Marx, Lenin and the Theoretical Struggle in the Web of Life

• In Event: Marxism and Anti-Colonialism (Co-sponsored by Marxist Sociology Section)

Abstract

This paper advances a proletarian standpoint on imperialism through historical materialism in the web of life. Its core premises, rooted in classical Marxism, are fourfold. First, social relations are irreducibly socio-metabolic, pivoting on the labor process. This foregrounds the specificity of labor—as process and class formation—in class society's history. This is Marx and Engels’ labor theory of life, where human labor mixes with extra-human webs of life in patterned flow of re/production, struggle, and transformation. Second, class societies are geographically situated, evincing patterns of development conditions by natural conditions variously given and made. These entanglements show how class formations and accumulation strategies unfold through definite biospheric relations. Third, historical materialism is praxeological, resolving theoretical dilemmas historically on the “real ground of history” (Marx/Engels). Debates over imperialism, and other geohistorical questions, can only be adjudicated by counterposing concrete “rich totalities of many determinations” (Marx). Under capitalism, these are world-historical, with specific expressions in time and place. Theoretical differences cannot be resolved via abstract theorization. Finally, historical materialism’s maturation stems from Lenin’s threefold contributions: 1) rejecting class formalism for a dialectical view of class formation and struggle; 2) recognizing “theoretical struggle” as fundamental to communist praxis and strategy; and 3) identifying, after Baku (1920), the anti-colonial forces as the Archimedean lever of worldwide class struggle. The world-ecology synthesis weaves these four moments into a world-historical reconstruction of capitalism’s class and accumulation dynamics of imperialism in the web of life. It synthesizes Marx’s “single science” incorporating metabolic contradictions in social ensembles, dialectically interpenetrating human labor with webs of life. World-ecology views capitalism as a regime of socially-necessary unpaid work supervised by bourgeois geopower. Following Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg, imperialist geopower forges regimes of Cheap Nature, incorporating unpaid work, social reproduction, and extra-human natures (e.g., soils, waterfalls).

Author

• Jason W. Moore, Binghamton University