MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE

John L. Stanley

In recent years attempts have been made by a host of Western Marxists to emancipate
the master from responsibility for various unsavoury doctrines. Especially at the
hands of political theorists, we have seen a host of attempts to show that Marx need
not only avoid the weight of Stalinism but also the various theories, such as
positivism, naturalism, Darwinism, technological determinism and the dialectics of
nature, that have served to support it. In the course of building up their defence of
Marx, these modern critics have developed an elaborate but often confusing rationale
whose premise consists in attributing many of the nefarious tendencies in Marxism
to the thought of Frederick Engels and particularly to Engels’ philosophy of nature.
Harkening back to a venerable, though somewhat muted, tendency in Marxist
criticism that stems from such sources as Croce, Sorel and Lukacs,1 the apostles of
what might be called the New Orthodoxy include an impressive array of writers such
as Sartre, Kolakowski, Colletti, Lichtheim, Avineri and Alfred Schmidt.2 Most
recently it has been affirmed by a group of contributors to the recent volume After
Marx, including J. Farr, T. Ball, T. Carver and Paul Thomas.3 Despite divergences
in interpretation and some important dissenting voices,4 the new conventional

1
B. Croce, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx (New Brunswick, 1981), pp. 27–8
and Georges Sorel, ‘Marxism and Social Science’, in From Georges Sorel II: Hermeneutics and the
Sciences, ed. John L. Stanley (New Brunswick, 1990), pp. 181, 183–4; G. Lukacs, History and Class
Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
2
J.-P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith (London, 1976); L. Kolakowski,
Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. I (Oxford, 1978); L. Colletti, Marxism and Hegel (London, 1973);
G. Lichtheim, Marxism (New York, 1961); S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
(Cambridge, 1967); Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London, 1971). See also Irving
Louis Horowitz and Bernadette Hayes, ‘For Marx/Against Engels: Dialectics Revisited’, Social Praxis,
Vol. 7 (1980); Z .A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism (New York, 1967); Norman Levine,
Dialogue Within The Dialectic (London, 1984); D. Little, The Scientific Marx (Minneapolis, 1986);
M. Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore, 1982); James Miller, History and Human Existence
(Berkeley, 1979).
3
After Marx, ed. Terence Ball and James Farr (Cambridge, 1984). Though containing diverse views, the
final section on method affirms the New Orthodoxy espoused by the editors. See also T. Ball, ‘Marx and
Darwin: A Reconsideration’, Political Theory (1979), pp. 469–83; T. Carver, Marx and Engels: The
Intellectual Relationship (Bloomington, 1983); T. Carver, ‘Marx, Engels and Scholarship’, Political
Studies, XXXII (1984), pp. 249–56; Paul Thomas, ‘Marx and Science’, Political Studies, XXIV (1976),
pp. 1–23; J.W. Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton, 1984).
4
In addition to the various defences of Marxism-Leninism, such as S. Timpanaro’s On Materialism
(London, 1975), see Bertell Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge, 1971); A. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms
(New York, 1981); Allen Wood, Karl Marx (London, 1981); William H. Shaw, Marx’s Theory of History
(Stanford, 1978); G.A. Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton, 1978). See also John

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XII. No. 4. Winter 1991

648 J.L. STANLEY

wisdom appears to focus on two main aspects of Engels’ naturalism that contribute
to the Stalinization of Marxism.
The first of these is the view that, in contradistinction to Marx, Engels formulated
a naturalistic doctrine that sees man as a product of evolution, and assumes that the
general laws of nature apply to him in specific forms. Marx on the other hand was
of the view that nature as we know it is an extension of man, an organ of practical
activity in which our concern is not nature in itself but our contact with it. There is
no ready-made nature that does not present itself to man as a purely human object
because practical contact with nature is a horizon that we cannot overstep. Hence
nature is known only in terms of our own acts and needs. Engels, on the contrary,
believes in trans-historical laws that apply universally to human development as
revealed especially in the dialectics of nature. Secondly, and as a corollary of the
above, for Engels as opposed to Marx material reality thus externalized results in a
sort of positivist tendency to know and even control the more remote consequences
of our productive activities. Scorning Albrecht Wellmer’s observations of a ‘latent
positivism’ in Marx,5 partisans of the New Orthodoxy argue that it is Engels alone
who leads us to the idea of a general administration of things, a technique, in which
freedom is equated with control over the necessary laws of nature.
Despite the variety of ways in which these ideas are expressed, the view that Marx
and Engels have fundamentally differing views of nature and man’s relation to it
shares certain common themes, and a certain common vocabulary. Leszek Kolak-
owski sums up his view of the issue by using four of the most commonly used terms
employed by the critics in various ways: Engels’ evolutionary naturalism6 opposes
Marx’s ‘Promethean’ anthropocentrism;7 and Engels’ positivism, the technical

L. Stanley and Ernest Zimmerman, ‘On the Alleged Differences Between Marx and Engels’, Political
Studies, XXXII (1984), pp. 226–48; G. Welty, ‘Marx, Engels and Anti-Dühring’, Political Studies, XXXI
(1983), pp. 284–94; Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (New York, 1974); and J. Habermas,
Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971) who are sympathetic to the idea of a ‘latent’ positivism
in Marx.
5
Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society, Ch. 2.
6
See for example Kolakowski, Main Currents, pp. 382–4, 388, 400–3; Schmidt, The Concept of Nature,
p. 191; Jordan, Dialectical Materialism, pp. 58–64; Little, The Scientific Marx, pp. 13–16; Ryan, Marxism
and Desconstruction, pp. 54–61; Avineri, Karl Marx, pp. 70–2; but cf. Wood, Karl Marx, pp. 159–73;
M. Lippi, Value and Naturalism in Marx (London, 1979); Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History, pp. 96–100;
Bertell Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge, 1971). For a discussion of Marx’s view of nature cf. Vernon
Venable, Human Nature: The Marxian View (New York, 1945) passim. A host of other discussions treat
naturalism as ‘materialism’.
7
See for example, Kolakowski, Main Currents, pp. 402, 405, 412–14; Leonard P. Wessell, Prometheus
Bound: The Mythic Structure of Marx’s Scientific Thinking (Baton Rouge, 1984); P. Springborg, The
Problem of Human Needs and the Critique of Civilization (London 1981), pp. 113, 194, 218. Cf. Jordan,
Dialectical Materialism, who identifies Marx as having an ‘instrumentalist’ view of knowledge, that is,
a ‘necessary condition of man’s control over his natural and social environment’ (p. 125).
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 649

interpretation of knowledge,8 opposes Marx’s ‘epistemology of praxis’.9 However,

the positioning of the four terms, that is the juxtaposition of Marx’s Prometheanism
and epistemology of praxis on the one hand against Engels’ naturalism and positiv-
ism on the other, has not succeeded in overcoming certain problems in the New
Orthodoxy. Recently, in the pages of this journal, Paul Thomas has noted that if
Marx’s man is the Promethean sovereign over nature, viewing it as a mere instrument
of his own goals, we may ask how this Prometheanism rules out all ‘positivist’
attempts to dominate nature as an external force.10 For Thomas it is precisely the
Promethean logic of the domination of an externalized nature that is in part respon-
sible for the Baconian view of nature that is the ancestor of positivist authoritarian-
ism.11 Furthermore, Thomas sees problems in the attempt to blame Engels’
bureaucratic and administered view of nature on his ‘naturalism’, that is, by calling
Engels a naturalist and a positivist at the same time. For if man is part of nature, if
he is in continuation with it, how can we say that unalienated communist man
opposes nature and dominates it instrumentally as an externality?12
Thomas thus attempts to change the axis of Kolakowski’s linkage of Marx’s
Prometheanism with the epistemology of praxis and Engels’ naturalism with posi-
tivism. Thomas argues that it is Engels who is both Promethean and positivistic and
it is Marx who is the proponent of ‘praxis’ and of naturalism. On the one hand Marx’s
view that nature is an organ of man’s practical activity and not simply given is,
according to Thomas, a view that man is in continuity with nature not dominant over
it; on the other hand it is Prometheanism that constitutes a part of Engels’ positiv-
ism.13 Thus, despite this change of axis, Thomas attempts to salvage the Marx–
Engels dichotomy by retaining Kolakowski’s use of two of the four terms and by
exchanging the uses of the other two. Like Kolakowski, he describes Engels as one
who holds a ‘positivist’ view of a pre-given nature against Marx’s ‘praxis’-oriented
denial of a ready-made nature; but he departs from Kolakowski by trying to divorce
Engels’ ‘positivism’ from a ‘naturalism’ that he now ascribes to Marx; and by
separating Marx’s epistemology of praxis from a Prometheanism that he now
relegates to Engels.

8
See Kolakowski, Main Currents, pp. 405, 414–16; Sartre, Critique, p. 23; Jordan, Dialectical Materi-
alism, Ch. IV; Schmidt, The Concept of Nature, p. 54; Miller, Analyzing Marx, Ch. 7; Ryan, Marxism
and Deconstruction, pp. 50–2; Little, Scientific Marx, pp. 14–16; Lichtheim, Marxism, p. 238; the
chapters by Ball, Farr, Carver and Noble in After Marx; and the controversy surrounding the work of G.A.
Cohen. Cf. Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society, Ch. 2; J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests,
Ch. 3.
9
Variously termed ‘practice’, ‘the union of theory and practice’ and ‘practical knowledge’. See,
Kolakowski, Main Currents, pp. 401–2, 405; Sartre, Critique, Ch. 1; Wood, Karl Marx, pp. 12–15;
Avineri, Karl Marx, pp. 133–9, 237–8; Jordan, Dialectical Materialism, p. 31; A.G. Meyer, Marxism:
The Unity of Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor, 1963).
10
Paul Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice in Marx’, History of Political Thought, IX (1988), pp. 485–503.
11
Ibid., pp. 486–7.
12
Ibid., p. 486.
650 J.L. STANLEY

However, Thomas’s reformulations have only raised different versions of the

questions posed by the use of these terms. First, is it really wrong for Kolakowski to
link Engels’ naturalism with positivism? It would seem that the science of man should
be naturalistic and in some way and at some point dovetail with the natural sciences.
How successfully can we separate naturalism and positivism in Marx — if, for Marx,
man is part of nature? As Thomas himself puts it: if humans are one species among
others ‘there is no obvious reason not to apply the methods of natural science across
the board to human history . . . much as Engels tried to do’.14 Secondly, is the problem
solved by Thomas’s linking positivism with Prometheanism? If it is Engels who is
a ‘positivist’ in his attempt to subsume man under natural laws, how and in what way
can his subject dominate nature if he is part and parcel of its greater laws, the very
laws which dominate him? Thirdly, if Marx’s view of nature is compatible with his
practical activities as Thomas claims it is, that is, if nature is to be fulfilled for ‘truly
human purposes’, then in fulfilling these purposes how do we avoid the Promethean
domination of nature that, by Thomas’s reasoning, brings us full circle back to the
positivist instrumentalism that is supposedly distant from Marx?
Despite these questions Thomas is still intent on retaining ‘positivism’ as the term
commonly found among Engels critics and hence as being responsible for the
authoritarian tendencies in Marxism; and he retains the term ‘praxis’ as the term
distinguishing Marxian freedom from Engelsian necessity. If Thomas wants to revise
the basis of the New Orthodoxy, it is only in order to strengthen it. Indeed he explicitly
appeals to the authority of the apostles of the new doctrine and even shyly inclines
back to some of Kolakowski’s views of Engels. In shifting the alliance of terms and
in revealing his proximity to the New Orthodoxy Thomas illuminates a larger
problem: the ease with which the attempt by its partisans to illuminate supposedly
starkly antagonistic terms in the Marxian texts actually results in their entailing one
another.15
First, he confesses that Engels is indeed a naturalist of sorts. In fact Thomas says
his essay has been ‘inspired’ by Alfred Schmidt’s view that places Engels as a
‘Darwinian’ who reduces human activity to a special area of nature’s general laws
of evolutionary development, and in which consciousness ‘is nothing more than a
factor that tends rather to complicate the matter’. Thomas thus refers back to
Kolakowski as ‘correctly’ identifying Engels’ ‘naturalistic evolutionism’. But this
restores much of the basis for Kolakowski’s association of Engels’ naturalism to
positivism and even harkens back to Kolakowski’s dichotomy between naturalism
and the epistemology of praxis.16 Furthermore, like Kolakowski, Thomas emphasizes
Marx’s epistemology of praxis as opposed to Engels’ positivism. He cites Terrell

13
Ibid., pp. 489–90.
14
Ibid., p. 486.
15
Bertell Ollman brings them together first by stating Pareto’s view that ‘Marx’s words are like bats: one
can see in them both birds and mice’. Ollman, Alienation, p. 3.
16
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 487, citing Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx, p. 191.
Cf. Kolakowski, Main Currents, p. 405. Thomas says that naturalistic evolutionism ‘is not a problem that
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 651

Carver’s ‘well-judged’ words that Marx’s stress on human productive activities is

‘obviously different from Engels’ insistence on the primacy of matter-in-motion
whose laws supposedly underlie and unify the science of nature, history and
‘‘thought’’.’17 Finally, he cites Terence Ball who has a Promethean view of Marx to
echo Kolakowski’s view that Engels’ ‘positivism’ entails instrumentalist manage-
ment by technical experts and administrators.18
After viewing the various criticisms of Engels and the attempts to separate him
from Marx, one is left with the suspicion that in the texts of Marx there is a close
connection rather than a consistent separation among the terms positivism, natural-
ism, Prometheanism and praxis. Thomas’s attempt to separate them on a different
axis only leads him to a softening of the supposedly precise distinctions existing
among them. While Thomas’s views largely typify the New Orthodoxy among
Engels critics, his departures from that orthodoxy serve more to illuminate its
problems than to solve them.
In what follows I argue that Thomas, along with Kolakowski, Schmidt, Carver,
Ball and the various Engels critics, despite their differences, have all been uncon-
vincing in their attempts to show consistent distinctions among the four terms in the
Marxian texts. Put another way, Marx’s references to nature cannot be read as giving
precise twentieth-century definitions to the four terms. On the contrary, in Marx’s
(and Engels’) texts, these terms have an ambiguity which leads us to interpret Marx
as linking the four terms as much as separating them. Thus Marx (1) regards human
history as part of natural history but in so doing he must recognize nature as prior to
history and in some sense as pre-given; (2) urges the sovereignty of human praxis
and yet admits that this praxis is limited by covering laws; (3) in affirming the
naturalistic basis of our knowledge, links that knowledge to the triumph of instru-
mentalist techniques in a communist industrial society; (4) while arguing for the
necessity of the administrative domination of nature, recognizes the natural limits to
which this domination can be put; and finally, (5) stresses the importance of
regulating production partly out of respect for those natural limits; but he also implies
that the needs of the consumer are the same as his desires and that these desires are
sovereign. A careful reading of the texts, I will argue, shows a Marx who bases a
reluctant Prometheanism on an ambiguous naturalism; who links that naturalism
with a science of man; who connects that science to praxis and praxis to the
administered domination of nature. If it can be shown that Marx and Engels shared
such an ambiguous naturalism, the theory alleging differences between Marx’s
theory of praxis and Engels’ ‘positivist’ authoritarianism would be unjustified.

can be addressed here’. Interestingly, in trying to distance both naturalism and positivism from Marx,
Daniel Little ends in minimizing the importance of praxis in Capital, which, Little says, is only a work
of social science: ‘Is Capital at least committed to the occurrence of socialist revolution in industrialized
Europe? It is not . . . This conviction is only a very distant and conditioned implication of his theory of
capitalism.’ Little, The Scientific Marx, p. 179.
652 J.L. STANLEY

I
Man’s Relation to Pre-Existing Nature
In Marx’s writings nature is sometimes treated exogenously and sometimes not. On
the one hand, in the Grundrisse Marx says that ‘universally developed individuals,
whose social relationships are . . . subjected to their own communal control, are not
products of nature but of history’.19 On the other hand, in the Paris Manuscripts he
says that for socialist man ‘man has become evident for man as a being of nature’;
and communist society ‘is the complete unity of man with nature’. Thomas reminds
us that for Marx ‘nature is man’s inorganic body . . . That man’s spiritual and physical
life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself’.20 Insofar as the
unity is consummated man is in continuity with nature rather than its external
conqueror.
This apparent conflict in texts supporting an exogenous nature and those support-
ing a nature indigenous to man is partly explained by Marx’s method of presentation
which is often couched in terms of natural history, in which the natural history of
human labour is seen as a moment of the historicity of nature. How separate this
moment is, is open to dispute. But nature certainly remains as a methodological
standard when Marx argues that ‘only naturalism is capable of comprehending world
history’.21 As Thomas puts it, the objectification of man’s species-being through
labour is part of man’s true nature; what we conventionally regard as artificial is
really in a fundamental sense natural as well. Because ‘the intentionality we can bring
to bear on our work transforms behaviour into action and transforms us as actors at
one and the same time . . . a far-reaching reciprocal process is set in motion’ in which,
as industrial man develops his productive powers to the fullest, he is ‘working out’
his relationship to nature.22 Thus, the labouring process is in itself not a stage; it is a
natural characteristic which unfolds in human history. The specific kinds of objecti-
fication and externalization of nature found in the alienation of man from nature
under capitalism do not negate Marx’s view that alienation under capitalism is
characterized by regarding nature as opposition, as something which ‘yoked to and
manipulated by capitalism’s productive apparatus . . . is likely to become interpreted
instrumentally or antagonistically’.23 In communist society this opposition is tran-
scended.
Thomas, in substantial agreement with the other Engels critics, says that for Engels
such a reconciliation between the human subject and the technical object has not been
overcome: for Engels, nature is outside us. Kolakowski says that for Marx, in contrast
to Engels, ‘there is no ready-made nature that we can contemplate and then act upon’.
Thomas argues that for Engels, nature ‘exists independently of the observer it

17
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 497, citing Carver, ‘Marx, Engels and Scholarship’, p. 253.
18
Ibid., p. 488, citing Ball, ‘Marxian Science and Positivist Politics’, in After Marx, p. 236.
19
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works (Moscow, 1975 et seq.) (hereafter CW), Vol. 28, p. 99.
20
CW, Vol. 3, pp. 305–6, 298, 275–6; cf. Thomas ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 490.
21
CW, Vol. 3, p. 336.
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 653

confronts’.24 Engels’ instrumentalism is the result of ‘abstract speculation, i.e.

contemplation and theorizing’ that contrasts with Marx’s view that nature should be
understood in terms of its ‘practical reality’, that is, its bearing upon history and
society. In supposed contrast to Engels, for Marx ‘nature taken abstractly, for itself,
separated from man, is nothing for man’: the distinction between pre-social and
socially mediated nature ‘has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct
from nature’. Interestingly Ball who, like Kolakowski, interprets Marx’s view of
nature as Promethean, concludes with a view close to Thomas’s: ‘The idea (later
espoused by Engels) that nature exists independently, and prior to, man’s efforts to
transform it is utterly foreign to Marx’s humanism.’25
Both formulations are unfortunate. Marx’s argument that nature should be con-
sidered only insofar as it is relevant to man should not mean that there can be no
existing reality prior to the emergence of man. But if Thomas can argue that for Marx
no material reality can exist independently of the observer, then the cognitive status
of pre-historic (meaning pre-human historic) nature is problematic — and doubly so
in light of Ball’s apparent denial that for Marx nature even ‘exists’ prior to man.
Marx’s view that the evolution of men constitutes the coming into being of self-
conscious nature may mean that nature is not now independent of humans. But if
Marx repeatedly noted that nature is natural historical, and if the existence of
pre-historic nature is accepted (and at least in this respect Marx agreed with Darwin
that it is), then it is absurd to argue that nature, at one point, did not exist
‘independently’ (in the sense of prior to) the observer since there was no observer.
If taken literally, Thomas and Ball either transform Marx into Bishop Berkeley or
put Marx’s man in the Promethean, not to say god-like, position of inventing nature.
This is more than a semantic quibble. Thomas and other Engels critics argue that
for Marx (as against Engels) no scientific truth can arise from the correspondence
of human perceptions and judgments to such an independently existing reality.26
That is perhaps why Thomas distinguishes Marx’s naturalism from Engels’ supposed
‘naturalistic evolutionism’. Precisely because Marx’s texts present man as both
integral to and external to nature, distancing Marx from such an evolutionary view
is not always easy. In regard to natural history, we find Marx stressing externality
when he says that social change ‘will depend partly on various external . . .
geographical, physical, etc., conditions’.27 This second tendency also seems evident
in Marx’s praise to Engels of Trémaux’s studies of pre-historical geology in which
the ‘progress, that Darwin regards as purely accidental, is essential here on the basis
of the stages of the earth’s development’. Marx extols Trémaux’s discoveries

22
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 493.
23
Ibid., p. 494.
24
Kolakowski, Main Currents, p. 401; Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 495.
25
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, pp. 495–6, citing Marx-Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1958), p. 18.
Cf. T. Ball, ‘Marx and Darwin’, p. 471. Schmidt, The Concept of Nature, pp. 190–1; Avineri, Karl Marx,
pp. 70–5; Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction, pp. 50–1.
654 J.L. STANLEY

regarding the geological determinants of nationality. ‘Only here has a basis in nature
[Naturbasis] been found’ he says, and concludes:
The same soil will give rise to the same character and the same qualities . . .
The true frontier of the Slav and Lithuanian races with the Muscovites is
represented by the great geological line which lies to the North of the basins
of the Nieman and the Dneiper . . . To the south of that great line, the talents
and the types fitted to that region are and will always remain different from
those of Russia.
Marx finds in such statements a confirmation of the view that surface formation
‘shows that the common negro type is only a degeneration of a higher one’.28 Indeed
Marx repeats this geographical determinism in Capital when he argues that it is not
the tropics, but the temperate zone with its ‘differentiation of the soil, the variety of
natural products, the changes of seasons, which form the physical basis of the division
of labour’.29
It is therefore curious for the partisans of the New Orthodoxy to accuse Engels of
‘reckless generalizations’ or of being guilty of what Marx calls the ‘abstract materi-
alism of natural science’ while Marx is said to reject its speculative side.30 For Marx
defends Trémaux’s speculations on the grounds that they are analogous to those of
the German nature worshippers who, despite the criticism of certified scientists,
correctly anticipated Darwin’s theory though they were unable to prove it.31 It is
Engels who disdains Trémaux’s presentations32 as ‘useless, pure theorizing’ on
account of their ‘one-sided’ science, on their failure to account convincingly for
human developments such as language and on the absence of any literary or historical
critique. It is Engels who directly indicts Trémaux for failing to analyse ‘how the soil
exerts an influence’ while putting forth a supposedly improved Darwinian ‘theory
of the mutability of the species based on geology alone’: not only does Trémaux cook
the evidence, but what little evidence he has is manipulated to produce a single
hypothesis which is given both epistemological and logical priority and is then used
to deduce the whole of human development. ‘No one can go on telling me that only
the Germans can ‘‘construct’’ systems’, Engels concludes, ‘the French beat them
hollow at that’.33

26
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 495. Kolakowski, Main Currents, p. 402. Schmidt, The Concept of
Nature, pp. 186, 195. Cf. Sartre, Critique, p. 184.
27
CW, Vol. 28, p. 400. Italics added.
28
CW, Vol. 42, p. 305.
29
Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1904), p. 564n. Das Kapital, Vol. 23 of the Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin,
1988), pp. 537–8, n. 7.
30
Kolakowski, Main Currents, p. 407; Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 495.
31
Terrell Carver (‘Marx, Engels and Scholarship’, pp. 253 and 255) says that ‘Marx was interested in
Trémaux because production takes place in a geological setting that puts limits to what is possible or
probable’. Marx’s concern for such ‘limits’ hardly supports Ball’s view that there was no nature ‘prior’
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 655

Subsequent science has confirmed Engels’ view. A careful reading of this ex-
change should convince us that critics cannot indict Engels for being an abstract
speculative philosopher of nature, without characterizing Marx as being an equally
enthusiastic one.34 Furthermore if Marx’s man is a natural species and hence part of
nature, he cannot be presented in all cases as not being governed by an independent
(pre-historical) reality. As Marx puts it, man may indeed be an active natural being
endowed with natural vital powers, but as a natural being these powers are inborn
instincts; thus ‘as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering,
conditioned and limited creature like animals and plants’.35
In Capital, Marx distinguishes two modes of the labouring process that situate
man’s relations with and inclusion in nature. The first mode exists in the extractive
industries where the ‘objects of labor [Arbeitsgegenstände]’ are ‘provided immedi-
ately by nature, such as hunting, fishing’ etc; in which ‘the soil (and this . . . includes
water) in the virgin state in which it supplies man with the necessities . . . exists
independently of man, and is the universal object [allgemeine Gegenstand] of human
labor’. Such virgin resources are ‘spontaneously provided by nature’. These in-
stances are different from the second mode consisting in the later branches of industry
in which manipulated raw material is already filtered by human labour; in which
natural wealth becomes an instrument of labour. But ‘only at a higher stage of
development’ do these materials that are already filtered provide the predominant
physical boundaries of our activity.36
Here the first mode consists in nature as prior to man, that is, as at first operating
‘without his agency [ohne sein Zutun]’ before he labours on it. Man is an object of
nature in the sense that his labours ‘remind us of the mere animal’, a species more
or less like others.37 It is this primitive mode that Marx appears to have in mind in
his treatment of Trémaux. The second mode characterizes later historical epochs in
which man is alternately both subject and object in his relations with nature. Clearly
Marx sees man’s productive history as the story of the movement away from the first
mode through various versions of the second. This is the ‘natural history of labor’
which Marx was seeing himself as writing, and which constitutes the later moments
of a much larger natural history that precedes men. However, even after removing
labouring man as a subject, ‘a material substratum is always left’. Man ‘can only
work as nature does, by changing the form of matter’. In creating wealth, in Petty’s
words ‘labour is its father and the earth its mother’.38 Thus Marx can say that:

to man. Nor does this address Marx’s endorsement of Trémaux’s ideas on the trans-historical constancy
of certain racial limits on ‘talents and types [that] will always remain different’, CW, Vol. 42, p. 305.
32
CW, Vol. 42, p. 320.
33
Ibid., pp. 324–5.
34
Compare James Farr’s criticism of Marx’s ‘peculiar’ vision of a future unified science which ‘suffers
from abstract speculation and is perhaps inconsistent with his own methodology’. See J. Farr, ‘Marx and
Positivism’, in After Marx, ed. Ball and Farr, p. 231.
656 J.L. STANLEY

just as in the beginning when the only participants in the labour process were
men and the earth, which latter exists independently of man, so even now we
still employ in the process many means of production, provided directly by
nature, that do not represent any combination of natural substances with human
labour.39

II
Praxis and Positivist Covering Laws
Marx’s terminology here is admittedly general. When he says that man ‘opposes
himself to Nature as one of her own forces . . . in order to appropriate Nature’s
productions’,40 he remains vague on the degree to which nature is an exogenous
determinant. But the statement illuminates the question of the relations between
praxis on the one hand, i.e. the process whereby man’s ‘action on the external world
changes his own nature’41 in a reciprocal relationship and, on the other hand, the
residual aspects of activity such as labour’s eternally necessary creation of use values
that are ‘natural laws’ independent of human volition.42 We have noted that the
proponents of the New Orthodoxy usually stress Marx’s emphasis on praxis and
downplay Marx’s references to ‘natural laws’. Conversely they deny that Engels
recognizes the reciprocal character of man’s relationship to nature and argue that he
stresses natural laws as an expression of what Thomas calls ‘the positivism of the
Engelsian stripe’.43
The term ‘positivism’ is defined with various degrees of precision by the Engels
critics, but most of them seem to agree with Terence Ball’s assertion that positivism
means a ‘meta-science’ — a word denoting (a) universal covering laws, (b) a unity
among the sciences entailing the epistemological primacy of the sciences of nature.
Consequently, (c) having reduced observed phenomena to external objects, this
scientism leads to an instrumentalism and stress on bureaucratic control supposedly
missing from Marx.44 Let us deal here with praxis and its connection to covering
laws.
There is a high degree of agreement between Marx and Engels in regard to the
reciprocal relations between man and nature. After being prodded by Engels’ first
volley of criticism in this exchange, Marx does say that Trémaux ignores human
historical factors. Both Engels and Marx stress the reciprocal relations between man
and nature, but this reciprocity means that man alternates as subject and as predicate

35
CW, Vol. 3, p. 336.
36
Marx, Capital, pp. 201–2, 198–9, 562. Marx, Das Kapital, pp. 195–6, 193, 535.
37
Marx, Capital, pp. 198–9; Marx, Das Kapital, pp. 192–3.
38
Marx, Capital, p. 50, citing W. Petty, A Treatise on Taxes and Contributions (London, 1667), p. 47.
39
Marx, Capital, p. 204; Marx, Das Kapital, p. 198. Italics added.
40
Marx, Capital, pp. 197–8.
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 657

of nature depending on circumstances including the stages of development. Both

recognize that there is little left of pre-human nature today.
Much of this is lost on the Engels critics. They choose instead to endorse the view
of Schmidt and others that Engels alone regarded nature as a particular expression
of a universal law of ‘the primacy of matter-in-motion, whose laws supposedly
underlie and unify the science of nature, history and thought’. This view, resting on
a metaphysics of matter, a ‘billiard ball atomism’ in Thomas’s words, reduces men
to ‘supine spectators [who] can watch natural processes unfold autonomously’.45 But
Engels really does not deal with an essence of matter and specifically rejects
simplistic atomism.46 While it is true that in the much maligned Dialectics of Nature
Engels does affirm the immutability of motion (which Marx also does, Thomas and
Ball to the contrary notwithstanding),47 Engels also adds that when we consider
matter in motion, ‘reciprocal action is the first thing we encounter’.48 If man is part
of nature, i.e. if natural history including the natural history of labour is part of that
immutable reciprocity, then it is illogical to argue, as Thomas and Schmidt do, that
Engels’ laws of motion ignored reciprocity and ‘consciously left out the impact of
man on nature’; that he appears ‘only as a product of evolution and a passive
reflection of the process of nature’.49 Engels clearly denies this indictment:
it is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which
is the essential and immediate basis of human thought . . . The naturalistic
conception of history as found . . . in Draper, as if nature exclusively reacts on
man, and natural conditions everywhere exclusively determined his historical
development, is therefore one-sided and forgets that man also reacts on nature
. . . There is devilishly little left of ‘nature’ as it was in Germany at the time
when Germanic peoples immigrated into it.50
But on what is this reciprocity between man and nature based? Marx’s Vician
verum factum principle is rooted in an increasing knowledge of nature gained through
our reciprocal actions with it, and labouring activity is central to this process. But
for Marx this labouring process has certain constants: the ‘necessity of the distribu-
tion of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by a specific
form of social production . . . Natural laws cannot be abolished at all’.51

41
Ibid., p. 198.
42
Ibid., pp. 50, 205; CW, Vol. 43, p. 68.
43
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 503.
44
cf. Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 488 and n. 11 (citing Terence Ball, ‘Marxian Science and
Positivist Politics’, pp. 237–8), and passim. Cf. Schmidt, The Concept of Nature, pp. 54–5; 190–2.
45
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, pp. 496–7; Schmidt, Concept of Nature, p. 55.
46
See CW, Vol. 42, pp. 382–3. Apparently Ball differs from Thomas on this point and is content to argue
that, for Engels, motion alone binds phenomena (Ball, ‘Marxian Science’, p. 253).
47
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, pp. 496–7; Ball, ‘Marxian Science’, p. 253. See also Kolakowski, Main
Currents, p. 384. Cf. CW, Vol. 6, p. 166 and n. where Marx paraphrases Lucretius’ De rerum natura, III,
658 J.L. STANLEY

For Marx, the question then is not whether there are covering laws: instead the
question is what form these laws take. Indeed Marx would have us rely on knowledge
of genuine covering laws in order to determine the degree to which we confuse
historically specific laws with historically transcendent ones. All languages have
some things in common. But just as we must, in order to understand the unique
development of each language, distinguish that development ‘from this general and
common element’, so too must we know the natural characteristics of production in
general in order to determine the historically specific, pseudo-covering laws of
classical political economy.52
Instead of confronting these questions, the Engels critics focus on Engels’ dialec-
tics of nature as the most egregious instance of his positivist covering laws. Thomas
is typical of the New Orthodoxy in this regard: ‘There is no counterpart in Marx’s
writings to Engels’ breezy assertion that in nature, amid the welter of innumerable
changes, the same dialectical laws of motion force their way through the history of
the development of human thought.’53 However, in Capital, while discussing the
change from handicraftsman to capitalist, Marx also says: ‘here as in natural science,
is shown the correctness of the law, discovered by Hegel (in his Logic), that merely
quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes . . . The
molecular theory of modern chemistry first scientifically worked out by Laurent and
Gerhardt rests on no other law’.54 In this text, Marx later says to Engels, ‘I quote
Hegel’s discovery of the law of the transformation of a merely quantitative change
into a qualitative one as being attested by history and natural science alike’.55
It is surprising that most of the Engels critics fail even to quote these statements.56
The few who do awkwardly explain them away in a sentence or two. Thomas says
only that Marx refers to Hegel and not to Engels here,57 but since Hegel endorses a
dialectics in nature, this is hardly a sufficient argument.58 Carver, whose ‘well-judged
words’ Thomas uses to support his overall viewpoint, has noted that Marx does not
adopt extreme generalizations and that ‘the law’ applies only in certain instances; he
argues that Marx was careful to draw limits to scientific analogies.59 But this will not
do. Carver never gives us a quotation from Marx to the effect that the dialectic applies
only in certain instances; of course Marx made generalizations (‘the history of all

882: mortalem vitam immortalis ademit — ‘mortal life has been usurped by death the immortal’ — to
support his view that ‘the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement — mors immortalis’.
48
Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow, 1972), p. 231.
49
Schmidt, Concept of Nature, pp. 55, 186.
50
Engels, Dialectics of Nature p. 231.
51
CW, Vol. 43, p. 68.
52
CW, Vol. 28, p. 23.
53
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 497.
54
Marx, Capital, pp. 26, 338 and n. Italics added.
55
CW, Vol. 42, p. 385.
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 659

hitherto existing society’. . . ) and as the statements from Capital indicate he was not
careful in drawing physical analogies and parallels. The Trémaux correspondence
reveals a quite incautious and speculative Marx, one who is eager to opine on the
relation between natural science and social science. This does not prevent Carver
from saying that he is unsure about Marx’s view of the relations between social and
natural science and that Marx may not have any clear-cut views on them.60 Carver
remains agnostic on the question and says that the ‘actual words’ of the quotation
from Capital ‘are not themselves an endorsement of Engels’ system unless Engels’
system is read back into his words’.61
Schmidt’s treatment of Marx’s view of nature, which Thomas says inspired his
essay,62 seems more cautious than Carver does on this point. Confining to a footnote
his discussion of the quotation from Capital on quantitative into qualitative trans-
formations, he says only that while Marx was familiar with Engels’ work, ‘it cannot
be established how far Marx was conscious of this difference between his concept
of nature and that of Engels’.63
But Marx was either conscious of these differences or he was not. If he was, then
the statement was made with conscious understanding and falsifies the critics’ view
that nature for Marx is, in Schmidt’s words, ‘devoid of negativity’. Marx’s formu-
lation was less detailed than that of Engels, but it specifically affirms an autonomous
dialectics of nature in some form, and posits it as a ‘law’ governing nature and society
‘alike’. The quotation from Capital certainly constitutes a Marxian ‘counterpart’ to
Engels’ views. If differences between Marx and Engels should be discovered through
a hermeneutic ‘meaning’ of Marx’s dialectical statements — of just how we are
reading our own view back onto the texts — the critics have not discussed them.
Until this long awaited day, we may assume that Marx means what he says.
If, on the other hand, we relegate to Marx’s unconscious an affirmation of a
dialectics of nature or, with Carver, say that we are unable to specify the precise
character of Marx’s theory of dialectics in particular or the relations of the sciences
in general, then how can the critics assert with such confidence that Engels’ ideas
on the role of nature are, in Carver’s words, ‘exactly the opposite’ of Marx’s?64
However, to establish that Marx believed in covering laws of some sort does not
address the two remaining aspects of positivism from which the proponents of the
New Orthodoxy want to immunize his thought: the degree to which the methods
used to uncover naturalistic covering laws have epistemological primacy and the
extent to which naturalism influences Marxism’s commitment to technocratic
instrumentalism.

56
I can find no mention of these statements in the works of Kolakowski, Sartre, Ryan, Ball, Farr, Miller,
Avineri, Colletti, Lichtheim, R.W. Miller, J. Miller or Horowitz. They are cited by writers upholding the
convergence of Marx’s and Engels’ views, such as Ollman and Wood. But Cohen does not mention them
nor do Habermas or Wellmer.
57
Paul Thomas, ‘Marx and Science’, Political Studies, XXIV (1976), p. 1.
58
The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (Oxford, 1892), p. 150.
660 J.L. STANLEY

III
Unified Technical Science and its Limits
Thomas notes that science, for Marx, was ‘justifiable insofar as it is of use as a
specifically human concern among other specifically human concerns’.65 On the
other hand, the proponents of the New Orthodoxy have not appeared to resolve
satisfactorily the problem that Thomas himself raises: if human beings are part of
nature, ‘there is no obvious reason not to apply the methods of natural science across
the board to human history and society’.66 While resisting this conclusion, Thomas
nonetheless quotes Marx as saying that since ‘genuine science’ must proceed from
sensuous need, ‘one basis for life and another for science is a priori false’. But how
can one speak of science as merely one of a number of activities and at the same time
give it this all-encompassing character? Thomas does not complete Marx’s point
which is that ‘natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man,
just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be
one science’.67 Here Marx certainly has a naturalistic view of the relationship between
natural and human sciences rooted in the view that ‘Man lives on nature . . . with
which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die’.68 Indeed Marx’s
communist man is neither the subject nor the object of nature but overcomes that
distinction.
The problem however is how this naturalism is to be reconciled with the techno-
logical progress that is so commonly linked to a natural scientific if not strictly
positivist outlook. Marx was no Luddite or nostalgic admirer of some rural idyll as
were some reactionary socialists. As Thomas puts it, ‘if technological progress and
cumulative adaptation of nature should entail an increase in the number or quality of
human needs that are then satisfied, this is all to the good, since the dynamism and
expansiveness of needs has always been the leitmotif of human history’.69 Thomas
insists that this expression of human needs has nothing to do with positivism; on the
contrary Marx’s rival anthropology was intended ‘as an explanation of the ontologi-
cal foundations of natural science that would render notions of the epistemological
primacy of the scientific method nugatory and beside the point’.70
But is the primacy of the natural scientific method really made nugatory by the
early Marx when the 1844 Manuscripts speak of transcended alienation under
communism as ‘the complete unity of man with nature’?71 Marx’s fully developed
naturalism may result in humanism, as Marx says, but ‘fully developed humanism

59
Terrell Carver, ‘Marx, Engels and Dialectics’, Political Studies, XXVIII (1980), p. 362.
60
Carver, ‘Marx, Engels and Scholarship’, p. 254.
61
Ibid., p. 254.
62
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 488, n. 12.
63
Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, p. 207, n. 121.
64
Carver, ‘Marx, Engels and Scholarship’, p. 256.
65
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 498.
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 661

equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature
and between man and man’.72 But the affirmation of this unity only leads Marx closer
to the methodology of Engels’ ‘positivism’. If the science of nature is a human
science, the logic of Marx’s position is that the science of man is part of a unified
natural science. In speaking of science as ‘one science’ Marx is not simply making
an ontological statement. If, as Marx says, ‘only when science proceeds from nature
is it real science’; and if, as he says, man is an extension of nature, then Marx speaks
of method when he says that ultimately ‘only naturalism is capable of comprehending
the action of world history’.73 If world history is the totality of man’s activities
(including ‘the natural history of labour’) and if, at least for Marx, technological
progress is the lietmotif of that totality, then it is reasonable to interpret Marx as
viewing the science of man as a natural science, or at least as becoming progressively
natural.
This is not to argue that Marx is a complete positivist or that these statements from
the 1844 Manuscripts are consistently echoed throughout Marx’s later work. The
changed definitions of positivism cannot always easily be read back anachronisti-
cally into the much more generalized ‘scientism’ of Marx’s day. In his unawareness
of the refined distinctions of future philosophers of science, in confusing natural
science with reflective knowledge, Marx’s writings contained some of the very
contradictory tendencies that Thomas and others try to attribute to Engels. Thus the
seemingly stricter positivism of the early Marx and Engels who say that ‘every
profound philosophical problem is resolved . . . quite simply into an empirical fact’,
diverges from the ‘realistic’ Marx of 1867, who accepts underlying unobserved
mechanisms as explanations.74 However, the issue of the role of underlying mecha-
nisms is separate from the issue of whether Marx envisions a uniform natural
scientific method. Such a method is suggested in the Marx of the Grundrisse where
‘determinateness by nature’ is seen as ‘the starting point’ of all analysis.75
66
Ibid., p. 486.
67
Ibid., p. 496. Cf. CW, Vol. 3, pp. 303–4.
68
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 490. Cf. CW, Vol. 3, pp. 275–6.
69
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 499. Italics added.
70
Ibid., p. 503.
71
CW, Vol. 3, p. 298.
72
Ibid., p. 296.
73
Ibid., p. 336. It is therefore misleading for Ball, in contrast to Thomas, to assume a different and quite
Promethean interpretation of Marx by arguing that Marx is dealing with the Geisteswissenschaften as
distinct from the Naturwissenschaften (Ball, ‘Marxian Science’, p. 242). In any case this distinction first
appears in a German translation of Mill’s Logic.
74
cf. CW, Vol. 5, p. 39 with Marx, Capital, p. 83. Scientific realism goes beyond the positivists’ reliance
on observation statements and admits the presence of some hidden structure beneath the surface. On this
subject see Russell Keat and John Urry, Social Theory as Science (London, 1975), pp. 29 and 96. Thomas
notes that these authors regard Marx as naturalist, realist and positivist at once (Thomas, ‘Nature and
Artifice’, p. 488 n), but he does not directly discuss the possible accuracy of this interpretation or its
662 J.L. STANLEY

Nor do the debates over the fine points of scientific methodology address what is
most crucial for Thomas: whether Marx’s naturalistic scientism can embrace the
expanded ‘needs’ of industrial society and still serve as a means of distinguishing
Marx’s ‘humanism’ from the alleged instrumentalist bureaucratism of Engels. In
linking this instrumentalism with ‘positivism’, and relegating both to Engels, we find
Farr rejecting as ‘pure myth’ Albrecht Wellmer’s theory of a ‘latent positivism’ in
Marx; and we find Thomas obscuring the very distinction between naturalism and
instrumentalism that he is so anxious to make: Wellmer, he claims, is ‘simply’
collapsing Marx into Engels when he says that the obscurity in the early Marx
between strict science and reflective knowledge allows, in the ‘later’ Marx, for the
very techno-bureaucratic view that supposedly belongs exclusively to Engels.76 In
fact Wellmer hardly mentions Engels, and we have no evidence for this ‘collapsing’.
Wellmer accurately observes that in the Grundrisse Marx presents the dissolution
of the capitalist system as a function of the scientific transformation of the process
of production and of bringing production under the control of the ‘general intellect’.
On the one hand, Marx notes man’s ‘appropriation of his own general productive
power, his comprehension of Nature and domination of it by virtue of his being a
social entity’.77 On the other hand, this post-capitalist Prometheanism also entails the
supersession of individual responsibility in the labour process by social labour. The
‘science’ that is independent of the capital relationship is responsible for the combi-
nation of workers, which combination retains the characteristics of an alien force
over and against the individual worker. In this regard, the transition away from
capitalism can no longer be described as a total transformation of the labour process
but a change in power relationships that depends more on emancipation within the
sphere of alienated work than on enlightenment and political praxis. For the latter is
now dependent primarily on the results of capitalist technology. By reducing social
control of production to an association of producers that is a technically pre-ordained
fact, rather than as a dimension of the social life process, the installation of a general
intellect becomes an automatic control system.78
Wellmer does not discuss the role that Marx’s own naturalism plays in this
ambiguous process of domination and of diminished individual responsibility. Yet
Marx cites, with clear approval, Robert Owen’s observation that for the economic
changes of which these tendencies are the results, ‘no individuals are blamable; they
proceed in the regular order of nature, and are preparatory and necessary steps

implications for his own viewpoint. It would seem that the majority of commentators who accept
inconsistencies in Marx or who point to differences between the earlier and later Marx, would argue that
the later Marx is, if anything, closer to instrumentalism or ‘positivism’ than to the ‘humanism’ of the Paris
Manuscripts. See for example George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York,
1961), p. 236.
75
CW, Vol. 28, p. 46. Despite his charges of ‘positivism’ against Engels, Thomas seems to ignore Keat’s
speculation that scientism and positivism may not necessarily entail each other. A positivist may hold that
his method is the only proper method of natural science, but may still confine it to those sciences; certain
forms of scientism may hold for the universality of the natural sciences without stipulating that the latter’s
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 663

towards the great and important social revolution which is in progress’.79 If, as it
seems, these tendencies appear to Marx as characteristic of the post-revolutionary
society itself, then what is left of man as the subject–object of nature? Are we not
left with a limited choice between domination of nature and subjection to it; between
Marx’s Promethean ‘comprehension of nature’ and his view of blameless individuals
moved by ‘the regular order of Nature’? If this is the case, does Marx not possess
tendencies similar to those attributed to Engels? If Engels shares in both of these
tendencies then are there any important practical differences between Marx’s
naturalistic understanding of communism and Engels’ supposedly rival Promethean
vision of the domination and administration of nature?80 Because of their ambiguity
on this question, is it possible, in any case, that one view slides all too easily into the
other?

IV
The Ecological Necessity of Administered Nature
In their indictment of Engels, the critics argue that Engels’ positivistic view of a
unified natural science results in separating nature from genuine human concerns
and that Engels fails fully to overcome this separation because he stresses the
Promethean ‘domination and manipulation of nature’ as an external force. This
charge oversimplifies Engels’ position and exaggerates his differences with Marx.
Thomas cites Engels’ statement that:
our mastery of [nature] consists in the fact that we have the advantage over
other beings of being able to know and apply its laws. And in fact, with every
day that passes we are learning to understand its laws more correctly [. . .] we
are more and more placed in a position where we can learn and even control
the more remote natural consequences of [at least] our ordinary productive
activities.81
Here the words ‘mastery’ and ‘control’ would seem to be the operative ones for
Thomas in determining Engels’ greater proximity to Prometheanism. Now Thomas’s
quotation leaves out the more modest bracketed phrase ‘at least’, and the bracketed
ellipsis shows that Thomas drops Engels’ reference to our increasing ability to
perceive ‘the more remote consequences of our interference with the ordinary course
of nature’. What is important is that the context shows profound misgivings on
Engels’ part about this ‘interference’. Engels’ desire to control the consequences of

methods should be positivistic. See Russell Keat, The Politics of Social Theory (Chicago, 1981), p. 19.
Even Farr concedes that ‘Marx never explicitly criticized Mill or Comte on unified science as such’. Cf.
Farr, ‘Marx and Positivism’, p. 222.
76
Farr, ‘Marx and Positivism’, p. 217; Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 488 n, citing Wellmer’s Critical
Theory of Society (New York, 1971). For other views that relegate bureaucratism almost entirely to Engels,
see Schmidt, The Concept of Nature, p. 191; Ball, ‘Marxian Science’, pp. 254–8.
77
CW, Vol. 29, pp. 91–2. Cf. Wellmer, Critical Theory, pp. 108–9.
664 J.L. STANLEY

our ‘interference’ with nature is based on his view that man, as another natural
species, will yet be uniquely conscious of his oneness with nature and hence mindful
of not despoiling it.
We should note that the sentence immediately following the quotation indicates
the same desire in Engels to overcome the alienation of man from nature as is to be
found in the early Marx.
But the more this [control] happens, the more will men not only feel but also
realize their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the
senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and
nature, soul and body, such as arose in Europe after the decline of classical
antiquity . . .82
Furthermore, the statement immediately preceding the quotation cited by Thomas is
as explicit a repudiation of Prometheanism as can be found in the Marx–Engels
literature.
Let us not flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over
nature. For each such victory it takes revenge on us. Each of them . . . has quite
different unforeseen effects . . . The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia
Minor and elsewhere, utterly destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land
never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated
condition of those countries . . . Thus at every step we are reminded that we by
no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone
standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to
nature, and exist in its midst.83
If Thomas can suggest that Marx’s naturalism condemns capitalism for riding
roughshod over nature’s ecological limits, and can suggest (if only in passing) that
Marx might be ‘an ecologist avant la lettre’,84 we might ask, why is it not possible
to raise the same possibilities in regard to Engels?
That Marx agrees with Engels’ ecologism is shown in a letter to Engels written
seven years earlier on this same question. In it he expresses views which are so similar
to those of Engels that even the same countries are named. In discussing Karl Fraas’s
(1847) book on the effect of climate on the plant world, Marx praises it
for proving that climate and flora change in historical times. He is a Darwinist
before Darwin, and admits even the species developing in historical times. But
[Fraas] is at the same time an agronomist. He claims that with cultivation —
depending on its degree — the ‘moisture’ so beloved by the peasants gets lost
(hence also the plants migrate from south to north), and finally step formation
occurs. The first effect of cultivation is useful, but finally devastating through

78
Wellmer, Critical Theory, pp. 112–14. Cf. CW, Vol. 29, pp. 83–6.
79
CW, Vol. 29, p. 99, citing Robert Owen, Six Lectures Delivered at Manchester (Manchester, 1837),
pp. 56–7. The italicized phrase appears in English in Marx’s manuscript.
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 665

deforestation, etc . . . The conclusion is that cultivation — when it proceeds

in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he naturally
does not reach that point) — leaves deserts behind it, Persia, Mesopotamia,
etc., Greece. So once again an unconscious socialist tendency!85
If, for Marx, the ‘devastating’ effects of deforestation cannot be avoided unless
its ‘natural growth’ is ‘consciously controlled’; if the ‘Darwinist’ evolutionary
tendencies of prehistoric times continue in historical ones; if the continuity between
man and nature is progressively realized through control of it, just how does this
ecologism avant la lettre differ from the administered and controlled society that the
critics so insistently relegate to Engels? A communist reforestation policy is still a
policy and it is still administered by some mechanism — statist or not. How then
can Thomas condemn Engels for anticipating our ‘control even [of] the more remote
natural consequences’ of our production, and not condemn Marx for anticipating
‘the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural
agencies’ including ‘a common all-embracing and far-sighted control of the produc-
tion of raw materials’?86
Marx’s ecologism is hardly very avant. That the German romantics were replete
with ecological notions is attested by The German Ideology itself. The difference
between their thought and that of Marx and Engels is that the romantics often
harkened back to a pre-industrial utopia and thus, in Marx’s terms, wished to separate
nature from history.87 If for Marx the natural history of labour is linked to the fact
that species naturally ‘change in historical times’, then the needs of the human
species also change naturally in the course of man’s natural fulfilment of his species
essence; and if for Marx, the expanded needs entailed by industrial society are the
leitmotif of human history, a mark of progress that in Thomas’s words is ‘all to the
good’, then the supposedly natural dimension of the industrial revolution in fulfilling
human needs is to continue apace under a communism whose function is to
emancipate industrialism from the unnatural, exploitative processes which frustrate
these needs.
But what standards are applied by communist men when determining unnatural
or unecological elements? Practically speaking, how are we to satisfy real human
needs without manipulating or administering both nature and human needs in order
to harmonize them with each other?

V
Controlled Production and Limitless Needs
In Marx’s economy, there is a ‘natural’ reciprocity between production and needs.
This reciprocity makes it difficult to untangle naturalism from Prometheanism in
Marx’s thought, or to distinguish needs from desires. As Marx puts it, ‘the nature of

80
Compare Jordan, Dialectical Materialism, p. 125, who upholds the Marx–Engels dichotomy but
nonetheless agrees that Marx’s contributions to naturalism do not prevent him from sharing an ‘instru-
mentalism’ with Comte.
666 J.L. STANLEY

wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no
difference’.88 Thomas, following Patricia Springborg, observes that Marx here views
needs as ‘analytic categories’ more than as a descriptive anthropology.89 Yet partly
on these very grounds Springborg argues that once rid of the most ‘appropriate
embodiment’ of commodity fetishism (e.g. of precious minerals used as exchange
media or the unnatural ‘need’ of superior classes to acquire wealth to mark off their
superiority), the category of need cannot serve as a limit on individual motives, and
Marx ‘specifically rules out theoretical criteria to differentiate between natural and
unnatural needs’.90 But while for Springborg, as opposed to Thomas, this very
absence of standards means a Promethean Marx who sees man as dominating nature
to satisfy his needs, we should add that this very Prometheanism is justified partly
on the basis of a trans-historical law postulating the ‘natural’ interdependence of
production and consumption.
As a result of this interdependence we are left with a choice between a Promethean
Marx for whom communist industrial development opposes an increasingly receding
nature and is governed by artificial needs whose infinite post-capitalist expansion
justify themselves; or a non-Promethean Marx for whom needs are conflated with
‘natural’ appetites and for whom every industrial development creates a ‘naturally’
legitimate need. In either case needs-appetites go unregulated in a direct way but are
enthroned as forces bringing industry under their control. The question then arises
as to what practical differences exist, with respect to needs, between Marx’s
communism and capitalist Prometheanism. It seems that Marx’s embrace of indus-
trialism as a means of satisfying human needs entails a choice between an enthusiastic
Prometheanism in which expanded needs are all to the good and a reluctant
Prometheanism of the manipulation of production (rather than consumption) ending
for all practical purposes in Engels’ instrumentalist view of nature.
Some of Engels’ writings only vaguely confront this problem and, to the horror of
his critics, they anticipate the administered society that is supposedly at odds with
Marx’s humanism. Thomas sees it as his task to disentangle Engels’ views from
Marx’s: he has no doubt that ‘domination and control philosophies of nature all easily
lead into domination-and-control philosophies of human nature and society’. Engels’
views ‘have repressive even authoritarian implications’, because in Thomas’s view,
‘nature to Engels was necessitarian; freedom could only be from it or over it’.91 Since
for Engels humans are physical objects governed by nature’s general laws of motion,
and natural and social management are on a continuum, ‘the ‘‘government of

81
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 487, citing Engels, ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition
from Ape to Man’, in Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 180–1; also in Marx–Engels, Selected Works,
pp. 89–90. (All further references will be to this version cited as MESW.)
82
Engels, ‘Part Played by Labour’, in MESW, II, p. 90.
83
Ibid., p. 89.
84
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 494.
85
CW, Vol. 42, pp. 558–9. Italics added.
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 667

persons’’ — the Saint-Simonian phrase Engels so readily appropriated — can give

way without undue difficulty to the administration of things’. For Marx communism
breaks that continuum and scorns unnatural social management.92
Yet we have noted that Marx himself seems ambiguous on the question of how
socialism should govern our intercourse with nature better than previously developed
societies. On the one hand, Marx’s discussions with Engels clearly indicate that it is
their shared ambition to minimize the ‘catastrophic effects’ of thoughtless exploita-
tion characteristic of previous societies, apparently by regulating rationally the
consumption of resources. On the other hand, Marx, like the classical economists,
seems more inclined to concern himself with overcoming barriers to production than
with the regulation of consumption. He appears at least as disposed as Engels to
attempt to claim that man can indeed overcome natural barriers. In the Grundrisse,
Marx extols the ‘civilizing influence of capital’ which results from ‘the universal
appropriation of nature and of the social nexus itself by members of society’. Such
a development includes ‘the discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising
from society itself’.93 Yet on these pages Marx does not directly call for these ‘new
needs’ to be regulated in order to take into account the natural limits that confront
man in his intercourse with nature. Instead, the discussion is couched in terms of the
illusions of limitless expansion that capital has about itself: that is, in the bourgeoi-
sie’s self-conceived mastership of nature, one which treats nature herself as a
commodity that is mediated by the exchange relationship. Supposedly destroying all
barriers to production, man regards himself as the subject while
Nature becomes purely an object for men . . . It ceases to be a power for itself,
and even the theoretical cognition of its autonomous laws appears merely as
a stratagem for its subjection to human needs, whether as an object of
consumption or as a means of production.94
However, instead of dealing with the possibility of limiting demands or consump-
tion, here Marx focuses on the limits standing in the way of production: capitalism
has not ‘really’ surmounted all barriers; he stresses the overcoming of the limits to
production which, unbeknownst to capital, has come up against its own internal
impediments. Consumption comes into play when Marx deals generally with the
character of these internal limits (the subject of Marx’s far reaching researches) and
specifically in his treatment of the imbalances that arise between production and
consumption as a result of their mediation by capital.
It is in Marx’s discussion of the rectification of this imbalance that we may look
for the basis of his approach to the administration of nature as a way of limiting
demands and appetites. Marx says that the pervasive methodological and ontological
individualism of bourgeois society95 contributes to the mistaken view on the part of

86
CW, Vol. 12, p. 222; and Marx, Capital, Vol. III (Moscow, 1966), p. 120. Italics added.
87
CW, Vol. 5, pp. 39–40, 55.
88
Marx, Capital, pp. 41–2. Cited in Springborg, The Problem of Human Needs, p. 106.
89
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 501; but cf. Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, p. 27.
668 J.L. STANLEY

many of the classical political economists that an economy in which each industry
is ‘not directly regulated and controlled by the wants of society’ will not produce
serious imbalances between production and need.96
For Marx then, production which is natural to man is also naturally social. But
consumption too is naturally social. That is because production itself is ‘in all its
moments also an act of consumption . . . Consumption is also directly production,
just as in nature consumption of elements and chemical substances is production of
a plant’.97 Consumption defines a social product (e.g. a railway is only a railway if
it is actually used). Reciprocally, production determines the objects even of individ-
ual consumption and the mode of consumption (hence meat is cooked rather than
served raw). Most importantly consumption creates a need for new production (such
as more and faster railways) while production creates even the most seemingly
individual consumer needs thereby mediating them socially (hence an objet d’art
creates taste and a demand for beauty). Production thus ‘produces not only an object
for the subject, but also a subject for the object’, and consumption is itself ‘an urge
mediated by the object’. The need for an object is created by seeing it.98
Here we have a double form of natural necessity: consumption is regarded ‘as a
necessity, and a need is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity’, while, as
Marx phrases it, expanded productive development ‘requires production of new
consumption’.99 Necessary wants are confronted with the necessity of production in
order to satisfy them, and vice versa. Indeed this necessity is all-pervasive and, in
this context, is presented in the form of trans-historical laws that extend even to
communist society itself. For Marx, freedom appears in the form of overcoming
production’s natural-historical internal (capitalist) barriers, but at the same time he
says that we must recognize that there remain necessary natural trans-historical
limits to production. Indeed, in Capital, Marx not only gives a naturalistic allure to
this trans-historical necessity, saying that man in ‘all social formations’ of civilized
life must ‘wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants . . . just as the savage must’, but
he adds that as the forces of production expand to satisfy new needs, ‘this realm of
physical necessity expands as a result of his wants’.100 Thomas criticizes Engels’
necessitarian view of freedom as different from that of Marx whom he quotes as
saying that freedom for men must be achieved ‘under conditions most favorable to,
and worthy of, their human nature’. He neglects to add Marx’s view that ‘it
nonetheless still remains in the realm of necessity’. If Thomas can cite Marx that
beyond this necessity ‘begins the development of human energy which is an end in

90
Springborg, The Problem of Human Needs, pp. 94, 98–9, 104–6, 117. While Marx notes that luxury
consists in ‘all goods which are not necessaries and which are not commonly used by the labouring class’,
and necessary needs ‘are those of the individual reduced to a natural subject’ and are the opposite of luxury,
he adds that the development of industry overcomes the opposition between necessity and luxury. (Marx,
Theories of Surplus Value, III (Moscow, 1971), p. 43 and CW, Vol. 28, p. 452.
91
Thomas, ‘Nature and Artifice’, p. 494.
92
Ibid., pp. 487, 494.
 MARX, ENGELS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF NATURE 669

itself, the true realm of freedom’, Marx adds that ‘the true realm of freedom . . .
however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis’.101
For Marx, the reciprocal necessity does not mean that production and consumption
are entirely identical. While production is in part ‘determined by other moments’
including ‘the needs of consumption’, consumption is ultimately a moment of a
process ‘in which production is the actual point of departure and hence also its
dominant moment’.102 But paradoxically this means that while it is the regulation of
the ‘dominant’ productive moment of society that is of paramount importance to
Marx, it would appear that needs, once unmediated by alienated productive relations
of capitalism, are free to expand and indeed dictate the nature of our controls on
nature and industry. Hence, he says, each and every industry must be ‘directly
regulated and controlled’ by the ‘wants of society’. In a direct sense appetites are
now sovereign. For only indirectly are appetites subordinated to production; but
these appetites govern that very production, a production that is now to serve those
appetites in an unmediated form.
Why should appetites not be directly regulated? Such a view constitutes ‘passive
materialism’ for Marx, a reversion to Owenite restraints that view nature at a distance
and that divide society into the educators and the educated.103 Marx seems to stress
controls on production rather than on consumption apparently because he assumes
that the reciprocally necessary ties between production and consumption allow both
for active intervention in nature while consumption goes unregulated. An unseen
hand places restraints on appetite through restraints on production and produces a
built-in harmony between production and consumption once production is socially
organized. Needs, determined as they are by production, are taken as a given in his
depiction of production in communal society. If society is ‘to achieve a production
corresponding to its total needs’, he says, it is not needs themselves but rather
‘economy of time, as well as the planned distribution of labour time over the various
branches of production, [that] therefore, remains the first economic law’.104
Marx’s practical solution to the problem of imbalance between consumption and
production thus consists in planning. In Marx’s view, ‘freedom in this field can only
consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their
interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being
ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature’.105 Marx’s well-known denunciations of
European bureaucracies hardly prevent him from speaking of the united workers
taking the economy under their ‘control’ in order to ‘regulate national production
upon a common plan’.106 If not in the economy as a whole, at least in the social
93
CW, Vol. 28, p. 336.
94
Ibid., p. 337.
95
Ibid., p. 18.
96
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, III, p. 118.
97
CW, Vol. 28, pp. 18, 28. Marx does say that some forms of consumption lie outside the economic
relationship and constitute purely individual physical interests (ibid., pp. 205, 213, 221).
98
Ibid., p. 30.
670 J.L. STANLEY

determination of value under such a plan, ‘ultimately the book- keeping . . . becomes
more essential than ever’.107

VI
Conclusion
The conflicting interpretations of Marx’s view of man’s relationship to nature are in
part due to a tendency for Prometheanism, praxis, positivism and naturalism to be
tightly interrelated in the writings of Marx and Engels. Contrary to the views of the
new Western critics of Engels, both he and Marx sometimes appear to treat man as
unified with nature, sometimes as exogenous to it. In the former case, neither Engels
nor Marx can judge man as a natural creature without his being subject to a unified
science of man and nature and without the subsuming of human science under natural
science. But in calling for harnessing science to the satisfaction of all human needs,
Marx calls for the manipulation of nature and reverts to the ‘Saint-Simonianism’ that
is falsely relegated solely to Engels. Furthermore if Marx and Engels can regard
naturalism as entailing the harmonious relations of organisms with their increasingly
global environment; and if that naturalism is to be simultaneously consistent with
the expanding and only indirectly controlled ‘wants’ of man, are we not required by
circumstances to plan for a massively all-encompassing science governing the
totality of increasingly global physical interrelationships entailed by ever-expanding
production to meet those wants?
Yet Marx wants to liberate men’s ‘wants’, and insofar as these wants are not
directly regulated, man does not dominate his own nature; only the ecological limits
of nature herself limit the demands of man. In this context, the limitlessness of
expanded human need per se supposedly allows us to see that only natural limits
constitute the proper direct restraints on these needs. For it is precisely at that point
that the circular relationship between production and consumption means that since
the non- Promethean Marx regards man’s expanded appetites as necessities natural
to himself and avoids direct self-regulation of his own nature, these needs must be
met as well as limited by the regulation and control of the world around him. In such
a case, Marx’s linkage between expanded necessity and expanded needs is consistent
with Engels’ association of freedom with the recognition of necessity. The non-
Promethean Marx joins with the Promethean one.
Marx as well as Engels presents modern men with a choice between an enthusiastic
Prometheanism that rides roughshod over nature or a reluctant administered one that
through the control of production, indirectly restrains the expansion of human needs
to the extent that they remain in natural harmony with man’s natural unalienated
productive capacities.

John L. Stanley UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

99
Ibid., pp. 31, 335.