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Six existential threats face
humanity: global warming and catastrophic climate change (Nayeri, August 3,
2026), the Sixth Extinction (Nayeri, May 14, 2017), recurrent pandemics (Nayeri,
March 19, 2020), nuclear holocaust, and artificial intelligence.
What are their root causes, and how
can we resolve them?
I have already discussed each one;
most recently, artificial intelligence (Nayeri, September 22, 2026), arguing
that they stem from anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. To
resolve them, I have argued that humanity must transcend it toward Ecocentric
Socialism (Nayeri, July 4, 20210.
I have published several essays describing
what Ecocentric Socialism is and why it is needed as a theory of socialism for
the twenty-first century. Still, some of my readers misunderstand it. For
instance, a socialist website editor and publisher whom I very much respect has
classified my essay “Why Ecocentric Socialism?” (published in English as “The
Case for Ecocentric Socialism”) under “Nature” and “Environment,” not under “theories”
and “socialism!” Although my readers are generally socialists, there has been
no reaction to these essays and my book “Whose Planet? Essays on Ecocentric
Socialism.” Not even a question, let alone a book review or a critique. I could
dismiss this as what I fear is true: a general demoralization among socialists,
accompanied by a lack of interest in the theoretical causes of socialism's
demise in much of the world. Still, I decided to write this essay to outline
the intellectual bases of Ecocentric Socialism in a new and well-documented form,
hoping it may raise some interest in the issues I tackle. Let me be clear: I am
arguing that Marx’s nineteenth-century theories of society and history have
been outdated for decades! I aim to respond to Marx’s and Engels’ admission of
their shortcomings while maintaining Marx’s focus on alienation and his theory
of socialism/communism as a society free of it.
As I have argued in my earlier
writings, Marx’s theory of society and history, historical materialism, was of
necessity anthropocentric by construction, setting aside nature, an essential part
of reality for any theory of human society. In this essay, I examine how Marx’s
theory was constructed, its limits, and how I propose to develop it by considering
what we know about humanity and its connection to the rest of nature, to arrive
at a superior theory of society and history. This theory replaces Marx’s
materialism with animist ecological materialism and Marx’s vision of socialism
with a very different vision. ‘
I have rejected the Greens’
argument that these anthropogenic threats are rooted in industrial society. They
overlook that industrialization historically emerged from the capitalist mode
of production in England from 1760 to 1830 and spread accordingly.
I have also criticized the Marxist
socialists and ecosocialists who argue that capitalism is the root cause. Even
those who admit deficiencies in Marx’s theory still fall back on his nineteenth-century
theories of capitalism and socialism because they do not question how he
constructed them. They also ignore that ecological crises date back to the rise
of civilization: Sumer, the earliest civilization, collapsed because of soil
salinization, and ecological crises have contributed to the collapse of most
civilizations since (Butzer & Endfield, 2012; Douglas, P. M. J. et al.,
2016). Clearly, the fact that capitalist societies are not ecologically sound
does not prove that ecological crises are rooted in capitalist dynamics and labor-capital
conflict alone.
Greens do not consider social
relations generated by the dominant mode of production in their explanation, and
Marxists do not consider the historical roots of malignant human relations with
the rest of nature.
The structure of Marx's theory
I agree with István Mészáros (1970,
p. 93) that “the Manuscripts of 1844…lay down the foundations of the Marxian system,
centered on the concept of alienation.”
Marx’s theory is built around the
idea of alienation (estrangement in the capitalist mode of production, presented
in its initial form in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
He identifies alienation from nature and social alienation (the worker's
alienation from the product of his labor, the labor process, other people, and the
self).
Marx’s theory of the capitalist
mode of production, Das Kapital, uncovers these forms of alienation and the
dynamics that can lead to overcoming them through a socialist revolution led by
the working class to open up the road to transition to socialism/communism, a
society free of all forms of alienation.
As Mészáros writes, in the
Manuscripts, Marx’s theory of alienation has “three fundamental terms of
reference,” man, nature, and “industry” or “productive activity.” (ibid. p.
103) In a diagram (ibid. p. 104), Mészáros shows their relationship as a
triangle, with each element at one tip and arrows showing “action upon” from
one to the other. Thus, both man and “industry” affect nature, while nature
affects both man and industry. But “industry” is man’s productive activity.
Thus, man and his activity affect nature, and nature affects both. Thus, Mészáros writes:
“As we can see,
here we have a dialectical reciprocity… between all three members of the
relationship, which means that ‘man’ is not only the creator of industry but
also its product. (Similarly, of course, he is both product and creator of
‘truly anthropological nature’—above all in himself, but also outside of him,
insofar as he leaves his mark on nature. And since man’s relation to nature is
mediated through an alienated form of productive activity, ‘anthropological
nature’ outside man bears the marks of this alienation in an ever-expanding
form, graphically demonstrated by the intensity of pollution that menaces the
very existence of mankind.” (ibid. 104).
Thus, Mészáros shows how Marx’s
theory of alienation in the capitalist mode of production might help explain
the existential crises of our time.
Alienation as a historical
problem
As Mészáros notes, alienation “is
an eminently a historical concept, if man is ‘alienated,’ he must be alienated from
something, as a result of certain causes.” (ibid., p. 36) Thus, he began
to trace Marx’s discussion of alienation in the capitalist mode of production. My
main interest is how Marx treated “man” and “nature” in developing his theory
of society and history.
In brief, I will argue that Marx
excluded nature or objectified nature in his theoretical constructions, thereby
undermining their utility.
A year later, in Theses on Feuerbach
(1845a), Marx says, “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each
single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.”
(Thesis 6) Thus, he excluded nature in what he called “the essence of man” to
emphasize social relations.
In 1845-46, in The German
Ideology, Marx and Engels outlined their theory of society and history.
They begin with the first premise:
“The first premise
of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus,
the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these
individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we
cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the
natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical,
climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these
natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the
action of men.” (Marx and Engels, 1845-46, my emphasis)
Thus, Marx and Engels consciously set
aside nature in historical materialism even though Marx still argued that
nature is the source of all wealth in his Critique of the Gotha Program
(Marx, 1875): “Labor is not the source of all wealth. “Labor is not the source
of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values.”
Marx separates human labor from the
rest of nature here to emphasize the value created by human labor, but it is
self-evident that humans are part of nature. Thus, all wealth comes from nature
through the labor of the laboring masses.
Marx also objectified nature in Das
Kapital. His theory of exploitation in Volume 1 treats “raw materials” as
contributing nothing to surplus value. However, I have shown that in the case
of the meat industry, farm animals raised and slaughtered certainly contribute to
the surplus value produced in that industry and by cheapening the food in the
wage basket, increase the surplus value economy-wide (Nayeri, December 31,
2022).
I have also suggested why Marx and
Engels had to set nature aside in historical materialism and future theoretical
developments. They did so because, in the mid-nineteenth century, they knew
little about the natural conditions of life on Earth and humanity’s
relationship to them. They had to rely on the written history of the most
recent 3000 years of civilization, that is, the class society, and class
struggle as the force to move from one mode of production to another. They also
had no way to know scientifically what constitutes human nature (Nayeri, July
30, 2026).
Thus, historical materialism is a
limited anthropocentric theory, as is Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode
of production and socialism. In these theories, nature is objectified, that
is, alienated, and set aside, unlike the “dialectical interactions” in Mészáros’s
discussion of the 1844 Manuscripts.
What follows is an outline of how I
have attempted to reconstruct a theory of society and history, hence of
capitalism and socialism, consistent with Marx’s intent to build these on the
basis of a theory of alienation and socialism as a process to create socialism
as a society free of alienation.
The origin of history and of alienation
We now know the Earth is 4.5
billion years old, and evidence suggests life may have started within the first
few hundred million years, around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. The oldest
known fossils date back to about 3.7 billion years.
For estimating Earth's age, the
crucial breakthrough was radiometric dating.[1]
By the early 20th century, physicists understood radioactive decay well enough
to use it as a geological clock. By measuring radioactive elements and their
decay products in rocks and meteorites, scientists eventually established approximately
when the Earth formed. The same techniques have been used to date fossils and
date approximately when life emerged on Earth and what it looked like.
These techniques began to mature in
the mid-twentieth century, boosting fields such as biology, anthropology, and archeology.
Human history became a small recent part of natural history.
Thus, we can reconstruct a theory
of society and history considering these findings. The Homo genus appeared
approximately 2.5 million years ago. Homo Sapiens, humans, appeared 300,000
years ago. Farming began approximately 12,000 years ago. The first
civilizations emerged about 5,000 years ago.
Thus, humans lived as
hunter-gatherers for 2.5 million years. Only a tiny fraction of this time
(0.00048%), the last 12,000 years, has turned to production, mostly agriculture,
and in the past 250 years increasingly turned to industrialization. Civilization,
a fancy word for class societies, is only 5,000 years old. Our ecological
crises began with the advent of farming and the expansion of civilization
(Nayeri, October 15, 2018).
This brings us to the origins of
alienation. Researchers in cultural anthropology have found that
hunter-gatherer bands saw themselves as part of their ecosystem and as kin with
other beings. Some were animist: the worldview
in which non-humans, including other animals, plants, rivers, and even weather
systems, possess a spiritual soul, or personal agency. Others (native of
Australia, for example) are totemist, the worldview in which individuals or
groups feel a spiritual connection or kinship with a specific animal, plant, or
natural entity (Scott, 2025; Swancutt, 2019; Poirier, 2013), “Animism”. I use
the term ecocentric for these worldviews. For 2.5 million years, our ancestors
were ecocentric.
The world-historical change in
humanity’s worldview from ecocentrism to anthropocentrism, that is, from being
one with nature to becoming alienated from it, has been ignored by socialists
and ecosocialists for the past 170 years!
However, alienation is central to
Marx’s theory, especially his conception of socialism/communism as the social form
of alienation from nature and social alienation.
This ignorance is encoded in
historical materialism as a mid-nineteenth-century anthropocentric theory of
society and history which lacks any attention to the so-called “pre-history” of
humanity, that is, humanity before the rise of class societies.
Anthropocentrism as alienation from
nature emerged with the rise of farming, which required domestication of
animals and plants. That is, alienation from nature was a prerequisite for the
farmer's exploitation of them. The farm itself is an artificial ecosystem
entirely dependent on the farmer's daily care, which set the farmer in
opposition to the wild nature surrounding the farm. Thus began the unceasing drive
to dominate and control nature. Hence, it set the stage for ecological crises
of all kinds.
Once farmers could produce a
consistent economic surplus, social differentiation began to develop, leading
to private property, patriarchy, and the state. All forms of social alienation.
Ecocentric Socialism
Thus, socialism as a society free
of alienation can be attained only through a combined revolution: a socialist
revolution against capitalism and a cultural revolution to replace
anthropocentrism with ecocentrism, with all implications of that transition. I
call this Ecocentric Socialism. In important ways, Ecocentric Socialism differs
from and is superior to hitherto theories of socialism and ecosocialism.
Animistic ecological materialism
Materialism as an ontological
theory concerns the kinds of things that exist. In its simplest form, it is a
claim with two aspects. It holds that only material things exist; that is, the
world is made up of material things, and other things, like the mind and
consciousness, arise from material interactions and depend on physical
processes, including those of the human brain and nervous system (Brown &
Ladyman, 2020). In the nineteenth century, philosophical materialism stood
against naturalism, that is, the philosophical belief that everything arises
from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations
are excluded or discounted:
Marx criticized materialism: “The
main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included —
is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived
only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but
not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively.” (Thesis 1)
Further he wrote:
“The question
whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question
of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the
reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in
practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is
isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question” (Thesis 2).
He added:
“The materialist
doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that,
therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed
upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the
educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide
society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of
the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change
[Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as
revolutionary practice.”
Marx concluded: “Philosophers have
hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change
it.” (Thesis 11, emphasis in original)
Thus, Marx’s materialism included
human praxis, both to confirm the truth of things and to change material
reality. In Marx’s materialism, consciousness plays a key role.
This aspect of Marx’s philosophy
has created controversy around the key concept of base and superstructure
(Marx, 1859; ).
In Anti-Dühring and other writings,
Friedrich Engels expanded the concept to include ideological forms such as
philosophy, religion, and art within the superstructure, creating a more
heterogeneous and all-encompassing model. The Second International and later the
Stalinist Soviet Union codified it as a fundamental tenet of dialectical
materialism. This prompted Engels and later Marxists like Georgi Plekhanov and
Louis Althusser to introduce concepts such as "determination in the last
instance", "relative autonomy", and
"overdetermination" to account for the apparent independence of
superstructural elements. Other recent theories propose that superstructures
must have their own distinct systems of production, which grants them a degree
of autonomy and can place them in conflict with the base. Marxists, like the
Western Marxist tradition like Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, and Raymond
Williams, expressed dissatisfaction with the rigid, stratified model. They
developed alternative concepts such as hegemony and social totality to offer a
more dynamic, interactive understanding of social formations, often critiquing
or rejecting the base-superstructure model in its received form.
Evolving scientific understanding
of physical reality
Since the seventeenth century, Materialism
has kept close to scientific development. Scientific understanding of the world
has evolved tremendously since the classical Newtonian view. Newton's universe
contained matter in the form of bodies, absolute space, absolute time, and the force
of gravity between physical bodies. Reality appeared fundamentally mechanical.
If you knew the positions, velocities, and forces acting on things, in
principle you could calculate their future behavior. This encouraged the famous
clockwork-universe conception. Matter was regarded as relatively passive, while
universal laws governed motion.
The nineteenth century profoundly
complicated the mechanical picture. Faraday and Maxwell showed that electricity
and magnetism could be understood in terms of fields extending through space. This
was a major conceptual shift. Reality became particles and continuous fields
permeating space. Light itself turned out to be an electromagnetic wave. The
idea of an invisible field became fundamental to physics.
Einstein's theories of relativity
produced another revolution. Special relativity (1905) showed that space and
time aren't independent. They form a unified spacetime, and measurements of
time and distance depend upon the observer's state of motion.
General relativity (1915) went
still further. Gravity was viewed as dynamic spacetime curved by matter and
energy.
So, the old Newtonian picture, matter
exists in space and time, became something closer to: matter, energy, space,
and time form a coupled physical system. This was an enormous change in the
concept of reality.
Quantum mechanics challenged this
view of nature. Max Planck introduced the idea of energy quantization in 1900,
laying the groundwork for future developments. Albert Einstein expanded on
Planck's ideas in 1905 by explaining the photoelectric effect, demonstrating
that light can behave as both a wave and a particle. Niels Bohr further
developed quantum theory with his 1913 model of the hydrogen atom, which
incorporated quantized energy levels. Other significant contributors include
Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac, who helped formalize quantum
mechanics mathematically.
Quantum mechanics demonstrated that
at microscopic scales, quantum entities exhibit wave-particle duality, superposition,
quantization, interference, probabilistic measurement outcomes, and entanglement.
It showed that an electron's
properties don't have a definite value independent of measurement in the
classical sense. This led to competing interpretations of what quantum
mechanics says about reality: Copenhagen-type interpretations emphasize
measurement and operational predictions; many-worlds interpretation treats the
quantum state as fundamental and avoids collapse; Bohmian mechanics retains
particles with definite positions guided by a quantum wave; objective-collapse
theories propose that quantum states sometimes physically collapse.
Importantly, physicists largely
agree about the experimental predictions while disagreeing about the underlying
ontology.
This distinction is important for my
philosophical argument: the failure of nineteenth-century mechanical
materialism does not necessarily imply the failure of materialism itself. It
may instead require a much richer conception of what "material" or
"physical" reality means.
These ideas challenge Marxian philosophical
materialism. Quantum mechanics introduces non-deterministic elements into the
nature of reality, making it probabilistic and stochastic. conflicting with
materialism's often deterministic framework. Quantum entanglement is the
phenomenon in which the quantum state of each particle in a group cannot be
described independently of the others, even when the particles are separated by
a great distance. Quantum entanglement lies at the heart of the disparity
between classical and quantum physics: it is a primary feature of quantum
mechanics absent from classical mechanics. This challenges the materialist view
of objects' separateness and individuality, suggesting an interconnectedness
that materialism struggles to explain.
Quantum tunneling, barrier
penetration, or simply tunneling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which an
object such as an electron or atom passes through a potential energy barrier
that, according to classical mechanics, should not be passable because the
object lacks sufficient energy to surmount it. Tunneling results from the wave
nature of matter and quantum indeterminacy.
Such discoveries have reintroduced
panpsychism into discussions of nature: the view that mind or conscious
experience is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, including all
physical reality. Panpsychism is also
described as a theory that the mind is a fundamental feature that exists
throughout the universe. It is one of the oldest theories in the philosophy of
mind, possibly overlapping in some interpretations with animism, the spiritual
or religious worldview of many indigenous societies, though panpsychism is
usually regarded as a philosophical (metaphysical) stance. Physicists and
cosmologists increasingly believe that the universe itself must be viewed in a
relational sense.
As I discussed above, these views
align with animist views of nature found among hunter-gatherers and indigenous
cultures.
“The idea that
existence is fundamentally relational – that nothing exists in complete
isolation – is not new to philosophy. But today, the sciences are independently
arriving at the same conclusion through their own rigorous methods. Across
disciplines as different as physics and meteorology, the emerging picture is
consistent: the universe’s deep structure is one of interconnection, mutual
influence, and dynamic interdependence. To understand this, we need to look
carefully at three major scientific frameworks: the theory of relativity,
quantum field theory, and chaos theory (Philosophy Institute, no date).”
The above opens an intriguing
philosophical possibility for animistic materialism: rather than opposing
"materialism" to "agency," one could ask whether agency,
relationship, emergence and process can themselves be understood as properties
of a dynamic, relational, material reality rather than as properties belonging
exclusively to human minds.
Conclusion
Ecocentric Socialism provides a
theory of society and history in which humanity is deeply integrated into the
rest of nature, thereby responding to the deficiencies Marx and Engels admitted
in historical materialism. It revises Marx’s
nineteenth-century philosophical materialism with animist ecological
materialism informed by developments in the natural and social sciences. It offers
a theory of alienation from nature rooted in systematic domestication and
farming beginning about 12,000 years ago, resulting in systematic economic
surplus, social differentiation, and alienation. Rather than limiting
historical agency to humans alone, it considers the ecological interaction of
animate and inanimate nature since the emergence of life; in class societies,
it includes the struggle of social classes as well as non-class struggles
inside and outside civilization, including the struggle for the rights of
Mother Earth and nonhuman beings. It provides a sound basis for understanding the
base and superstructure in dialectical interaction, rather than a mechanical one-way
relationship. Ecological-social forces of production and forces of destruction,
Eco-social relations of production, and dialectically interacting base and
superstructure. It promises to undo all alienation originating in alienation
from nature, which has resulted in all forms of social alienation. It provides
ample grounds for the reverence for the natural world of which humans are a
tiny part, not its master and certainly not the “apex of creation.”
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[1]. Scientists don't
determine the age of a fossil simply by looking at it. They can use radiometric
dating of minerals associated with geological formations. Methods include uranium-lead
dating, potassium-argon dating,
argon-argon dating, and samarium-neodymium dating. These
methods can date rocks millions or billions of years old.
