For Luxemburg, all objective arguments for socialism depend on “the concept of a breakdown, a social catastrophe … a cataclysm”. But what sort of catastrophic materialism is Marxism? Its concern has never been with matter, but with the rule of ideal relations of pure form superintending and limiting and limited by the material-metabolic flow. The annihilatory propensities of capitalism are not those of matter, but of a spiritual machine. Against which, our best resource is the enlightenment and self-consciousness of the masses won through suffering and educative defeats. From the standpoint of metaphysical materialism, this picture of history as the terrain of freedom won through a bloody and improbable dialectic would make no sense. Since life would be nothing but an unagentive form of chemical repetition governed solely by the relation between internal force and external conditions, freedom would be a paradoxical illusion. Discoveries in the life sciences, however, point to a ‘cognitive’ or even ’teleological’ biology in which organisms, far from being propelled into their ultimate shape by blind, bottom-up, mechanical causation, are innately agentive, creative and governed by a striving toward a final form. This understanding of living processes as intrinsically mind-like at all levels, from the cell to the organism to the ecological community, is a much more promising basis for an ecosocialist politics of freedom, multispecies conviviality and planetary stewardship than the bourgeois materialism upon which Marxism has often problematically grounded itself.
moderated by: Stipe Ćurković
Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster, based in London. He is a founding editor of Salvage magazine, and the author of Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation (Verso, 2024).
