosticism in Britain, in the work of figures like Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall, was closely identified with neo-Kantianism. Social Darwinism first arose in this period principally as an attack on historical materialism in the work of the German zoologist Oscar Schmidt. As a result of these various attacks on materialism and dialectics, both Marx and Engels were pulled into the task of articulating a dialectics of nature consistent with a socialist conception of the metabolism of humanity and nature, in what was later variously referred to as dialectical materialism, dialectical naturalism, and “dialectical organicism.” [14]

Engels’s dialectical naturalism was first advanced in a comprehensive form in his influential work, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (better known as Anti-Dühring), completed in 1878. His wider, unfinished work, written in the 1870s and ’80s, Dialectics of Nature, was not published in German and Russian until 1925, and had to await another decade and a half before it was to appear in English translation. Nevertheless, Engels’s central argument, that “Nature is the proof of dialectics,” was clear from the start. Translated into today’s terms, it meant Ecology is the proof of dialectics. [15]

“Dialectics,” in its materialist form, was, in Engels’s words, “a method found of explaining…‘knowing’ by…‘being,’” rather than “‘being’ by…‘knowing.’” It “interprets things and concepts in their interdependence, in their interaction and the consequent changes, in their emergence, development, and demise.” Viewed in this way, “nature,” he wrote, “does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but [goes] through a real evolution.” Thus, “the whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies here we understand all material existences extending from stars to atoms.… It is precisely [their] mutual reaction that creates motion.” [16] Nature as matter and motion (transformed energy) generates, within the course of natural history, new, emergent forms or integrated levels of material existence that arise out of, and yet remain dependent on the physical world as a whole. Human society is, in this sense, an emergent form of the universal metabolism of nature with its own specific laws. [17]

Engels has often been criticized on the left for his three dialectical “laws,” more properly referred to today as general ontological principles, that he presented in his works on the dialectics of nature: (1) the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa; (2) the law of the identity or unity of opposites; and (3) the law of the negation of the negation. However, the first of these ontological principles has been long recognized within science through the concept of phase change, while the second is the main way in which dialectics is commonly approached in philosophy and social science through the concept of contradiction, or “the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation.” [18] Most criticisms thus focus on the third of these laws, the negation of the negation, which is often simply dismissed. [19]

Nevertheless, it is important to understand these three laws or ontological principles in terms of a dialectics of emergence. For Engels, everything is motion, attraction and repulsion, contingency, and development, leading to new forms or levels of organization in nature and human history. The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa refers to material transformation and transcendence at the most general level. Given such tendencies, arising out of the transformation of matter and motion (or energy) in organic and inorganic processes, contradictions or incompatible elements naturally ensue, leading to change as development, evolution, or emergence, the negation of the negation.

We can see the significance of this in Engels’s approach to geology. He treated geology and paleontology as “the history of the development of the organic world as a whole,” which practically came into being as a developed field of scientific research only in the late eighteenth century. The world that geology describes exists even “in the absence of human beings.” [20] Nonetheless, geological history can be approached dialectically, since “the whole of geology is a set of negated negations” resulting in massive transformations on the surface of the planet that can be discerned by means of careful scientific investigation. Engels questioned Georges Cuvier’s crucial emphasis on geological “revolutions” or catastrophes as contaminated by religious dogma, and argued that Charles Lyell, with his gradualism, had introduced a more scientific approach to geology. But Lyell himself had made the error of “conceiving the forces at work on the earth as constant, both in quantity and quality,” so that “the cooling of the earth” associated with ice ages “does not exist for him.” In this view, there are no “negated negations” and no major, permanent changes. [21]

There was, for Engels, no constant, non-contingent, inconsequential process of earth surface formation in line with Lyell’s uniformitarianism. Massive transformations of the earth at certain intervals in its history, as emphasized by Cuvier, were not to be denied. Some of these criticisms (and appreciations) of both Cuvier and Lyell, advanced by Engels, were later developed in the twentieth century by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who used precisely these antinomies to explain the origins of the theory of punctuated equilibrium within the evolutionary process. [22]

Anti-Dühring, because of its sheer range—addressing philosophy, natural science, and social science—became one of the most influential works of its time. It helped spark the development of left materialism in science, which was later given a further boost by the publication of Dialectics of Nature. This facilitated major ecological discoveries, especially in the Soviet Union in the first two decades after the revolution, and in the British Isles, where a tradition emerged drawing on both Darwin and Marx. Among the major figures in Britain were Marx’s friend, and Darwin and Huxley’s protégé, E. Ray Lankester, and later leading red scientists and related cultural figures such as J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy, Christopher Caudwell, V. Gordon Childe, Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson, and Jack Lindsay. [23] Along with Engels’s works on science, the red scientists drew heavily on V. I. Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. [24] Although frequently overlooked in treatments of Marxism, this tradition included the most prominent Marxist thinkers in Britain of the day, all of whom were connected with materialist philosophy and natural science. Their work sunk deep roots in natural science, the influence of which has extended to our own time.

Marxist scientists and materialist philosophers were the target of purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in the anticommunist attacks in Britain and the United States in the 1950s. The suppression of red science, which seemed almost to disappear for a time, had deep ramifications for Marxism as a whole. Since the leading representatives of the Western Marxist philosophical tradition rejected outright materialism apart from economic/class relations—a position closely associated with their rejection of the dialectics of nature—they had almost nothing of substance to contribute to the ecological critique. This led to the myth that socialism as a whole had failed in this area. [25] To be sure, critical theorists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno referred to the “domination of nature,” by which they chiefly meant the role played by instrumental rationality and technology in contemporary capitalist society, as well as the repressive effects of this on human nature. However, the material-ecological world itself was characteristically absent from their analysis. Hence, the dialectical connections associated with human social production and its metabolism with the larger environment were also absent. [26]

What has become clear with the growth of Marxian ecology since the 1980s is the close connection between the critique of economic alienation and ecological alienation under capitalism. Recognition that these constitute the two sides of the historical-materialist critique has become increasingly pronounced in the context of the planetary ecological crisis. All of this calls for the reunification of Marxian theory, symbolized by the return of Engels, and an attempt to grapple with the universal metabolism of nature. There is an urgent necessity to transcend the current alienated form of the capitalist social metabolism with its destructive mediation of the human relation to nature through generalized commodity production.

Engels and the Roots of the Anthropocene

In the twenty-first century we live in an age of planetary ecological peril, represented by the anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. This is associated with the advent, around 1950, of the Anthropocene Epoch in the geological time scale, which succeeded the Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years. Capitalism is presently in the process of crossing planetary boundaries that have defined the earth as a safe place for humanity. If all geological history, as Engels said, is the history of “negated negations,” today the Holocene—the geological epoch in which human civilization arose and prospered—is being negated by the system of capital accumulation, leading to the Anthropocene crisis of today.

If we were to look back to the earliest overarching recognition of the ecological predicament imposed by capitalist society, we could not do better than to turn to Engels’s famous treatment of this in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” in the Dialectics of Nature. Here, Engels declared that human beings, as social beings, do not “rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” Thus, for each presumed “victory” of humanity over the natural world of which we are a part, “nature takes its revenge on us,” leading to widespread natural/ecological devastations—not simply in the ancient and medieval worlds, but increasingly, and on a far larger scale, in the world wrought by capitalism and colonialism. [27]

Failure to understand what Engels called “our oneness with nature” and the need to conform to its laws is itself a product of our historical class relations. Here the capitalist domination of nature becomes a means of dominating human beings. The result is that history moves in a spiral, exhibiting both progress and retrogression. [28] Accumulation of capital is accompanied by the accumulation of catastrophe. Moreover, under such an anarchic system—as opposed to a socialist and planned society controlled by the associated producers—a fully rational pursuit of science becomes impossible, and substantive irrationalism prevails even in the midst of the advance of formal technological rationality. Pointing to soil degradation, deforestation, floods, desertification, species extinction, epidemics, and the squandering of natural resources, Marx and Engels indicated that the current mode of production was generating widening Earth catastrophes associated with the uncontrolled “interference with the traditional course of nature.” [29] Engels’s global analysis of nature’s “revenge” was thus at one with Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.

“The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” was first published in 1896 in the German Social Democratic journal Die Neue Zeit shortly after Engels’s death. Although it is difficult to chart its influence outside of Marxism, it is remarkable how close Engels’s analysis was to the ideas put forward not long after by Lankester in 1905 in his Romanes Lecture at Oxford, “Nature and Man” (later retitled “Nature’s Insurgent Son”), and his related 1904 article “Nature’s Revenges: The Sleeping Sickness,” both of which were reprinted in his 1911 The Kingdom of Man. [30] We do not know if Lankester read Engels’s article, though he was fluent in German, communicated with social democratic circles, and would have been deeply interested in Engels’s analysis in this respect, which overlapped in many ways with his own. [31] As a close friend of Marx and an acquaintance of Engels, a strong materialist, and a critic of capitalism (who had read Marx’s Capital), as well as the leading figure in British zoology at the time, Lankester’s radical ecological critique was necessarily related to historical materialism. In referring to the Kingdom of Man, Lankester sought to describe a new period in Earth history in which human beings were now the main force affecting the natural world, with the result that they increasingly must take responsibility for it. He presciently highlighted the ecological consequences of a capitalist economic system engaged in the unheeding destruction of nature, ultimately undermining humanity itself.

In “Nature’s Revenges,” Lankester referred to the human-social being as “the disturber of Nature,” including being the instigator through global capitalism and finance of all epidemics in animals and humans, which could be traced largely to social, and primarily commercial, causes, including the “mixing up of incompatibles from all parts of the globe.” [32] Under these circumstances, humanity had no choice but to control its production and its relation to nature, relying on science and superseding the narrow dictates of capital accumulation, thus ushering in a coevolutionary development. Human society was on a permanent ecological knife-edge in its relation to the natural world, which Lankester described somewhat ironically as the “Kingdom of Man.” Such “effacement of nature by man” not only undermined living species, but also threatened civilization and human existence itself. [33] The only answer was for social humanity to take responsibility for its relations to the natural world, in conformity with natural laws and principles of sustainability, in opposition to the capitalist mode.

Today, resistance to the notion of the Anthropocene Epoch is evident in many of those on the left, who, while largely oblivious of the scientific discussion, are horrified by the implications of a dominant Anthropos. This seems, in their minds, to point to an exaggerated humanism or anthropocentrism in the understanding of the physical world, and to a downplaying of the social causes of the geological climacteric that we are now witnessing. Yet, from a geological and Earth System perspective, the issues are clear. By crossing certain critical thresholds or planetary boundaries, the global system of capital accumulation has generated quantitative changes that represent a qualitative transformation in the Earth System, shifting it from the Holocene Epoch in the Geologic Time Scale to the Anthropocene Epoch, where anthropogenic rather than nonanthropogenic factors are for the first time the major drivers of Earth System change, and in which human civilization and human existence are currently imperiled. [34]

From a historical and dialectical perspective, the planetary ecological contradictions that we are now witnessing have been long coming. The issue of a new “Kingdom of Man,” which was also at the same time subject to the revenge of nature or nature’s revenges, can be traced back to Engels and Lankester. Such views were related to the conception of nature as a dialectical totality mediated by processes of evolutionary change, in which humanity was increasingly playing a dominant role. It was in the Soviet Union during the 1920s that the notion of what was called the Anthropogene Period in geological history, connected to the disruption of the biosphere as defined by V. I. Vernadsky, was introduced by the geologist Aleksei Pavlov. The word Anthropocene itself, as an alternative to Anthropogene, first appeared in English in the early 1970s in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. [35] It was by uniting the awareness of ecological destruction with the concept of ecosystem, the theory of the origins of life, and the analysis of the biosphere—all products of dialectical science—that Rachel Carson was able to warn the world population of the full scale of the planetary peril confronting them in her lecture introducing the concept of ecology to the general public. Moreover, it was socialist scientists who pointed to a decisive change in the human relation to the entire Earth System, or “ecosphere,” beginning around 1945. [36]

More recently, we can point to the breakthrough in the treatment of the Anthropocene Epoch in Earth history represented by the geologist Carles Soriano. The conception of the Anthropocene Epoch in the Geologic Time Scale derives from the recognition that for the first time in the more than four billion years of Earth history, a living species, Homo sapiens, is the primary driver of Earth System change. This revelation of the human role in geological change was thus the product both of the emergence of Earth System science and the growing perception of an “anthropogenic rift,” undermining the earth as a safe home for humanity. It has its theoretical roots in the concept of metabolism, which formed the basis for both the notion of ecosystem (first introduced by Lankester’s student, the British ecologist Arthur Tansley, a Fabian-style socialist) and the later concept of the Earth System metabolism. [37]

Once human society has emerged as the primary force in Earth System change due to the scale of production, inaugurating the Anthropocene Epoch, this becomes unalterable—barring the collapse of industrial civilization in an Anthropocene extinction event. Like it or not, industrial humanity is now permanently responsible, on pain of its own extinction, for limiting and controlling its effects on the Earth System. Nevertheless, if capitalism by the mid-twentieth century has ushered in a planetary ecological rift, the possibility still remains of the transformation of the human metabolism with nature in conformity with natural laws in a society devoted to substantive equality and ecological sustainability.

Rooting his analysis in materialist dialectics, Soriano proposed in Geologica Acta in 2020 that the first geological age of the Anthropocene, following the current geological age of the Meghalayan (the last age of the Holocene Epoch), be designated as the Capitalian, in recognition of the destructive relation that capitalism is now playing with respect to the entire Earth System, creating a habitability crisis for humanity. [38] The Capitalian Age stands for the fact that behind the current Anthropocene crisis lies the capitalist mode of production. Environmental sociologists independently issued a similar proposal shortly after, suggesting that the new geological age associated with the advent of the Anthropocene Epoch should be called the Capitalinian, and that the future geological age toward which humanity must now necessarily strive—introducing a new climacteric surmounting the planetary emergency—should be named the Communian, after community, communal, and commons. [39] If all of geological history, according to Engels, is one of “negating negations,” leading to the Earth System crisis of today, we are now presented with the choice between the negation of the material conditions of human society itself to which capitalism is leading us, or else the negation of the capitalist mode of production (and thus of the present Capitalian/Capitalinian Age). What is essential in these circumstances is the creation of a new, socially mediated geological age of the Communian (the negation of the negation), embodying a restored, developed, and sustainable metabolism of humanity and the earth.

Dialectics, Engels argued, encompassed interaction, contradiction, and emergence, and was a general expression of the evolving totality of material things and of motion (matter and energy), applicable to all of existence. From this standpoint, it was possible to understand more fully the material world around us, providing the basis of a grounded scientific socialism. In the past, Marxist scholarship with respect to Engels’s forays into dialectics of nature has focused simply on the question of the rejection or acceptance of his general views, leaving out the more positive challenge of exploring their significance for the philosophy of praxis. Today, we need to go beyond this stale debate to recognize, in line with the neglected second foundation of Marxism within science and materialist philosophy, that the dialectics of nature offers new insights and methods for the understanding of our time, precisely because its approach is a unified one, bridging the great gulf that has emerged in the ecology of praxis.

As Soriano explains, “most natural sciences” today—if “spontaneously” and without full awareness—take “a dialectic and materialist epistemic view in understanding the natural side of the Earth System and of the Anthropocene crisis. From the social side of the problem, however, the epistemic view adopted by most natural scientists turns into an positivist and idealist one,” deferring to mainstream liberal social science and philosophy. [40] Meanwhile, the so-called Western Marxist tradition, while holding on to the notion of dialectics, has applied this only in ways related to the identical subject-object of the human historical realm. The tendency here has been to portray natural science as primarily positivistic, while seeing no relation between nature and dialectics. In this way, the two realms of dialectical thought in the natural sciences and the social sciences have remained separate, making a unified praxis based on reason as science impossible. This can only be overcome by reunifying Marxism’s first foundation in the critique of bourgeois political economy with its second foundation in the critique of mechanistic science.

Writing in the tradition of Engels, Soriano states: “Nature is dialectical too, and the dialectics of Nature is not merely a theoretical construct but a construct that is only possible because Nature is inherently so. Otherwise, how is it possible to ‘construct’ dialectics if it is not yet in the studied object, which is the ultimate source of any empirical perception?” [41] Today, the dialectics of nature must be reunited with the dialectics of society, the critique of political economy with the ecological critique of capitalism. This requires that the second foundation of Marxism be accorded a central place in the philosophy of praxis. The human relation to the earth lies in the balance.

Postscript: Did Engels Break with Marx on Metabolism?

Kohei Saito’s important work Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of Degrowth Communism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, has raised the critical question of whether Engels departed fundamentally from Marx’s analysis of social metabolism. [42] Saito charges that Engels, in editing the third volume of Capital, from the original draft in Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, removed the adjective “natural” and thus in effect the term “natural metabolism” from Marx’s passage on the “irreparable rift.” [43] This is then backed up by a criticism of Engels for allegedly “rejecting Liebig’s concept of metabolism.” On these bases, Saito argues that Engels was largely responsible for the suppression of Marx’s social metabolism/metabolic rift argument, helping “to make Marx’s ecology invisible,” with disastrous effects for later Marxist theory. The reason given for Engels’s alleged transgression in this respect is that his notion of the dialectics of nature represented an approach to nature/natural science that was in direct conflict with Marx’s social-metabolic analysis. “It was precisely due to this difference” between Marx’s and Engels’s approaches to dialectics and ecology, we are told, “that the concept of metabolism and its ecological implication were marginalized throughout the 20th century.” [44]

It is true that the term “natural metabolism” was missing from the passage on the “irreparable rift” in Engels’s edition of volume 3 of Capital. (This same term is also absent in Ben Fowkes’s recent English-language translation of Marx’s original manuscript for volume 3 in the Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865.) Hence, instead of capitalism leading to “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself,” as conveyed in Engels’s edition of third volume of Capital, the same passage should read, in Saito’s rendering: “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process between social metabolism and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.” (An even more literal translation would be “an irreparable rift in the context of the social and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.”) Engels, in editing the third volume of Capital, thus removed the term “natural metabolism,” though “natural” still remains in the rest of the sentence. In Saito’s view, this omission reflected a “profound methodological difference” between Marx and Engels on the concept of metabolism. [45]

Yet, examined closely, it is debatable that the removal of “natural metabolism,” substantially changed the meaning of Marx’s original passage—certainly not enough to raise a significant issue in that regard. Although Marx referred in his original incomplete draft to the “social and natural metabolism,” definitely including the term “natural metabolism,” there was a certain redundancy here. The notion of natural metabolism is basic to Marx’s entire materialist approach and is already assumed in the very concept of “social metabolism” itself, which mediates the relation of humanity with what Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.” [46] The social metabolism for Marx is nothing but the specifically human relation (via the labor and production process) to the universal metabolism of nature. Moreover, even without the words “natural metabolism,” the passage indicates that the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” violates “the natural laws of life [soil],” which itself refers to a break with the universal metabolism of nature. The omission of the word “natural,” and thus the term “natural metabolism,” does nothing to alter the fundamental point being made. Saito declares that what is lost in Engels’s version is Marx’s second-order mediation, or alienated mediation. [47] But that too is problematic, since the very context of the passage, as it appears in the third volume of Capital, is a rift in the social metabolism, that is, a disruption of the social-metabolic mediation of humanity and nature as a result of alienated capitalist production.

Saito supplements his philological argument on the missing term in Engels’s editing of Marx’s “irreparable rift” passage, with the additional charge that Engels developed a “critique of Liebig’s theory of metabolism.” [48] However, evidence of this “critique” is nowhere to be found in Engels’s writings. In fact, Saito himself is unable to offer a single sentence indicating such a critique of Liebig on metabolism issued from Engels’s pen. Instead, he resorts to highlighting Engels’s quite different criticisms in Dialectics of Nature of Liebig’s vitalism, including his rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution and his hypothesis that life had existed eternally. Saito illogically infers from Engels’s criticisms of Liebig in this regard that since Engels objected to Liebig’s vitalistic and anti-evolutionary notions in biology, he must also therefore have objected to Liebig’s use of the metabolism concept in his chemistry. However, Liebig was a “dilettante” in biology and at the same time a leading scientist in chemistry, a distinction that Engels stressed. What makes Saito’s criticism here even more problematic is that Engels repeatedly utilized Liebig’s analysis of the rift in the soil metabolism, in his own writings—even if he did not choose, as Marx did, to use the word Stoffwechsel (metabolism) in this context. [49]

But the deeper theoretical problem confronting Saito, in his attempt to find evidence of Engels’s supposed “rejection” of Liebig’s concept of metabolism, is that Liebig, in utilizing the notion of metabolism was referring to the natural-science concept of metabolism. Liebig did not, as in the case of Marx, develop the category of social metabolism. Saying that Engels rejected Liebig’s concept in this regard then amounts to charging that he rejected the notion of natural metabolism, of which Engels, however, was a major nineteenth-century proponent. The concept of metabolism originated in German cell biology early in the nineteenth century and was applied broadly in Liebig’s mid-century writings in agricultural chemistry. [50] Metabolism in this sense was a concept that Engels employed many times, including in his famous analysis of metabolism (and proteins) as the key to the origins of life. [51] Indeed, the notion of Stoffwechsel was central to the development of the first law of thermodynamics in Julius Robert Mayer’s “The Motions of Organisms and their Relation to Metabolism” (1845), which strongly influenced Engels (as well as Liebig and Marx). [52]

All of this throws into further disarray the contention that Engels, supposedly encumbered by his dialectics of nature perspective, failed to appreciate the significance of Marx’s inclusion of “natural metabolism” in the “irreparable rift” passage. It was due to this failing, Saito tells us, that Engels “intentionally” deleted the term natural metabolism, effectively “marginalizing” and making “invisible” Marx’s core ecological critique, which was thereby “suppressed.” [53] Yet, here Saito is confronted with the inconvenient fact that Engels, who was certainly one of the most erudite figures of his day, wrote again and again on the subject of nature’s metabolism, a concept for which he demonstrated a very deep appreciation. [54] Moreover, Engels’s edition of the third volume of Capital, far from suppressing the conception of “natural metabolism,” includes it in other places where Marx employed it in his original text. [55]

Behind Saito’s entire argument here is an attempt to reinforce the notion within Western Marxist philosophical tradition that Engels’s dialectics of nature, with its wider materialism, was antithetical to Marx’s own historical materialism. Thus, rather than looking at how Marx and Engels’s ecological analyses are complementary and reinforce each other, we are presented with the notion of a theoretical break between the two that is rooted in Engels’s dialectics of nature, which supposedly led Engels to distance himself from Marx’s ecology. Yet, in the course of his argument, Saito is unable to find any satisfactory way of demonstrating that the dialectics of nature as developed by Engels is actually at odds with Marx’s ecology. Hence, he merely contends that Engels’s approach to Earth history was “transhistorical” in that it transcended human history in the manner of positivistic natural science when addressing nonhuman nature. [56] Yet, one wonders what kind of natural science there would be if it were to restrict its analysis simply to human history, that is, if it were not transhistorical in the sense of superseding the human world. Clearly, our social being influences our understanding of nature, something that Engels emphasized as well as Marx. But science is necessarily concerned with domains beyond the human. [57] Surely, an analysis of Earth history extending beyond human history did not contradict Marx’s own thinking, since he exhibited a deep fascination with paleontological developments within geological time prior to human existence. [58]

Engels is also criticized by Saito for developing a more “apocalyptic” theory of ecological crisis than Marx through his use of the metaphor of the “revenge” of nature and the notion that human beings are capable of undermining the conditions of their existence on a planetary scale. [59] Engels even contemplates human extinction in the distant future. Saito attributes such views to Engels’s “apocalyptic” conception of the dialectics of nature as opposed to Marx’s nonapocalyptic ecological conceptions in his theory of metabolic rift. But surely Engels, from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, is to be commended for conceiving of the reality of human-generated ecological crisis throughout the globe! Nor does this in any way contradict Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, the contemporary relevance of which has mainly to do with the Earth System crisis. [60]

The full extent of Saito’s adherence to the notion of a break between Marx and Engels on the dialectics of nature, depicting a deep ecological split between the two thinkers, can be seen in his direct support for Terrell Carver’s position that Engels most likely lied in his 1885 preface to Anti-Dühring when he indicated that he had read the various parts of that work to Marx prior to their publication in serial form. In Saito’s own words, Engels’s statement here was “not necessarily credible.” [61] Hence, Engels, it is insinuated, might very well have lied about his interactions with Marx in this respect. The fact that there is absolutely no basis for believing that Engels would have lied on such an important point, which does not at all fit with his character or his lifelong loyalty to Marx, does not seem to deter those sowing such doubts. Indeed, the nature of this argument is that Engels must have lied, because otherwise, Marx (who had contributed a chapter to Anti-Dühring) could be assumed to have been entirely familiar with that work prior to its publication and presumably agreed with its contents. This would then undermine the notion of a fundamental break between Marx and Engels. [62]

Saito’s attempt to establish a methodological break between Marx and Engels with respect to the concept of metabolism adopts a similar form for essentially the same reasons. Engels must be responsible for intentionally suppressing the term “natural metabolism” (and with it, the significance of the metabolic rift) in editing the third volume of Capital, since otherwise notions of the complementarity of Marx and Engels writings on ecology might carry the day, contradicting Saito’s contention that “Marx never really adopted the project of materialist dialectics that Engels was pursuing.” [63]

Yet, the fact that Saito’s whole supposed proof of a methodological break between Marx and Engels depends on the absence of a single term, the word “natural” preceding “metabolism,” in a single passage, constituting a small change of highly debatable significance, points to the total absence of any substantive evidence of such a break. To rend asunder Marx and Engels on metabolism and ecology on such a basis is unwarrantable. The truth is, while Engels did not directly employ Marx’s notion of “social metabolism,” except in his 1868 Synopsis of Capital, nor develop Marx’s analysis in this regard, there is no indication that his outlook contradicted that of Marx in this area. [64]

If Marx’s theory of metabolic rift was not better known among Marxists prior to this century, this had nothing to do with Engels’s alleged suppression of Marx’s ideas, a claim for which there is no concrete basis. Rather, it had to do with the reality that the metabolism concept was embedded in the deep structure of Marx’s work and thus was often overlooked, while a great deal of what he wrote on this was incomplete, and developed only in his later years. More importantly, much of Marx’s science, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, was well ahead of the socialist movement itself and would only be taken up as new problems presented themselves. [65] It was the development of ecosocialism a century after Marx’s death that led to the rediscovery and reconstruction of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, rather than the reverse. This unearthing of Marx’s ecological argument was partially enabled by the substantial (if somewhat indirect) influence that it had exerted, along with the work of Engels, on subsequent socialist ecological analyses within natural science and materialist philosophy. [66]

Rather than perpetuating old divisions within the left, it is necessary today to bring Marx’s social-metabolism argument together with Engels’s dialectics of nature, seeing these analyses as integrally related. The object should be to unite the first and second foundations of Marxist thought, providing a broader material basis for the critique of the capitalist mode of production as the essential ground for a revolutionary ecosocialist praxis in the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 7, emphasis added. Reference to the “second foundation of Marxist ecological thought” was first introduced twenty years earlier in Marx’s Ecology. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 250.

2. Western Marxism took its point of departure in this respect from the short footnote in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, where he indicated dissatisfaction with Engels’s account of the dialectics of nature. Yet, as Lukács indicated on multiple occasions afterward, and as attested by the text of History and Class Consciousness itself, he did not actually reject the “merely objective dialectics of nature.” The distortions of his thought in this respect nonetheless remain dominant. In the translation of his famous Tailism manuscript, this went so far as to translate incorrectly what appears as “Dialectics in Nature” in the original German in one of the chapter headings as “Dialectics of” See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1971), 24, 207; Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2000), 94, 102–7; Kaan Kangal, “Engels’ Intentions in Dialectics of Nature,” Science and Society 83, no. 2 (2019): 218; Foster, The Return of Nature, 16–21.

3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 463–64.

4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 279.

5. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66.

6. Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1974), 389–90; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 28.

7. Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 67.

8. Joseph Fracchia, Bodies and Artefacts, vol. 1 (Boston: Brill, 2022), 3.

9. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 545.

10. Karl Marx, Early Writings, 398.

11. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, 301; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 633; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 41, 232, 246; Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 197, 291; Foster, The Return of Nature, 251–58.

12. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 212–21.

13. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 340; Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 403–8.

14. On “dialectical organicism” see Joseph Needham, Moulds of Understanding (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976), 278.

15. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, 301; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 23–27, 633; John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature, 254.

16. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 26–27, 363, 593, 633.

17. On dialectics and integrated levels, see Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (London: George Allan and Unwin, 1943), 233–72; Jean-Pierre Vigier, “Dialectics and Natural Science,” in Existentialism Versus Marxism, ed. George Novack (New York: Dell, 1966), 243–57.

18. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 11; John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 304–8; Craig Dilworth, “Principles, Laws, Theories, and the Metaphysics of Science,” Synthese 101, no. 2 (1994): 223–47; Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), 268.

19. A characteristic of much Marxist dialectical thought has been to downplay the negation of negation, or development, evolution, and emergence. This can be seen in Ollman’s influential work where “dialectical research” is confined to “four kinds of relations: identity/difference, interpenetration of opposites, quantity/quality, and contradiction.” Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, 15. On Marx and “scientific socialism,” see Foster, The Return of Nature, 253. This was even more the case in Soviet Marxism. As Frederick Copleston notes: “In Stalin’s time, of course, the law of the negation of the negation was passed over in silence.” Frederick C. Copleston, Philosophy in Russia (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 327.

20. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 82, 326.

21. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 126, 324–25.

22. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 479–92; Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 112–15, 133–34; Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 97–105; Richard York and Brett Clark, The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 21, 28, 40–42.

23. See Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985); Foster, The Return of Nature, 358–530.

24. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 14 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977).

25. Sebastiano Timpanaro issued a strong criticism of Western Marxism for abandoning materialism, but since he also rejected the dialectics of nature, his analysis—despite its brilliance—was unable to overcome the limitations he imposed upon it. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: Verso, 1975).

26. The inability of critical theory, due to its shallow materialism and its denial of the dialectics of nature, to provide any meaningful ecological analysis is evident in a recent work seeking to promote classical critical theory’s contributions to ecology, chiefly that of Adorno, while at the same time acknowledging that “the classical Frankfurt School critical theorists hardly engaged with natural science,” or ecology. Carl Cassegård, Toward a Critical Theory of Nature (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 118.

27. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 460–62. Engels attributed ecological disasters to shortsighted, “unforeseen,” and “remote natural consequences,” and to the necessary byproducts of a system of production devoted only to immediate gain. In the chapter on “The Revenge of the External” in his Barbaric Heart, Curtis White explains that such “unintended consequences” are treated in capitalist economics as externalities, and it is these externalities, vis-á-vis natural processes, which are coming back to haunt capitalism. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461–62; Curtis White, The Barbaric Heart (London: Routledge, 2009), 89–107.

28. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 313, emphasis added.

29. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.

30. Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911).

31. Lankester’s conception of human evolution in its emphasis on the hand was much closer to that of Engels in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” than to either Darwin or Ernst Haeckel. See E. Ray Lankester, Diversions of a Naturalist (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1915), 243–44.

32. Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, 1–4, 26, 31–33, 184–89.

33. Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1913), 365–79.

34. Carles Soriano, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other ‘-Cenes,’” Monthly Review 74, no. 6 (November 2022): 1–28.

35. I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998); E. V. Shantser, “The Anthropogenic System (Period),” in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1973): 139–44; V. I. Vernadsky, “Some Words About the Noösphere,” in 150 Years of Vernadsky, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: 21st Century Science Associates, 2014), 82. The Anthropogene was initially introduced in the Soviet Union to describe the geological period now known as the Quaternary.

36. Rachel Carson, Lost Woods (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 227–45; Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Bantam, 1971), 60–61, 117, 138–45; Foster, The Return of Nature, 502–13; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique,” Monthly Review 59, no. 9 (February 2008): 1–17.

37. A. O. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 18, no. 3 (July 1935): 284–307. In developing the notion of ecosystem, Tansley relied heavily on the systems theory of the Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy. See Hyman Levy, The Universe of Science (London: Watts and Co., 1932).

38. Carles Soriano, “On the Anthropocene Formalization and the Report of the Anthropocene Working Group,” Geologica Acta 18, no. 6 (2020): 1–10.

39. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 73, no. 4 (September 2021): 1–16.

40. Carles Soriano, “Epistemological Limitations of Earth System Science to Confront the Anthropocene Crisis,” Anthropocene Review 9, no. 1 (2020): 112, 122, Soriano, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other ‘-Cenes,’” 14.

41. Soriano, “Epistemological Limitations of Earth System Science,” 121.

42. Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 53–55.

43. In Marx’s original German, as well as in Engels’s edition of the third volume of Capital, what is presented in the English translation as single sentence is in fact only a section of a much longer sentence, taking up an entire paragraph. Hence, rather than referring to a “sentence” in the discussion here, the term “passage” is used, particularly as the main issue in dispute concerns only a part of a sentence, even in the English-language edition.

44. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45, 67–68.

45. Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), II/4.2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 753; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 25 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964), 822; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 53–55, 70; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949; Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (Boston: Brill, 2016), 797–98. Saito also makes the point that Engels’s edition of volume 3 of Capital incorrectly uses the word “life” at the end of the disputed sentence, rather than “soil.” However, both terms essentially convey the same broad meaning in this particular context, while “soil” also appears in the sentence that follows in Engels’s edition of volume 3, as well as in Marx’s original manuscript. Saito himself said that this discrepancy was probably due to Marx’s poor handwriting, in which the words Boden and Leben look almost identical. Yet, although acknowledging in his footnote that this could very well have been a result of Marx’s poor handwriting, he nonetheless criticizes Engels in his text for substituting the term “life,” claiming that Engels made this change to bring Marx’s sentence more in line with Engels’s own notion of the “revenge” of nature. Given the penmanship problem and the very problematic nature of Saito’s claims about the theoretical significance of the replacement of “soil” by “life,” this whole issue can be set aside in the present discussion. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56, 70.
    In correspondence and discussions with me, Joe Fracchia has translated the critical passage in the original German in his Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (as published in MEGA) slightly differently from Saito as: “provoking an irreparable rift in the context of the social and natural metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of the soil.” It is Fracchia’s translation that is the more literal one mentioned in the text. I owe much of my understanding of these philological problems to Fracchia, who helped me in exploring the differences and nuances in a close comparison of Marx’s original German text with his Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, Engels’s edited German text of volume 3 of Capital, and the various English-language translations.

46. Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 41–61; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66.

47. Marx in the Anthropocene, 53. On István Mészáros’s concept of “second order mediation,” see John Bellamy Foster, “Foreword” in István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 16. On Marx’s concept of alienated mediation see Marx, Early Writings, 261.

48. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45.

49. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56–57; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 574–76; Justus von Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry, in Its Relations to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy, fourth edition (London: Walton and Maberly, 1859), 283–86; John Farley, “The Spontaneous Generation Controversy (1859–1880),” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 2 (1972): 317; Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), 92–93.

50. Franklin C. Bing, “The History of the Word Metabolism,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 26, no. 2 (April 1971): 158–80.

51. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 578; J. D. Bernal, The Freedom of Necessity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 363–64; Foster, The Return of Nature, 414; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 56–57.

52. Julius Robert Mayer, “The Motions of Organisms and Their Relation to Metabolism,” in Julius Robert Mayer: Prophet of Energy, ed. Robert B. Lindsey (New York: Pergamon, 1973), 75–145; Kenneth Caneva, Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 117; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 688.

53. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 45, 53.

54. Foster, The Return of Nature, 414.

55. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 195, 949, 954.

56. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 59, 67.

57. Saito points to Lukács’s criticism in History and Class Conscious of the validity of scientific experiment as a basis for a dialectical knowledge of the universal metabolism of nature and says that this constitutes the grounds for Lukács’s rejection of Engels’s dialectics of nature. Saito fails to note, however, that Lukács later reversed himself on this point in his 1967 preface to his book. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xix; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 85.

58. Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels Gesamtasugabe (MEGA) IV/26 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 214–19; Joseph Beete Jukes, Student’s Manual of Geology (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1872), 476–512; Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 51, 270; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 143; Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 65–67.

59. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 55, 59.

60. On this see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).

61. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 51; Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), 123–25; Foster, The Return of Nature, 584. In addition to indicating that he had read the entire manuscript to Marx, Engels said that “it was self-understood between us that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 9.

62. Oddly, Saito refers elsewhere in his argument to evidence provided by the present author and others pointing to the extent of Marx’s involvement in and appreciation of Engels’s Anti-Dühring. See Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 48, 241, 253.

63. Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, 67.

64. Frederick Engels, On Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1937), 63.

65. Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 111. An additional factor was that the word Stoffwechsel was not originally translated as “metabolism” in the English-language translations of the first and third volumes of Capital in 1886 and 1909, but rather as “circulation of matter.”

66. See Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 21–65; Foster, The Return of Nature, 405.

The New Frontier of Settler Colonialism

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Republished from Michigan Specter.

In early June, a video went viral of a Palestinian woman arguing with an Israeli man. “Yakub, you know this is not your house,” says Muna El-Kurd, a resident of Sheik Jarrah, to a man who has been living in some part of her family’s property for years.

“Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back,” he replies, in a Brooklyn accent, “So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?” He throws his arms in the air in an expression of ostensible innocence and confusion. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. It’s easy to yell at me, but I didn’t do this.”

“You are stealing my house,” she insists.

“And if I don’t steal it,” he replies, “someone else is going to steal it.”

How Did We Get Here?

Settler colonialism is often seen as a thing of the past. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world are populated primarily by the descendants of people who took that land by force, drove out or slaughtered the natives, and claimed it as their God-given right. It is generally accepted that the world was shaped by these forces, but we are rarely willing to see this process as continuous. Even the left, critical of power and skeptical of narratives that ignore the modern implications of past atrocities, tends to frame the continuation of imperialism primarily as neocolonialism, or unequal relationships between countries maintained by debt, corruption, regime change, threats, and cultural hegemony by which developed governments and corporations drain money and resources from the third world without resorting to the older methods of colonization. This framework, while useful, places the world of colonial annexation, direct governance, and settler colonialism firmly in the past.

White European settler colonialism, specifically from the western European countries, has been by far the dominant form of settler colonialism in recent centuries, and arguably in all of human history. Europe, led by the British Empire, carried out settler colonial projects in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Nearly all settler colonial territories eventually became independent of the Empire, but imperialism continued. The United States was the leader in this, securing most of its territory after independence, but it was not the only one. Apartheid in South Africa and Canadian sterilization of Indigenous women, to give just two examples, existed long after British control, but no one could deny the shared origin of this oppression and the continued cooperation and connections between these states, especially in the military and intelligence fields, but also culturally, linguistically, and economically. In all of these countries, settler colonialism is not a process that is completed or one that has ended. Indigenous people are still marginalized and oppressed, and they are forced to exist in a system set up by the colonizing forces. It would be a mistake, however, to view internal repression as the only descendent of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism continues to find new frontiers, most notably in the state of Israel.

Historical Parallels

Israeli settler colonialism is really a continuation of the same process that European settlers started in the Americas hundreds of years ago. White settlers, marginalized in their homelands, but generally viewed as superior to the natives by the great powers of their day, invaded new territory and drove the native peoples out. They stole the land and the resources on it, exploited the native inhabitants while destroying their economy, culture, resources, and way of life.

The process of Israeli settler colonialism is much the same as American settler colonialism. Both the United States and Israel began as important projects of the British Empire. Violence and ethnic cleansing against Native Americans and Palestinians, in the bloody so-called Indian Wars fought by European powers and later the United States and Canada and events in Israel like the Nakba, forced Native people to flee their homes, relegated to locations the colonial power had no need of yet, west in America, east in Palestine. Once a region is conquered and integrated, the frontier moves. Palestinian self-governance, legally at least, exists only in a group of physically divided areas, places in the West Bank labeled as “Area A” and “Area B”, and of course, the Gaza strip. (In reality, Israel controls security in Area B, and completely surrounds these areas and Gaza, controlling emigration, immigration, and trade, making actual Palestinian self-governance a fantasy). Native Americans were deported to lands far away from their homeland, and the US government has even attempted to send Palestinians out of Israel and Palestine altogether, like when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice suggested that Palestinians could be resettled in Argentina and Chile in a meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in 2008.

On the other side of the colonial state, the direction they came from, things look similar as well. Israel does the majority of its trade with Europe and North America, including the profitable weapons trade. Early America traded heavily with Europe as well, and its cotton plantations, maintained by slave labor and existing on stolen land, shipped massive amounts of cotton to Europe to help fuel the textile industry and industrialization. Both countries may be considered “Nations of Immigrants,” but both are quite discriminatory in the type of immigrant they populate their territory with. For America, it was blatantly white supremacist, prioritizing a small group of peoples seen as the most advanced, and gradually growing to include other people considered white.

Jewish immigrants to the United States, so long as they came from white, European countries, were tolerated much more than immigrants considered racially inferior. Though they faced violence, discrimination, and marginalization in a conservative country dominated by Christians, Jewish immigrants received recognition as valued members of society by people such as George Washington and equal political rights. The tolerance of Jewish institutions was not the same reality for other ethnic groups living in America at the time. Again, because it needs to be made absolutely clear, this does not erase the reality of antisemitism, especially in institutions and from individuals that promote white supremacy. Rather, Jewish identity and whiteness are intersecting identities, not mutually exclusive ones.

Israel has faced accusations of racism from its Jewish citizens of non-European origin, including accusations of police brutality, discrimination in school enrollment, and even forced sterilization. This is compounded by the fact that Jews living in the so-called “developed” world, typically meaning white-majority countries in Europe and North America, simply have greater opportunities to move to Israel. The advantages of living in the “developed” world (their greater wealth, higher levels of education, easier transportation to Israel) allow Jews living there to move to Israel more easily than Jews living in poorer countries. This reality, while it is a result of global capitalism and white supremacy and not any aspect of the Zionist movement, effectively privileges white immigrants to Israel.

Race, Religion, and Civilization

There are also important parallels to draw between the settler colonial ideologies of Israel and America. Israelis claim that the land is theirs due to their ancestry, but ignore the fact that many Palestinians have descended from the ancient Jewish residents of Palestine. Zionists like Ber Borochov and David Ben-Gurion accepted this and saw the Palestinians as descendants of the Israelites who had stayed on the land. This is not to say that Palestinians have some special status over other people because of their ancestry, or that any Jews are somehow “not real Jews,” or that race is a metric that dictates a particular allocation of power or land. It does show, however, the inherent failures of relying on abstract and contradictory concepts like race and descendancy over thousands of years. Israeli ideology relies on the idea that Israelis are somehow more tied to the land than the people who live on it now, and who have lived there in recent history. Israeli ideology relies on claiming a difference in ancestry between the Palestinians and Israelis. The only difference that can be reasonably discerned is the European ancestry of the Israeli colonizers.

An important clarifier is the distinction between the Zionist movement of Jews, mainly from Europe and the Americas, and the historical existence of Jews in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews have always lived there, but their simple existence is not Zionism. Zionists may seek to tie these Jews to their cause, but the core of Zionism is the movement of Jews from outside of this territory, with the backing of Europe and America, into Palestinian territory. That is a settler colonial project. Zionist ideology appropriated the right of Palestinian Jews to keep living where they were to justify a larger project of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.

Americans also steal a component identity of those they colonized, even as they sought to replace that identity. Individual white Americans from the participants in the Boston Tea Party to Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have dressed up as Native Americans or claimed Native American identity without evidence or any cultural link. We took the name Apache for a helicopter, we took the Powhatan word tamahaac for a missile, we took the word Ojibwe word mishigami for our state, our university, and the Michigamua club here at the University (renamed in 2007 and disbanded in 2021), where members would disrespectfully appropriate Native dress, custom, and names. These identity thefts are key to settler colonialism. As the connections native peoples have to the land are severed, the land must be reconnected, even if sloppily and artificially, to the new inhabitants.

Both colonizers claimed to be more civilized than the colonized, sometimes in explicitly racist language, sometimes not. We hear over and over how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East despite it having near-total control over millions of people with no say in their own governance. The early United States claimed to be more civilized in its day too, promising “liberty and justice for all” while maintaining slavery and calling itself a republic, “by the people, for the people,” even when voting rights were restricted to a small elite of wealthy white men. We hear the same narratives of development, that Israel is “making the desert bloom,” and that America tamed a vast, uncivilized and unpopulated wilderness, and that the wealth of both is a sign of their superior industry, talent, and work ethic, or even of God’s favor.

God’s favor is actually tied with civilization in other interesting ways. According to many Jews and Christians who use God as a justification for colonization and expansion, Israel was promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible. The ideology of Manifest Destiny also relied on God allowing his chosen (white) people to conquer the world and convert the natives from their religions, which were represented as uncivilized, savage, and infantile, into members of the Christain religion, which was seen as the religion of the civilized, developed world. The Pope himself would proclaim the rights of European colonizers to the land they conquered. Mormons, like the Puritans before them and the Jews after them, were an oppressed religious minority who led the charge of expansion, believing God wanted them to.

In much the same way as Ashkenazi Jews (along with Italians, Irish, and others before them) have gained some degree of “whiteness” and integration into structures of white supremacy, the Jewish religion has gained some degree of legitimacy in the eyes of American Christians. Some conservatives will talk about “Judeo-Christain Values,” a confusing term that ultimately serves to drive a wedge between Jews, Christians, and “enlightened” western Atheists who allegedly hold these values, and Muslims, who allegedly do not and are therefore deemed to have an inferior civilization. Exclusionary ideologies are anything but consistent, and as they lose power, they can expand the in-group to unite against a new outgroup. This has led to bizarre political alliances and support, such as American white nationalist Richard Spencer praising Israel’s political system, or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has praised Nazi collaborators and used antisemitic language to refer to his enemies, a “true friend to Israel.” Many early American settlers were marginalized in Europe for their religion, but that did not stop the Christians from uniting themselves against some other, more distinct religion or group of religions.

The Frontier

The creation of Israel is not just a copy of the United States but an extension of the United States. Its colonial efforts are also American colonial efforts. The United States provides $3 billion to Israel annually in military aid, as well as billions more in loan guarantees. The US State Department changed its position on settlements under Mike Pompeo, supporting the obviously illegal project. In the private sector, an entire network of American nonprofits support Israeli settlers in Palestine, and many American and European corporations are closely intertwined with settlements and do business with the Israeli government. Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, previously ran one such foundation funding the settlements. The Israeli Land Fund, funded by American donors, has assisted in the eviction of a Palestinian family in Sheikh Jarrah. Its founder, the deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, and a settler living in a Palestinian neighborhood, Aryeh King, has worked hard to increase Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. King, while on his visit to Sheikh Jarrah on May 6, even wished for the death of a Palestinian activist who was shot by police.

The recent forced evictions and other police violence are not unique to East Jerusalem. King is also supporting the eviction of residents in Silwan, another Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The land from which Israel clears the houses may actually be used to expand a biblical theme park called City of David National Park, run by a settler group called the Ir David Foundation. Nothing exemplifies the Israeli colonial project more than the destruction of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods to make room for a park named after a king who lived some 3,000 years ago where settlers and tourists can look at ancient artifacts. Tourists to Israel are predominantly Christian, and a plurality of them travel from America to visit Israel.

It is not just American money, but American people who help drive settler colonialism. US Citizens make up 15% of the settlers in the West Bank. It’s a familiar phenomenon: Americans, on the frontier, traveling inland and claiming new land for themselves and their people, building a homestead, and arming themselves to fight the people who lived there before. America didn’t stop when it got to California, or even Hawaii, it just sought out new avenues for colonial expansion.

Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, the twin brother of Muna El-Kurd, went on Democracy Now! and explained the altercation between his sister and the settler that began this article and how it represents a broader settler colonial project.

“Can you explain this scene? And talk more specifically about what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah right now,” asked Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!.

“Absolutely. The scene that you saw, Amy, is a scene of colonialism. People often think that colonialism is this archaic concept or a concept of recent memory, but in fact, it’s alive and well in Palestine. And this is a colonizer that happens to be from Brooklyn, as you can hear by the accent, who decided to find a home in my backyard. This happens because we, as a community of refugees in Sheikh Jarrah, have been battling billionaire-backed, often U.S.-registered settler organizations that employ these people to come and live in our homes and harass us and intimidate us…What’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah today is nothing short of ethnic cleansing.

“…You know, I know it sounds bizarre that an Israeli settler is taking over half of my home, and likely they will be taking over the entirety of the neighborhood should no international action be taken. But it’s not as absurd when you put it in the context [of] how the state of Israel came about. It came about by destroying and burning hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian cities and villages and taking over Palestinians’ homes. Today, all over historic Palestine, there are settlers who are living in homes that were once Palestinian.”