Better Red than Dead:

Marx on the Dialectics of Nature

The inevitable failure of COP21 hot air to meet the challenge of global warming proves
yet again that capitalism is the problem not the solution. But what makes the crisis of
capitalism this time different from past crises is that climate change makes the crisis
terminal. The capitalist class cannot survive without destroying both popular resistance to
its rule and the ecological foundation of humanity in society. Marx always saw socialism as
bringing alienated humanity back to nature. That is why there is no future for humanity
without a global socialist revolution. Better to be red than dead!
Most analyses of this predicament blame the hubris of humanity in destroying nature nature good; capitalism bad. This idea is expressed in the term Anthropogenic that
refers to the changes brought about in climate (nature) as a result of industrial society.
For most climate warriors society must stop abusing nature and return to nature if homo
sapiens is not to suffer the pain of extinction. For the Green Left that means change the
system. Yet its clear that this system is antagonistic to nature as two distinct and
separate entities.
Marx did not agree. For him, society and nature were one. Not a fixed and immobile unity
but a contradictory unity. The contradiction is not that of humanity versus nature, but one
that runs through the heart of capitalism itself, the capital-labor relation. It is the
contradiction between the labor that produces value as the working class, and capital that
expropriates surplus value as its private property thus appropriating nature to accumulate
its profits. Hence class struggle refers to the basic contradiction between nature (as usevalue) to reproduce society, and capital as exchange-value that exploits and appropriates
use-value (nature) as private profit. That is why Marx talks of class struggle as the motive
force that drives the historic rise and fall of capitalism. The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggle.
We can call this the dialectics of nature which understands that society and nature are
not antagonists but bound together as a contradictory unity. For Marx and Engels,
dialectics was a method of analysis which took as its starting point the reality of social

change as a material process driven by humans producing to meet their basic needs.
Human labor was used to transform nature and society was dominated by nature so long as
its ability to control nature was limited. This appearance of a society/nature antagonism
persisted despite, and because of, to obscure the rise of class divided society made
possible by new technologies that produced a social surplus.
Class societies resulted from a series of revolutions in social relations to create new
classes of owners and producers. Men overthrew women in lineage societies to privatise
the surplus and create the patriarchal society; then some men became slave owners to
privatise the labour of other men and all women; then some men became landowners in
tributary or feudal society, privatising the labour of other men and all women as rent;
finally, some men who started as merchants became capitalists by creating the factory
system to privatise the labour of landless peasants. Each revolution enabled a new class to
proclaim its historic superiority in developing the forces of production (progress,
civilisation, etc) to new heights before being replaced by a new exploiting class capable of
higher leaps in development.
Each historic class society harnesses nature for private wealth. The socialised forces of
production clash with the privatised relations of production that form barriers to their
further development. The contradiction between social nature and privatised society that
runs through capitalism has reached bursting point. As a result capitalism as the most
advanced class society has exhausted its capacity to develop the forces of production and
is overdue to be replaced by a new revolutionary class, this time one that is genuinely
superior because it is universal and capable of abolishing classes.
Capitalism has exhausted the pre-history of class society by creating the pre-conditions for
real human history where the privatised surplus is socialised again, not under conditions of
scarcity, but of plenty. A socialist revolution is necessary to restore the highly developed
forces of production back to nature by removing the un-natural capitalist ruling class. The
contradiction between potential humanity-in-nature to reproduce itself and the ruling
classes that appropriated nature as private profit, can then be resolved by the working
class, no longer as a class, but as universal humanity because it ends the privatisation of
antagonistic production relations and socialises production as one with nature.
The question then is how to make a socialist revolution. As already pointed out if no new
class emerges in time to replace capitalism with socialism, homo sapiens and many more
species will become extinct. This time the stakes are higher than ever before. Our task is
not just about removing a defunct capitalism that destroys the forces of production, but
stopping capitalism from destroying humanity as part of nature. The ruling class must be
overthrown, not simply because it has passed its use-by date, but because it threatens to
take down humanity to destruction with it.
Can we do it? Yes, capitalism has created its own gravediggers. Everywhere, it has
abandoned bourgeois democracy and the rule of law and now rules by naked force,
militarising society in an attempt to destroy all political opposition. Yet it is being met by
resistance to its destruction at every point. The global working class is ready and willing to
fight. The class war is now breaking out openly everywhere; by Arab and Kurd warriors in
the Middle East; by anti-austerity and anticapitalist youth; by unions defending casualised
workers; by hackers and whistleblowers; by social mediaphiles using the internet as a
weapon; and by climate warriors against fracking and deep sea drilling. This is the actual
global class war where the armoury combines ideas, high tech, civil disobedience and
military resistance.
But despite this spontaneous willingness to fight, the working class will remain
disorganised and fragmented so long as capitalism can hide behind the divisive ideologies
of patriarchy, nation, political Islam, terrorism, violence, etc until the working class
becomes conscious of itself as the class that represents humanity and fights for itself as

humanity. Essential to this task is the international organisation of the working class as a
united anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist force with a transitional program for socialist
revolution that can counter and defeat the organisation of the imperialist ruling classes.
That program must guide the working class in its historic mission from overthrowing
capitalism to restoring humanity/nature in a future communist society. The victory will be
sweetest for women workers who were the first representatives of humanity to be socially
oppressed. Never better to be red than dead.