3597. Marxism, Science, and Science Studies: Marx and Engels to COVID-19 and COP26

By Helena Sheehan, Monthly Review, May 1, 2022

The history of Marxism in relation to science is extraordinarily dense and dramatic. Although it is a fascinating and important story, it is one increasingly forgotten.

From the beginning, Marxism took science extremely seriously, not only for its economic promise in building a socialist society, but also for its revelatory power in understanding the world. Marxism has made the strongest claims of any intellectual tradition before or since about the sociohistorical character of science, yet always affirmed its cognitive validity.

Science was seen as inextricably enmeshed with economic systems, technological developments, political movements, philosophical theories, cultural trends, ethical norms, ideological positions—indeed, all that is human. It was also a path of access to the natural world, generating studies, texts, theories, tensions, and debates.1 The objectivist/constructivist dichotomy could never capture this epistemological dynamic. Nor could internalist/externalist dualism ever do justice to the interacting field of forces harnessed in its historiographical process.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were acutely attuned to the science of their times and integrated their awareness into the core of their thought process in developing the intellectual tradition and political movement that came to be called Marxism. I would prefer that this complex theoretical and political history not be named after one man, but so it was.

There have been controversies about the Marx-Engels relationship, with a tendency to counterpose a humanist Marx to a positivist Engels, especially to dissociate Marx from Engels’s posthumous Dialectics of Nature. The dialectics of nature debate resurfaces periodically, as it has done recently, and there is a stronger tendency to vindicate Engels today than when I entered the fray decades ago.2 What is at stake is the development of a comprehensive worldview embracing both human society and the natural world, with a strong emphasis on cutting-edge science.

The subsequent generation of Marxists, during the period of the Second International, also paid acute attention to the onward development of science and there were debates about its implications and consequences, especially in response to trends such as positivism, Machism, and neo-Kantianism.

After the Russian October Revolution, there was an intensification of this activity. Science was a necessity in building a new social order. Scientific theory was thought to be not only a matter of truth and error, but also of life and death. There were many debates, including between those more grounded in the empirical sciences and those who stressed the continuity of Marxism with the history of philosophy.

Intertwined with all the intellectual debates of the day was an intense struggle for power. There was tension with a more cosmopolitan Marxist intelligentsia, who had found their way to Marxism in difficult and dangerous conditions, exposed to an array of intellectual influences, accustomed to mixing with intellectuals of many points of view and arguing the case for Marxism in such milieus. They came under increasing pressure from those who had come up under the revolution, never been abroad, knew no foreign languages, had little detailed knowledge of either the natural sciences or the history of philosophy, and never mixed with exponents of other intellectual traditions. Some were more inclined to cite the authority of classic texts or party decrees than to engage in theoretical debate. They were being fast-tracked in their careers and taking over as professors, directors of institutes, and members of editorial boards, occupying positions of authority over intellectuals of international reputation. There was high drama and, soon, blood on the floor.

It was the more cosmopolitan intelligentsia that came to London in 1931 for what is perhaps the most memorialized conference ever. The Second International Congress on the History of Science and Technology spilled over into the mass media with the arrival of a Soviet delegation led by Nikolai Bukharin and including Boris Hessen, Nikolai Vavilov, and others renowned in the history of science. They were struggling for their version of Marxism against one set of pressures at home and quite another abroad. They navigated these turbulent waters impressively. Nevertheless, tragedy engulfed them. Bukharin, Hessen, and Vavilov all perished in the purges.

The paper from this congress that had the greatest impact then and since was Hessen’s “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” often cited as a classical manifesto of the externalist position in the historiography of science. Hessen examined the roots of Isaac Newton’s thought within the social, political, and economic forces of his time, seeing Newton as a son of seventeenth-century mercantile capitalism and the class compromise of 1688, combining mechanistic causation with theological speculation in his pattern of scientific explanation. Within the Soviet Union, Hessen was defending relativity theory and quantum mechanics against a position that argued that the new physics was rooted in bourgeois idealism. Although he emphasized the socioeconomic roots in London and cognitive credibility in Moscow, most provocatively in both contexts, against conflicting pressures, his position was a consistent one, demonstrating a dialectical synthesis of internal and external factors, empirical evidence, logical argument, and socioeconomic context. Hessen was not an externalist.3

Bukharin was a major figure in both the political and philosophical development of Marxism. Although a possible successor to V. I. Lenin, he had fallen from the pinnacle of power, yet was still a prominent player in many sectors of Soviet life, from the arts and sciences to economic planning. In the pressure to “Bolshevize” every social institution and academic discipline, to shut down debate and arrive at a correct Marxist line on every question, Bukharin stood up to brash Bolshevizers who were attempting to override the process of scientific discovery, siding with geneticists such as Vavilov against Trofim Lysenko. In London, Bukharin set out to convey the intellectual vitality of Marxism to a skeptical audience, placing Marxism within the context of all contemporary currents in philosophy. He continued refining his philosophical position throughout the decade. Even in his prison cell, preparing to leave life, he wrote a major tract on philosophy that showed a most impressive grasp of the history of philosophy as well as philosophical problems within science.4

The 1931 congress brought forces already in motion into a new level of interaction with each other. At the congress, contrasting worldviews collided. Those most touched by this confrontation were those who stood in between, the left-wing scientists in Britain who shared the visitors’ vision from afar. The ideas of J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, and other leading scientists who became Marxists took hold among many of their contemporaries and gave rise to a dynamic radical science movement in the 1930s.5

This encounter between British and Soviet Marxists radiated outward and touched many who did not attend the congress. The book Science at the Crossroads, collecting the Soviet papers from the congress, was translated into many languages and found its way into many parts of the world for decades. It was read by Antonio Gramsci in his prison cell and by Christopher Caudwell as he raced through every field of human knowledge, reconceptualizing all from a Marxist point of view. From this, Caudwell produced many amazing tracts on biology and physics, as well as history, philosophy, psychology, and culture—all left unfinished when he was killed in the Spanish Civil War.

Caudwell showed how scientific discoveries reflected fresh contact with the natural world through empirical experiment but received their form and pressure from the social relations of the age. He argued that the problems of physics could not be solved within physics alone and saw the metaphysics of physics as rife with the same dualisms as every other aspect of bourgeois consciousness. Caudwell saw knowledge as advancing at an empirical level while generating confusion and chaos, as bourgeois culture was unable to assimilate its achievements or unleashed forces because of the lack of an integrated worldview.6 Bernal too saw Marxism as providing such an integrated framework. It was a philosophy derived from science that brought order and perspective to science and illuminated its onward path. It provided a method of coordinating the experimental results of science and unifying its different branches in deep sociohistorical perspective. He called for a science of science—what later came to be called science studies.7

Marxists of this period not only elaborated this position, but also entered into polemics with others holding contrary views. In philosophy of science, arguments against James Jeans and Arthur Eddington, who were seen as importing irrationalism into science itself, were particularly prominent. It is not hard to know what Marxist scientists and philosophers of science of that time would make of the postmodernist anti-science science studies that came later.

After 1945, the influence of Marxism spread ever wider. In Eastern Europe, Marxism became the dominant force in the universities, research institutes, and academic journals of new socialist states. It spread to Asia, Latin America, and Africa in liberation movements, some of which became parties of power. Marxism was sometimes a matter of deepest conviction, but sometimes not. Being an orthodoxy in a one-party state was not a recipe for the healthy development of an intellectual tradition.

Nevertheless, there was serious work done in developing a distinctive approach to science, particularly in exploring the philosophical implications of the natural sciences. This was the case in the academies of Eastern Europe, in the intellectual life of Communist parties, in journals such as Science & Society, La Pensée, Modern Quarterly, and Monthly Review. It was very different from the narrowly methodological approach being pursued in philosophy of science elsewhere. It was work of profound significance that was too little known outside these milieus.

Marxism combined attention to the advancing results of the empirical sciences with the development of a philosophical framework capable of integrating expanding knowledge and an awareness of the sociohistorical context of it all.

In the rest of the world where capitalism held sway, the 1960s and ’70s put Marxism on the agenda in a new way. New left ferment pervaded North America and Western Europe especially. This was a time when all that had been assumed was opened to question, when the universities and the streets became contested terrain. Academic disciplines were scrutinized at their very foundations. Philosophy, sociology, literature, science—all knowledge—was seen as tied to power. University campuses and academic conferences were alive with passion and polemic. Journals such as Radical Philosophy, Insurgent Sociologist, Science for the People, Radical Science Journal, and Science as Culture gave expression to this ferment. Many of my generation threw ourselves wholeheartedly into this searching, this striving. We burned many boats and set ourselves swimming in strange seas. Never in my youth as a little Catholic cold warrior did I imagine myself crossing to the other side of the “iron curtain” and becoming a communist. Even when I first moved to the left, I did not see myself as heading that way.

There was residual anticommunism as well as generational rebellion in the U.S. new left’s attitude to the old left. There was also a naiveté about power, obliviousness of economics, and suspicion of science. I shared these attitudes at first. I changed when I moved from the United States to Europe, where the gap between new left and old left was not so wide. My involvement in the political culture of Europe was transforming and I took a new look at the previous generation of the left. Although many were still alive, those who touched me most deeply were dead. Nevertheless, they came to life again in my imagination as I read their texts and grilled their contemporaries about their lives. Bernal and Caudwell especially were my mentors. Perhaps it had something to do with the sensibility of Catholics who become communists.

I was interested in Marxism as a comprehensive worldview. I was intrigued by the ways in which intellectual movements were rooted in sociohistorical forces. I saw the whole history of philosophy that I had been studying in a new way. I saw everything in a new way, a way in which everything was interconnected: philosophy, culture, politics, economics, science. I decided to focus on science within this network of relationships. Researching my book Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History was an absorbing adventure, especially during my intervals in Eastern Europe. I felt like a detective uncovering an intricate series of intersecting stories. I tried to write a Marxist history of Marxism and science, despite the enormous and opposite pressures on me as I strove to do so—pressures from east and west, left and right, old and new left, commitment and career.

Sometimes, to my surprise, I felt more of an affinity with the previous generation than my own. I could not understand why my contemporaries, especially among British Marxists, turned their backs on the earlier generation of British Marxists and went flocking to Louis Althusser or Michel Foucault. New Left Review veered between obliviousness and hostility to the previous generation of British Marxists. Marxism Today moved ever further from Marxism, no matter how far the term was stretched.

Radical Science Journal did engage with the earlier generation, however critically. Gary Werskey’s book The Visible College was perhaps the most substantial work mediating between these generations on the question of science. Robert Young’s “Science Is Social Relations” was the most explicit and provocative exposition of a new left position on science. Reacting strongly against the view that science itself is neutral and that only the use or abuse of science is ideological, Young and Radical Science Journal held that science as such is ideological. We never encounter nature unmediated, the argument went, and so what we call nature is socially negotiated and socially constructed, a product of interactions among contending interests. From the premise that modern science, with its characteristic concepts of truth and rationality, and modern capitalism, with its alienating division of labor, arose upon a single edifice, came the conclusion that both would have to be totally dismantled. For Young, science meant capitalist science, epistemology was a bourgeois pursuit, and philosophy of science was a dead end. It was hard to see a way forward. It was a far cry from the affirmation of science characterizing previous generations of the left.8

Meanwhile, some of us carried on in the tradition of older generations of the left, most outstandingly Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, who brought it to bear on the advancing science of our times, always clear that “the truth is the whole,” especially in polemics against trends that got lost in the parts.9

Through the 1970s, I found what was going on within the intellectual culture of the left to be much more absorbing than anything at Trinity College Dublin, where I was based at the time. Every summer I went over to the Communist University of London. There were alternative approaches to every academic discipline and the liveliest debates imaginable. I veered to the courses on philosophy, history, science, Soviet studies, gender studies, but regretted that I could not attend the ones on psychology, anthropology, literature, and other fields.

Living as if in some parallel universe much of the time, parts of academe proceeded as if the only story in philosophy of science was the one proceeding from the Vienna Circle through Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Thomas Kuhn. Philosophy of science in philosophy departments rarely took a sideways glance at this other tradition. I found adjusting to the philosophy department at Trinity strange every time I returned from Moscow, Berlin, Dubrovnik, or even London.

Meanwhile, Soviet delegations were no longer a surprise at international conferences. They were integrated into the organizing structures and gave papers in many sessions. How much of a meeting of minds occurred, however, was another matter. The World Congress of Philosophy was to be held in Düsseldorf in August 1978. I spent much of that year in Eastern Europe, mostly in Moscow. The philosophers there were constantly talking about it. In fact, they were preparing for it as if for Warsaw Pact maneuvers. They kept asking me what Irish and British philosophers were planning. They were not planning anything in the sense that they meant. They were coming or not coming as individuals and thinking only about their own papers and travel arrangements.

At the congress itself, philosophers from the socialist countries and philosophers from the rest of the world mostly read papers past each other (as most academics at most congresses do). There were, however, several skirmishes and a Cold War atmosphere. I felt myself to be in a similar situation to that of British Marxists at the 1931 congress. I moved between both sides in a way that very few did. I found this quite stimulating and entered into all of the polemical possibilities the situation offered.

It was similar at other conferences in those years, for example, the 1979 International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science in Hanover and the 1981 International History of Science Congress in Bucharest. At the latter, I was often in the company of British historians of science. I felt that my arguments that Marxism plus science did not necessarily equal Lysenko were constantly undermined by the locus and events of the congress. Elena Ceausescu was presented to a plenary session as a great scientist and many sessions featured Romanians arguing that Romanians were responsible for many discoveries in the history of science and technology attributed to others, including Albert Einstein. There were others who were negotiating these tensions. Joseph Needham, present at the 1931 congress and prominent in the movement of left scientists in the 1930s, was there still mediating between east and west fifty years later.

There were other enclaves where there was sustained cross-fertilization, such as the Boston Colloquium in Philosophy of Science, issuing many volumes of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Robert Cohen and Marx Wartofsky. The Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik was a pioneering and important base for interaction between east and west, between Marxists and non-Marxists. I have happy memories of stimulating encounters in these milieus. The philosophy of science conference in Dubrovnik was preoccupied with the defense of scientific realism against various forms of social constructivism, particularly the Edinburgh School and Paris School. Arguing against positions of Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and Bruno Latour were philosophers from a critical Marxist position such as Wartofsky, Srdan Lelas, and Władisław Krajewski, alongside others from different philosophical traditions, such as William Newton-Smith, Rom Harre, and Ernan McMullin. The dialogue was free, friendly, funny, and purposeful.10

This was a particularly difficult time for me as a precariously employed intellectual. I often felt angry and bitter, near to despair at times, but I kept working. I lectured at many venues, from Ivy League universities to local employment centers, became a talking head on radio and television, and diversified into cultural studies. When it came to a secure position, I was always passed over for someone safer, even if less qualified. Long after I thought it would never happen, I did finally get a tenured academic position in the 1990s.

Marxism may not have been an asset to me in career advancement, but it made me develop a way of thinking through the trials and tribulations that it brought upon me. I had intellectual clarity and moral purpose and that was a lot. I had ways to steel and to console myself. I thought: Who were the prestigious professors of philosophy when Marx and Engels were writing their classic texts while living difficult exiled marginalized lives, when Caudwell and David Guest were bleeding on battlefields with all their brilliance and passion draining into the soil of Spain, when Bukharin was writing in his bleak cell, arguing the case for Marxism to posterity right up to the moment when he was taken out to be shot? So many times, I had sung “through dungeons dark and gallows grim,” but I was not imprisoned, I was not executed. I could live with unemployment, semi-employment, marginalization, condescension, injustice. I could endure the loneliness of the long-distance Marxist.

In Eastern Europe, within a few years, there was much happening. Everything opened up only to close down again. In 1990, it seemed that the world turned upside down. The Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia disappeared from the map of the world. I often wondered how many of the intellectuals I met in Eastern Europe would be Marxists if there were a regime change. I found out. I had several confrontations in the 1990s with those who had made their careers professing Marxism and then made their careers denouncing it. Academic life all over the world is full of such people. They do what is necessary to advance themselves and they are rewarded, then and now, but they will never produce anything of real value.

In 1996, I was sent to a university in Slovakia, as part of the European Union’s Trans-European Mobility Programme for University Studies, which sent Western academics into Eastern universities to show them how “proper” universities were run, a blatantly colonizing project. I was asked to give a guest lecture on a topic of my choice. I picked Marxism. They were surprised, then disconcerted. Nevertheless, they organized it. The room was packed. Marxism had the frisson of forbidden fruit again. I said that the situation was ridiculous. Marxism was the philosophy for decades and then it disappeared from the curriculum, as if it had never happened. It was orthodoxy one day and apostasy the next. It was not healthy. Marxism, I argued, was a major intellectual tradition in the history of the world and things would never be healthy until it found its place vis-à-vis all contenders in the overall scheme of things. People came whispering to me in the following days, saying that they agreed.

I have returned over the years to Eastern Europe to see where all the Marxists went. I have been most impressed when visiting the vanquished, the Marxist intelligentsia who were still Marxists, especially those involved in philosophy of science, who once occupied the apex of academe and subsequently led quite marginalized lives. However, there has been much dishonesty and denial. It has extended even to the dead. I have been profoundly distressed to read obituaries of those I knew as Marxists where this was never mentioned. When I asked questions about Marxism, it was sometimes as if I were probing sexual liaisons or spy scandals. Nevertheless, while the topic still generates a considerable unease among many, what I have found most striking is the surprise of younger intellectuals at hearing someone make a case for Marxism in this area and their openness to considering it.

Loren Graham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, who has spent his whole professional life studying Soviet and post-Soviet science and philosophy of science, has testified to the lasting impact of dialectical materialism on Russian scientists, even after the demise of the Soviet state. Moreover, he observed: “This philosophy of science is actually quite a sensible one and corresponds to the implicit views of many working scientists all over the world.”11

What does Marxism have to offer to science and science studies now? These fields seem to be flourishing in the sense that there is a lot happening. There is much funding, many metrics, all sorts of empirical studies. Much of this is interesting and valuable, although a lot of it is bland and bitty. Many studies are short and shallow, driven by market demand and fast-track careerism more than intellectual quest. There is not much in the way of thinking that is simultaneously empirically grounded, philosophically integrated, and sociohistorically contextualized. This is what Marxism could bring to bear. Instead, science and science studies go from one extreme to the other: from the minutiae of molecules to the Tao of physics. It is either science stripped of philosophical and historical reflection or it is new age nonsense stepping into the philosophical gap and filling the bookshop shelves. Both are commercially successful. Contradiction sells.

The intensification of the commercialization of science, as part of the general commodification of knowledge, is the strongest force in the field today. A new orthodoxy has taken command, not so much by winning arguments, but by wielding systemic power on a global scale. Philosophy is not thriving in this arena. Nor is theory in any discipline. Universities are being harnessed to operate by market norms and survival of the fittest in commercial competition, outstripping all other forms of validation, particularly truth criteria, theoretical depth and breadth, moral responsibility, and political engagement. There are powerful pressures disincentivizing, eroding, and marginalizing critical thinking, creative thinking, and especially systemic thinking.

Universities are contested terrain. The atmosphere has changed drastically from what prevailed in the 1960s and ’70s. Then, large-scale contending paradigms in every area faced off with great energy and passion. This has dissipated. It is disconcerting, because nothing has been solved. People have learned to live with problems unresolved or unacknowledged, or to settle for resolution at a less than fundamental level. The confrontations of worldviews have given way to low-level eclecticism. There is a narrowing of perspective and a retreat from engagement, whether through myopia, ignorance, shallowness, conformity, fear, or careerism.

So much of what I read or review in so many areas is half-baked. Conceptualization is weak and confused. Contextualization is thin and random. Marxism has nurtured in me a demand for conceptualization that is strong and lucid, for contextualization that is thick and systemic. Many social studies of science are still too weak in conceptualization and contextualization.

There have been periodic rediscoveries of the sociohistorical context of science as if Marxism had never happened—from Kuhn to the Edinburgh School to Latour. This is not to deny the significant contribution of the Edinburgh School, offering an impressive output of empirical studies of intriguing episodes in the history of science connecting social structures to cosmologies, relating class interests to positions taken in scientific controversies. They have argued against seeing what is considered to be true and rational in the history of science as unproblematic, as needing no sociological explanation, and against understanding social factors as necessarily involving distortions or corruptions of science. They have taken issue with the older view of knowledge as individualist, passive, and contemplative in favor of a view of knowledge as social, active, and contextual. Knowledge is conceived as a product, not of passively perceiving individuals, but of interacting social groups. Scientific theories are not individually revealed but socially constructed. This much is in common with Marxism.

However, unlike Marxism, Edinburgh School proponents see scientific knowledge as totally contingent, leaving us with no overall patterns, no necessary connections linking knowledge either to the social order or to the natural world, no concept of scientific progress, no criteria of differential assessment. For them, social groups simply choose theories as resources to suit their purposes and there is no way in which such theories can be ranked in terms of their proximity to reality or their rationality. They constantly shift ground, veering from the most arbitrary voluntarism to the most mechanistic determinism. They set down a hard interest-constitutive model of knowledge and then plead for disinterested research. They argue against giving science a special status vis-à-vis other forms of culture and against criteria of demarcation and then give the highest honorific status to science. It is too random, too contradictory, too loose to take us any further toward a deeper insight into the relationship between the cognitive and social aspects of science.12

The science wars of the 1990s took up the threads of this tension. I found myself on both sides, yet wholly on neither. I agreed with those who wanted to defend the cognitive capacity of science against epistemological antirealism, irrationalism, mysticism, conventionalism, and especially anything-goes postmodernism. I also agreed with those who insisted on a strong sociohistorical account of science against a reassertion of scientism. A better grounding in what the Marxist tradition has brought to bear on these issues would have illuminated the terrain. I do not believe that the debunking of science in terms of its cognitive validity is an appropriate activity for the left.13 It is neither epistemologically sound nor politically progressive. The left should take its stand with science—a critically reconstructed, socially responsible science, but with the possibilities of science.

Science and science studies have tended increasingly to back away from the big ideas that were once in play. They have become too small, too introverted, too obsessed with mini debates of micro-tendencies, with only weak evidence of relevant intellectual history and social context.14

As to philosophy, although it is central to the human condition, many professional philosophers have reduced it to technicist esoterica or obfuscating nonsense. They have alienated many who have come to it seeking meaning, putting any defense of its declining status on dubious grounds. Some texts in philosophy of science seem to me to be equivalent to obsession with a game of chess while the house is burning down around it.

Marxism is still an alternative. It is still superior to anything on the scene. It is a way of seeing the world in terms of a complex pattern of interconnecting processes where others see only disconnected and static particulars. It is a way of revealing how economic structures, political institutions, legal codes, moral norms, cultural trends, scientific theories, philosophical perspectives, even common sense, are all products of a pattern of historical development shaped by a mode of production.

Marxism as a philosophy of science is materialist in the sense of explaining the natural world in terms of natural forces and not supernatural powers. It is dialectical in the sense of being evolutionary, processive, developmental. It is radically contextual and relational in seeing everything that exists within the web of forces in which it is embedded. It is empiricist without being positivist or reductionist; rationalist without being idealist; coherent and comprehensive while empirically grounded.

It needs constantly to be revised in light of the most advanced science, the most up-to-date knowledge, of its time. In philosophy of science, this means reflecting substantively on the philosophical implications of the empirical sciences and doing so in a thick sociohistorical context. In philosophy, generally it means looking to other disciplines and to interdisciplinary inquiries and participating in debates about the theoretical foundations of growing knowledge. It means scrutinizing contemporary shifts in the very production of knowledge.

Marxism has been a major position in the history of philosophy. It has been a formative force in science studies and other disciplines, and it is a continuing influence. It is not as influential as it deserves to be in the current intellectual landscape, but it is still more influential than many might think. It is there in ways that are not always acknowledged. It is sometimes the philosophy “that dare not speak its name.” Moreover, many of its premises have come to be so accepted that it seems no longer necessary or opportune even to know from where they have come.

Marxism lives on, but in circuitous and complex ways, sometimes in strong, brilliant, defiant ways, sometimes in subtle yet influential ways, but sometimes too in weak, confused, and debased ways. It is often “Marxism lite” as an element of shallow intellectual history to be raided for random insights for shallow theory. Some are quasi-Marxists or post-Marxists. They have become discouraged by defeat or decentered by postmodernism. It was one thing when the wind was at their back, but they have been swept off their feet by crosswinds they could not withstand. There are ebbs and flows and new waves of realization all the time.

The current push for the decolonization of knowledge is important. I cheered as Rhodes fell at the University of Cape Town in 2015. I cringed every time I passed it on campus prior to that. However, I have watched as a lot of this progressive impulse has become unmoored for failure to see what has been achieved by previous generations or that the central force colonizing knowledge is capital. I am already seeing a lot of it co-opted into a bland and blind liberal agenda.15

There is evidence of a revival of interest in Marxism in relation to science now. Over the years, my invitations to speak about it rose and fell. The reasons why I and other Marxists are now sought out have more to do with our current planetary emergency, particularly the looming climate catastrophe and the persisting COVID-19 pandemic. Science has become urgent. Premodern or postmodern antiscience is a blind alley. Positivist scientism has some limited potency, but is too narrow, too myopic to grasp the full picture.

I have not seen much of the postmodernist critique of science lately. Because science has become so salient, so immediate, so crucial to our collective fate, I do not think anyone wants to hear that we have no criteria for deciding between contending truth claims or that science is inherently deceptive or oppressive. Yet science under capitalism has never been so problematic. Only systemic analysis can address this, and only action flowing from this understanding is able to deal with the issues that emerge.

The statistics on carbon emissions or biodiversity loss only get us so far unless we name the system that created the problem, fuels the process, and blocks possible solutions. There is so much being written about ecological crisis, but it is Marxists, such as John Bellamy Foster, Ian Angus, and Andreas Malm, who connect the science to philosophy, sociology, and political economy, who bring the whole picture into clear focus and point the way beyond it.16

It is the same with the current pandemic. The statistics on COVID cases, hospitalizations, deaths, vaccinations, and mitigation measures only get us so far unless we see what conditions have created this pandemic and persist to create future and fiercer pandemics. It is Marxists, such as Mike Davis and Rob Wallace, who predicted that such a pandemic was coming and showed how it was bound up with circuits of capital. Whatever may have happened in the Wuhan lab or market, the real source is in deforestation, destruction of habitats, wildlife trafficking, the whole industrialized system of food production, and the global circuitry of capital. Marxists and others have highlighted the downgrading of public health systems, the negative effect on patents, and the stranglehold of big pharma in obstructing just distribution of vaccines and therapeutic medicines.17

We need a more open, cooperative international science to deal with these problems. There have been moves in this direction in response to current crises, but the obstructions are still formidable.

Marxists have been at the fore in doing the systemic thinking demanded by these crises, not only in clarifying the causes, but pointing to the solutions—solutions difficult to achieve, because the imperatives generated by ecological and epidemiological crises go contrary to the very logic of capitalism. I think this is being understood by more and more people, the sort of people who gathered outside the barriers of the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference or followed the news reports with dismay.

So where are we now? It is a paradox: never has there been such a totalizing, systematizing force as contemporary global capitalism and yet never has there been such inhibition of synthesizing systemic thinking. The centralizing market decenters the psyche. It organizes production and consumption, but disorganizes community. Nevertheless, there is a seeking of truth, a striving for justice that the system can neither satisfy nor suppress. In this, I place my hope in a revival of the kind of totalizing thinking and collective acting that Marxism has nurtured through the decades.

The history of Marxism and its relation to science is tied inextricably to the history of everything else. It has been so far a riveting drama, full of revelation, catharsis, tragedy, and farce. We are ready for the next act. It is still the unsurpassed philosophy of our time.

Notes

1. ↩ The story here is necessarily somewhat sketchy, sweeping through decades and dealing with many thinkers, theories, and debates. For the fuller story, see my more comprehensive account in Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (1985; repr. London: Verso, 2018).
2. ↩ For a good account of the whole history of this debate, see Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
3. ↩ The Soviet papers from this congress were published as Nikolai Bukharin et al., Science at the Crossroads (London: Kniga, 1931).
4. ↩ Nikolai Bukharin, Philosophical Arabesques (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005).
5. ↩ For more on this congress and its aftermath, see Gary Werskey, The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (London: Allen Lane, 1978); Christopher Chilvers, “Five Tourniquets and a Ship’s Bell: The Special Session at the 1931 Congress,” Centaurus 57, no. 2 (2015): 61–95; Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.
6. ↩ Christopher Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Christopher Caudwell, Heredity ad Development (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); Christopher Caudwell, The Crisis in Physics (London: Verso, 2018).
7. ↩ D. Bernal, Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (London: Watts & Company, 1934); Helena Sheehan, “J. D. Bernal: Philosophy, Politics and the Science of Science,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 57 (2007): 29–‌39.
8. ↩ Werskey, The Visible College; Robert Young, “Science Is Social Relations,” Radical Science Journal 5 (1977): 65–129.
9. ↩ Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
10. ↩ For a more elaborate account of these conferences and other events and movements of these years, see Helena Sheehan, Navigating the Zeitgeist (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
11. ↩ Loren Graham, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
12. ↩ Barry Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); Barry Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977); David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).
13. ↩ The catalytic events were the publication of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition in 1994, the infamous Sokal hoax in 1996 and the flurry of publicity surrounding it (the special issue of Social Text on the “science wars,” books were published, and so on), and the New York Academy of Science conference, published as The Flight from Science and Reason. For an overview, see Ullica Segerstrale, ed., Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse About Science and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Helena Sheehan, “The Drama of the Science Wars: What Is the Plot?,” Public Understanding of Science 10, no. 2 (2001).
14. ↩ For example, see Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999).
15. ↩ Helena Sheehan “Class, Race, Gender and the Production of Knowledge: Considerations on the Decolonisation of Knowledge,” Transform 7 (2020): 13–30.
16. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2020); Ian Angus, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017); Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York: Verso, 2017); Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2020).
17. ↩ Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2020); Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Rob Wallace, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

 

3013. 18 Theses on Marxism and Animal Liberation

By Bündnis Marxismus und Tierbefreiung/Alliance for Marxism and Animal Liberation, August 17, 2018

Neither has the Marxist left stood up for the liberation of animals so far, nor has the animal rights and animal liberation movement taken up the construction of a socialist society. We argue that Marxists and animal liberationists have the same enemy–the bourgeoisie. Our 18 theses justify why they must unite for a truly revolutionary project.

Marxism and the liberation of animals are two things which, at first glance, do not seem to have much in common. Neither did the former make waves for being particularly animal-loving, nor are animal lovers known for taking up the cause of liberating the working class and the construction of a socialist society.

Quite the opposite: Classical Marxism has little appeal to the predominantly autonomist-anarchist animal rights activists; it is regarded as an overly simplified theory and as an authoritarian ideology which has become obsolete with the end of actually existing socialism. Although the critique of capitalism and the labour movement’s vocabulary (‘comrade,’ ‘class’) are regaining popularity amongst the radical left, one nevertheless does not quite know what to make of traditional Marxists. Marxists are considered to be people who notoriously hate animals and only talk economy, and who are often indistinguishable from petty bourgeois philistines who do not want to forego their grilled sausages.

Marxists, in turn, do not hold animal liberation activists in particularly high regard either: they are often seen as strange ascetics and bourgeois moralists who invest themselves in negligible causes instead of focusing on the key issues. They are expected to take part in actions and alliances for class struggle, but to leave their ‘animal craze’ at the door. Many comrades break out in cold sweat when they ponder a society in which both humans and animals alike are liberated from exploitation and oppression, since it would mean giving up their meat and cheese. And anyway: Friedrich Engels already made fun of the “Herren Vegetarianer” who underestimated the importance of meat consumption in the history of human civilization and who were, at best, utopian socialists.

Nevertheless, we reject this opposition and believe that the historical materialist analysis and critique of society developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the corresponding politics and the call to liberate animals from their socially produced suffering all necessarily belong together. On the one hand, demands for animal liberation are indeed moralist if they do not analyse the historically specific conditions in which the exploitation of animals is taking place and which social changes are necessary to end it. On the other hand, however, every Marxist critique of society remains incomplete if it does not consider the fact that, to make profits, the ruling classes have not only exploited the oppressed classes within the history of class struggle, but also and always animals (and nature).

The exploitation of wage labourers on the one hand, and of animals on the other, may have qualitative differences in the way they have developed historically, and their relation to the means of productions also remains different today. In spite of all the differences, however, the working class and animals have a common history during which they have both faced the ruling class antagonistically as suffering, humiliated, oppressed and abandoned beings; the former as subjects, the latter as objects of liberation. Hence, we argue: the idea of animal liberation remains inconsistent when it repudiates the historical materialist critique of society. At the same time, Marxism remains equally inconsistent when it refuses to acknowledge that today, the liberation of animals must be integral to contemporary Marxist theory and politics. Firstly, the current stage in the development of the productive forces not only makes such liberation possible, but indeed necessary. Secondly, everyone who aspires to create a world without socially produced and objectively preventable exploitation, domination and suffering is required to also acknowledge the suffering of animals and strive for its abolition. Isolated approaches to unite Marxism and animal liberation have already occurred in the history of the left and the labour movement. But these have not become widely accepted to date. The following theses explain why Marxists and animal liberationists should not be compelled into a forced marriage but rather unite in a bond for life.

Why anti-speciesism must be Marxist

I.

Modern, capitalist society recognises animals only as material carriers of value and as capital’s means of production, as means of labour and subjects of labour which are supplied by nature for free–as long as no human labour is used to harness it.

The executives in the meat industry, the heart of the animal exploitation complex, earn billions with the killing of animals. In Germany alone, record turnovers of up to 40 billion Euros per year are reached by slaughtering more than 60 million pigs, 3.5 million cows and 700 million chicken, ducks and geese annually. Even in Switzerland, the sales volume amounts to 10 billion Swiss francs. In circuses and zoos, ‘exotic’ animals are usually kept under atrocious conditions to perform excruciating, stultifying show-acts. During hunts, they are killed for the mere amusement of mostly well-off huntsmen. In experiments, they serve as objects of research and labour, while the pet industry overbreeds and sells them off as toys. These conditions are horrific and brutal and anybody who witnesses them and who does not have a completely alienated relationship with the environment experiences at least some sort of empathy with the sentient beings when seeing them in their plight.

As a consequence, a commitment to ending animal exploitation often begins with being appalled by the killing of animals on a mass-scale and by their ideological degradation. At the same time, such a commitment may begin with an impulse of solidarity in search of an explanation for the exploitation and for a way to abolish it. Empathy with the suffering of animals then leads to a theoretical reflection on the relation between humans and animals and sparks the impulse to become active in the struggle for the liberation of animals. But how does this impulse manifest itself in practice? Let us look at the theory and practice of the current animal liberation movement.

II.

In a nutshell and somewhat simplified, the contemporary German-speaking animal rights and animal liberation movement is dominated by a politico-theoretical current which the Marxist philosopher Marco Maurizi describes as “metaphysical anti-speciesism.” It is composed of three main schools of thought:

• Bourgeois moral philosophy in the tradition of Peter Singer, Richard Ryder, Tom Regan, Hilal Sezgin and others.
• Liberal legal criticism, the figurehead of which was for a long time Gary Francione. Authors such as Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson have joined him recently.
• Social liberal post-structuralist anti-authoritarianism, which relies on the thinking of Carol J. Adams, Donna Haraway, Birgit Mütherich, Jacques Derrida and others.

Bourgeois anti-speciesist moral philosophy is predominant in a number of organizations and initiatives, such as PETA, which raise political demands for animal rights and animal welfare and appeal to consumers, the state and private institutions by means of petitions, lobbying, campaigns, offering expert consultancy and so forth.

Liberal legal critics form a theoretical and political bridge between moral philosophers and anti-authoritarianism. Depending on their interpretation and affinity to any of the two political theories, they may lean toward one or the other. This also explains to some degree the broad agreement in the animal welfare, animal rights and animal liberation movement that animal rights indeed are an aim to strive for.

The social liberal post-structuralist-anti-speciesist anti-authoritarianism makes its political appearance in forms of the extra-parliamentary left inspired by autonomism and anarchism respectively. Such autonomist anti-speciesism represents the core of the abolitionist wing of the animal rights and the animal liberation movement.

III.

Bourgeois anti-speciesist moral philosophy deals with the question of why the suffering of animals is considered different from the suffering of humans, or, to be more precise: why such differences provide the moral basis for actions.

Accordingly, this current vets commonly accepted justifications for killing and utilizing animals–for example that animals do not reason and lack cognitive abilities, that animal suffering is different in kind and less grave than human suffering, and so on. Also, it reveals the inner contradictions in the arguments for killing and using animals by pointing out that not all animals lack cognitive skills, for instance, and that neither are all humans (of all ages, and so on) equally capable of performing cognitive tasks. Moreover, even within the human collective, forms of suffering are so different that we could thus hardly speak of a universal human suffering in opposition to a universal animal suffering. As a consequence of such inconsistencies, advocates of the anti-speciesist moral philosophy maintain that there are no justifiable reasons to make morally significant distinctions between human and animal suffering. Accordingly, they ask why such distinctions are made in practice nevertheless. Their answer: because human society is permeated by speciesism, that is, the ideological assumption that the human species is superior. The argument is that just like racism or sexism, speciesism establishes normative boundaries that cannot be justified and thus lacks any actual foundation. Instead, according to Singer, speciesism, defined as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species,” is the reason for the “discrimination” against animals.

The merits of such a moral philosophy are that speciesist ideology is confronted with its own untenable claims. However, bourgeois anti-speciesist moral philosophy has numerous problems of its own: strictly speaking, it does not explain why animals are being exploited, why they are being made objects of economic utilization; rather, it explains how the different treatment of animals and humans is legitimized and shrouded under current social circumstances. This is an important distinction. Therefore, bourgeois moral philosophy can tell us which form of thought justifies that humans are not killed in abattoirs and why in the case of animals the slaughtering is not eliminated, for example. Yet it cannot contribute anything of substance on the origin and function of animal exploitation or, more specifically, explain both the abattoir as an industrialised business and for what purpose the animals are killed in it. Instead, it reduces all these questions to abstract, individual acts, views and practices that are treated in complete isolation from the functioning of capitalist society. Moreover, such moral philosophy is ahistorical: its subject matter is speciesist ideology of the bourgeois society within the here and now. It is interested in the history of human-animal relations only in terms of the history of ideology, if at all; it can tell us nothing about the social origin and the genesis of speciesist ideology.

IV.

Liberal animal rights theory primarily attempts to explain why animals, in contrast to humans, do not have civil liberties, why they are treated as objects but not as subjects of law. Its answer is essentially tautological: because animals are defined by law as property. Following this line of argument, because animals are normatively determined as human property, every serious conflict of interest between the species then leads to the defeat of non-human creatures. The status of animals as property then prepares the way for the institutionalized exploitation of animals. Depending on the respective politico-scientific reading, the problem is accordingly the absence of either negative or positive basic rights analogous to human rights. Advocates of this theory conclude that current law is based on a moral prejudice that privileges humans over animals, much in the same way as whites had once been favoured over black slaves. The theory of law thus excludes animals from being subjects of rights by definition.

The criticism of the judicial fact that animals are legally considered to be ‘things’ and/or ‘property’ of natural or legal persons has not lost any validity today. However, legal norms neither self-evidentially explain nor have they or the theory of law established the exploitation of animals. Animals are not just private property because the law says so or because jurists presume them to be. Private ownership (of the means of production) is constitutional because the law is the legal expression of bourgeois relations of production and exchange. In the course of class struggle, the ruling class has degraded nature in general and animals in particular to a means of production at their disposal, secured such hierarchy juristically and stipulated it as universally applicable. For that reason, it is lawful today for man to treat the animal as their property. Legal norms allow the exploitation of animals because they are bourgeois, not just because they are speciesist.

However, there are instances in which animal rights theorists have also contributed to focus the analytic perspective despite the legalistic and anti-speciesist mystifications immanent to their positions. In particular, among the irrevocable achievements of the anti-speciesist legal criticism is that it highlights how the juristic status quo enables an economically more efficient exploitation of animals and how it fosters the required political compliance of civil society at the same time–in other words, that the actually existing animal welfare law therefore secures rather than prevents the exploitation and oppression of animals.

Yet it weighs all the heavier, then, that animal rights theory is subservient to bourgeois illusions about state and law. Animal rights theorists sever the connection between capitalist economy on the one hand and the bourgeois form of state and its legal form on the other, and even propagate the latter as a positive frame of reference for progressive politics. Certainly, it is legitimate, insofar as it is possible, to enlist federal institutions and laws as tools in the fight against the animal industry. However, the demand to turn animals into citizens or similar subjects of rights is an ideological one. This is especially true against the background that, even among humans, state and law do not guarantee but undermine liberty, equality and fraternity.

V.

The post-structuralist-anti-speciesist critique of power proceeds in much the same way as the bourgeois moral philosophy, but radicalizes the ethical consideration of human-animal relations. It asks primarily how the animal was introduced to the world as a social construct and holds that this construct is continuously reproduced through, for example, religious, literary or journalistic publications and those of the natural and social sciences–from the bible through Descartes to Kant. Speciesism, it claims in unison, is the result of a dualist construction of society and nature, “the large occidental discourse” (Coetzee) of the human and the animal. Furthermore, advocates of this current highlight that while all those characteristics that had been somehow beneficial to the progress of human civilization–reason, science, will, rationality and so forth–are ascribed to society, whereas the side of nature is identified with everything that has been superseded and left behind by this process–spirituality, drives, affectivity, magic and so on. According to this interpretation, such a dualist construction continues within the relation between humans and animals: humans are constructed as reasonable, rational and analysing subjects, which are raised above animals who are constructed as unreasonable creatures of nature controlled by their drives and affects. Arguing by means of this dualism is the foundation of the post-structuralist-anti-speciesist critique of power to explain the political dominance of humans over animals, the control of the former over the latter as well as the latter’s exclusion from democracy.

In its proceeding, the post-structuralist-anti-speciesist approach differs little from that of anti-authoritarian feminists and anti-racists, who examine forms of sexist and racist practices in similar ways. According to this perspective, sexism exists because the woman is constructed as an emotional creature driven by affects and requiring protection, whereas the man is constructed as being rational and ‘cool headed,’ strong-minded and able to assert himself; the root of racism, in turn, is the construction of the other, for instance peoples and religions degraded as primitive in contrast to the superior Western nations.

The radicalness of the anti-speciesist critique of power amounts to showing the duality residing in speciesist ideology, to calling this duality out as an instrument of political domination and to reject passing off the struggle against one ideology as more important than fights against other ideologies. For this reason, autonomist anti-speciesists oppose animal exploitation with the same conviction that they oppose sexism, racism, homophobia and other social mechanisms of exclusion which belie any promise of bourgeois emancipation. This is also why the unity-of-oppression approach–known in its current form as intersectionality or total liberation–is so popular among them.

In purely analytic terms, many observations of anti-authoritarian anti-speciesism are correct. The problem is that they deliver mere descriptions of the dominant discourse on human-animal relations and other forms of oppression, but no explanation as to why the human-animal relation is the way it is, and why the criticized discourse is so predominant. A post-structuralist-anti-authoritarian anti-speciesism can elucidate the character of the dualism of human and animal in bourgeois ideology, that is, how it is present as an ideological form of thinking in discourses that are called upon; it cannot, however, determine the origin or the function of this ideology. It offers no explanation for what exactly created the ideological dualism of the human and the animal and what mediates it. Whenever anti-authoritarian anti-speciesists allude to this point, their analysis becomes woolly. For this reason, it remains phenomenological, in the end purely formal and, above all, idealist, as it considers mere (wrong) thinking to be the engine of history. What is more: The unity-of-oppression approach confuses the question of the qualitative interrelation between different types of oppression and their genesis with their political-normative assessment. Ultimately, it is capable only of tautological patterns of explanation: Speciesism hence arises from speciesist discourse. Historical materialist theories are mostly taboo. The question of the inner and functional correlation between bourgeois relations of production and racist ideology, for example, is confused with the question of whether capitalism as a mode of oppression is normatively worse than racism or more important an issue–or vice versa. Thus, already the attempt at analysis is rejected.

VI.

We can thus establish: both anti-speciesist moral philosophy, and its more radicalised version, anti-authoritarian anti-speciesism, as well as the liberal legal criticism offer no useful explanations for the exploitation of animals and its ideological concealment. They can describe speciesist ideology and legal norms in detail, determine their parallels and commonalities with other similarly structured ideologies and norms and also highlight inner contradictions within these ideologies and laws. They cannot tell us, however, how ideological thinking about animals or their status as property came into the world and why in bourgeois capitalist society animal exploitation took on precisely the highly technological, industrialised form which it currently has. In short: they do not help us understand why, in whose interest and how exactly animals are exploited in capitalist society.

Such theoretical deficiencies yield immediate consequences for political praxis: all three approaches deal exclusively with the inner functionality of speciesist reasoning. Accordingly, every form of animal exploitation appears to them as the result of speciesist consciousness–for them the political practice directed at liberating animals is also primarily a question of adequate thinking, moral comport and legal norms. The circle of friends, the butcher, the producer of meat, the animal testing laboratory and its lobbyists–according to those schools, they all must cast off their speciesist thinking for animals to be freed. Social praxis is here above all a question of social consciousness, which is the sum of the consciousnesses of all its separate individuals. Animal exploitation and animal liberation are reduced to a philosophical, epistemological, at best theoretical judicial problem. Moral philosophers, theorists of law and anti-authoritarian-anti-speciesists neither really explain that those who profit from the exploitation of animals have a strong interest in perpetuating current forms of animal exploitation, nor do they explain why they have this interest.

VII.

Here is precisely where Marxism comes into play. The early writings by Marx and Engels discuss the relation of being and consciousness, of nature and society and also of humans and animals. Marx and Engels pose the question in what way historically specific forms of cognition and consciousness interrelate with the way in which society is organized–in other words, the question of the element of mediation between being and consciousness. Their answer, grossly simplified: through social labour in the respective historically specific relations of production, humans produce by way of their material existence their own consciousness as well as the conditions by which this consciousness can and has to change. It is social labour–the active alteration of pre-existing conditions–which molds both nature and the functionality of society, while also creating the basis for the understanding of both. Hence, Marx and Engels say: we must look at what produces the supposed dualism between being and consciousness, between society and nature, what mediates and influences it, what constitutes the inner relation between humans, society and nature–and this something is social labour in its respective historically specific form. Therefore, the contradiction between society on the one hand, and animals and nature on the other does not simply develop in people’s minds: capitalism as a historically specific form of organizing social labour produces this contradiction constantly anew: within the capitalist process of production, animals and nature quite literally become a mere resource to exploit.

This way of understanding the relation between humans, society and nature is historical materialist. It is a materialist perspective, because it assumes that social existence forms the basis for consciousness; and its materialism is historical, because it does not consider existence as fixed and invariable but understands it as existence that is produced socially by humans themselves. There also exists an unhistorical materialism, from which Marx and Engels disassociated themselves forcefully. The relation between being and consciousness is not a deterministic one in the sense of a simple schematism, as Engels emphasizes: “The economic situation is the basis, but the various factors of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, namely constitutions set up by the ruling class after a victorious battle, etc., forms of law and the reflections of all these real struggles in the minds of the participants, i.e. political, philosophical and legal theories, religious views and their expansion of the same into dogmatic systems — all these factors also have a bearing on the course of the historical struggles of which, in many cases they largely determine the form. It is in the interaction of all these factors and amidst an unending multitude of fortuities (…) that the economic trend ultimately asserts itself as something inevitable.”

VIII.

If we want to explain, criticize and abolish the exploitation of animals, rather than deal exclusively with the patterns of its legitimization, we must rely on the tools of historical materialism.

In one of their most important texts for this endeavour, The German Ideology, Marx and Engels show how humans step by step worked their way out of nature by repressing both inner and outer nature, how they learned to use and subjugate nature and how thereby humans produced the difference between nature and society themselves. According to this analysis, humans produced and domesticated themselves by learning to dominate external and their inner nature through labour. Marx and Engels highlight that humans were originally animals–and that they also remain such. However, through social labour, through the social development of production and distribution and through their socio-historical evolution humans attained a gradual difference from other animals. In Marx’s and Engels’ words: “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life.” At the same time, it would not occur to Marx and Engels to “dispute the ability of animals to act in a planned, premediated fashion,” as Engels writes in Dialectics of Nature, “but all the planned action of all animals has never succeeded in impressing the stamp of their will upon the earth.” Humans, creatures of nature, who have to satisfy natural needs such as food, drink and so forth, hence do not differ categorically but gradually from animals, and this gradual difference is the result of their own politic-economic social praxis.

IX.

Therefore, historical materialism provides a fruitful approach to explain the history and development of human-animal relations: they are the result of a process of civilization in which humans have worked their way out of nature through social labour and have thereby produced the difference from non-human animals themselves. Unlike post-structuralist anti-speciesism, for example, historical materialism can not only describe the dualism between humans and animals but also explain it. Furthermore, it can identify social labour as the element through which this dualism is constantly reproduced in practice. It follows that the ideological perceptions of animals are not mere figments of imagination but are also actually true, in so far as they have a real material foundation. Speciesist thinking about animals hence is not the basis of animal exploitation, but rather the latter’s ideological reflex. Marco Maurizi got to the heart of this: “We do not exploit animals because we deem them to be inferior, rather, we deem animals to be inferior because we exploit them.” Yet from this also follows that we have to determine the historically specific forms this relation is organised in. After all, there is no universal social labour that propels the process of civilization, but always only social labour in historically particular forms of organization.

X.

It is not just the politico-economic relations of current capitalist society that brought about classes that confront each other antagonistically, but also the preceding relations. The conflict between the classes, which results from their opposing interests, remains history’s engine to this day. Accordingly, the Manifesto of the Communist Party states: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Within contemporary bourgeois-capitalist class society, the organization of social labour rests basically upon two social relations: the organization of labour by way of the market–labour is a commodity–and class relations: workers and capitalists confront each other in the process of production. Capitalists own the means of production (or the necessary capital for their acquisition), they thus buy instruments of labour, subjects of labour and labour force (the latter offered by the wage labourers who have nothing else to sell) and deploy them in the production process. The product re-assumes the form of commodity, which is sold for profit. However, this profit, the accumulation of which is the reason and purpose of capitalist production, does not just fall from the sky. It can be obtained only by exploiting the workers: they work beyond the point at which they have produced a value equivalent to their wage; they thereby produce a surplus that is not at their own but at the capitalists’ disposal. Capitalists, writes Marx in the third volume of Capital, build “a veritable freemason society vis-à-vis the whole working class.”

Therefore, given that there are both exploiters and exploited in capitalist society, it is not the whole human species who exploits animals. Instead, the exploitation of animals and wage labourers first and foremost takes place following the interests and under the direction of the ruling class. Of course, the exploitation of animals and the exploitation of wage labourers differ qualitatively, and the latter do not necessarily act in solidarity with animals just because they are also being oppressed and exploited. Workers in abattoirs even kill animals. But capitalist relations of production do not only rest upon an antagonism between capitalists and the working class, but also between the ruling class and nature as well as animals. The former conducts the industrially organised exploitation of animals and profits substantially from it. Accordingly, as Marx writes, “The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for and practical debasement of, nature.” This of course includes animals. To answer the question why not only workers are exploited under capitalism but also animals–if in a particular qualitatively different way–one must examine the position and function that animals inherit in this form of organizing social labour, and hence the specific capitalist form of animal exploitation.

XI.

Animals do not immediately take part in the social relations that are characteristic for capitalism as active individuals–they do not purchase or sell anything on the market, not even their labour: when they expend labour in the process of production they do not receive wages in return. Accordingly, animals do not produce surplus value and are not part of the working class. Their exploitation corresponds to what Marx describes as exploitation of nature: by virtue of bourgeois property rights and the economic power at their disposal, the capitalists make a profit from the ruinous dealing with animals and nature. This is not exploitation in the sense of the labour theory of value. Yet Marx also does not limit the notion of exploitation to the production of surplus value. And he certainly does not conclude from the observation that slaves also do not produce surplus value that they are not exploited.

Since they cannot resist in an organized manner, animals are appropriated just like other natural materials as freely available means of production, that is, as instruments of labour (as though they were machines for the production of eggs, milk, meat and so forth) and subjects of labour (leather, meat for further processing and so on). Wage labourers perform the oftentimes violent appropriation in practice. They execute, under capital’s command, the production of surplus value, which in the animal industry encompasses killing and milking as well as performing vivisections and suchlike more. The products that are produced by animals or which they themselves are, are processed further by wage labourers and are finally sold as commodities. The production of profits hence rests not only upon the exploitation of wage labourers, but also on that of animals in particular and of nature in general. For the purpose of maximizing the profits that are realized through the exploitation of animals, capitalists are striving to integrate animals into the process of production as efficiently as possible. Efficiently also means: by abstracting from their qualities, among which is their ability to suffer.

XII.

From all this follows for us that only a historical materialist anti-speciesism proves capable of comprehensively explaining and analysing human-animal relations, which upon closer inspection reveal themselves today as relations of exploitation and domination between capital on the one hand and the proletariat, animals and nature on the other. A historical materialist anti-speciesism opens up new perspectives for the analysis and critique of bourgeois class society, and it identifies areas in which the capitalist order proves vulnerable and which need to be targeted in order to liberate animals from exploitation.

Indeed, one cannot conclude from the critique of political economy that animals would automatically be liberated within a socialist or communist society. Yet, the struggle against the rule of capital and its expropriation are necessary preconditions in order to enable people to collectively cast the decision: we will liberate the animals!

As long as the relation of capital persists and with it the control of the ruling class over what is produced, as well as how and by what means, capital will appropriate nature and incorporate everything into the process of valorisation from which one cannot save oneself or take a stand against.

Why Marxism must be anti-speciesist

XIII.

For Marxists, much of what has been said so far is not new. Historical materialism and the Marxian critique of political economy are after all the guiding principle of their economic and political analyses. They could therefore shrug their shoulders and tell the animal liberationists: well spotted, now stop with the moralizing and start fighting capitalism with us. And they would have good reasons for this!

We think, however: If one is serious about historical materialism, then one must acknowledge that humans and animals do not only have a shared history. Above all, the oppressed, exploited classes and animals have the same enemy, who profits from and is responsible for their exploitation while also organizing–in different ways–their oppression: the ruling class. In addition, Marxists need to recognize that due to its damaging social and ecological effects the current extent of animal production is objectively irrational and obstructs social progress.

XIV.

The current level of the development of productive forces does not just allow us to think about resolving the socially produced suffering of animals and to pose the question of including them in the struggle for liberation. A glance at the carbon footprint of the meat industry or its mindless consumption of natural resources also highlights the urgent necessity to develop a Marxist position on the social dealing with animals. The contradiction between capitalism and nature has reached a scale today that threatens the principal survival of the human species–to which industrialised animal production makes a significant contribution.

Today, the exploitation of animals is not only objectively unnecessary, but irrational and counter-progressive. It causes excessive and ever-growing consumption of resources such as water and soy, which are not used for meaningful purposes but are deployed in the production of meat, milk and eggs, and which are not at all rationally distributed. The ecological damages caused by clearing rain forests, by monoculture cultivation or by the pollution of water are already partially irreversible. Therefore, whoever believes that they can ignore the production of meat or even transpose it into a socialist operation, is taken in by the naïve and romanticized image of industrialized food production that the capital lobby groups are promoting. The conversion of the food and meat industry into ecologically sustainable, vegan and socially planned production, in contrast, would be a timely socialist demand.

It is well-known that the utilization and consumption of animals plays an important part in the history of human civilization. This, however, does not warrant its continuation to the present day: today’s productive forces do not only permit sympathy for the suffering of animals, but they also make it possible and necessary to restructure the relations of production accordingly. And, as the present theses in this paper ought to prove, Marxists have no reasonable cause not to do so.

The fact that the technological potential of developed capitalism enables historical progress should not hide the fact that this potential also allows for capacious destruction: it contains the possibility for liberation and at the same time for total reification, disregard and annihilation of life. If modern productive forces shall no longer be destructive forces but means for the unfolding of progress and well-being, those who have a mutual interest in this must join forces. They need to change the social relations, so that the productive forces are no longer deployed for the profit of few, but instead be developed and applied for the benefit of all. That is why we say: Marxists and animal liberationists should join forces in their struggle for a revolutionary, truly civilizing project–the liberation of humans, animals and nature.

XV.

In contrast to idealist conceptions of history, historical materialists assume that not ideas, but class struggles are the engine of human history. This struggle is based on the fact that within class societies the interests of classes which antagonistically oppose each other can never be reconciled–the antagonism can merely be disguised, or, rather, be suppressed by way of ideological mechanisms, religion, politics, law and so on. The ruling class is at pains to assure as much, for example by imposing their ideas as the dominant ideas.

Just as there are qualitative differences in the functions animals and wage labourers have within the process of production and in the process of their exploitation, the role animals inherit in the struggle against the ruling class is also different from that of the wage labourers. Wage labourers can organize to defend themselves, plan strikes and demonstrations or think about a liberated society. Above all, however, in contradistinction to animals, they can analyse the social conditions under which they are being exploited and dominated and, consequently, derive concrete measures to organize their own liberation. For this reason, the working class can be the subject of its own liberation. Animals, in contrast, can only be objects of liberation.

When it comes to the question of animal liberation, traditional Marxists often bring up this difference between wage labourers and animals. They argue that no historical necessity for the liberation of animals can be deduced from a systematically reflected social analysis. This is correct: when it comes to its implementation, animal liberation is essentially a politico-economic question–its necessity cannot be derived immediately from an analysis of capital. Yet the situation with regard to abolishing wage slavery is not significantly different. As a historical necessity, organized class struggle from below can neither be deduced from the analysis of capital relations and the realization that class struggle is the driving force of history. It also only exists if and when wage labourers politically decide to take it up.

Revolutionary Marxists not only analyse the modern mode of production. They also make the political decision to fight against their subjugation to capital based on their experiences, their suffering, their consciousness that they have of capitalist exploitation and their knowledge of the “material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle,” as Marx writes.

Whoever has accepted that liberation is necessary (at all) to end socially produced suffering and exploitation has no reason–other than an ideological one–to exclude animals from this endeavour. The analysis of capital relations as central relations of exploitation and domination in today’s society shows that the production of capitalist profits is not solely based upon the exploitation of wage labourers, but also upon the exploitation of animals (and nature in general). Capitalist production, in which the interaction between society and nature is organized in order to maximize profits, simultaneously saps the original sources of all wealth: “the soil and the labourer” (Marx). An uncompromising struggle for the abolishment of this relation must therefore include the struggle for the liberation of animals and nature.

XVI.

Thus, once one has decided to fight for liberation, there is no reason why one undertakes everything to end socially produced suffering, while at the same time excluding animals from this goal (according to some Marxists this is even the case in communism). Indeed, despite all qualitative differences in the exploitation of wage labourers and animals: both humans and animals alike have the capacity to suffer–even though it constantly takes on different forms. It would be inconsistent and a product of false consciousness to set a clear and absolute distinction between humans and animals where this capacity is concerned, something which has remained their commonality in spite of the gradual differences that have been developed socio-historically.

At this point, many Marxist comrades object saying that all the talk of suffering is moralism, and that morals cannot provide the foundation for a class conscious anti-capitalist politics. After all, one cannot fight the bourgeoisie with empathy or appeals to sympathy, but with an organization and a deliberate political line developed on the grounds of a concrete analysis of the concrete situation. And this is correct, but even so, they make two mistakes: they misjudge the historical materialist significance of suffering and confuse the genuine existence of morality with bourgeois moralism.
The suffering we are writing about here is not an idealistic, but a historical materialist category. It is not a kind of suffering like lovesickness or toothache, but a suffering which is grounded necessarily in society’s organization, in its relations of production, and accordingly can and must be alleviated and potentially abolished. The will to do precisely this is an essential propulsion of class struggle and solidarity–it is part and parcel of historical materialism’s spark. To neglect the suffering in Marxist theory means accordingly to negate an important element of its foundation.
Even politics in the best Marxian sense is initially motivated by morals, for the simple reason that, as we have demonstrated, the suffering under (wage) slavery and exploitation is a catalyst of the search for possibilities to abolish capitalism. The realization that the production of exploitation, oppression, imperialism and suchlike is inherent to capitalism, or, in other words: that it spawns conditions under which we suffer, causes Marxists to analyse and criticize society and, on this basis, to do revolutionary politics.

We can hence establish: Marxists are also driven by a moral impulse, which is essential for the decision to become politically active as well as to promote political messages. Yet they do not stop there. Rather, they realize the political and economic limitations of empathy and make the experience of suffering the starting point of a historical materialist analysis of society. Thereby, they derive the political necessity to organize themselves not exclusively from the exploiteds’ collective experience of suffering, but from the understanding of the objective position wage labourers occupy in the social fabric–and which possibilities for a class struggle from below arise from this.

This is the difference between morality and moralism: revolutionary morals understand that a “really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life” (Engels).

XVII.

As long as the class antagonism is not overcome, the alienation of workers from their product of labour, from themselves, from the social process of production and from nature will also persist. In the animal industry, such alienation needs to be extreme so that wage labourers are able to harm creatures capable of suffering in the process of production, to process them industrially, that is, to kill them. Within capitalist exploitation of animals, we lose the consciousness that we have an essential commonality with animals: that we, too, possess a tormentable body, and that ultimately to be a human also means to be an animal. The suppression of the inner nature of humans is both a condition and a consequence of the capitalist mode of organizing social labour at the same time.

XVIII.

When taking all of this into account, then we also have to conclude: the very indignation we experience in the face of capitalism’s brutality that drives us to a Marxist analysis of society and to resistance is the same one that animal liberationists experience in the face of the suffering of animals. The enemy of animals–capital–is also the enemy of humans. As a Marxist, as an anti-capitalist, one must turn this impulse of solidarity into fuel for one’s life, and understand and acknowledge the objective position of animals within the capitalist process of production, that is, that they belong to those oppressed creatures at whose expense the ruling class accumulates its wealth. The class struggle for the liberation of animals is the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat.

Bündnis Marxismus und Tierbefreiung/Alliance for Marxism and Animal Liberation is an association of people active in the animal liberation movement and in the communist left.