Man and Nature, Parts I-IV (Complete) - The Charnel-House PDF

27/9/2019 Man and Nature, Parts I-IV (Complete) | The Charnel-House
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Mar
31 Man and Nature, Parts I-IV (Complete) 4
For those who would like to read my series of articles on Man and Nature,
here they are, presented as a continuous text. Also, for a detailed response
to the fourth installment of my series on Man and Nature, please visit the
Oroborous Self-Sufficient Community. Its founder, the scientist Allister
Cucksey, is a Robert Owens of sorts, and his counter-critique is welcome.
Caspar David Friedrich, "Sunset" (1835)
Man and Nature, Part I: The Shifting
https://thecharnelhouse.org/2011/03/31/man-and-nature-parts-i-iv-complete/ 1/53
Historical Conceptions of Nature in Society

History proves again and again
How Nature points out the folly of man…
— Blue Oyster Cult, “Godzilla”
With recent events in Japan and images of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004
tsunami still fresh in our minds, it seems appropriate to revisit the old issue of
humanity’s relationship to nature. The proper exposition of the problem would
require a great deal of space; therefore, I propose to divide my treatment of
the issue into three separate blog entries, each of which builds on the results
of those that precede it. After all, the problem of man’s relation to nature has
been conceived in a number of distinct ways over the ages, many of which
survive into the present day, in various mutations.
So perhaps it might be useful to begin with an overview, a genealogy of sorts,

so that these different conceptions and their relation to one another can be
clarified. The presentation will be dialectical, but not out of any obligation to
some artificially preconfigured format. It will be dialectical because the
subject at hand is itself really dialectical, as the various conceptions of nature
interweave and overlap in their progress through history. For man’s
orientation to nature has by no means been the same over time; and by that
same token are no later conceptions of nature that do not bear the traces of
those that came before it.
And so, to begin at the beginning:
At some points, nature was viewed as an adversary to be feared, bringing

plague, catastrophe, and famine to ravage mankind. Often these elemental
forces were either animistically, naturalistically, or totemistically embodied as
divine powers in themselves,[1] or anthropomorphized as gods who
commanded these forces as they saw fit. When cataclysms occurred, it was
because the gods or spirits had somehow been enraged by the misdeeds of
men, and thus they unleashed their fury upon the mass of fear-stricken
mortals. In Christian times, this same logic persisted,[2] with periods of
plenty seen as signs of God’s providence and grace, while periods of blight
were viewed as God’s wrath, brought on by the sinfulness and iniquity of men.
Later, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, nature was reenvisioned as dead

matter, abiding by a set of mechanical but unknown laws, which could be
discovered and mastered through careful study and observation under
controlled conditions. As the Baconian dictum went, contra Aristotle: “the
secrets of nature reveal themselves better through harassments applied by
the arts [torture] than when they go on in their own way.”[3] Thus began the
“conquest” of nature, the quest to harness its forces so that they may serve
the ends of mankind. Robbed of their mysterious properties, natural objects
therefore became “disenchanted,” in the Weberian sense.[4] With the arrival

of the Enlightenment, as Hegel recognized, “the intellect will cognize what is
intuited as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber.”[5]
Romanticism responded to this alienation from nature with a sense of tragic

loss, and sought to regain what they saw as the fractured unity of man and
nature. The Romantics exalted the primitive, celebrating the charming naïveté
of the ancient Greeks or their modern-day counterparts, who appeared in the
form of “noble savages.” The playwright Friedrich Schiller even dedicated an
essay to the distinction between the “naïve”[6] and “sentimental” in poetry.
For modern man, he asserted, “nature has disappeared from our humanity,
and we can reencounter it in its genuineness only outside of humanity in the
inanimate world. Not our greater naturalness [Naturmäßigkeit], but the very
opposite, the unnaturalness [Naturwidrigkeit] of our relationships, conditions,
and mores forces us to fashion a satisfaction in the physical world that is not
to be hoped for in the moral world.”[7] The Romantics thus preferred the
bucolic simplicity of the small old village to the sprawling chaos of the modern
city. Vitalistic explanations of nature, like Goethe’s and Schelling’s, were
offered as alternatives to the Democritean-Newtonian vision of the universe
as composed of dead matter and obeying a changeless set of mechanical
laws.
Despite its nostalgia for a bygone simplicity of life and man’s unity with
nature, the Romantic worldview was gradually overtaken by that belonging to
the modern industrialist. To the industrialist, nature presented itself as a
wealth of raw materials waiting to be exploited. Through the application of
human labor, these natural resources could be transformed into social
products, valuable commodities to be distributed to the whole of society. “Man
when producing wealth acts upon the things which Nature supplies,” wrote
Alfred Marshall, the famous British economist. “The gifts of Nature to man are
firstly materials such as iron, stone, wood, etc., and secondly, forces such as
the power of the wind, and the heat of the sun, the source whence all other
powers are derived.” Wealth, Marshall claimed, could only be generated
through the action of men on these natural materials, whose worthiness could
only be evaluated according to their potential utility. He continued:
“
The agents of production are then Nature’s forces, and Man’s
force; man’s force being generally most efficient when it is so
applied as to control and direct nature’s forces, rather than to
counteract them. And the wealth of a country depends upon the
manner in which nature’s forces and man’s force work together
in the production of wealth.[8]
One might note how much the modern industrialist’s perspective on nature
mirrors that of the Enlightenment man of science. For both, nature is
conceived as nothing more than the sum of dead matter and the mechanical
forces that compel it. The difference is that, while a Bacon or Descartes might
be interested in natural products insofar as they might understand them, a
Rockefeller or a Carnegie would be more interested in the way they might be

exploited so as to generate value.
Though Romanticism took a “dark” and urbanistic turn toward the middle of
the century (think Baudelaire and the Symbolists) all the way up to the fin-de-
siècle, many of the sentiments it originally possessed toward nature survived
alongside Europe’s rapid industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth
century. The American Transcendentalists are only one of the more notable
movements confirming this fact. In the twentieth century, however, the
various currents stemming from early nineteenth-century Romanticism began
to reemerge, tying themselves to a number of different political tendencies.
Preservationists, environmentalists, vegetarians, and nudists joined in with
groups from all shades of the political spectrum: Teddy Roosevelt-style big-
game conservationism in America, NSDAP fascism in Germany, the pseudo-
left Front Populaire in interwar France. Following the end of the war, these
tendencies joined in with sections of the international New Left and later the
nebulous “post-ideological” Left in the second half of the century.
For most of these groups, the environmentalists tended to view any

exploitation of nature by man as invasive, as a transgression of its inherent
sanctity. Nature for them became something of a Kantian Ding-an-Sich,
something inviolable and essentially unknowable. Its continued “natural”
existence, uncorrupted by the malign influence of society, came to be
considered a kind of virtue in itself. Untouched wilderness was thought to
constitute some sort of pristine, prelapsarian paradise existing in perfect
harmony with itself. It was thus to be set apart from any considerations of its
utility to society. Faced with the reality of the increased industrial exploitation
of natural sites, however, environmental activists blamed the rapid destruction
of the environment on the expansion of global capitalism and corporate greed
run amok. And so they marched in protest of the further exploitation of the
environment, spouting apocalyptic rhetoric and predicting ecological
catastrophe. All of humanity is doomed, they say, should mankind not mend
its ways. In some sense, this almost marks a return to the primitive belief
that the sinfulness of humanity will be met with wrath, and it is almost ironic
that the rising sea levels resulting from the melting of the ice caps should
recapitulate the biblical Flood. Modern society for the environmentalists
constitutes a sort of capitalist Sodom and Gomorrah, which will soon be
punished by Mother Nature. This is the sort of environmentalism one often
encounters today, the dispensationalist hysteria almost eclipsing the sound
scientific evidence on which the theory of global warming is based. These are
the times in which we live.
Returning to the original purpose of this outline, however, what should all
these various historical conceptions of nature tell us? First of all, it should tell
us that the conception of nature is in large part dependent on the society for
which it is an object of contemplation. Nature, though it probably does
operate according to an unchanging set of uniform physical laws, has a
significance beyond its mere existence in itself. The concept of “nature” also
carries with it a great deal of ideological baggage, and reflects the

superstructures of thought in any given age. The problem, going forward, is
thus not merely to find some sort of solution to the prospect of a potential
ecological collapse, but to formulate nature as a social problem. The question
of humanity’s relationship to nature goes far beyond “saving the planet” or
any such platitude; it involves at its core the disalienation of man from
nature, and their reconciliation thereby. No amount of recycling, collecting of
litter, or “going Green” will solve this fundamental issue. The resolution of the
problem of man and nature can only be reached through radical social
transformation, and not by the aggregate sum of superficial actions that only
treat mere symptoms rather than the underlying problem.
The next entry will focus on the Marxist approach to humanity’s alienation
from nature, and from there explore some of the contradictions and false
dichotomies set up by the contemporary Green movement.
[1] See Durkheim’s excellent treatment of these different theories of primitive

religion in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E.
Fields. (The Free Press. New York, NY: 1995).
[2] Durkheim makes very clear that the results of his observations of
“primitive” religions apply to the more elaborate religious systems of the West
and beyond: “[I]f, in the very humble societies just studied, I have managed
to capture some of the elements that comprise the most fundamental
religious ideas, there is no reason not to extend the most general results of
this research to other religions.” Ibid., pg. 418.
[3] Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. (Cambridge University Press. New
York, NY). Pg. 81.
[4] “[I]ncreasing intellectualization and rationalization does not mean

increasing general knowledge of the conditions under which we live our lives.
It means something else. It means the knowledge or belief that if we only
wanted to we could learn at any time that there are, in principle, no
mysterious unpredictable forces in play, but that all things — in principle —
can be controlled through calculation. This, however, means the
disenchantment of the world. No longer, like the savage, who believed that
such forces existed, do we have to resort to magical means to gain control
over or pray to the spirits. Technical means and calculation work for us
instead. This, above all, is what intellectualization actually means.” Weber,
Max. “Science as a Vocation.” From Complete Writings on Academic and
Political Vocations. Translated by Gordon C. Wells. (Algora Publishing. New
York, NY: 2008). Pg. 35.
And later: “It is the fate of our age, with the rationalization, intellectualization
and, in particular, the disenchantment of the world, characteristic of it, that
precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have faded from public life,
entering either the obscure realm of mystical life or the fraternal feelings of
direct relationships among individuals.” Ibid., pg. 51.
[5] Hegel, G.W.F. Faith and Knowledge. Translated by Walter Cerf and H.S.
Harris. (Albany, NY: 1977). Pg. 57.
[6] “We consider someone to have a naïve character if in making judgments

about things he overlooks their artificial and affected relations and fixes on
the simple nature of them.” Schiller, Friedrich. “On Naïve and Sentimental
Poetry.” Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. From Essays. (The Continuum
Publishing Company. New York, NY: 1993). Pg. 186.
[7] Ibid., pg. 194.
[8] Marshall, Alfred and Marshall, Mary Paley. The Economics of Industry.
(Cambridge University Press. London, England: 1879). Pgs. 8-9.
Still from Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1979)
Man and Nature, Part II: The Marxist
Theory of Man’s Alienation from Nature

When Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, he was
likewise concerned with the problem of man’s (specifically, the worker’s)
relationship to nature. It was part of the worker’s fourfold alienation under
capitalist modernity: his estrangement from nature, from the products of his
labor, from other people, and from himself. As Marx explained, with respect to
nature: “The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous
external world. It is the material in which his labor realizes itself…”[1]
However, as the products of the worker’s labor are expropriated, nature is
reduced to a mere means of subsistence. “In a physical sense man lives only
from these natural products, whether in the form of nourishment, heating,
clothing, shelter, etc.…Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in
so far as it is not the human body.”[2] The natural world is further and further
removed from the worker, and arrives then only in a relatively processed,
mediated form. The immediacy of nature has been lost, and nature confronts
humanity as an alien, unknown entity. This alienation is exacerbated by the
shared estrangement from nature that the individual sees in other men:
“Every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested in the
relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature.”[3] Or, as
the Marxist theorist Max Horkheimer would later put it, echoing Marx, “The
history of man’s efforts to subjugate nature is also the history of man’s
subjugation by man.”[4]
Clearly, the alienation felt by the Romantics toward nature was a real one,
Marx recognized, but he did not see it as the result of some sort of spiritual
downfall or fall from grace. Rather, he understood it to be symptomatic of the
rise of a new social formation — namely, capitalism. That is to say, the
alienation from nature that was registered ideologically (in poetry, philosophy,
and art) by the Romantics was indicative of a deeper shift in the
socioeconomic substructure of their time.
Although humanity’s alienation from nature was clearly a central concern of

the young Marx, most of his later work was solely devoted to the analysis of
class relations under capitalism and the critique of political economy. It was
thus Engels, rather, who would eventually take up the subject of nature again
in his writings. Not only in his 1883 Dialectics of Nature, a text that remains
controversial within the annals of Marxist literature, but even in other works
like Anti-Duhring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels discussed the
way in which humanity became further estranged from nature even as science
began to discover its innermost workings. For rather than encountering nature
in an organic, holistic fashion, natural science was methodologically
microscopic, isolating individual phenomena from their original context and
observing their operation in abstraction from the whole. This entailed, as
Bacon had already himself admitted, a certain domination of nature. And this,
in turn, implied an equal degree of alienation from nature. Engels explained
the historical unfolding of this process as follows:
“
The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of
the different natural processes and objects in definite classes,
the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their
manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the
gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been
made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has
also left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects
and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the
vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as
constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in
their life.[5]
Although Engels himself repudiated the French materialists and natural

philosophers like Bacon and Locke for their “metaphysical” approach to
nature, and considered the mechanistic view of the world to have been
superseded by dialectical thought, it was the mechanistic worldview that
eventually won out in the field of the natural sciences. It remains down to the
present day — for better or for worse — the predominant mode of thought
amongst the disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology. This is a large
reason why Engels’ later Dialectics of Nature has subsequently been so
disparaged by scientists and philosophers, despite the fact that some of its
content is both salvageable and valuable to Marxist literature.
But it was precisely the application of this mechanistic Weltanschauung in the

natural sciences to the social sciences that later formed the premise for the
young Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács’ critique of reification and commodity
fetishism in society. This was the view adopted by both bourgeois economists
and Bernsteinian Revisionists around the turn of the century. They believed
that society operated according to a series of timeless, mechanical laws that
could be comprehended and controlled, just as in nature. Lukács pointed out
that this took for granted the notion that the laws peculiar to the capitalist
social formation had always existed in every past society. As Marx had already
shown before him, such categories as “supply and demand” and “socially
homogeneous labor-time” were only valid for describing one particular form of
society, capitalism. But these categories themselves were merely the
transitory outgrowth of this social formation, and did not necessarily belong to
prior modes of production:
“
The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of
forms of this [relative] kind. They are forms of thought which
are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of
production belonging to this historically determined mode of
social production, i.e., commodity production. The whole
mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that
surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity
production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other
forms of production.[6]
It is therefore invalid for economists and social theorists alike to claim that
there are “eternal” laws that govern society in all ages, unlike the ones that
are presumed to exist in the mechanistic view of nature. In the case of
commodity fetishism, a social relation between people becomes objectified as
a permanent state of affairs that exists independent of their own activity,[7]
as “just the way things are.” Or, as Lukács put it, “a relation between people
takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an
autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal
every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”[8]
Lukács’ great contribution to Marx’s theory of man’s alienation from nature

arose out of his recognition of this mysterious “quasi-objectivity” that social
relations seemed to assume. It was as if, through the alienation of
commodities from their producers and their subsequent circulation throughout
society, bourgeois social relations became a sort of “second nature.” As Lukács

explained it:
“
[M]en are constantly smashing, replacing, and leaving behind
the “natural,” irrational, and actually existing bonds, while, on
the other hand, they erect around themselves in the reality that
they have created and “made,” a kind of second nature which
evolves with exactly the same inexorable necessity as was the
case earlier with irrational forces of nature (more exactly: the
social relations which appear in this form).[9]
As a sort of nature in its own right, bourgeois economists and Bernsteinian

Revisionists believed that they could set forth notions like “marginal utility,”
“supply and demand,” and so on as inexorable laws of society. These laws
were thought to operate in a mechanical, predictable and unchanging fashion,
in every society that has ever existed. What is lost is the dialectical
recognition that this system of social relations has come into being, and could
just as easily pass away. “In its mystified form,” Marx explained, “the dialectic
became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify
what exists.” “In its rational form,” he continued, “it is a scandal and an
abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it
includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous
recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every
historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore
grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be
impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and
revolutionary.”[10]
Lukács’ discovery of this apparent “second nature” carries with it even further
consequences. For, entangled in this self-created “second nature,” man found
himself further and further distanced from “first” nature. The seeming
immediacy of nature enjoyed in previous societies, where the wood he used to
build his house came from the nearby forest, in which the meat he ate came
from animals that he raised and slaughtered, or game that he hunted,
became increasingly rare. Instead, what humanity encountered was a system
of commodities, goods imported from every corner of the globe, serially
processed through a complex division of labor before arriving to their
consumer in their finished forms. In other words, this nature, “second nature,”
became the world to which humanity was immediately accustomed. With the
rise of capitalism, everything changed. “In place of the old needs satisfied by
home production we have new ones which demand the products of the most
distant lands and climes for their satisfaction. In place of the old local and
national self-sufficiency and isolation we have a universal commerce, a
universal dependence of nations on one another.”[11] Despite the extremely
abstract character of this social totality, with its multiple layers of mediation,
this complex system appears more familiar and recognizable than the sort of
nature one encounters in the wilderness.
Even the experience of this sort of “primitive” wilderness is increasingly

mediated under modernity. They come in the form of artificially-designed
parks established in the midst of huge cities, in zoos and nature reserves, in
activities like hiking, rock-climbing, and even safaris. The critical theorist
Theodor Adorno recognized the patent falsity of the notion that these sites
and pastimes could serve to reunite man, if only briefly, with nature. “The
more purely nature is preserved and transplanted by civilization,” he wrote,
“the more implacably it is dominated.”[12] Humanity under capitalism can
maintain the illusion that we are still at one and are in harmony with nature,
but it is illusory nevertheless. “Only the irrationality of civilization itself, in the
nooks and crannies of the cities, to which the walls, towers, and bastions of
the zoos wedged among them are merely an addition, can nature be
conserved. The rationalization of culture, in opening its doors to nature,
thereby completely absorbs it, and eliminates with difference the principle of
culture, the possibility of reconciliation.”[13] The parks, forests, and zoos can
provide some comfort to a humanity yearning for its lost relationship with
nature, but in the final analysis such artifacts (and yes, they are artifacts) can
only serve as a reminder of the extent to which mankind has already
transformed, and sometimes disfigured, nature.
But if humanity cannot be reunited with nature by such means, how can one
ever hope to achieve this lost oneness with the world? The total flight from
society and its network of unnatural relations (“into the wild”) is no less
problematic, and almost assuredly more reactionary. As Adorno’s colleague
Horkheimer explained, “The doctrines that exalt nature or primitivism at the
expense of spirit [i.e., civilization, society] do not favor reconciliation with
nature; on the contrary, they emphasize coldness and blindness toward
nature. Whenever man deliberately makes nature his principle, he regresses
to primitive urges.”[14] More on this point later.
All this brings us to a point that dovetails neatly with the question posed at
the end of my first blog entry on the subject: How is it possible to conceive of
nature as a fundamentally social problem? For if indeed the social conception
of nature is historically variable — i.e. it changes from epoch to epoch — how
might the relationship between man and nature be reconceived so as to bring
an end to their mutual alienation? The problem of nature must necessarily
involve a transformation of the “second nature” constructed by society under
capitalism. This may, in turn, necessitate a transformation of the natural world
from whence society sprang. Nature must not appear to us as something
entirely outside of us, as an autonomous thing-in-itself, even if it does
possess certain laws and regularities of its own. It must be recognized as
inextricably bound up with society, such that its fate is tied with our own. The
reality of the estrangement must be acknowledged, the contradiction of
nature and culture affirmed, so as to ensure that the problem is not denied or
hastily written off as inconsequential. A post-capitalist society must
necessarily be free of all the contradictions that are inherent in capitalism,
and a solution to this problem must therefore be sought. Indeed, number of
solutions have already been proposed. But before we uncritically attach
ourselves to this or that proposed solution, a review of the major positions is

in order. The next segment of this series will thus lay the groundwork for a
radical critique of the various ideologies surrounding the relationship of man
to nature by examining one of the central dichotomies to the debate: the
nature/culture distinction.
[1] Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. From Early Writings.
Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. (Penguin Books. New
York, NY: 1992). Pg. 325.
[2] Ibid., pg. 328.
[3] Ibid., pg. 331.
[4] Horkheimer, Max. “The Revolt of Nature.” From The Eclipse of Reason.
(The Continuum Publishing Company. New York, NY: 2004). Pg. 72.
[5] Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Translated by Barrie

Selman. From Marx & Engels: Collected Works, Volume 24 (1874-1883).
(International Publishers. New York, NY: 1989). Pg. 299.
[6] Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben

Fowkes. (Penguin Books. New York, NY: 1982). Pg. 169.
[7] “The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore

simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of
men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour
themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also
reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a
social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside
the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become
commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or
social. In the same way, the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is
perceived not as a subjective excitation of that nerve but as the objective
form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of seeing, of course, light is really
transmitted from one thing, the external object, to another thing, the eye. It
is a physical relation between physical things. As against this, the
commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within,
which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of
the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this. It is
nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which
assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In
order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of
religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures
endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each
other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the
products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the
products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is

therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.” Ibid., pgs. 164-
165.
[8] Lukács, Georg. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”

From History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.
Translated by Rodney Livingstone. (MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 1971). Pg. 83.
[9] Ibid., pg. 128.
[10] Marx, Capital. Pg. 103.
[11] Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. Manifesto of the Communist Party.
From Later Political Writings. Translated by Terrell Carver. (Cambridge
University Press. New York, NY: 1996). Pg. 5.
[12] Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. (Verso

Books. New York, NYL 2005). Pg. 115.
[13] Ibid., pg. 116.
[14] Horkheimer, “The Revolt of Nature.” Pg. 86.
Still from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
Man and Nature, Part III: An Excursus into the
Structuralist Opposition of Nature and Culture

The basic distinction between “nature” and “culture” — that fundamental
opposition so central to Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology[1] — has
been denied, deconstructed, and dissolved countless times by post-
structuralist scholars and intellectuals. But in this respect, it is hardly the only
binary to have been so challenged — man/woman, inside/outside, and
self/other have all similarly come under attack. The reality of such
distinctions, they say, is far less certain, and far more ambiguous, than the
structuralists would have us believe. An absolute division between any of

these pairs, they argue, cannot therefore be established.
And there is undeniably something to the blurring of this distinction: after all,
is man (historically associated with culture and civilization) not also an
animal? Darwin’s theory of evolution proved definitively man’s derivation from
more primitive animal species. It could thus not be denied that man is simply
one species amongst many. Humanity can claim no special status separate
from these other species, by dint of some sort of divine creation or other
fantasy. And so also can humanity not maintain any sort of special dominion
over all the rest of nature, as suggested by Judeo-Christian mythology.[2] By
what right, then, ask the environmentalists, can mankind dominate and
exploit the whole of nature? Humans have no special privilege — at an ethical
level — over and above any other sentient animals. It is unethical, therefore,
to live at the expense of other sentient beings, or to intrude upon their natural
environment. Would this not constitute a form of speciesism?
But this argument cuts both ways. For how is it that the actions of this animal,
mankind, be considered so wholly unnatural? After all, it might be justifiably
pointed out that all biological organisms exploit their environment, to the
extent that they can. Those species that do not adequately exploit their
environment or find their way into an environment in which they can, simply
go extinct. So when environmental activists protest the exploitation of nature
by human beings, the argument could be made that we are simply doing what
all other organisms do. We just happen to be especially good at it. Might it not
even be human “nature” to ruthlessly exploit and dominate the rest of nature?
In the end, human beings are exceptionally gifted in terms of their ability to
think systematically, understand the relationship between means and ends,
and contrive complex devices to use as tools to manipulate the environment.
It is as if evolution produced an animal capable of conquering nature in its
entirety, and that mankind is merely exercising the gifts bestowed on it by
nature.
Both these attempts to deny the difference between nature and culture,
however, must be admitted to be flawed. For even if one cannot set up an
absolute divide between the two, it is simply a fact of our historical moment
that there exists a very real contradiction between nature and human society,
or culture. Humanity stands alienated from the nature from which it emerged,
millennia ago. And though human beings are indeed animals themselves,
there is something about them that profoundly distinguishes them from the
rest. Engels explained this eloquently in his Dialectics of Nature:
“
With men we enter history. Animals also have a history, that of
their derivation and gradual evolution to their present position.
This history, however, is made for them, and in so far as they
themselves take part in it, this occurs without their knowledge
or desire. On the other hand, the more that human beings
become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the
word, the more they make their own history consciously, the
less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and
uncontrolled forces of this history, and the more accurately does
the historical result correspond to the aim laid down in advance.
[3]
Humanity is in this respect radically differentiated from the rest of nature,

even though it owes its existence to it. Moreover, the moment mankind
entered this history Engels described, human history, marks the beginning of
mankind’s long path of estrangement from nature.
Despite his animal origins, the first seeds of self-consciousness and free will
were gradually awakened in the mind of man. The natural instincts that drove
him mindlessly toward the satisfaction of this or that primitive desire were
gradually suppressed, and sacrificed so that man might cultivate the earth
and himself along with it. This is taught not only by Hegel in his dialectic of
the master and the slave,[4] but also by Freud, who saw that the redirection
or sublimation of these natural instincts toward conscious ends was a
prerequisite for society. “Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous
feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher
psychical activities, scientific, artistic, or ideological, to play such an important
part in civilized life,” wrote Freud. “If one were to yield to a first impression,
one would say that sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon
the instincts entirely by civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a
little longer. In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of
all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon
a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-
satisfaction (by suppression, repression, or some other means?) of powerful
instincts.”[5]
From his earlier enslavement to his natural instincts, man progressed through
a series of more refined, but less severe forms of enslavement — from
savagery, barbarism, and finally, civilization.[6] But even if one rejects this
stagist view of history, it will be generally agreed that the earliest phases of
agriculture and the domestication of livestock took place in a time when
mankind lived under fairly barbaric conditions. In these primitive societies
there was a great deal of unfreedom: the domestic slavery of women, the
subjugation of men to other men, etc. Nevertheless, through the repression
and sublimation of their cruder, more immediate desires, humanity
distinguished itself from nature and progressively gained a more conscious
mastery over its own ends, even though this freedom was available only to
those least bound in their service to other men.
Throughout these more primitive, and even some of the more advanced
civilizations, however, nature was never that far away that humanity felt
totally estranged from it. Small urban centers were established, and new
comforts of life introduced, but the social and technical limitations of these of
the day prevented nature from ever becoming too distanced from society. And
thus the feelings of alienation in man’s relation to nature remained beneath

surface, and only rose to the level consciousness with the passage to a
radically new social formation, capitalism. From the moment commodity
production began to dominate social relations in Britain and Western Europe,
the estrangement of humanity from nature progressed at an ever-increasing
pace. The rapidity with which the humble stone cottage was displaced by
towering industrial smokestacks was startling. The contradiction between
town and country was brought into even greater relief with overwhelming
urbanization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Marx and Engels
wrote:
“
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the
town. It has created enormous cities, vastly inflated the urban
population as opposed to the rural, and so rescued a significant
part of the population from the [rural] idiocy of living on the
land.[7]
The contradiction between nature and culture was thus obviated by this
historic development — the advent of capitalism, which would grow to
eventually swallow the globe. And here is where we can accept the
structuralist opposition, although not in the same way the structuralist would
have framed it. For both linguistic and anthropological structuralism share
with dialectical thought (idealist and materialist alike) the tendency to pair
polar opposites with one another and seek their resolution through
intermediate terms. One needs only to look to Lévi-Strauss’ seminal essay,
“Structure and Dialectics,”[8] to witness its many parallels.
The difference between structuralist dialectics and the historical dialectics of

Hegel or Marx is that structuralism is methodologically synchronic, following
Saussure’s original formulation. That is to say, they viewed the structural
oppositions with which they dealt as timeless, indissoluble contradictions in
language or human nature. For structural anthropology, the mediation of
these opposites through ritual provides only temporary relief for what is
actually an eternal struggle between irreconcilable polarities. Thus, what it
can offer are only ahistorical snapshots of various resolutions to what are in
essence primordial oppositions that the structuralists believe pertain to every
society throughout all of time.
Dialectical materialism, by contrast, is methodologically diachronic. It views

the various contradictions that arise throughout history as fluid relationships,
which can either be resolved or exacerbated in any number of ways. Thus,
with the opposition between “nature” and “culture,” the dialectician can
understand it as a contradiction that is by no means timeless, but which came
into being along with the foundation of the first societies. The two terms have
been in opposition for some time, but have subject to a rapidly accelerating
process of alienation and even polarization with the development of
capitalism. One could even say that it is here that for the first time Nature
presents itself to humanity as a problem. Both the sense of lost unity with
nature and the prospect of impending environmental collapse weigh like a

nightmare on the brain of contemporary humanity. Humanity begins to realize
the extent to which society has already radically reshaped the world, and
recognize the potentially disastrous consequences this transformation might
have. Or as Engels puts it,
“
Man alone has succeeded in impressing his stamp on nature, not
only by shifting the plant and animal world from one place to
another, but also by so altering the aspect and climate of his
dwelling place, and even the plants and animals themselves,
that the consequences of his activity can disappear only with
the general extinction of the terrestrial globe.[9]
Reviewing the course of the discussion to this point, what are the results of
this analysis of the nature/culture distinction? First, it shows that humanity
cannot be glibly subsumed to nature, as if the activity of mankind is just
nature as usual. Also, it demonstrates that the opposition of nature to culture,
of civilization to the wild, is not an eternal and indissoluble contradiction, but
rather one that arose historically and can potentially be overcome. In
connection with our previous posts, it furthermore implies that — since the
problem of man’s relationship to nature arises only in society and is
dependent on the specific society in which it appears — the opposition of
nature to culture can only be overcome through radical social transformation.
Finally, it shows that the solution to the problem cannot come in the form of a
one-sided embracement of nature over culture, or culture over nature. But by
that same token we must reject attempts that only aim to dull the opposition
through the implementation of piecemeal legislation and the regulation of
industry. Nor can we accept as sufficient the idea of changing lifestyle choices,
isolated attempts at corporate sabotage or animal “liberation,” and least of all
the numerous scenes of theatrical protest and “Go Green!” initiatives. This
analysis forms the groundwork for a searing critique of lifestylism, anarcho-
primitivism, and the Green movement in general. This is what will be pursued
in the next entry.
[1] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” From Structural

Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf.
(Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. New York, NY: 1963). Pg. 225.
[2] “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our
likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of
the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing
that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in His own image; in the image
of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed
them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and
subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air,
and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” Genesis 1:26-28. New
King James Version.
[3] Engels, Friedrich. The Dialectics of Nature. Translated by Clemens Dutt.

From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Collected Works, Volume 52.
(International Publishers. New York, NY: 1987). Pg. 330.
[4] Through the mutual antagonism of two self-conscious beings, and the
mastery of one over the other, “[t]hey [each] put an end to their
consciousness in its alien setting of natural existence.” Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. (Oxford
University Press. New York, NY: 1997). Pg. 114.
[5] Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. From The Standard
Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James
Strachey. (The Hogarth Press. London, England: 1986). Pg. 4,495.
[6] Engels, Friedrich. The Origins of the Family. Translated by Clemens Dutt.
(International Publishers. New York, NY: 1987).
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch01.htm
[7] Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. Manifesto of the Communist Party. From
Later Political Writings. Translated by Terrell Carver. (Cambridge University
Press. New York, NY: 1996). Pg. 5.
[8] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Structure and Dialectics.” From Structural

Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf.
(Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. New York, NY: 1963). Pgs. 232-241.
[9] Engels, Friedrich. The Dialectics of Nature. Translated by Clemens Dutt.

(International Publishers. New York, NY: 1987). Pg. 329-330.
Communist Party International Emblem, 1919
“Go Green” Emblem, 2010
Man and Nature, Part IV: A Radical Critique
of the “Green” Environmental Movement
“
A part of the bourgeoisie wants to redress social grievances in
order to assure the maintenance of bourgeois society.
Included in it are economists, philanthropists, humanitarians,

do-gooders for the working classes, charity organisers, animal
welfare enthusiasts, temperance union workers, two-a-penny
reformers of multifarious kinds.
— Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Surveying the various constituencies that make up the present-day Green

movement, a number of distinct tendencies can be observed. These each have
their own peculiarities and distinguishing features, and are sometimes even at
odds with one another. But there do exist overarching themes that hold this
jumbled mass of ideological fragments together. One trend held in common by
most of them, for example, is a shared opposition to “big business” and
“corporate greed.” It is on this basis that many of them fancy themselves to
hold a generally anti-capitalist worldview.
1. THE IDEOLOGY OF “LOCAL” AND “ORGANIC”: LOCAVORES AND

URBAN-AGRICULTURALISM
But on closer inspection, it can be seen in most cases that these activists
don’t really want to overturn capitalism. They merely want to turn back the
clock to what they perceive as a kinder, gentler capitalism, in which the “little
guy” wasn’t stomped on so severely by all the corporate giants. They want the
family-run local shops down the block where everybody knows each other’s
first name. They miss the nearby farms that were owned by honest,
hardworking families who brought their fresh produce into market every day.
They want to get rid of all the corporate suits who come into town and
vampirically leach off the hard labor of others and put these local stores and
farms out of business by importing cheap goods made by foreign labor and
selling produce enhanced by synthetic additives. (The völkisch and vaguely
crypto-fascist/anti-Semitic overtones of this perspective should be obvious).
Instead, these activists advocate to “buy local” and “go organic,” since they
imagine that a world built on these principles is more “natural” than the one
in which we live today. The pro-organic and “locavore” movements are based
on precisely this belief, which they consider to be more “eco-friendly.”
This world is, of course, a fiction. But that doesn’t stop activists from calling
for a return to this paradise that Marx and Engels called “the idiocy of rural
life.” Indeed, many leftish urbanites and self-proclaimed radical students have
developed a bad conscience out of their sense of distance from the more
natural and “authentic” world of organic farming. In fact, this has driven many
such greenophiles out of their urban lofts or student housing in some vain
hope of achieving a “return to the land.” They buy some land out on the
outskirts and set up farms where they can grow their own food. This gives
them an overweening sense of self-satisfaction; they experience the thrill of
producing homemade, holistic goods, which they can consume or perhaps sell
at the local co-op back in town. The maintenance of such small-scale organic
farms, however, is a luxury available only to those who are wealthy enough to
afford selling their produce at a loss, or those who find clientele wealthy
enough to afford paying much higher prices for local organic products rather
than their mass-produced synthetic equivalents. It is thus an elitist
phenomenon not only in the smug sense of ethical virtue that comes with
buying organic or local, but also in a very real, economic sense.
There are those, however, who have not even had to look beyond the city
limits for a place to reunite with nature. Though parks and public gardens
have been a feature of most major urban centers since the nineteenth
century, the movement toward urban-agriculturalism is a relatively recent
phenomenon, and is associated with the whole ideology of Green. Many
urban-agriculturalists are simply private individuals buy their own plots at
outrageous prices inside the greater urban municipality, where the retail-value
for the same acreage bought on the countryside would be dwarfed. So it goes
without saying that those who can stand to keep up such an expensive hobby
must be extraordinarily rich. But what they’re buying is almost certainly not
the crops they will grown on it, or the relaxation brought from the hobby, but
rather the knowledge that they, city-dweller though they may be, are eco-
friendlier than thou.
“American Gothic” — The Small Family Farm

as Remembered by the Green Movement
That this fetishization of small local farms stems from a romantic anti-
capitalist ideology should be obvious. However, the deeply conservative and
reactionary character of this tendency remains hidden to its adherents. They
imagine a past where everything was done at the local level, with “organic”
social relationships and good family values. They remember the honest
farmer, with his pitchfork in hand and his wife by his side. What they forget is
the revolting reality and chronic backwardness of the old, small family farm,
most famously condemned by the journalist H.L. Mencken, whose vitriol must
here be quoted at length:
“
…Let the farmer, so far as I am concerned, be damned
forevermore. To Hell with him, and bad luck to him. He is a
tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and hypocrite, the
eternal Jack of the human pack. He deserves all that he ever
suffers under our economic system, and more. Any city man, not
insane, who sheds tears for him is shedding tears of the
crocodile.
No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is

known to students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good
for him he robs the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our
endurance; when the going is bad be comes bawling for help out
of the public till. Has anyone ever heard of a farmer making any
sacrifice of his own interests, however slight, to the common
good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer practising or
advocating any political idea that was not absolutely self-
seeking — that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the
rest of us to his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, the
government guarantee of prices, bonuses, all the complex fiscal
imbecilities of the cow State John Baptists — these are the
contributions of the virtuous husbandmen to American political
theory. There has never been a time, in good seasons or bad,

when his hands were not itching for more; there has never been
a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan,
however grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Only one
issue ever fetches him, and that is the issue of his own profit.
He must be promised something definite and valuable, to be
paid to him alone, or he is off after some other mountebank. He
simply cannot imagine himself as a citizen of a commonwealth,
in duty bound to give as well as take; he can imagine himself
only as getting all and giving nothing.
Yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as the Ur-

burgher, the citizen par excellence, the foundation-stone of the
state! And why? Because he produces something that all of us
must have — that we must get somehow on penalty of death.
And how do we get it from him? By submitting helplessly to his
unconscionable blackmailing by paying him, not under any rule
of reason, but in proportion to his roguery and incompetence,
and hence to the direness of our need. I doubt that the human
race, as a whole, would submit to that sort of high-jacking, year
in and year out, from any other necessary class of men. But the
farmers carry it on incessantly, without challenge or reprisal,
and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at
intervals, to actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They
are all willing and eager to pillage us by starving us, but they
can’t do it because they can’t resist attempts to swindle each
other. Recall, for example, the case of the cotton-growers in the
South. Back in the 1920’s they agreed among themselves to cut
down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price — and
instantly every party to the agreement began planting more
cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That
abstinence being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell
instead of going up — and then the entire pack of scoundrels
began demanding assistance from the national treasury — in
brief, began demanding that the rest of us indemnify them for
the failure of their plot to blackmail us.[1]
Not only is the historical memory of the locavores fantastic and imaginary, but
their vision for the future is equally unthinkable and alarming. To generalize
the practice of local farming and small shops would mean a regression to a
quasi-feudal state of existence, with massive urban depopulation and the
death of probably 95% of the Earth’s people. For many Green activists,
however, such a development might not be so unwelcome. Unwittingly
echoing the arch-conservative Malthus, they insist that the current growth of
population is unsustainable and will inevitably exhaust the world’s resources.
They fail to recognize: 1. that it is classist (since the lower classes have more
children); 2. that it is racist (since non-whites have more children); 3. and
that it is sexist (because women are supposed to be the “gatekeepers” of
reproduction). Yet the activists who still hold fast to the fear of overpopulation
continue to reinforce their claims with apocalyptic rhetoric and eco-
scaremongering, evoking images of global environmental collapse. The
Malthusian theory of a limit-point to the growth of population was materially
disproven by the industrial revolution taking place before his very eyes. And
while many may fear the influence that chemical additives might have on their
food, the kind peddled by vast multinational corporations like Monsanto,
there’s a good reason that population growth has accelerated at such a rapid
pace since the end of the eighteenth century: capitalism, and its concomitant
industrialization of the agricultural process.
Indeed, there was a time when the Left advocated the industrialization of
agriculture, calling for the mass-production and distribution of foodstuffs
throughout the world. They welcomed mechanization insofar as it rendered
the labor-heavy mode of traditional farming superfluous and produced more
goods for consumption. And this is very much what has happened over the
course of the last century. The elimination of small family farms and the
mechanization of crop production has taken place on its own in the West and
throughout the modern world, without the brutal programs of forced
collectivization and “tractorization” implemented by Stalin. And while famines
still take place in some of the poorer countries, it is only in recent times that
all famines could actually be prevented — that for the first time we produce
enough food to potentially feed the entire world. So it is a bitter irony of
history that many on the Left today seek to return to more primitive modes of
local production, rather than to take control of the massive forces of
agricultural production that capitalism has unleashed — and end starvation
forever. But instead, the Green ideologues exalt and glamorize the small
family farmer, and demonize and vilify big agrobusiness. Huge agricultural
corporations may be ruthless and unmerciful when it comes to the way they
operate and do business, but only a fool would want to return to the world of
petty small-time farmers that Mencken described.
2. LIFESTYLE POLITICS: VEGANS, FREEGANS, AND RAW FOODISTS
To return to the prospect of worldwide ecological catastrophe, however — we

needn’t fear, some Green activists will say. “If we all chip in and do our part,”
they continue, “together we can really make a difference!” This sort of puerile
rhetoric brings us to the next subject of our investigation: lifestyle politics, or
lifestylism, as it is sometimes called. Its origins can be traced to Gandhi’s
famous injunction to “be the change you want to see in the world.” But lately
it’s more the kind of message usually delivered by some well-known
spokesman (or spokeswoman) — a famous athlete or movie star. The
celebrities, always insecure of their ethical status because of the fame and
fortune they enjoy, are always ready to join in for a good cause. And so they
become the mouthpiece for this or that social message, usually inoffensive
and uncontroversial. “The change begins with YOU,” they will say. And then
they will parade around the fact that they’ve donated to many charities,
rescued sick animals, or adopted a vegan diet. In this way are they spared
the guilty conscience of knowing that they have it better off than most people.
It’s why they’re so easily lampooned for their endless (and almost
pornographic) pontificating.
But the lesser-known practitioners of lifestyle politics are hardly less smug,
sanctimonious, and self-satisfied than their celebrity counterparts. They are
almost invariably ostentatious in the exhibition of their given way of life. A
vegan might take every opportunity to point out how the waiter must first
check with the chef to make sure that no animal products are being used in
the preparation of his meal, before he can order. Oppositely, they’ll rarely miss
a chance to sneer or take offense at something that falls outside their narrow,
single-issue worldview. A fur coat, an unrecycled recyclable, a “gas-guzzling”
SUV — they’ll find almost any excuse to launch into one of their patented,
pre-rehearsed tirades. The word “speciesism” 0ften enters the diatribe,
followed by absurd casuistry and moral equivalencies. The lifestylists thus
usually find their way into a clique of like-minded ethicians, who share the
same ideals and who can feel virtuous with one another. As certain lifestyles
become unfashionable, many tend to drift away from their chosen lifestyle or
simply burn out — so there’s typically a high turnover rate. But there are
some diehards who still cling to their diet or other ethical habits of living
(“dumpster diving,” buying “eco-friendly” products, reducing one’s “carbon
footprint,” etc.).
McDonald's is "Going Green"
That they tend to flaunt their given way of life may be obnoxious, but in the
end it’s fairly harmless, really. Far more dangerous, politically speaking, is the
delusion that the sum of their individual lifestyle choices will have a significant
impact on society. This is all the more true if they believe that they are
somehow undermining capitalism through their actions. Quite the opposite is
true. If anything, these various lifestyles are so readily integrated into the
edifice of capitalist society that they almost immediately lose any
revolutionary force they might have had. They are reduced to mere niche
markets within the greater totality of capitalism. This is why it should not
come as a such a surprise that one sees organic food aisles in major
supermarket chains, as well as the opening of a “Green” McDonald’s in
Riverside, Los Angeles. Lifestyle politics is remarkably assimilable to
capitalism. It was for this reason that Lenin as well as Marx argued against
prefigurative utopianism: the idea that one must behave as if he already lived
in a perfect society, a Kantian kingdom of ends. Marx was a merciless critic of

the utopian socialists of his day. Lenin would later write off the ultraleftist
utopianism (or “Left-Wing” Communism) that surrounded the Revolution as
merely an “infantile disorder.” One must accept the social reality that obtains
at any given time, and not imagine himself to be ethically superior to the rest
of humanity by virtue of some lifestyle change. Such a conceit is all too easily
repackaged — and thereby absorbed — by capitalist society.
3. ECO-FEMINISM
Closely related to, but distinct from, lifestyle politics is a “gendered” strain of
eco-activism — eco-feminism. They offer an environmentalist critique that is
at once broader and more particular than that of the lifestylists. For many
eco-feminists, the whole problem of man’s domination over nature (and yes,
specifically man’s) can be traced to a male way of viewing the world. Men,
they argue, seek to dominate and bend to their will everything that stands in
their path. They will stop at nothing to bring Nature, often culturally identified
as female, under their dominion, and so they must beat it into submission.
And so patriarchal society has pursued throughout history a campaign against
nature, as a test of manhood, an eternal struggle. By contrast, a more
feminine perspective on nature, the eco-feminists contend, would be more
empathetic and understanding. It would accept nature in all its abundance
and fertility; it would show compassion where the men showed none. Many
eco-feminists draw inspiration from the mythological representation of nature
as a woman — Gaia, Terra, Mother Earth, and so on. This often leads them to
embrace numerous mystifications, many of them anagogic or primitivist in
nature. These eco-feminists will then point to indigenous tribal myths that
teach that nature should be revered and held sacred. An eco-feminist
worldview, its proponents insist, would lead to a more harmonious
relationship with nature.
Of course, there are several problems with these arguments. First of all, it
essentializes (one could even say naturalizes) the difference between men
and women. It hypostatizes the old patriarchal myth, so often repeated, that
men are strong, bold, and decisive, while women are weak, caring, and
empathetic. This is a dichotomy that feminists have for centuries been trying
to disprove, and now many eco-feminists are looking to resurrect it to serve
the purposes of their argument. Secondly, the appeal to the mythological
symbolism portraying Nature as female must be seen as inadmissible
superstition. The phantoms of religion and mythological deities cannot be
used as evidence in any rational discussion, no matter how “authentic” or
“sincere” some of these indigenous beliefs might seem. Finally, even if one
were to accept such dubious symbolic evidence, would it not stand to reason
that men would refrain from acts of environmental destruction like
deforestation? After all, the act of chopping down a tree (a longtime symbol of
the phallus) could be easily interpreted as an act of castration, the worst fear
of men, according to Freud. If the eco-feminists were to trot out such
symbolic interpretations in defense of their arguments, one could easily

counter with symbolic interpretations of his (or her) own.
4. RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM: GREEN ANARCHISM AND

ANARCHO-PRIMITIVISM
There are those within the Green movement, however, for whom a superficial
change in one’s way of life or a gender critique is not enough. As self-styled
radicals, they cannot be satisfied by such modest acts. Nor can they be
content with merely participating in theatrical demonstrations, marches, and
protests against animal or environmental exploitation (though they continue
to do these things as well). These young firebrands feel they must do
something more. A truly radical activism, they contend, must seek to do away
with the whole bloody system — dismantle it piece by piece. So what you
usually get is a bunch of angry young activists, often with some sort of
anarchist orientation, who will sometimes whip themselves up and engage in
isolated acts of corporate sabotage, office disruption, and animal “liberation.”
These acts are usually carried out by either single individuals or small groups
coordinating their efforts according to some preconceived plan. The most
notorious organizations advocating such militancy are the Animal Liberation
Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), with which it is closely
associated. But there are countless little coteries of activists strewn
throughout the more developed world that operate by using such tactics. In
the age of the internet, they issue any number of online manifestos or
proclamations of intent.
Much of this is just militant posturing, though occasionally some groups are
able to muster the courage of conviction to actually pull off some of these
stunts. They are, however, often quickly arrested and given harsh sentences.
There have some been some journalists who believe the courts have been a
bit heavy-handed in labeling these activists’ crimes as “terrorism.” They even
believe these rulings to be the result of some conspiratorial plot cooked up by
big business interests, who then pull some strings in Washington to
specifically target eco-activists through their legislation. Though there might
be some small truth to this belief, the reality is that these isolated attacks on
corporate property and sporadic acts of animal liberation barely dent the profit
index of most of these major businesses. Militant Green activism isn’t even
half as disruptive or effective as its practitioners would like it to be. It would
be (and perhaps is) an extreme overreaction for business interests in
government to insist that these young crusaders be classified as “terrorists.” If
anything, this only ennobles them by giving them the sense that they are
martyrs of state oppression, when in fact they are little more than petty
pranksters who got in over their heads.
We have already mentioned how many of these militant tactics owe their
origin to the long tradition of political anarchism, which dates back to the first
decades of the nineteenth century. Many anarchist authors actually did call for
individual acts of terrorism — one needs only read Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei
Nechaev’s Catechism of a Revolutionist or look to the acts inspired by Georges

Sorel’s book on revolutionary violence to witness this fact. (Lenin would
famously critique such Narodnik terrorism in his book, What is to be Done?).
This does not, of course, imply that all forms of anarchism employ or even
approve of terrorist tactics, as there have been almost innumerable anarchist
tendencies over the past two hundred years — some violent, others not.
Indeed, most Green anarchists and “veganarchists” are so oblivious to the
history of political anarchism that they might scarcely be aware that there
were ever any major figures within the annals of anarchism who considered
terrorism an acceptable revolutionary method. Their association with
anarchism is in most cases purely ahistorical. It’s a sad truth that many
activists who identify with anarchism do so out of temperament rather than a
thorough course of study. Nevertheless, we may close this critique of the
contemporary Green movement with an examination of the peculiarities of the
Green anarchist Weltanschauung, then moving on to its most troubling
manifestation, anarcho-primitivism.
The anarchist elements within the greater ideology of Green manifest

themselves mostly in their anti-hierarchical organizational structures and
belief that individual actions can spark revolutionary change. This is closely
connected with the more general theme of lifestyle politics, to which almost all
Green anarchists adhere. The Green anarchists tend to associate themselves
with an anti-globalization political stance, as well. Their critical perspective on
what they call “mainstream” environmentalism also distinguishes them from
other eco-activist groups. Green anarchism understands itself to be part of a
radical fringe, and often takes great pleasure in that occupying that status.
Indeed, for all too many Green activists, the anarchist affiliation is little more
than a fashion accessory that they pin to their preexisting beliefs in ending
climate change and animal cruelty. They enjoy marching side by side with
other self-declared anarchists, wearing black bandanas over their mouths and
waving a large black flag. They will usually hold up some placards covered
with anarchist slogans and chant commonplaces like “this is what democracy
looks like!” and “ain’t no power like the power of the people ’cause the power
of the people don’t stop!” — mindless populist jargon. While these are the
kind of people who can sometimes get caught up in the Durkheimian swell of
religious fervor and overturn a police car or break into a Starbuck’s, in their
life outside of protest their anarchism is more like a hairstyle or tattoo. They
might go out of their way to get arrested (in order to wear that fact as a
badge of honor), but for the most part their anarchism extends no further
than that.
There are the true believers, though. The most frightening among them
identify with the anarcho-primitivist movement — a tendency founded under
the ideology of John Zerzan, who has a number of followers who live up and
down the west coast of the U.S., but also some residing in the northeast.
Considered fanatics even by many of the other Green anarchist currents, the
anarcho-primitivists are actually pro-collapse. In their interpretation of
history, society has been built on slavery, injustice, and the ruthless
exploitation of nature ever since the first agrarian communities were

established. Domestication, to them, is the root of all evil. Even simple
farming is too “unnatural” for their tastes; they look to small bands of hunter-
gatherer tribes as the only natural mode of human existence. Everything else
is “Civilization,” and must be destroyed as a whole. This is why they actually
welcome climate change and the prospect of ecological catastrophe —
because it would undo the accomplishments of human society and force
mankind to “rewild,” to really finally return to nature. Only this can end man’s
alienation from nature, the anarcho-primitivists maintain. And so some of
them even prepare for this “endgame” scenario by going on barefoot runs
through the wilderness at night or learning basic nature survival skills. The
lunacy of their ideology is so patent that it would almost honor it too much to
offer a critique of it. Needless to say, this is the outermost extreme of the
present-day Green movement, but still can claim a number of adherents.
5. CONCLUDING REMARKS: RESULTS AND PROSPECTS
And so with that shall we close the critique of contemporary eco-activism we

have pursued thus far. It might be appropriate here to recapitulate some of its
results. In the final analysis, far from being a single, unitary ideology, the
ideology of Green is rather just a hodgepodge of past ideological remnants —
neo-Romanticism, vitalism, primitivism, Luddism, Eastern mysticism, and
quasi-fascist Germanic naturalism. Though there is a small kernel of truth to
its project insofar as it deals with sustainability (i.e., the ability to carry on the
exploitation of natural resources without the threat of environmental
catastrophe), more often than not there is an underlying notion amongst eco-
activists that humanity should have some sort of “respect” for nature as an
inviolable thing-in-itself. The Green movement therefore views nearly every
industrial-technical instrumentalization of nature, plant and animal alike, as
invasive and chauvinist. Insofar as it preaches “eating local” and “going
organic,” and then promotes the long-outdated ideal of self-sufficiency, it’s
tacitly advocating a return a semi-feudal mode of production, which would
necessarily involve massive famine and urban depopulation.
Humanity does, indeed, stand alienated from nature. And yes, there is good
scientific evidence that supports the theory of global warming, though the
scientists are characteristically more cautious in their predictions. Those on
the Right who insistently deny the fact of climate change are just as
delusional as the hysterical dispensationalists on the Left who declare the
world is doomed. But the present-day Green movement provides no real
answers for reconciling man with nature, when posed as a social problem,
outside of, perhaps, its notion of sustainable growth. So what might a Marxist
approach to the societal problem of man’s relation to nature look like?
To begin with, it must acknowledge that the answer can only lie in radical
social transformation. Since humanity’s alienation from nature began with the
foundation of the first societies — i.e., the beginning of history as such — and
since the precise form in which this alienation has manifested itself has varied
throughout history, we are left two options. Either we renounce society in its
entirety, with all its freedoms and higher sensibilities, and retreat into the
dark recesses of prehistory (as the anarcho-primitivists suggest), or we must
progress into a new, as-yet-unseen social formation. With the former option,
nature would no longer present itself as a problem to humanity because there
wouldn’t be a consciousness of anything different, and we would act on our
every savage instinct. Following the latter course of action, human society
must gain a more self-conscious mastery over nature, such that it would
become merely an extension of our will. What we are faced with is thus clear:
either we must accept the renaturalization of humanity, or, inversely, the
humanization (or socialization) of nature. Only by pursuing one or the other of
these options can the contradiction be overcome — only then might humanity
be disalienated from the natural world.
For the Marxist, the choice is simple. Though regressions do occasionally take
place throughout history, one cannot turn back the hands of time wholesale.
Thus is the dream of the anarcho-primitivists only a nightmarish fantasy,
never to be realized. One can only progress by moving forward. The only
answer the Marxist can accept is worldwide revolution — the fundamental
transformation of existing social relations. This revolution must honor neither
regional convention nor national boundary, it must extend to encompass the
globe. And only by eliminating society’s foundation on that insatiable category
called Capital, only then can society exist for itself, only then can men truly
make his own history, rather than be made by history. In the words of Marx,
“[m]en make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they
do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances
existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”[2] Engels
expanded on this in later work, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific:
“
With the seizing of the means of production by society,
production of commodities is done away with, and,
simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.
Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite
organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears.
Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally
marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges
from mere animal conditions of existence into really human
ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ
man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the
dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the
real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become
master of his own social organization. The laws of his own
social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of
Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with
full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social
organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed
by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free
action. The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto,

governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only
from that time will man himself, more and more consciously,
make his own history — only from that time will the social
causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a
constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is
the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom
of freedom.[3] [my emphases]
How to achieve such a seizure of the means of production is a political

question, one that has been dealt with historically by figures like Lenin and
Trostkii. And although it would be utopian to speculate exactly what such a
realized society would look like, a few possibilities seem plausible. First, such
an emancipated society, freed from the rule of Capital and the forces of
history, can now consciously direct its actions at a global level. No longer
would there be the haphazard, chaotic hyperexploitation of nature that one
sees under capitalism, which so often gives rise to crises and acute shortages.
Secondly, humanity, liberated from its servitude to merely use technology as a
tool to generate relative surplus-value, can now self-consciously harness the
vast technological forces bestowed upon it by capitalist society. No longer
beholden to these machines, gadgets, and other devices, but their master,
human society can use these technological instruments to radically reshape
nature for the benefit of both society and nature. Indeed, this would involve
both the transformation of man and nature. Or, as Trotskii put it in the
conclusion of his book, Literature and Revolution, in a quote that might as
well serve as an appendix to our whole discussion:
“
The Socialist man will rule all nature by the machine, with its
grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains
and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he
will lay down rules for the oceans. The idealist simpletons may
say that this will be a bore, but that is why they are simpletons.
Of course this does not mean that the entire globe will be
marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks
and gardens. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and
tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to
remain. And man will do it so well that the tiger won’t even
notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived
in primeval times. The machine is not in opposition to the earth.
[…]
[And thus, t]he wall will fall not only between art and industry,
but simultaneously between art and nature also. This is not
meant in the sense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that art will come
nearer to a state of nature, but that nature will become more
“artificial.” The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of
fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores,
cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in
the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they
are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming.
Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology,
which takes nothing “on faith,” is actually able to cut down
mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for
industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the
future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale,
according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will
occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and
will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In
the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image,
at least according to his own taste.[4]
This entry is intended to serve as a standalone piece, but it is informed by

three previous posts I made in which I establish my theoretical position. For
those who are interested in reading them, please refer to the following links:
Man and Nature, Part I: The Shifting Historical Conceptions of

Nature in Society
Man and Nature, Part II: The Marxist Theory of Man’s Alienation
from Nature
Man and Nature, Part III: An Excursus into the Structuralist
Opposition of Nature and Culture
[1] Mencken, H.L. “The Farmer.” From American Mercury, March, 1924. Pgs.
293-96
[2] Marx, Karl. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
[3] Engels, Friedrich. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
[4] Trotskii, Lev. Literature and Revolution.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch08.htm
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In “essays”
Posted in modernity
Tagged Adorno, civilization, Claude Levi-Strauss, criticism, culture, Durkheim,
eco-activism, eco-feminist, Engels, environmentalism, Freud, Hegel, history,
Horkheimer, Lenin, man, Marx, nature, politics, Schelling, structuralism, Trotskii,
utopia, Weber
4 THOUGHTS ON “MAN AND NATURE, PARTS I-IV (COMPLETE)”
Renegade Eye
— APRIL 1, 2011 AT 2:38 AM
The rightist utopia, at this point in history; is to go back to smoke stacks and
child labor. If the 8 hour day could be repealed, that would only be a bonus.
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Ross Wolfe
— APRIL 1, 2011 AT 9:59 AM
That would certainly heighten the class struggle again. Seeing the
unions in America going into their death throes is a testament to
seventy years of bad politics in the form of their allegiance to the
Democratic party. I’d prefer to have a clean slate on which to build the
class struggle anew.
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humanity’s relationship with nature
business
— APRIL 11, 2011 AT 1:22 AM
The study of natural things and the regular laws which seem to govern them
as opposed to discussion about what it means to be natural is the area of
..The word nature derives from a philosophical term derived from the verb for
which was used as a translation for the earlier term which was derived from
the verb for natural growth for example that of a plant. Already in classical
times philosophical use of these words combined two related meanings which
have in common that they refer to the way in which things happen by
themselves naturally without interference from human deliberation divine
intervention or anything outside of what is considered normal for the natural
things being considered..Understandings of nature depend on the subject and
age of the work where they appear.
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27/9/2019 Man and Nature, Parts I-IV (Complete) | The Charnel-House

Caspar David Friedrich, "Sunset" (1835)

Man and Nature, Part I: The Shifting

Historical Conceptions of Nature in Society

How Nature points out the folly of man…

— Blue Oyster Cult, “Godzilla”

So perhaps it might be useful to begin with an overview, a genealogy of sorts,

And so, to begin at the beginning:

At some points, nature was viewed as an adversary to be feared, bringing

Later, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, nature was reenvisioned as dead

therefore became “disenchanted,” in the Weberian sense.[4] With the arrival

Romanticism responded to this alienation from nature with a sense of tragic

Rockefeller or a Carnegie would be more interested in the way they might be

For most of these groups, the environmentalists tended to view any

carries with it a great deal of ideological baggage, and reflects the

[1] See Durkheim’s excellent treatment of these different theories of primitive

[4] “[I]ncreasing intellectualization and rationalization does not mean

[6] “We consider someone to have a naïve character if in making judgments

[7] Ibid., pg. 194.

Still from Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1979)

Man and Nature, Part II: The Marxist

Theory of Man’s Alienation from Nature

Although humanity’s alienation from nature was clearly a central concern of

Although Engels himself repudiated the French materialists and natural

But it was precisely the application of this mechanistic Weltanschauung in the

Lukács’ great contribution to Marx’s theory of man’s alienation from nature

society, bourgeois social relations became a sort of “second nature.” As Lukács

As a sort of nature in its own right, bourgeois economists and Bernsteinian

Even the experience of this sort of “primitive” wilderness is increasingly

ourselves to this or that proposed solution, a review of the major positions is

[2] Ibid., pg. 328.

[3] Ibid., pg. 331.

[5] Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Translated by Barrie

[6] Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben

[7] “The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore

products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is

[8] Lukács, Georg. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”

[9] Ibid., pg. 128.

[10] Marx, Capital. Pg. 103.

[12] Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. (Verso

[13] Ibid., pg. 116.

[14] Horkheimer, “The Revolt of Nature.” Pg. 86.

Still from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Man and Nature, Part III: An Excursus into the

Structuralist Opposition of Nature and Culture

structuralists would have us believe. An absolute division between any of

Humanity is in this respect radically differentiated from the rest of nature,

thus the feelings of alienation in man’s relation to nature remained beneath

The difference between structuralist dialectics and the historical dialectics of

Dialectical materialism, by contrast, is methodologically diachronic. It views

nature and the prospect of impending environmental collapse weigh like a

[1] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” From Structural

[3] Engels, Friedrich. The Dialectics of Nature. Translated by Clemens Dutt.

[8] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “Structure and Dialectics.” From Structural

[9] Engels, Friedrich. The Dialectics of Nature. Translated by Clemens Dutt.

Communist Party International Emblem, 1919

“Go Green” Emblem, 2010

Man and Nature, Part IV: A Radical Critique

of the “Green” Environmental Movement

Included in it are economists, philanthropists, humanitarians,

— Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

Surveying the various constituencies that make up the present-day Green

1. THE IDEOLOGY OF “LOCAL” AND “ORGANIC”: LOCAVORES AND