UC Santa Barbara

The “very gist, the living soul, of Marxism” (per Lenin) is a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. Such a situation is the climate crisis: an exigent issue for humankind and nature. No longer the exclusive purview of scientists, it has emerged into the mainstream media, political debate, and real lives of those suffering periodic climatic catastrophes: the climate crisis is a labyrinthine global threat. It straddles capital, value, production, class, corporate power, geopolitics, and diplomacy. This paper provides a synthesis of certain writings by Karl Marx over 1844–75 (including his articulation of the public trust doctrine), several contemporary theorists in the Marxian tradition, and other radical voices as they relate to the climate crisis. It also features cameo appearances by topical literary figures, including Marx’s friend Ferdinand Freiligrath, whose serendipitous gift of G.W.F. Hegel’s Logic enhanced Marx’s draft manuscript Grundrisse and subsequent Captial. The paper argues that Marxian dialectics—with its dimensions of philosophy of internal relations, process of abstraction, and dialectical laws—is an appropriate tool for analyzing the climate crisis, particularly in light of the exigency’s interconnectedness. Frederick Engels—who defines dialectics as “the science of universal inter-connection”—writes, “[Marx] was the first to have brought to the fore again the forgotten dialectical method, its connection with Hegelian dialectics and its distinction from the latter, and at the same time to have applied this method.” The subject of dialectics, according to Bertell Ollman, is “change, all change, and interaction, all kinds and degrees of interaction” and the key problem addressed by dialectics is how to “think about change and interaction so as not to miss or distort the real changes and interactions that we know, in a general way at least, are there.” And, as John Berger writes, “Never before has the devastation caused by the pursuit of profit, as defined by capitalism, been more extensive than it is today. Almost everybody knows this. How then is it possible not to heed Marx who prophesied and analyzed the devastation?”