Dialectic distribution driver#

Dialectic distribution driver#

Here, Engels had indicated that the capitalist class was “a class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is too weak to open.” It was precisely capital’s inability to control “the productive forces, which have grown beyond its power,” including the destructive effects imposed on its natural and social “environs,” that was “driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution.” Hence, “if the whole of modern society is not to perish,” Engels argued, “a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place.” 4Įngels’s earlier metaphor differed slightly from Benjamin’s later one, in that the object was to open the safety valve in order to prevent a boiler explosion and crash-a fairly common cause of train wrecks in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by passengers on this train-namely, the human race-to activate the emergency brake.” In Michael Löwy’s well-known interpretation of Benjamin’s statement: “The image suggests implicitly that if humanity were to allow the train to follow its course-already mapped out by the steel structure of the rails-and if nothing halted its headlong dash, we would be heading straight for disaster, for a crash or a plunge into the abyss.” 3īenjamin’s dramatic image of a runaway locomotive and, hence, the necessity of conceiving of revolution as a pulling of the emergency brake, recalled a similar passage in Engels’s Anti-Dühring, written in the late 1870s, a work with which Benjamin, like all socialists in his day, was familiar. Some intimation of the contemporary significance of Engels’s ecological critique can be gained by commencing with Walter Benjamin’s celebrated 1940 aside, often quoted by ecosocialists, from the “Paralipomena” (or side notes) to his “On the Concept of History.” There, Benjamin stated: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. As Paul Blackledge has stated in a recent study of Engels’s thought, “Engels’s conception of a dialectics of nature opens a place through which ecological crises” can be understood as rooted in “the alienated nature of capitalist social relations.” 2 It is because of the very comprehensiveness of his approach to the dialectic of nature and society that Engels’s work can help clarify the momentous challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch and the current age of planetary ecological crisis. If Karl Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift is at the heart of historical-materialist ecology today, it nonetheless remains true that Engels’s contributions to our understanding of the overall ecological problem remain indispensable, rooted in his own deep inquiries into nature’s universal metabolism, which reinforced and extended Marx’s analysis. In “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” from his Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels declared: “Everything affects and is affected by every other thing.” 1 Today, two hundred years after his birth, Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times. The author would like to thank Fred Magdoff for his help at several points in this article.