Rev Left Radio - Dialectics Without Destiny: Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

In this episode, we're joined by professor Joel Wainwright (co-author of Climate Leviathan) to discuss his newest book, The End: Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis. Together, Breht and Joel explore the intellectual impact Charles Darwin had on Karl Marx, and why it matters for the ecological crisis of our time. Wainwright argues that Marx's study of Darwin helped him develop a distinctly Marxian concept of natural history, reshaping how he understood history, nature, and capitalism itself. Reading Capital through this lens, they unpack how Marx's critique becomes an ecological critique: capitalism as a social formation that reorganizes the human–Earth relation, producing crisis, "surplus" populations, and new forms of domination - and have some fun disagreements along the way. They close by asking what this natural-historical Marx can contribute to building an eco-socialist alternative beyond capitalist growth and climate catastrophe. Check out Breht and Alyson's previous episode on Climate Leviathan HERE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get bonus episodes on Patreon Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have a really fascinating, wide-ranging conversation. I know I say that a lot, but it's true a lot. This is the author, Joel Wainwright, the author, the scholar from OSU. He wrote with a co-author, The Book, Climate Leviathan, which longtime listeners of Red Menace and Rev. Left might remember. Allison and I basically did a whole episode on that book, explained it, reflected on it, etc. He's come out now, or Joel has come out now with his newest book,

just released through Verso a couple months ago called The End, Marks, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis. Really bringing together Darwin and Marx who were alive at the same time, doing work at the same time. When Darwin dropped on the origin of species, marks in angles immediately, as I've said many times, saw this as in line with their project and reached out to Darwin, wrote a very flattering letter. Darwin wrote back writing flattering stuff about Marx. Marks, of course, was in London at that time where Darwin was, so he was in the sort of cultural milieu of the impact of Darwin's work. And so what Joel does is he takes this historical meeting and he really drives home the Darwinian impact on Marx's thinking post-1860 in his later more mature work and particularly in capital to kind of put pressure on

some orthodoxies that may be outdated and to kind of talk about Marx's understanding of capitalism and modes of production as a form of natural history, which we'll get into if that doesn't make intuitive sense to you up front. We get into that. So we kind of talk about Darwinian anti-teleology. So teleology meaning that there's a process with an end goal in mind, which, you know, for example, when we talk about this, Hegel and Hegelianism is teleological. in that there's an unfolding process with a very specific end in place. And Darwinian evolution is non-teleological, and that evolution is not geared towards some end state,

but is a naturally unfolding and occurring process that is fundamentally open-ended. And so when Marx is thinking about the evolution of human societies over time, there are different Marxisms, as it were, on this question. There's a more Hegelian-inflicted Marxism in various different forms, which can be very teleological. in its vision. And there can be, as Joel argues for, a more Darwinian understanding

of Marxian natural history as fundamentally open-ended with a multiplicity of possibilities. As we go through the conversation, we talk a lot about that. We talk a lot about dialectics. And Joel, you know, has some pushback. He's not a Marxist Leninist.

So we talk about China. We talk about the Vanguard party, you know, and Joel, you know, sort of criticizing vanguardism as such. You know, me kind of pushing back on the limits of spontaneity, which he seems to be advocating for. We talk about the limits of trade union consciousness, ecology more broadly, dialectics, and particularly, you know, his disagreement with Angles' dialectics of nature, which I've

done it, you know, Allison and I did a whole episode on. It's one of our best of episodes. I'm very proud of that episode. I love that episode. I'm very much in the tradition of Angles' dialectics of nature that he criticizes, and we kind of have a quick back and forth. Our time was wrapping up at the end, so I would have loved to have another 30, 45 minutes with Joel to work through that disagreement more robustly. So throughout this conversation, we go deep on a lot of philosophy, on a lot of natural history, on evolution as such, and we come across many disagreements that we have. And as always, I know my audience is mature enough to take those disagreements and those different viewpoints and use that as grist for the middle of your own critical thought.

If you disagree with me or you disagree with Joel on a certain issue, why? How? What's your argument? How would you argue back against one of the things you disagree with? And that's how we become deeper thinkers, not by, you know, confining ourselves in the eco chambers or only surrounding ourselves with people who agree with us already. but taking other well-meaning principled, you know, socialist and communists and their disagreements with us and working through them in good faith. That is what we have to do as Marxists and just as critical thinkers, as human beings interested in the truth, right? And so I hope that this conversation serves not only as a fascinating exploration of the connections between Darwinian evolution and Marxian natural history, but also as a sort of practice for those that might disagree. with me or Joel on various issues, to take that as a wonderful opportunity to deepen your own thoughts and to wrestle critically with things you disagree with, and to come out a better thinker

and ideally a better Marxist because of it. So that's our conversation. Absolutely love it. Get the book, if any of this, is interesting to you because we could only cover, we could only scratch the surface of what the book covers, you know, by definition, an interview is never going to be that as deep as a book itself. So check. that out. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, we are 100% listener-funded, you know, genuine, sincere, hardcore independent media. Never run any ads, never have any sponsors, never have any big money donors. We depend on our Patreon subscribers to keep the show going and to put food on our tables. Me and David's, you know, we have families and we use the Rev. Left income

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It's also the one place where in the comment sections of every Patreon post, I make sure that I go out of my way to respond to every single comment. So I can't check all my social media notifications, you know, keep up on all the emails. But that one place, Patreon comment sections on our posts, is the one place I put aside. I'm going to read and respond to everything that gets put here. So if you're interested in that direct engagement with me, that's another perk, perhaps. of that. And if you don't like the subscription model, you don't want to join Patreon. You can always

give us a one-time donation and buy me a coffee.com forward slash revleft radio and just show us some love. And it matters a lot. And it helps us a lot. And we're deeply appreciative. If you don't have the extra income, you can leave a like, share this episode, share these episodes with your friends or on your social media accounts. Leave us a positive review. All those things go a long way and helping us move up the algorithm and reach more people. As a communist outlet, the algorithms don't favor us. You know, we're not in a favored position broadly in the ecosystem of podcast and media output and all those things help to continue to move us up and get our voice out there tomorrow. So without further ado, here's my fascinating, wide-ranging conversation with

Professor Joel Wainwright on his book, The End, Marks Darwin in the Natural History of the Climate Crisis. Enjoy. Hi, everyone. My name is Joel Wainwright. I'm a professor of geography at Ohio State University, and the author of the book, The End, Marks, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis, recently published by Verso. Well, welcome to the show, Joel. Thanks, Brett. Yeah, long-time listeners of the show will remember an episode perhaps that we did on your previous book with a co-author, Climate Leviathan. That's right. I think we might have tried to reach out, never made it happen, but Allison and I, we kind of went through the book, explained it, reflected on it, loved it. And now you've

come out with your newest book, The End, Marx, Darwin, and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis, which in some ways is continuing in this line of inquiry and this really important line of work about the climate catastrophe that we're increasingly living through. I've always been deeply influenced by Darwin and Marx. They were two intellectuals and philosophers and just thinkers that I got really into as my political consciousness was blossoming in my late teens and early 20s. So having them in conversation has always been kind of natural for me, but seeing the way that you did it in this book was really, it elevated the entire discussion and elevated their relationship with one another. So I'm really excited about this book. Yeah. No, thanks. Thanks a lot. Can I just jump in on that point and say that Jeff Mann, first of all, with whom I wrote Climate Leviathan, is not a co-author on this book, The End, but he was a very important source of inspiration and ideas. encouragement and I feel like he's he's with us here today in spirit. I should also mention up front that

that the original project that I conceived for this book, the end, had two more chapters and the book got too long and so they had to be cut out. And one of those, both of them were going to be in part three, which we'll talk about later, but just as a heads out. One of them is now being completed as a separate book, a companion volume, as it were. And it's called the Anthropocene and the atomic bomb and it should be out later this year with MIT press. Wow. So that's what I'm working on right now. And if you want later, we can get into that.

But it was really kind of an extension of the same, the same project. So the project continues. It's not, it's not done. Wonderful. It's not done with me. I don't know if I'm done with Hid, but it's still keeping me going. But now, what you mentioned, I just want to say up front that since this book came out, there have been two main responses to it.

And one of them has come from readers like yourself who say things like, you know, I learned about Darwin and evolution of high school and it just made sense to me. And it's always been a big part of how I understand things. And then I became a Marxist and I tried to put the two together. But it seemed like, you know, somehow we weren't supposed to talk about them together. And I'm really glad you kind of, you know, you sort of put all this on the table. And I've heard that enough now that I'm starting to get annoyed with Marxists who don't talk about Mark Darry. If I could put it that way. Like, come on.

Like, what's wrong with this? There's all this like hush tones. Like, yeah, of course, you know, Darwin, but we don't talk about that as Marxists. It's like, well, you know, the planetary crisis is going to force that conversation to change. So we might as well wise up. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I remember reading that the big biography on Darwin.

I forget the authors of it, but it's kind of the classic go-to, huge biography of Darwin. And just learning about his life and everything is fascinating. And the sort of interaction, and we'll get into this very soon, between the letter writing, between Marks and Darwin, which I always found deeply fascinating. So we'll get into all that. But I think before we move into this, I have to assume, as always, that, you know, lots of our listeners, they probably haven't read the book or are familiar with it. It came out a few months ago.

So kind of like from a bird's eye perspective, can you just kind of like pitch the book and let people know what you're trying to do in this one? You bet. So as the reader would guess from the title, this is a book about the end and what the end is and how we should think the end. So that is to say that the book is about teleology in social analysis, which is to say how ideas and arguments are made that presuppose a certain end. And one of the big arguments of the book is that Marx became an increasingly anti-teleological thinker as his life went on and that Darwin helped him to arrive at that conclusion. And there's some important political implications for that.

But regarding the structure of the book, the book is written in three parts. In part one, I tell the story of Marx and Darwin. So chapter one looks at Marx's thinking before he read Darwin. Chapter two looks at Darwin and reintroduces Darwin for the reader. Many of us think we know Darwin, but Darwin's life and thought was very complicated, in fact. And so I needed to kind of retell the story in a way that made sense for Marxists and people were interested in Karl Marx's thought. And in the third chapter, then I look at how Marxist's thought changed after he read Darwin in 1860. So just as a little footnote for the reader, as a reminder, Darwin's masterpiece on the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Marx was living in London at the time. This was by far the big intellectual event of that era. And Marx was swept up with the debates surrounding the book. He read it himself in 1860.

And it's quite clear how that... or I believe it's quite clear that it had a major effect on his critique of Capital's political economy. So then in Part 2, I turn to look at Marx's masterpiece, which is called Capital. I first published in 1867. Most of the quotations that I'm drawing from in the book are from the new translation by Paul Reiter, which is of the second German edition, which came out a few years later. But the point, though, is that Part 2 is essentially reading Capital, the book, as a work of natural history, which is what Marx told us who was doing in the preface. And then in part three, I step back and I say, okay, if I'm right, and if we really should have been reading this book

called Capital all along as a Darwinian-influenced work of natural history, then what does this mean for us and how we understand the world? And in the initial conception of part three, there were five chapters. One looked at state, the formation of the state, and Marxist state theory. That had to be removed because it was too long. I hope to write that book someday soon. The next chapter, which is chapter six, is on the natural history of the emergence of capitalism. Essentially, the old question, like, how did we become capitalist and what does that have to do with nature?

And then there was a chapter on the philosophical implications of this perspective, like, okay, if I'm right, what does that mean for the philosophy of Marxism? And then a chapter on the Anthropocene, which is the book I'm finishing now. And then the final chapter is a political chapter. What does all this mean for revolutionary political strategy?

So that's the book in a nutshell, all three parts, Marx and Darwin, Capital's Natural History, and then implications and elaborations. Beautiful. Let's go ahead and get into it. Yeah. I want to talk about the teleology point. This is important because, you know, a lot of Marxists, once they understand historical materialism, there can tend to be an implicit or explicit teleology, meaning that they kind of think that as historical materialism unfolds,

it more or less inevitably leads through socialism and towards communism. And, you know, some people will say, well, Marx also said that it could end in the common ruin of contending classes, so it's not purely guaranteed or inevitable. Some people are so structural that they sometimes think that it's almost going to happen deterministically, you know, just naturally. And we're kind of along for the ride, which has its own problems and errors. So let's kind of talk about that. When most people think Darwin, they think biology, when they think Marx, they think class struggle, political economy, they think these things are totally different. So can you kind of start talking about the bridge you're building between them and what you mean when you say Marx's encounter with Darwin helped him purge teleology? Okay, so there's a lot there. Let's unpack it one step at a time. So first of all, for readers who haven't heard that strange word teleology before, obviously it comes from, it has Greek roots. It means the logos of the telos, which you could roughly translate to mean a kind of claim, which is,

which is determined by its end, or thinking from the end, or speaking from the end, the logos of the telos. We all actually think teleologically all the time. It's a fairly ordinary human thing to do. We do so when, instead of making careful logical deductions on the basis of certain facts that we are able to determine, we start with a quote-unquote known conclusion and then think backwards to make sense of patterns that we see. So a very common example of this would be to posit a rational God that created everything. So this is a familiar argument for people who are Darwinians who have been confronted by, for instance, religious believers who are telling them that Darwin must be wrong because they're presupposing the existence of a rational and loving God who created everything.

So by starting with the presupposition that there's a God who is loving and rational and so forth, they can explain anything by making up stories that go backwards, so to speak, to explain how creation came about. Now, Darwin and his theory was really the first scientific explanation of evolution that undid teleology in that sense. And he did so not only by positing a mechanism for evolution, incidentally, the idea of evolution predated Darwin by a few generations, or even thousands of years, depending on how we talk about evolution. But what Darwin did wasn't just to identify the mechanism of natural selection, which is one of the important mechanisms that causes species to change. But crucially, he developed a conception of the way natural selection works on populations

that presupposes random chance in the production of differences within populations. So, okay, I'm getting a little bit ahead into the biology here, but the long story short is that Darwin didn't say, and therefore nature determines X, Y, or Z outcomes. Quite the contrary, what he said is that because there is randomness and the play of chance within populations, and then natural selection plays out in those populations, there tend to be certain predictable outcomes. That's a totally non-deterministic and non-theological conception of the change of species. Well, I claim that that actually is what helped Marx arrive at his conception of

class struggle in history, which is also non-teleological and non-deterministic. And so that, however, runs against, as you rightly put it, Brad, some conceptions of Marxism. There are versions of what are usually called historical materialism or dialectical materialism, two terms that, by the way, Marx didn't ever use about himself. Those were terms that were used by Engels and others to describe Marx after he died. Where they, you know, there's a certain theory of Marxism, I'll present a caricature of it, and then you can tell me if I'm being unfair. It essentially posits on the basis of a reading of the Communist Manifesto and other early writings of Karl Marx

that there is essentially a motor driving all of human history, and that motor is class struggle. And what happens is that class struggle and the development of technology produces a series of modes of production, which are quite distinct, and they have to move logically through certain stages, and the final stage will be something called communism. And on the basis of this theory, one says, well, all societies have to pass through a phase called capitalism, and then there will be class struggle, and then the outcome of that will be communism. And while it's certainly possible to develop a theory that looks like that on the basis of certain texts of Marxists from the 1840s or the early 1850s, perhaps even up to 1857, I claim that past that point it becomes more difficult, and especially after 1860, because after reading Marks,

excuse me, after Marx read Darwin in 1860, he eviscerated the last remnants of that stadialist and deterministic teleological thinking from his, from his analysis. Stadial is another word I should pause on for a second. Will we speak of stages in history? Like first this stage and then that stage? That's stadialism. So that's differ from determinism, which is whenever we presuppose a kind of mechanistic causality to changes, which is also different from teleology, which is thinking and determined from the ends.

So they're slightly different, but they tend to overlap. It tends to be that teleological thinking tends to be deterministic and stadialist in the early and mid-20th century, and not only with Marx. There were plenty of other thinkers like that. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah, so I think you did a fair job of kind of recapitulating what it is and how it's often viewed in a simplistic terms. let's go ahead and move forward I'm interested as I ask this question perhaps you can work your way towards it of what a non-teleological historical materialism might look like and here's how I'll ask the question and you can take it in any direction

so what shifts in Marx's way of seeing and thinking after his encounter with Darwin particularly like if you had to name the before Darwin marks and after Darwin marks what's the most concrete difference in how he begins to think about history nature and you know even historical materialism Well, the signature is you'll note that in the book he writes called Capital and in the subsequent works, he's much vaguer about where things are going to go. That's the big signal. In the earlier Marx, he has a kind of confidence about communism coming out of capitalism.

So much so that you do tend to get this interpretation. Like it's almost inevitable that the proletariat's going to win because we're going to make a revolution through class struggle. because, you know, the man named Carl Marx taught us that this had to be so because of these contradictions in capitalism. Well, that's not what he says in the book called capital. Not at all. I mean, you get to the end and you read the three conclusions. And there's a little footnote here. We can talk about the three conclusions of capital, why it's important that they're multiple. But you get to the three conclusions and none of them say anything is guaranteed at all. There's much more of a discussion of probabilities or tendencies. possibilities. And then of course, as we know from the writings of people like Kevin Anderson or Coet-Saito, later, after drafting the first volume of capital, Marx would go on to spend another decade conducting research into the natural sciences, world history, indigenous communities around the world, pre-capitalist communities generally, not only in Russia, as we know, famously,

from the letters he wrote late in life to comrades in Russia about the possibilities of going from a commune-based society to communism without passing through capitalism. And the general tenor of all this work is that Marx is capaciously looking through the whole direction of world history and natural history to think through the possible multiplicity of directions for future human society.

Well, that's a very different style than the early stadialist teleological writing that we see in Marx. And another way to put it is that what we can see there is Marx is sloughing off the influence of his teacher Hegel. And I don't claim, of course, that Marx ever completely turned his back on Hegel. He didn't. He was deeply influenced by Hegel as a philosopher. But there is a way in which the teleological perspective that Marx absorbed in the early Hegel, excuse me, that the early marks absorbed from Hegel, which had been kind of secularized and turned into a sort of historical materialism in his early writings,

becomes less and less pronounced so that by the 1860s and 1870s, we can speak of a thinker who is more ecological, more world historical, and more concerned with the multiplicity of possibilities in human society. And that's good because that's the kind of thinking we need today. Because, you know, if you look at the world crisis today, the planetary crisis encompassing, on one hand, political economy and capital, and on the other hand, encompassing ecological crisis. I use the word ecology here as a shorthand for everything, including global warming and climate change to the sixth grade extinction to the various other forms of pollution and degradation occurring around the world. put all that together. And you try and say, oh, but don't worry, Mark said that the proletarian revolution is coming.

It's just a matter of time. And I mean, that doesn't even make any sense to people anymore. I mean, I don't think anyone really genuinely believes that. I think what people might say those things ritualistically because they have become accustomed to it. And in the same way that a person who believes in a religion will repeat the mantra or the prayer of the religion because it gives them comfort. But analytically, I don't think that anyone really believes that's true. And so in the face of that uncertainty, to recall that in his later decades, this thinker, Carl Marx, actually arrived at a much more open-ended, capacious, a multilinear, we might say, non-stadialist, non-teleological conception of social and ecological transformation is good news, because it means that the writings that he wrote, during that period, including crucially the book called Capital,

remain our best guide to understanding our world today. Okay, yeah, so this is really interesting. I like the dichotomy between Hegel and Darwin, the teleological inevitabilism of Hegel as compared to the contingent, historically sort of, yeah, arbitrary in some sense, evolution of Darwin and how Marx might shift more in the Darwinian direction. But let me ask you this, thinking about

historical materialism in particular. Are you familiar with the Dune series? You know, I've never read it. Of course, I know of it, but I don't know it well. But go ahead. Yeah, the interesting thing is like in the, there's the Bularian jihad against artificial intelligence, and the humans rise up, smash the technology,

and basically, from a historical materialist perspective, Dune retreats to a sort of feudal mode of production as it spreads across many different planets. They're all land-based feudal orders. And so there's sort of like a, reverse and stuck historical materialism inherent to Dune. Not sure that that was obviously conscious or explicit, but it just how it manifests. But on the other end of this, communists, you know, Marxists, et cetera, and me, myself,

I hold out the belief that if humans live, we don't go extinct, we continue developing without being knocked back thousands of years, that it seems natural that we would eventually outgrow class society as a whole. You know, what's the time scales that happens? on, who knows, but class society itself could be seen as a sort of adolescent phase in human development and perhaps posterity will look back and see it as such. And so I'm just wondering with those two things in mind, kind of what do you mean by multiplicities of possibility as compared to a stagest approach that we're in late capitalism, socialism must come next, and then we move

into communism. Wow, okay, you put a lot on the table there, Brett. Let me start with, I haven't read or watch June, so I can't comment on the details. But what I picked up on your question is a common problem, which is that most works of fiction, let's say since the 1960s, which concerned themselves with the great questions of the tragic contradictions of our social order, which let's be honest, that's what most science fiction at least is doing. It's kind of projecting into an imaginary world the problems of our own time in one way or the other to try and solve those puzzles in another space, they tend to fall back on either false utopian or romantic narrative solutions,

which are not to be helpful politically. They just kind of give us a fantasy to kind of hope for a different world that isn't really based on the same premises as the one we're in, or they cannot sustain any sort of utopian vision at all, and they fall back into showing the inevitability of something like, as I take it from this example, a future of feudalism or slavery or empire or some such thing like that. And the hallmark of the truly great fiction workers or thinkers today, those who are cultivating new worlds for us in our minds, is that they help us increase our capacity to imagine creatively

how we could get from where we are to a better world, which is absolutely essential because that is, in a sense, the foundational problem of all our problems on the left is that we don't really have a shared imagined vision of what we're trying to fight for today. And that's definitely a loss because if you think back to the 20s and 30s around the world in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, you know, there was a vision that was like, you know, okay, we can build a party, we can seize the state, and we can build communism. And but unfortunately, in my view, that ended very badly. And it wasn't something that provided us with. a model that we can use today to overcome the crisis that we face today.

So now to your other question, which is, okay, if humans don't go extinct, will we overcome class society and look back and think of this as the adolescence of human existence? That is certainly what I'm hoping for. However, what I think Marx would say late in life is there's no reason to be so confident that that's going to happen. That's what we want, but we don't always get what we want. And I would hesitate to, I would not claim that from where we stand today, it even looks particularly likely. I have to say, I'm more pessimistic than that. And the reason I say that is because we are really on the precipice of global disaster today, World War III, nuclear exchange, climate change, et cetera.

I mean, I don't want to belabor the negativity too much because it will turn people off from your podcast. But let's just say that I am one of those people who has, I think, a very dark view of the current situation and where the general tendency of humanity is moving today. And in the face of that, I think we have to allow our critical minds to not stray away from the facts by telling ourselves that despite how bad things look, humanity is just about to turn the corner. overcome all forms of class society. Now, certainly that's what we want, and that's what we have to struggle for. But unfortunately, there's no guarantees that that's what's going to come. And I think Marks recognized that late in his life. I think that that was, that was certainly where he, that's certainly where he ended up. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's interesting. I'm certainly not utopian. I don't, I don't think it's in the near future. I think it would be something on the scale of

centuries, if not perhaps, I mean, I hope not millennia, but perhaps centuries. I don't, I don't I don't have any pretense that I'm going to live to see this, right? I see. I understand. As a vision for humanity, but as you said, yeah, I agree with that. So this is an interesting question is when you clarify your vision, you'll notice that we start talking about time differently. So you immediately start saying, well, I meant, you know, maybe in a thousand years.

And we just should pause there for a second to acknowledge something important, which is that that kind of long-term thinking means that, you know, we suddenly shift into talking about natural history, not just human history. Because to say that something's going to happen in 500 years or 1,000 years, if we're talking about the organization of human life on the planet Earth, means that we're making certain assumptions about the relationship of humans and the Earth. And that's a question of natural history. And that's why having a much more robust sense of Marxism as natural history,

which is, again, what Marx suggested he was writing it when you wrote the preface to capital, is so essential. But we also have to be clear about when we're talking about Marxism as natural history, as opposed to critique of capital's political economy or geopolitical analysis, etc. Well, yes, that's actually my next question. So let's go ahead and move in that direction. A lot of people say stuff like, you know, humans are part of nature, which is true, but kind of shallow or empty in itself. When you say Marxian natural history, what's the sharper claim that's being made here? And what does this standpoint let us see that we can't see if we treat capitalism as a purely social or economic machine or system? Well, let's start again.

I think it's worth pausing to talk about the language I'm using here just to make sure everyone's on the same page. I don't want to presume anything about your audience. Most people today, if they hear that expression, natural history, the first thing that pops in their mind is probably a museum with old dinosaur bones and a rock collection, a lot of dust, dusty cases. being bored as kids, being brought there if they went there from school or whatever. And the reason we call those museums natural history is because they are remnants of a major discipline that existed in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. In fact, one of the most important disciplines to come out of the Enlightenment. And in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, disciplines that today we separate,

such as biology, geology, history. history and so forth, tended to be combined together into a field of inquiry called natural history. And the object of natural history was essentially, on one hand, taking nature as a historical phenomenon, which was incidentally a break from religious conceptions of nature, which treated nature as God's creation. So by putting nature in history, natural history was making a secular scientific shift. On the other hand, natural history was placing human history within nature, looking at, for instance, how humans of different communities, different peoples emerged in different places, made a living on the surface of the earth where they did, encountered other peoples, moved from place to place, how all of that interacted with the changing environment, etc. In other words, the concept of natural history as a discipline, which I'm emphasizing its post-enlightment expression here briefly, but it goes way back. You can find it in different parts of the world thousands of years ago.

It's an old, it's an old proto-discipline or anti-discipline, you could say. But the concept of natural history has the potential for something quite radical embedded within it, which is the recognition of the mutual negation, you might say, to speak Hegel of nature and history. or the mutual adequation of nature and history. So, okay, that's the backdrop. So who was the most famous natural historian of the 19th century? Well, there's no doubt. It's Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin is usually called today a biologist or a Darwinian.

Those were words he never used for himself. He sometimes called himself a, quote, man of science, which was a Victorian thing, but thankfully we've dropped that masculine expression. But what he was best known was as a naturalist, which is shorthand for natural historian. And in fact, you know, like many natural historians, he studied a bit of theology and he studied geology and he studied field botany and biology. And then, of course, went on the famous voyage of the beagle.

And through the course of years on the beagle did a lot of reading. He spent most of his time on the ship reading, works, natural history and so forth. and he first became famous for developing a theory of the development of coral atolls, which is an eminently natural historical problem. And then, of course, for writing up his book on the voyage of the natural, the voyage and discoveries and natural history of the beagles. Anyway, the point is that for people in the 1850s and 60s and 70s, that is to say people like Karl Marx,

then living in London in the 1860s, they would have encountered Charles Darwin's theory, of evolution and associated it strongly with that tradition called natural history. Well, that's very important because then if you open the practice to the book called Capital, which came out just eight years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Marx writes this remarkable statement at the beginning of the book. I'm going to read the quotation now so that I get it right. Let's see.

Just a moment. Here it is. To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this. I, meaning Marx, do not by any means depict the capitalist and landowner in rosy colors, like with rose-colored glasses, as we say. Individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class relations and interests. And then here's the key sentence. Marx writes,

My standpoint from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains socially speaking. So there's a lot we could say to unpack that sentence, but what I want to emphasize on here is that Mark states his object and capital in the following words. He says, I'm going to examine the economic formation of society

as the product of a processes of natural history. And what I want to suggest, read or claim is that in the 1860s, anyone who read that sentence would have immediately associated it with Darwin's great achievement and would have said to themselves, oh, I get it, Marx is trying to do something analogous for human history

to what Darwin has done for species, and that's why he's also calling it natural history. And so let's flesh out this metaphor a little more clearly. But to do so, we have to talk about Darwin again. when people think about this book called On the Origin of Species, they tend to think it tells us how species first emerge. And in a way that's true, except that when you read the book,

what you find out is that Darwin says, individual species always come from other species. That what happens is that species evolve. So a particular kind of pigeon comes from another kind of pigeon. You see, so what is actually changing, is not the emergence of entirely new forms of species, but rather the change over time of existing forms of life, aka species.

In some, Darwin's On the Origin of Species is not really a well-named book. It should be called something like, on the way natural selection changes the forms of life. But admittedly, that's not as euphonious as a title. But that's what he really says in the book. So Marx understood that. He was a smart guy.

Marx read Darwin's book and he immediately understood what Darwin was saying. And so then he writes his book, Capital, to explain how natural historical processes change the forms of socioeconomic society. So then he clarifies in that book that what we call capitalism is not a thing. It's not about nature like, oh, we're just greedy, so suddenly we had to live this way. it's a specific socioeconomic formation that is to say a way of organizing human life on earth which emerged historically,

relatively recently, and has a logic that has to be explained through the lens of natural history. So you can see the parallel there is very strong. So in some, when I speak of Marxian natural history, as the readers of my book will know, I posit that this is like a thing

that we should be developing. All I'm saying is that kind of reading of Marx that embraces what he says there in the preface to capital is Marxian natural history. And it's something that we could really use today because it would help people to understand the crisis that we're in. In fact, I don't really, if I could say something that perhaps sounds arrogant, I don't mean to suggest I've found the one golden key to understanding our world.

It's not quite like that. But I would say that I don't really think that a person can understand the crisis the world is in today without having some familiarity with Marx's critique of capitalist society and without a natural historical perspective on the history of human society. You have to have those two things. So good news. They come together actually in a package after the 1860s. So let's make the most of that.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that and I completely am on board with that. Yeah. So actually it leads into this next question, which is this sort of dialectical tension, if you will, between capitalism as natural in the sense that humans and their activities are natural, but also not natural in its expansionary, very destructive, and obviously historically specific. So can you kind of talk about that contradiction in particular and how it feeds into this broader discussion of Marxian natural history? Sure. So that's a reference to the first chapter of part three of the book, which is called a natural history of capitalism. which begins by laying out the antinomy that you just introduced Brett, which is on one hand, it has to be said that once we take up this framework that I'm characterizing as Marxian natural history,

we have to concede that there is something natural about capitalism, which is kind of unusual, I know, for Marxists, but I think it simply is true, which is that once we understand capitalism as a socioeconomic formation that emerged through natural, history. And we recognize that capitalism is simply a way of organizing and forming human society on earth. Then we have to accept that, yeah, in a sense, it's natural because human beings are part of nature. We're a species that evolved like every other on this earth. You know, I'm breathing in oxygen and breathing out CO2, metabolizing my breakfast and so forth and so on. I'm a natural being on earth just like you and all other people are the same. And so since people are natural and we're on

the earth, which is part of nature, then we have to accept that. Yeah, there's something about capitalism that is natural. But that's not the end of the story. Because on the other hand, if we look at the consequences or the human environment relation, since humans adopted the form of society we call capitalism, well, then it doesn't seem natural at all. Because we've caused the sixth great extinction. We've caused the great acceleration.

we've caused the transformation of the contents of the atmosphere so that they're now holding on to much more heat, which is rapidly changing the world's climate. We've invented nuclear weapons, which could end human civilization in a matter of ours, et cetera, et cetera. There's nothing about the current arrangement that seems natural, if that means, likely to be sustained in an ecological fashion for much longer. So this conundrum,

complicates many conversations about capitalism and nature. People get all tied up and nuts because of the concept of whether capital's nature or not. And my way of resolving this antinemies is to say that there's truth to both sides and they can be easily squared once we adopt a Marxian natural historical framework and recognize, as I've already suggested, that what Marx came to in life was a recognition that capitalism emerged on earth by the reforming of human society, and that that has a variety of consequences, it creates the undeniable dynamism

whereby hierarchically organized competitive societies driven to produce new forms of technology and means of production, generate all kinds of new commodities and possibilities all the time. That's the undeniable source of capitalism, dynamism, which generates all kinds of possibilities, like the possibility of having a lot more food than we used to have, and therefore sustaining more human,

lives on the planet. On the other hand, it is also, as we know, the source of all the environmental problems of our time and the threat of World War III, et cetera. So what is to be done is, of course, the question that comes out of that. And the answer that falls from this is that what it would take to resolve this antinemone really is to change the socioeconomic formation within which we live. we would have to undergo another transformation of human society to produce a socioeconomic form that didn't have the negative consequences and qualities of capitalism. That's no small matter, but I think that's what late in his life Marx was looking for. A different conception of capitalism that essentially amounted to a different socioeconomic formation,

one that would base on, for instance, communal ownership of the means production, not private ownership. of the means production, one that would not be based on the alpha and omega of money. Because right now, as we all know, in a capitalist society, the starting point and the ending point of capital is money. And since money is something that can be accumulated infinitely without end, it means that there's no end point to the relentless expansion and accumulation of capital. I mean, there's, you know, a person who has $900 million, Brett, doesn't say to, I'll say himself because they're usually guys, doesn't say to himself, okay, I got enough money, 900 million, that should do it. You know, I'm probably only going to live in our 30 years, whatever. No, no, they want to be billionaires. A billionaire is someone who had $900 million and said, no, that's not enough. Think about that. And a trillioner is someone who has, you know, $600 billion and said, that's still not enough. And, you know, this is this, this is not the result of a few bad apples or some individuals who are morally corrupted or something like that. No, no.

This is the result of the organization of society as a, as a socioeconomic formation that is based on the accumulation of capital as money. A relentless, a relentless competition, I might add, for the accumulation of capital as money. Well, we're sure seeing the result of that. we now have a world that is impossibly unequal, where, you know, one percent of humanity owns half of everything or more, and where rather than doing what would be rational, one might think, which is quickly redistributing that wealth to meet the needs of the billions of people who don't have what they need, which would also be an excellent thing to do, not only from a justice perspective, but from an ecological perspective. In fact, they're doing everything they can to make sure that

the political and economic system aligns even more fully with their interest so they can accumulate more. Well, we have to find a way to change this form of society or else we're going to see things become much more difficult for even more people. Yeah. I completely agree with that. So let me bounce this idea off you then. Because what you're describing is obviously, you know, the massive explosion and productive forces that come with capitalism. Right. As that system develops, it becomes inherently unstable in all of these, ways primarily environmentally, but in so many other ways, it's just fundamentally unstable. It creates illogical outcomes increasingly. The relations of production on those forces have

become a hindrance to the development of those productive forces in a way that could actually meet human needs and widespread human flourishing as opposed to, you know, profit accumulation. The system you're describing is obviously something along the lines of eco-socialism. And so the question then becomes how to go about doing that. You said, earlier that you were skeptical of the vanguard party formation. You know, my sort of gentle pushback on that would be political power seems to be something we absolutely need in order to confront the forces of capitalism, imperialism on the national and international scale and the high forms of organization inherent in something like a

vanguard party seems utterly necessary and more likely to produce the wanted outcome as compared to other forms hitherto expressed of political formation and organizations like spontaneity or decentralization or these other concepts and other parts of the left. So just how would you respond to that? So first of all, as regards to your description of the situation, I think you put it beautifully. And your suggestion that what I'm calling for is ecological socialism is correct. Although in the book, I use a couple different names for the thing I'm talking about, climate X is one, building off the conclusion of climate leviathan, which I wrote with Jeff Mann. I also talk about degrowth communism, which is a term I take from my friend, goa, Saito. I like all those

terms. So we could have the debate about the prospects of Marxist-Leninism. I'm certainly happy to do that. Before I do, I would just point something out, which is that I think that outside of a few small pockets in what we usually call the West, that Marxist Leninism is mostly a very, very small minority force in the world. And it seems to me that Maoism probably deserves prioritization because it has a much more quantitatively important effect

in world history at this stage. So that's just an aside. And the difference is, well, there are various differences between Marxist Leninism and Maoism, but I'll just say that what really is happening in 2026 when we're having this conversation, usually when we have these discussions on the left, is we're talking about China. So I think we should just sort of be up front about this. I was going to bring it up.

Okay, so let's just go there. I mean, and I hope that doesn't sound like I'm trying to avoid the other conversation. I'm just trying to save sometimes. Yeah. Okay. So the question then quickly becomes something like the following, is the Communist Party of China building ecological socialism? And if it's not, should we on the left and the West place our bets that they will someday suit?

And my answer to both questions is no. China's Communist Party is presently the governing party and the ruling class, actually, which is two different things, but they've merged in the party. Of the largest capitalist society in the world, largest both in the same, sense of number of people. Well, okay, India has now surpassed China by number of people, but I mean, a number of proletarians, China's number one, and the largest GDP in the world if we use the PPP measure of the size of the economy. So we have the curious phenomenon whereby the world's largest communist society based on those measures is governed by a party which calls itself

communist and which by its own ideology, which is now incidentally called Marxism, Maoism, Shi Jinpingism, importantly, claims to be building a communist society. And unfortunately, I think that is just not true. And we have to have the clarity and the honesty to say that up front. And then the question, usually most people I know on the left who read books like mine will concede that point pretty quickly. And they'll say, yeah, I know that. But the point is, At least they're trying, and I think it's reasonable to expect that they might actually undergo some changes that would bring that fate about in the future. And then, of course, that raises questions about how that could occur under what social and political circumstances in China. We could go there. I'd be happy to go there. I will save some time and say, I don't think that's very likely.

And I do think we need an analysis of the political economy of China in relationship to the world crisis today. That's absolutely essential. Unfortunately, not many Marxists are doing that kind of work these days. I have a side interest in the political economy of China. I'd be happy to share my thoughts on this. But I don't think that's where the world, I don't think that's where China is going today. I think what will happen is the most likely outcome

if we avoid a war between the United States and China, which is not at all certain. In fact, that's the thing that keeps me up at night. Yeah. Is that what will eventually occur through one means, or another is that there will be a shift in the world hegemony, patterned after the long history of capitalism written by Giovanni Ariki, I think, in terms of systemic cycles of accumulation in world hegemony,

and that eventually at some point in this century, China will become the new hegemon. But if China becomes a new hegemon of a world hegemony of capitalist type, then it's not going to produce ecological communism. It will essentially, and this also occurred in other, so-called state communist societies like the Soviet Union, it will end up in a specific type of capitalist society through a rather long circuitous route. So all that is to say, all that is to say, with all respect to my friends and Marxist Leninism and Maoism, I think we need to have an honest assessment of other strategies that might be available to us. And there I think we can start by considering

the provocations of people like Karatani Kojin, that perhaps we should start by emphasizing the mass strike and mass boycott as ways to immediately slow down capital accumulation and to force within every society of the world reckoning with the contradictions of the capitalist form of society. Yeah. So this is super fun, and I agree with that last point 100%. I remain actually agnostic on the China question in this regard because it really does. depend on where they go from here, right? Because their argument is, well, we're in the primary stage of socialism. We've subordinated capital to the state. We put politics in command of the economy. We're developing the productive forces so that we can make more robust moves towards,

not communism, obviously, but socialism to the secondary phase of socialist development by 2050 or something like that. They express that explicitly in their own terms coming out of the party itself. You know, whether you're cynical about that or not depends. But But my main position there is. Can I just ask you put it really well, Brett, and I'm glad that you are so on top of things that you can say it like that. But can I just ask you, I mean, if you don't want to be put on the spot, it's your show, feel free. But do you really think that the Communist Party of China has subordinated capital to the state? I think they are using, I think they are using obviously capital.

they're letting capital unfold in some regards. They put constraints on it. When it gets out of control, they do try to reel it in when certain individual capitalists step out of line in a way that is not aligned with what they perceive as the national interest. They clamp down. And they have high levels of state-controlled investment

in a productive economy meant for the long-term health of the society as a whole, bringing people out of poverty, not just a rabid free market, but actually a constrained and controlled free market. and we've seen expressions like we've seen like state controlled or state constrained capitalism in social democracies in Europe and maybe even to some extent during the New Deal in the United States. Right. But I do I do think in the final analysis with push comes to shove, if there is a real contradiction between capital as such and the state as such, that it is capital that will be subordinated in that conflict.

I think I think you, again, you put it perfectly. And just to repeat back some of the things you said, I think if we look at monetary policy, the treatment of the yuan, the ability of the ruling class to maintain its egemony over fractions of the emerging bourgeoisie who might take things in a direction that is inconsistent with the goals of the party, the ability to raise the quality life for the subaltern social groups. They're roughly, you know, 300 million people lifted out of poverty. In all these respects, we can see things that seem admirable to us as people on the left. And I think are admirable.

On the other hand, and here comes the, the political implications of the philosophical conversation we were having earlier, if we accept the proposition that the book called capital is this Marxian natural historical perspective focused on the socio-economic formation of a society, I put it to you that as a socio-economic formation, China today is a fully capitalist society. And so again, we have this contradiction. I mean, I don't know if you've had the opportunity to visit China. I've been there twice myself. and, you know, just done a lot of reading and talking with people from there. Sure.

It's a totally capitalist society in terms of how ordinary people live their lives, how they imagine what they will do to move up in society, the strategies people adopt to be able to sell their labor power or to accumulate wealth and invest it to make more money. It's a totally capitalist society. And in that sense, socioeconomic formation. I agree. And yet, and yet, totally conceded.

governed by a Communist Party. I would go so far as to say that when I look around the world today and consider the different types of actors that are both influenced by capitalism and both try and shape world capitalism today, if you think about the largest actors, you know, really big players, I mean, even bigger than people like Elon Musk or Bill Gates,

like nation states, or the IMF and World Bank, or giant banks or giant corporations, you know, it seems to me that the largest actors in the world shaping global capitalism today are mostly connected to the Chinese Communist Party, giant banks in China, giant corporations based in China. And so that's a paradox. It's like when a, when world capitalism comes to be organized in such a way that some of its largest actors are part of the Communist Party of China, that's definitely an unusual situation, but it doesn't change the fact that the world today is capitalist.

Yeah, yeah. So, okay, anyway, so that's an aside. So if one, if one believe, I will happily concede this point, Brett, and I'll, and then I'll turn it back over to here, like if someone on the left in, let's say, the United States, or I don't know where your listeners come from, I'm guessing they're mostly here in the U.S., but if someone in the United States thinks that China is a really good model,

and that it's likely to become, for lack of a better word, a better kind of ecological communism in the future. It seems to me that where I would agree with them about political strategy is the following. It seems that even though I don't agree with them about the nature of China, what I think we would both agree on is that our number one mission, as people on the left in the United States, is to try to tone down the anti-China rhetoric in the United States

and avoid having World War III between the United States and China. So let's agree on that. That's my conclusion. Absolutely. And I'll even go further than that and concede to you that and the actual lived lives of people on the ground in China, they live in 100% a capitalist economy. And I think most people would concede that point.

There's no question about that. And incidentally, on that note, incidentally on that note, and despite the fact that, as I've already mentioned, a few hundred million people have been lifted out of poverty, the quality of life for the ordinary workers in China today is not great, as measured against what we think of as the rights of labor in the United States today. For instance, I mean, the ability, and I'm not just speaking about the political rights, like the things we associate with free expression.

That's also true. But the challenge of acquiring good health care for your family or a good place to live, it's not insignificant. Of course, things are getting worse all the time for ordinary working people in the United States. States too. So I'm not suggesting that things are great here. But I'm just, I'm just reminding everyone that in terms of the overall quality of life for the working class in China, things could be an awful lot better. I mean, they could be an awful lot better right now if the party redistributed

the wealth of that society because there's been extraordinary increase in inequality, wealth inequality in China in my lifetime. Which is a natural byproduct of a capitalist mode of economy growing, right? Thank you. Yeah. Exactly. So the idea that that that that increasing inequality concentration of wealth and power and fewer and fewer hands is going to some natural tipping point lead to ecological communism. I mean, I would really want to ask my, those who defend that position to explain themselves. I just don't see how or why that's going to happen. What it would require would be the political mobilization of the working class in China.

Totally. Well, yeah, that's kind of hard to imagine right now. I'll just say it like that. it's not to say it would require a major change, which could occur, and I hope it occurs. I don't see it occurring any tense soon. I think that is fair and sober analysis, and anybody who might have a more Marxist-Leninist position, you should at least struggle through and wrestle with those arguments because I think they're in good faith and they're important for us to wrestle with.

So I thank you for that. And I kind of want to shift the conversation now. Sure. Back to philosophy a little bit. One thing I noticed, because you mentioned a few questions back about the consciousness transformation, right? We're living in the sort of capitalist end times where the system of capitalism imperialism is just obviously fundamentally unstable and unsustainable. We need to transform it. The interesting thing about historical materialism, actually in parallel with

Darwinian evolution via natural selection, is that these are processes in the case of society, historical materialism, the evolution of human societies over time, obviously in the case of Darwin biological evolution, that were once unconscious processes. meaning they happened and they unfolded and humans didn't apprehend that that was actually what's happening. With the rise of Darwin in biology and then with the rise of Marx, I think, in socio-historical development, we've become, we're attempting to become conscious of these processes and actually investigate their mechanisms to understand them so that the next transformation in the mode of production can, and I think this is the great achievement of Marxism, can be a conscious effort of transformation, whereas the shift from feudalism,

to capitalism through mercantilism was a basically a process unfolding outside of the conscious apprehension of human beings themselves. With Darwinian evolution, now that we understand how evolution works, we have a whole bunch of new possibilities at our hands, right? Gene editing, the solution of genetic diseases, the mapping of the human genome. These are beautiful accomplishments that were unlocked by the Darwinian understanding of these processes that had hitherto been completely unconscious. I'm just kind of putting that out there. Does that sound right to you? I think I follow what you've said, and I think I agree with most of it.

I would say that what you're really driving me to speak to is the philosophy of consciousness and how that relates to Marxian natural history. That is a huge question, Brett, and it's very difficult. Since that might sound like a dodge, I'll just start by pointing out two problems. First, defining consciousness is no mean feat. This is something that some philosophers spend decades, working on. It's not an easy thing to do.

Incidentally, that's behind the big puzzle that many people are wrestling today about AI. Is AI about to be known conscious? Well, what is consciousness? What do you mean by that? So that's the first issue, which we could go into, but I'm not really an expert on that. And I would probably get tongue-tied pretty quickly.

The second issue is that speaking of consciousness in history implies that we're talking about human consciousness, of course. and human consciousness is usually grasped in relationship to non-human consciousness. For instance, I have a dog. I love my dog. I have a cool dog. And I'm pretty sure my dog is conscious in the sense that, you know, my dog is aware that it exists and that, you know, it's hungry sometimes. And it recognizes me and wags its tail when I come in the house.

And, you know, we talk to one another in our own way, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think I'm revealing anything weird about myself when I say that in relating to an animal in that way, I can not only experience my consciousness, but also that I can get a glimpse of what I think the dog's consciousness is. And that's important to acknowledge because it means that if you think about it, human consciousness has always presupposed the other of the non-human consciousness, whether it's a dog or whether it's the horse or whether it's the crow. The crow is an important case that comes up in my book because crows are really smart. And, you know, that whole thing. family of birds is capable of communicating in ways that are quite sophisticated. And I think

people have known that for a long time. And so anyway, the point I'm trying to get it here is, it's impossible to speak of human consciousness without talking about human consciousness as it relates to non-human consciousness, which turns out to be another complex philosophical thicket. So bracketing those problems now to simplify as if we know what we're talking about, Brett, let's just sort of simplify and be like, yeah, yeah, human consciousness. We know what we mean. So I think that for a long time, Marxism has been understood as a kind of post-enlightenment philosophy whereby human history was finally going to be put under conscious control. And in this regard, this is one of the most Hegelian qualities, you might say, of the whole project. Because as is well known, Hegel had this idea that freedom more or less is the expression of reason unfolding through history,

a concept associated with Hegel's conception of geist, which is usually translated as spirit. Again, a complex thicket we could go into, but bracketing it for now, I'll simply say that one way of understanding what Marx was doing in his early work between roughly 1840 and the mid-1850s was to try to take that general Hegelian schema and transpose it into a secular conception of the unfolding of human history where class struggle and material social relations were the processes that were driving things forward. And ultimately his idea was, you know what, if I can explain all this,

then we can provide a kind of rational, conscious basis for the proletariat to do its job in history and overcome capitalism. And, well, to come right out with it, Brett, I see little evidence that he still held that view after writing the book called Capital in 1860s. the words, after his encounter with Darwin, and as I imply in the book, using an expression called alliatory materialism or alliatory Marxism, I want to suggest that I think the late

Marx proposes that the revolution to come does not need to be the result of the rational, conscious application of good thinking applied to the contradiction to capitalism. It's something that may come. it doesn't necessarily mean need to be managed as the rational conscious result of the imposition of a good set of ideas by a small elite group of people who have figured out the truth of the history of philosophy or the history of humanity. And I think that's good news, actually, because it provides us with a solution to a problem that has vexed Marxist-Leninism and Maoism, which is substitutionism. I mean, it seems to me that whatever else we might say about vanguardism, one of its reasons for being a persistent phenomenon within the history of Marxist political organizing is because we believe that there was this idea that Marxism was a special kind of science whereby reason and consciousness could take command of the contradictions of history and solve them. But since you weren't really ever going to get a lot of people to understand the special science, you had to work with what you got, which you had to work with what you got, which a small group of people who are going to direct things from above.

And again and again, that brought us to the problem of the de facto elitism and vanguardism and substitutionism, you know, where the proletariat are represented by the party and the party is really represented by the inner circle. And the inner circle ultimately is Stalin or Mao or what have you. So if we're going to overcome that tendency, we have to address this problem of treating Marxism as another form of what Kant called constitutive reason, like the idea that you're going to establish a new form of society on the basis of a good principle which is achieved through

the elaboration of a rational scientific consciousness and the part of a small click of people. Okay, so then if go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. So, yeah, so the good news is, the good news is this is not to say that we give up on revolutionary

social transformation in case there's any doubt. Like, no, no, I'm still committed to... I mean, I hope the book is not confusing on this point. Like, I'm definitely on the side of we need to overcome capitalism as soon as possible. The problem again is that we just can't get there by way of the old formulas. And so in lieu of a vanguard party apparatus and in lieu perhaps even of the proletarian conscious of itself as the force in history which can overthrow capitalism properly

organized, of course, you mentioned general strikes earlier, which seems to at least allude to the fact that the working class as such does have a certain sort of leverage within a system that no other social group has within the capitalist system because it can shut down the economy, which is the lifeblood of capitalism. What, in lieu of that, what exactly rises to become the possibilities of a force capable of actually overthrowing capitalism and ushering in socialism? The most honest answer I can give you, Brad, is I don't know. And I know that that is weak key, so let me say more, but I want to say that first because I owe it to my

readers and my listener to say that I have just as hard time of figuring that out as everyone else. In the last chapter of the book, I adopt Karatani Kogan's schema for World Revolution to explain what a revolution from above and below might look like. And so readers can read that chapter to get a sense of how I think it could play out. But let me just put all that theory stuff aside and pick on something that recently happened here in the USA that your listeners probably would have an easier time grappling with. I'm from Minneapolis, St. Paul. Bradson of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and I'm product of the left-wing community that has existed there for a long time. So needless to say, I was following very closely events there in recent months.

After the killings of Pready and Good, you'll recall, there was a de facto general strike that spontaneously occurred. Now, if we had this conversation in December, I couldn't make reference to this. But as soon as I say that, you're like, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. It wasn't just that. mass daily protests pulled the politicians way out of their comfort zones so that they were doing things like

condemning ICE and condemning Donald Trump using vulgarity daily practically and what's more substantive and important although let's be honest like to have leaders in the Democratic Party talking like that is kind of unusual and helpful in those circumstances what was amazing too

was the spontaneous creation of neighborhood-based networks and systems to meet people's needs who couldn't leave their homes because of ice, as well as the daily confrontations with ice in the streets. What does that show us? Did that all come about

because a Marxist-Leninist went to those neighborhoods and organized people in advance? No. It goes to show that incredible power of people to transform their social formation very quickly through well-nigh, spontaneous forms of organizing. But what did it take? What led to that?

Well, it led to the point, where people were being assassinated in the streets by mass agents of the state. Yeah. Where consciousness and reason comes into all this bread is, we got to get more people to the point where they're doing that hard work before they're killing us. And that's why we do this stuff,

like write books and talk like this, so that we can increase our numbers and get people ready for making a deeper commitment in their life to not just do the specific things that our friends and comrades in Minneapolis, St. Paul, we're doing, but more generally to prepare themselves mentally, psychologically, morally, in terms of the organization of their lives, to make greater and greater changes in preparation for broad-based social movement organizing.

But my own feeling, honestly, is that if there is going to be a world revolution in my child's lifetime, let's say, I think about my kid a lot. My kid is 14, and I look at, you know, where the world is going today. obviously like any parent, I think about what's going to happen in the next, say, 50 to 60 years, their expected lifetime. And so in that time scale, when I think about the prospects of world revolution, it doesn't tend to be something that comes about through the old formula of individual parties and individual places building vanguard and then somehow making the leap from that transnational social revolution. It tends to take the role of what Marx wrote in the margins of the German ideology,

which he wrote with Engels in 1844 to 1845, at one point Marx writes in the margins, if there's going to be a world revolution, if there's going to be a revolution against capital, it would have to be a simultaneous world revolution. Marx wrote that in 1845. I don't know why that hasn't been a more prominent fact in the history of Marxism.

To me, it's supremely important. He just says that. I agree. I agree. It's either going to be a simultaneous world revolution that we don't really see coming, or it probably won't occur. That's my feeling at this point in my life.

Yeah. So much good stuff. First of all, I'm from Omaha, Nebraska, born and raised. It's where I am right now. Right on. Midwest solidarity with Minneapolis, love them, been to St. Paul, Minneapolis several times at this point. So Midwest love and solidarity for damn sure. And I watched the unfoldings extremely closely up there as well.

And you did rightly say that there's this spontaneous, beautiful, gorgeous blossoming of people power, of regular decent people in the face of this. atrocity rising up, taking to the streets, and this development of the general strike, but there's also, as I think you would concede, this dialectic between organizations on the ground in Minneapolis, stemming through the George Floyd protest and going back much further than even that, that made that spontaneity able to be sharpened into a general strike without that organization spontaneity itself probably wouldn't have developed in that particular direction. Do you think that's true? Oh, 100%. And I think we could even go back further than that. I mean, so I was raised in a Republican voting family in an all-white community in a post-war

working class suburb of St. Paul. I had no exposure, no exposure whatsoever to radical ideas as a kid growing up. The turning point in my life came in the 80s when after some exposure to music, particularly punk rock and hip-hop, to my mind, the two great cultural achievements of the left and the musical sphere in the United States in the 1980s. Thanks to that, I got turned out by going to shows and, you know, seeing other kids who were like more advanced than me and their exposure to radical ideas, learning about a protest that was going to occur in Minneapolis against yet another killing by the Minneapolis Police Department of a black person who was my age, a young man who was shot at a party by some fucking cops.

The young man killed by the Minneapolis Police Department in December 1990 was 17-year-old Tysel Nelson. Tyson Nelson, rest in peace. So I went to my first ever protest about this in front of the, in downtown Minneapolis at the place where all these big protests happened. And I didn't tell anyone in my family because, you know, I'd never been to a protest before. It wasn't something that, you know, my family would have approved of. So I just, like, went on my own.

And when I got there, I was expecting, you know, a big crowd of people and a lot of conversations about cops killing black kids. and what I found instead was a very small group of people who were mostly white talking about things like capitalism and imperialism and El Salvador and I was completely completely confused. And I remember afterwards I went over to a person who I got to know pretty well later on who was like a middle-aged white lady. I suspect I was attracted to ask her this question because she seemed kind of non-threatening to me,

you know, given where I was from. And I basically said her, I remember I asked her in somebody where it's like, Like, I'm not so dumb, but I don't understand what is going on. I thought we were talking about, you know, police and like racial. And she was like, oh, okay, here's what you need to understand. And so she sends me to a bookstore, a radical bookstore that exists in Minneapolis. What is it called? I think I've been there.

It's called, yeah, Mayday books. Yeah, yeah, love it. Yeah. And I ended up working there for many years as a volunteer later on. Nice. But when I got to Mayday, I walked there immediately. And when I got to May Day, I talked to the person who was behind the counter, a gentleman named Earl, who I got to know quite well later on. Earl was a wonderful guy. And I explained the situation to Earl. I was like, yeah, you know, I just came from this protest.

And I didn't understand what was going on. And they told me to come here and that I should read something about this and not. And he sides to me up. And he's like, where are you from? I was like, oh, you know, you know, the, you know, she post-word and suburb in St. Paul. He's like, okay. And have you ever been here before? Have you ever gone to a protest before? he's like, okay. And he gives me Noam Chomsky's lectures on Latin America. He pulled the book off the shop. He's like, read this kid. I was like, no, no, no. You don't understand. I don't, I don't want to, I don't even know what is Latin America.

I don't, that's not what I'm looking for. And he says, read this, you'll understand this. So I bought the book. And I remember I'll never forget reading Chomsky's opening the book on the way, on the bus on the way home. And I got through about the first two lectures. And it was like, okay, I think I'm beginning to understand why. And of course, now I understand he started there because anybody can understand U.S. imperialism towards Latin America. You know, all these nice Minnesotans were like, okay, this guy, we got to start real easy with this guy, you know. You know, let's break it down real basic. Like, okay, the CIA makes coups when things don't go our way or we don't make enough profit. Okay, let's start there.

Then we'll work our way up. And it was exactly the right thing to do. So to your point, yeah, what if that protest hadn't been organized? What if that bookstore didn't exist? What if there wasn't generations of solidaristic, humanistic understanding built into those relationships already? Then I wouldn't have, you know, encountered all that and got put on the path that led me to be someone who has now worked in Latin America for many years, has, you know, done all this kind of solidaristic work myself, et cetera. So I totally take your point of the dialectic of organization and spontaneity. What I would say is let's not fetishize.

let's not fetishize the form of organization we call the Vanguard Party. That's it. That's the bottom line. That's fair. Organization where organization means a new economic form, absolutely essential. That is our job. But that usually, I emphasize the economic side, we don't usually give enough thought to that. Like who's building our next round of consumer co-ops?

Who's building the new producer co-ops? How are we working on local exchange systems? What are we doing to help people get out of the banking system they're stuck in? How are we helping get people out of debt and into jobs that are both dignified and meet their needs? I mean, this is really where we should be focusing most of our attention. It seems to me on the left when we think about organization. Not how do we get three more people into our little vanguardist party. So instead of having six people, we are nine.

that seems to me to be mostly waste of time. I agree with that. And the construction of a party, whether it's a vanguard party or some other party form, I think if it's done correctly and perhaps it has been done by Communist Party in the 30s and 40s in the U.S. before, where those things are inherently a part of what we would, you know, maybe we get hung up on this term vanguard party. What I'm advocating for is high levels of national organization to be able to run those things and coordinate those type of things in dialectical relation,

with already existing bottom-up forces, as well as the spontaneous energy that we see erupt often, not so much to co-opted in the name of a small elite, but to have the high levels of organization and coordination needed to develop the very things that you're arguing for and to be able to confront the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and fascism, not only on the local stage, but ultimately on the national and ideally, and eventually, as you said earlier, on the international stage. But, yeah, I just wanted to put that up there. No, I take your point. And let me just jump in on that last point because sometimes we think that there's like a scale ladder.

We have to start local and then build ourselves up to the global. But one thing I would mention on that point is that in my lifetime, I've benefited enormously from the inherently transnational organizing that occurred around anti-globalization, for instance, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That was a huge part of my political investments in that period. and it really changed the horizon for people all over the place. And it was really an important moment in the history of the left, I think. And the fact that we lost so much ground there is really unfortunate. One thing I'll mention on that note as well is you might recall that between about 2014 and 2020, we saw this huge, spontaneous or quasi-spontaneous global movement for climate justice emerge.

And it was by some measures, one of the first. fastest growing political social movements on a planetary scale ever recorded. I mean, it was really significant. You had children all over the place, you know, leaving school in the wake of Greta Thunberg and, you know, going on strike. And, I mean, to have so many young people exposed to the idea of mass strike in order to confront the organization of society was an incredible, powerful historical event. But then COVID hit. And as far as I can tell, the climate justice movement has not recovered. So one thing I'm really looking forward to in 2026 is that next month in April, the government of Columbia has called a global gathering in the city of Santa Marta

to begin the process of creating essentially a new international global forum for fighting for the phase out of fossil fuels. Optimistically, I'm hoping that what will come from that event is a proto-treaty, like a draft treaty, to call for the banning of all new exploration and exploitation of fossil fuels, as well as the immediate phase of fossil fuels. So this would be a new offshoot of the existing climate negotiations, which occur under the aegis of the UNF-T-C, the so-called COP meetings. In fact, this came about because at the last COP meeting in 2025 in Brazil, which was a total disaster, at the conclusion of it, Colombia said, uh-oh, we got to come up with another trek here. We need it. We need them.

a more, we need a new horizon. And I'm optimistic that if the Columbia meeting goes well, that we might soon be talking about a new global movement of climate justice for the so-called Santa Marta Treaty. But we'll see. We'll see. So we desperately need that, though, because right now, I mean, I don't, I don't know what it's like where you are, Brett, but if we try and have conversations in Ohio, which is very much a fossil fuel economy about climate justice locally, people don't have a imagination of what a transition looks like and they don't see a global movement for climate justice and that makes it very hard to get momentum.

You need that. So there is that dialectic too of the global planetary conception of what's possible and locally thinking about how you fit into that transformation. Totally agree. Just really quickly, you know, thinking about the limits of so many things. You're showing the, limits of perhaps the vanguard party form. I've kind of pushed back a little bit on the

possibilities of the limits of spontaneity itself. We both agree there's a dialectic there. I'm also in a, I'm a construction worker in the trades, and I, you know, I, I'm in a, I'm in a trade union. And, you know, we're talking about the proletariat as such in the United States. And let me just say that I've seen up close the limits of trade union consciousness in the United States in particular. And it's, there, there are, there are aspects that are heartening, for sure. There is a baseline class consciousness and a hostility towards the bosses, but there is just a lot of reactionary, social conservatism, conspiratorial thinking that I'm confronted with, you know, more or less on a daily basis

and I try to work through with my coworkers who I like and are good people and, you know, are really smart in the trade and teach me a lot. But, you know, these are the sort of conversations I'm having on the ground on construction sites and trying to work through the contradictions of working class, blue-collar, American life and the vision they have for the future. It's an interesting dynamic to be sure. It's absolutely essential work, Brett, and I applaud you for Do It. You have my solidarity. I hope that you have many great gains. I'm sure you're doing you're doing more things than you could possibly know when those conversations. And as I'm sure you know, the labor history, the United States is very complex and checkered with some terrible

stories. But there are these incredible stories as well again and again where specific unions you know, achieve incredible things, whether it's against racism or whether it's against other forms of exclusion within the union or where it's overcoming the trade bureaucracy and building a more expansive sense. Obviously, we are not going to be able to achieve anything in this, you know, in this country on the left without a much more vibrant and democratic labor movement. So the work you're doing is essential. Absolutely. Totally agree. It's difficult, but an essential side of struggle. Okay, so I know, like, you're careful about the way that you talk about dialectics and its broader application to the dialectics of nature in particular. This

is interesting. I'm in a socialist night school program. We run the six-week community political education program here in Omaha. And I'm tasked with teaching the class on dialectical and historical materialism. And interestingly, to try to give people

a grasp of dialectical materialism. I don't know if you might not agree with this or not, but I use Darwinian evolution via natural selection as a fundamentally dialectical and materialist process in nature. Kind of a la angles his dialectical. of nature. I've done an episode on that book as well.

But you seem to be a little bit more skeptical of that, which I love and I invite your skepticism. Okay. So can you kind of talk about how you wrestle with that issue and what you're trying to clear? I mean, Mike, the first thing I want to ask you is, is how do you teach evolution as not like it? Because it may be that I agree with you, it's not using the word. You know what I mean? I mean, maybe we're just, maybe it's just semantics.

Yeah, I mean, to me, to me, it's not helpful to speak of it that way. I think I can kind of guess what you're going to say, but I think I better listen to what you're going to say before I criticize something. I don't understand. Sure, yeah, I've done episodes on this. People can go, but, like, you know, it's a fundamental materialist process. It doesn't need any supernatural or idealist, you know, machinations for it to occur, evolution, right? There is this interpenetration of the organism in the environment and constant dialectical relationship shaping both.

You know, there's the genetic quantity build up over time of genetic mutations and changes that result in a qualitative shift to a new species. There is no teleology, right, which I think isn't in line with your points as well. And I could go on. But, but yeah, that's kind of an interesting. So everything you just said is true as far as I'm concerned, and I agree with you. But I would just note that you didn't use the word dialectic, which is fine, which is the way I would prefer it. Because Darwin doesn't.

Right. And most biologists don't. And, you know, so when I was an undergraduate, and I was studying science and I took a couple semesters of biology, never heard the word dialectics in those settings. My wife happens to be a professor who works on ecology. So through her, I know lots and lots of ecologists, except for a few who were exposed to Marxism and Levinz and La Watton, they never speak about dialectics. They speak about things the way you did. So in other words, my response to say would be, I don't think you need the concept of dialectic to tell the story of

of the natural history of evolution. So what is the benefit from bringing in a fundamentally complicated ontological concept from philosophy to describe it? It would seem to me the burden would be on those who want to follow angles in transposing Hegel's concepts and categories into the natural sciences systematically, which, by the way, was not a project that his friend Karl Marx signed off on. It's not like Marx in his later years was like, yeah, that's what, we really need to be doing. Not at all. That was Engels his project after Marx died. He finishes

that up and publishes it. And then crucially, then that becomes a major part of what shapes how dialectical materialism, aka historical materialism, was taught as essentially state religion in communist societies in the 20th century. All the way up to the present date, like if you look at the textbooks that are used in China today to teach Marxism, they don't start with Marxist critique of capital. They don't start with, they don't start with natural history of socioeconomic formations. In other words, they don't start where I think they should. They start with this insane Higalian metaphysics about the three laws of nature that we get from ankles. I mean, this is a problem in my view, Brett. So I'm not saying you're wrong. You're right. I like,

if you, if you, if you, yeah, organisms and, and environments are inseparable. They are in fact, as you put it interpenetrating. I would simply. say mutually adequateing phenomenon or something like that. All of which Darwin knew, you see, Darwin's breakthrough did not require him to read a page of Hagle. Right, of course. And I put it to you, so in some, I wouldn't say you're wrong, Brett.

I would just say, man, don't make your life so difficult. Don't try and teach the socialists in your night school, Hagle. Yeah, yeah. You know, because it's just metaphysics and it's just going to complicate things. And honestly, in my experience, what usually ends up happening is that you end up in arguments that most people can't really understand why we're talking that way. But then moreover, whoever in the conversation happens to either have had a little more fancy education in philosophy or speak a little more German is going to have this huge advantage in how they talk about things. And then that generates an inequality of power in the relationship that is not helpful.

for the group. So let's just drop it. Like I'd presume you're familiar with the writings of Levin's and La Lantan like the dialect to a biologist. Yes, yes. I have that book, yeah. Yeah. So I have to say I have enormous respect for Levin's and La Lantan as people. I think what they achieve both as scientists and as scholars and the left is enormous. I also have, I won't get into the details here, but I have some personal connection to each of them. I have great respect for them. Also, I would just mention Stephen Jay Gould, someone I read voraciously in the early 90s. All of those thinkers, Gould, Levin's Lawantin, these were, for listeners who don't know, major, major biological thinkers and scholars of the post-war period.

I would say there were three of the most important biologists of the period between, let's say, the 70s and the 1990s in the United States. I had great respect for them. They all happened to be men of the left who were, to a greater or lesser degree, influenced by Marxism, Levinz and Luwanton in particular admired Engels' project of dialectics of nature and wrote a book called The Dialectical Biologist in which they essentially elaborated a perspective that would approximately begin from the Engelsian position. Now, there are parts of that book that I really like. But what I would observe here, what I would point out, Brett, and with this I think

we should conclude, is that we have to remember the time in which Levinson and Llewan, Engel, for his part, were writing. Okay, most of that work that we're talking about here occurred between the late 1970s and about 1989. In other words, it was the last decade of the Cold War. And that was a time when in the United States, you couldn't say anything good about Marxism without coming across us like a crazy person. But moreover, it was a time when the debate around sociobiology was raging hot. And the gene determinism was out of control because people were really figuring out, oh, you know, we're all products of our genes and so forth and so on and talking about genetic manipulation as the next big scientific breakthrough. So in other words, it was like AI

today. You know how you can't go through a day without talking about AI. It was like that in the 80s with genes and sociobiology and the idea that we're determined by our genes. So Levin's, Luantin, and Gould were all writing against that. And what that meant was they, at times inflate their opposition to Charles Darwin. They come across as more anti-Darwinian than they really are. And the reason for the confusion is because we have to remember

that Charles Darwin never knew about genes. He wrote a half century before the, more than a half century before the breakthrough the so-called modern synthesis. And so people read what they're writing and they read in particular about what they say about Darwin forgetting that the environment influences, excuse me, that the organism influences the environment,

which to my mind is an absurd simplification. And they think, okay, so these guys are like non- or post-Darwinian evolutionary biologists or something like that. Or they adopt this kind of almost Stalinistic line that only by adapting a dialectical perspective, can we speak about evolution? Otherwise, it's bourgeois science. This to me is crazy. This is crazy.

When I was in high school, I don't know about you, Brett, but I was taught biology by a non-Marxist. Yeah. And they explained, I didn't have a problem learning it. Yeah. I don't think it was bourgeois science. I think it was science.

For sure. And what I learned wasn't all that, because it wasn't overly emphatically, genetically deterministic. In fact, quite the contrary. It actually was, because it was kind of a more holistic ecological, historical conception of evolution.

It was actually closer to what Marx would have encountered in 1860, and it was therefore, you know, easy to understand, and I could imagine what Marx took from Darwin in 1860. In sum, I would just take it easy on that stuff. I mean, I'm not going to tell you that you can't use the word dialectics and all that kind of stuff. I would just push back and say, do you really think you're helping yourself as a leftist

by bringing in Hegelian metaphysics? I don't think so. Fair. Fair point. If that sounds like a pragmatism, that's kind of where I would leave it for this kind of encounter. We could go deeper into the conversation. of exactly why I think Engels went wrong. But I think realistically, on this point,

what is really essential to take from the theory of evolution or Darwin, it seems to me, is not anything that is well described by dialectic. It's what Darwin was, which was a natural historian. So to bring this full circle and conclude, I would say, what we really need today is not dialectical biology, it's Marxian natural history. Joel Wainwright, this has been an absolute pleasure,

I have so much more to talk to you about. I hope you'll come back on again. Sure. We have many, much more to talk about. I absolutely love the challenges that you provoke in me as well as it makes me think deeper about things that I've, you know, that I've sort of imbibed or that I've internalized and I think it's a very constructive thing. And I hope our conversation will serve that end to our audience as well. The book is The End marks Darwin in the Natural History of the Climate Crisis. No interview could possibly cover all of it.

Highly recommend if you're interested in these issues going out getting that book. and I will link to our episode that Allison and I did on your previous book, Climate Leviathan, for those that want to go deeper into that, which is a fascinating and well worth the read as well. And yeah, I hope you'll come back on the show because I would love to talk to you more. Yeah, sounds great. It's always a pleasure, Brett. Thanks very much for having me on. And I'll also put in a plug for the next book in this series, which is going to be called the Esprosine and the atomic bomb. It should be out by the end of 2026 with MIT books.

And then hopefully someday I'll get to write the other book, which is going to be on the natural history of the state and state theory through the lens of Marxian natural history. Amazing. Where can listeners find you in your work online? Oh, I avoid social media. I think it's a cancer, but yeah, so they can write me by email at wainwright.11 at osu.edu

Or I would just say read my books because I think that's where the good stuff is. Hell yeah. All right. Thank you so much, man. I'll talk to you soon. No, my pleasure. Thanks a lot. Take care. everybody. This is a little Easter egg at the end of this episode, but I kind of wanted to, I kind of wanted to spend a little time maybe helping to articulate what exactly Joel's criticism of angles is dialectics of nature and that whole approach is. He talks about it obviously at the end of our episode, but we were rammed up against a time limit. And so, you know, he mentioned

several things, but I don't think he was able to fully fill out the critique that emerges in the book itself. So I made some notes, and I'm hoping to articulate this in a way that's totally fair to Joel about what his critiques might be and then maybe give some thoughts on that. So, like, in my conception, Joel's pushback in this book on, you know, angles as dialectics of nature or using dialectical materialism as a broader sort of ontological lens through which you not only understand the development of human society, but through which you can understand the natural world through the natural sciences, right? And again, I linked in the show notes of this episode,

our episode on Angles is Dialectics of Nature. So if you're totally confused about what the fuck I'm talking about, you can go listen to that episode. I'm really proud of it. It's one of my personal favorite episodes we've ever done. I love it. But obviously there's a lot in there that Joel would disagree with. So he isn't disagreeing with it on the grounds that, like, nature is static

or that change isn't real. Of course, not that's absurd, right? I think what his pushback would be is that it's, or his criticism is kind of aimed at angles his move to treat dialectics basically as a set of universal laws that govern nature as such, right, independent of the historically specific social relations that Marxist analyzing. And this is a long tradition within Marxism, this split between the application of dialectical materialism to the conscious behavior and social relations of humans in historically constructed society and its evolution over time

or moving beyond that realm like Sartreau was a like John Paul Sartreau was a figure that had a position like that that you know he wanted to keep dialectical materialism in the realm of the historical socio-cultural development of human civilizations

and social relations a la Marx and not expand it a la angles to use it as a mechanism by which you can understand the natural world so so what he what Joel might disagree with point by point. Here's some notes I wrote down. He disagrees with perhaps dialectics as ontology versus dialectics as method. Angles as dialectics of nature tends to read dialectics as the way reality itself works everywhere, a sort of cosmic logic. And this is something

that I've advocated for and articulated in various ways myself. But Joel, on the other hand, once dialectics treated as a critical method for analyzing historically specific, socio-natural relations, right? He talks about Marxian natural history, and that's what I mean by socio-natural relations, right? Capitalism's metabolic rift, et cetera. And he doesn't want to treat it as a universal metaphysical principle. He's kind of allergic to that, as you can hear at the end of our discussion there.

Another point is that the laws of dialectics move angles this famous formulation. Quantity goes and spills over into quality, interpenetration of opposites, negation of negation can become a template you can kind of stamp onto anything, which risks turning dialectics into a vague explanatory solvent rather than a concrete analysis of determinate relations. And, you know, I think there's something fair to be said about that. And I've actually had, you know, very smart friends of mine kind of probably in a less articulate way and in a less clear-sided way, push back on dialectics as this sort of, you know, as I put it or whatever vague explanatory solvent or a stamp you can put on anything.

So there's fairness there. I think he would, you know, say that there's a category slippage from Marxist critique of political economy. Marx is analyzing social forms, value, capital, wage labor, property relations, as historically produced. And I think Joel argues that angles his dialectics of nature encourages people to, talk as if the same dialectical categories apply straightforwardly to nature itself, which muddles what's distinctive about Marx's critique. And I think, you know, that's something I kind of have to sit with, you know. Now, when we, you know, I sometimes feel like there's a harmlessness in seeing it. And I think my Buddhism pushes me in the direction of already viewing the natural world

through a dialectical, if not, perhaps not materialist, but certainly the Buddhists would have a dialectical view of the mind, of the self, of existence as such, of subjectivity. And because I see in Marxism this application of dialectics to socio-historical evolution over time, and then through Buddhism, I see it as a sort of lens through which to understand the development of being itself. self, non-self, the mind, subjectivity, interiority.

It's like, okay, well, they apply in these two totally different realms. And then I look over at biological evolution. I'm like, it applies there too. And I'm kind of defending that view. I actually do think, I do think in those terms. But I think it's fair to push back on that. As Sartre has, as other figures, I think Lukash has a similar position here that Joel is in that other Marxist camp, perhaps, where they

really want to keep it to social forms and keep it in line with Marx's analysis and capital and Marx's work, which is not about the natural sciences as such. And, you know, on the other hand, and Joel talks about this in this book where Marx reads on the origin of species, immediately light bulbs go off in his head. And Mark says, I'm trying to do for human socio-evolution what Darwin is, is doing for biological evolution. And he was already working in that direction. Obviously, reading on the origin of species clarifies a bunch of stuff for Marx.

And I think Joel is right that coming out of that engagement, Marx has a sort of altered vision of his work that comes out in his mature work post-1860 and in DOS Capital itself. I think that's completely fair and true. But I would say, you know, that that is kind of what, what makes Darwin so appealing to Marx and Engels is precisely this framework of how evolution occurs, right? And I would say that that framework is dialectical and materialist. And so whether Darwin has ever even heard those terms, which I doubt he has, Joe makes the point Marx himself isn't really using those terms.

Those are terms that Engels uses and that comes after Marx and is applied to him, which is fair, right? Like, you know, that old stupid quote that you'll see people bring up is like, I don't know what Marxism is, but I'm certainly not one. And we talk about Darwinianism, you know, Darwinian evolution. And, well, of course Charles Darwin never called himself a Darwinian. It would be absurd and almost narcissistic for anybody to accept those things. But they're just terms later applied to a sort of box of ideas, concepts, methodologies,

that people later attribute to a thinker and then apply that name. That's Marxism. That's Darwinian. evolution, right? I think there's no harm and no foul in that. And the fact that Darwin and Marxists wouldn't call themselves Darwinian or Marxists, that just makes sense, right? But it's still, it's not as big of a thing as it's made out to be by those who want to claim that Marxism as such is somehow undermined because of the relatively arbitrary term that we associate with this body of knowledge, right? So food for thought. What else here in my in my notes?

I think Joel would say that such angelian dialectics of nature is unnecessary for Marxian ecology. So there is an aspect in which dialectics of nature has produced or helped produce an eco-Marxism, right, that I certainly feel like it has. I think in the episode on dialectics of nature, we talk specifically about that tradition of eco-socialism, eco-Marxism, being able to be traced back in large part, although it's multifaceted, two angles as dialectical. of nature, which I think still is fair and good, but I think Joel would argue that it is unnecessary for a Marxian ecology and that Joel is kind of articulating a Marxist ecology that doesn't necessarily depend on dialectics as ontology or worldview. He calls it metaphysics, right? Which is a critique of it using Marxian terms, right? The Marxian critique of anti-dialectical thinking is to call it metaphysical, and there's certainly a lot of Higalian metaphysical. And there's

certainly a lot of Hegelian metaphysical baggage that can be brought into Marxism that we should be critical of and parse out and figure out where Hegel ends and Marx begins and what a less Hegelian-inflicted Marxism might look like. These are, I think, useful things for us to wrestle with. But Joel's point here is basically that you don't need angles as dialectics of nature to ground in ecological Marxism. You can get there through Marxist's metabolic framing, which unfortunately, that was a question on my outline that we did not have time to get into in the interview. I think that was the next

one or two questions I was going to ask. So unfortunately, we didn't get to it. But it's, you know, this idea of labor mediating material exchange with nature. I'm sure many of you can Google metabolic Rift, Marx's metabolic analysis and see the ecological import immediately of what that might mean, right? This communion with the natural world as we produce and reproduce the means of life. And so, you know, Joel would be, kind of says that that framing is sufficient. We need not go into the dialectics of nature direction to develop and articulate a principled Marxian ecology.

You can agree or disagree with that. And then finally, and I think this comes out in his critique at the end of our conversation, it invites confusion, right? That because dialectics of nature can sound like deep science while functioning as what he would say is philosophical inflation, Joel avoids the phrase to keep the analysis tight, to show the determinate contradictions of capitalism's socio-natural process rather than proclaiming that nature is dialectical.

So that's fine, and when I was telling him that I sometimes use Darwinian evolution via natural selection as a shorthand explainer of how dialectical materialism might work, in a realm of knowledge most people understand, right? I think most thinking people have a decent grasp on what evolution is and how it unfolds, just through high school, you know, high school biology and sort of the passive accumulation of knowledge and pop culture and reading various books. And, you know, most people listening will have a relatively decent idea of how Darwinian evolution by natural selection works and why it's true. So I use that as a explainer to help highlight the

the core ideas and dynamics of dialectical materialism into a body of knowledge that most people have a reference for, where they might not have it for Marxism as such. They would have it in that way. And I still think we can read back on evolution a dialectical materialist framework, and it makes sense. Not that you needed dialectical materialism

to charge forth, right, in the investigation of nature to come up with evolution by natural selection. Darwin did not probably even ever hear the terms dialectical and historical materialism. And yet, what he discovered is a process that I believe can reasonably and seriously be called dialectical materialism. Does that confuse or clarify? Well, Joel would argue that it confuses and is needless and unnecessary, bringing in jargon and Marxist categories and trying to apply them outside of Marxist field. And I would say that I found it clarifying personally and I know at least some other people who have listened to me talk or

give speeches on this have found that clarifying and helpful. So it comes down to individual positions on that, but I think both have legitimacy. And so that's my best attempt based on the book to articulate what Joel's broader critique of it would be. I think it's useful to kind of think through those critiques and wrestle with them. I think I'm ultimately still on the side that I've been advocating for four years and um i only wish that joel had more times so we can get into it i mean that could be a literally a whole two-hour episode itself is just him and i diving into dialectics and all of that so i hope that is at least kind of useful and i wanted to give joel um you know expression of his broader critiques i don't think we hit on all those points in the in the course of our natural

dialogue so there's that and then you know with the with the debate about china and stuff like that, I think it's totally fair to have those debates. I know I've always argued that I do remain agnostic on the question of where Chinese socialism goes from here, that I'm willing, like Marxist-Leninists, to accept what the party itself says and how it seems to conceive of itself as putting politics in command of the economy, right, the towering heights of the economy, first and foremost, and about being in the primary stage of socialism, which is developing the productive forces through capitalism in order to move in a more vociferously socialist direction when the material conditions are such that they can. Now, to people who are

skeptical of China as a social, we'll see that cynically. They're like, they're just kind of putting the Marxist accoutrema, you know, dressing up what is basically state capitalism in Marxist flourishing language as in some ways a product of their historical, emergence as a party, right? Like, there's not a total break. They see themselves as doing this. I'm not that cynical. I think that they, that on the whole, that, you know,

leaders in the Communist Party genuinely see themselves as socialist, as Marxists, genuinely study Marxism, Leninism, genuinely are conceiving of their political and economic system as a primary

stage of socialism that they aim to continue to push in and move forward. He talked about some of their green technology. I'm having on a guest within the next month who's coming from a different position, articulating China's green developments and why they might hold out an eco-socialist future. And in fact, are already materially building that. So I am having somebody come on to argue basically the opposite position where Joel is skeptical. This person is optimistic. But why am I agnostic? Well, because if socialism with Chinese characteristics

more or less stays in this phase, right? And there is no shift into the secondary phase of socialism, whatever that may be, or however you may want to articulate it, if there is no massive redistribution of wealth and class power, if there is eventually no attempt to revolutionize or alter social relations, then you do kind of have an indefinite functioning of capitalism. And so what's the time horizon for that? I don't know.

I know China talks about 2050 as a particular landmark they're shooting for, and I'm willing to be open to that. So hardline, you know, Marxist-Leninist would say, I'm not, you know, I'm not agnostic about it. This is socialism. This is what it looks like. It's the state taking over the heights of the economy. It is developing the productive forces. This is exactly in line with Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. This is an elaboration of the NEP under the Soviet Union, and the Chinese leadership is taking a long view of the situation, developing their capacities, not necessarily doing the upheaval of the Maoist eras, but doing a more, you know, Deng Xiaoping approach to developing and embedding the Chinese economy into the global economy, building up its military and economic capacities to be able to move more aggressively in the direction.

of socialism. Maoists and other non-Marxist Leninists would launch critiques of the Chinese state and the Chinese system as still fundamentally capitalist, as not revolutionizing social relations in any meaningful way, and as just another form of capitalism, state-controlled capitalism. And I think when there are good faith-informed actors on both sides of that debate, it's a genuine debate worth having. But Joel also says, and I've always agreed with this, that these are internal, you know, sort of things that you and I can wrestle with. But when we're speaking publicly, when we're talking about imperialism as the primary contradiction in the world, we are not going in any way to discourage or disavow or denigrate China. There's no, nothing to be gained politically

from sitting out and opining public declarations of why China isn't this and, and kind of degrade them to the level of just another capitalist or social imperialist power that must be overthrown while the U.S. government is headstrong focused on overthrowing the Chinese state as such, which we all know is their ultimate goal. So obviously there's a principled political position that those of us in the imperial core need not throw our criticisms out publicly of why China is bad and not really what it's, as it is and it deserves to be overthrown and it is basically the same thing as any other you know power in the world a capitalist power in the world etc so okay these are nuances that my listeners will be familiar with that we'll all have navigated in various ways publicly within

our organizations and within our own mind as we think through these really important issues i just had on torquil lawson right and torquil lawson following in the marxist leninist perspective would disagree with jol and was arguing that what is emerging in china is is the next mode of production, the socialist mode of production, out of material necessity of the conditions of the global economy and the environmental and ecological crises, that this and equality and all the problems of global capitalism, imperialism, that China is, is emerging and helping birth a genuinely new mode of social, a mode of production that looks like, you know, politics in command, which I think is a phrase that Torkel uses explicitly in our interview.

So if you're interested in hearing that argument articulated more fully, go check out our episode on Unequal Exchange with Torkel. And I think we've also done Torkel's on Torkel's book, The Socialist Transition. So you can go back for fact in the show notes to Torkel's episode on Unequal Exchange as all our other episodes with Torkel, including that episode. And you can kind of flesh out that side of the argument, wrestle with these things. and deepen your understanding of the different points of view here because they're all broadly Marxist, right? These are all people that are operating

and see themselves operating within the Marxist tradition and have genuinely different opinions on this and we shouldn't run from that. We should run towards it and embrace it. And I think that's interesting. You know, I've articulated in our episode my critique of the spontaneity claim and that the ultimate limit of spontaneity

is that without high levels of organization, they do fizzle out. Right. And we've seen spontaneous uprising after spontaneous uprising in the last 10 to 20 years here in the United States in particular. And they're real advancements. And the latest one that he pointed out with the Minneapolis uprising against ICE turning into a general strike in the dialectic between spontaneous mass energy from below and the preexisting organizations that existed in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and have existed there and have been built up over years of struggle, that connection is what allowed. a fundamentally spontaneous uprising against ice to turn into a political form that took the form of a general strike, right? That is a real advancement on previous spontaneous uprisings in the last 10, 20 years in the United States. And it is a testament not to spontaneity, I would argue, but to the organization that can shape and direct the spontaneous energy that arises in these clashes. And I do agree with Joel that nationally and internationally we're going to see more and more and more what would be called spontaneous uprisings around various issues.

And we have to understand, I would argue, that that spontaneity has limits. And spontaneity in and of itself can only get so far. And I think it's very much in line with the limits of trade union consciousness. Certainly there are benefits to having trade union consciousness. I see it every day in a trade union myself, but I also see the limits of trade union consciousness. Most of the political energy within a trade union is totally fine being embedded within the system as it currently exists and fighting for its share of that pie, which is important and obviously deeply needed in a highly unequal capitalist, brutal society like the United States. some elements, the more progressive elements of trade union consciousness, expand that out beyond their union and beyond the trades itself,

to see themselves as a sort of de facto vanguard of the working class more broadly. That's much more progressive, and that comes out of the trade unions themselves. I think it is perhaps a rarer form of trade union consciousness, right? I think the previous limitation of trying to carve out your slice of the pie through your trade union is the predominant, at least in my experience, the predominant posture and orientation towards what the union is. But there are elements within my union and other unions that really do articulate this broader working class narrative and to see the union as attached not only broadly and economically

to the rest of the working class, but historically to the labor movement and working class struggles through time. We make that explicit in our union meetings. And I've been in groups within the union, rank and file groups within the union that have produced this idea of coming to the union meetings and spending about five or ten minutes on the mic doing a quick labor history hit. Every union meeting will have a representative from this committee come up and give a little speech about, you know, on this month, 50 years ago or 100 years ago,

this crucial strike happened. Here's the basic dynamics of what happened. Here's what was one. Here's how the state reacted. Trying to infuse regular union members with that historical dimension to their self-conception. But, you know, the limits of trade union consciousness, the limits of spontaneity. That is in Lenin's What Is to be done. We have a full episode on it.

Link to it in the show notes as well if you want to go deeper on those arguments. But all this is to say I really, really enjoyed Joel's work. Climate Leviathan was amazing. The end really is a great book. And yes, he diverts from some of my positions in important and essential ways. And I find that diversion generative. I genuinely enjoy wrestling with those forms of criticism and clarifying my own position and articulating that position and defending that position, you know, because I think we have to engage in these sort of basically de facto line struggles within the Marxist movement more broadly. So, okay, all that is to say, I hope you enjoy the episode.

I hope a lot of that makes sense. Again, I'm only doing this to give full credence to Joel's arguments, flesh them out a little bit more, and just for the raw fact that the time limit prevented Joel and I from continuing these particular strains of the conversation, which I very much wanted to do. And again, hopefully have them back on to do just that. But all right, love and solidarity. Talk to you soon.

Thank you.