Th e article distinguishes between two fundamental dynamics in Marx’s critique of capitalism: the humanist, cyclical, perpetually-renewed struggle between capitalists and wage labor over profi ts, wages, and the distribution of social wealth more generally and what I term a “posthuman” dialectic between humans and machines, unfolding as the unilinear historical dynamic of automation and the corresponding decreases it brings to the capacity of living labor to produce surplus value. Th e consequence of this posthuman dialectic is both the growing superfl uity of living labor relegated to a planet of slums and the actual and coming collapse of valorization as a global process (as opposed to its operation in any single unit of capital). If the former, humanist dialectic remained predominant in what Moishe Postone has termed “traditional” Leninist Marxism, the contemporary context of the “Second Machine-Age” and the expanding automation of virtually all production and services points to a collapse of valorization that philosophers such as Michel Henry and Robert Kurz identifi ed in Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism as “the moving contradiction.”
John Bellamy Foster is editor of the Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Since the publication of his book Marx’s Ecology in 2000 he has become one of the most significant voices in uncovering Marx’s ecological thinking and developing ecological Marxism. In this interview we discuss his most recent work, the legacy of Soviet environmentalism, the long-running debate over “the dialectics of nature”, and the idea of production according to need.
Text se pokouší sledovat, jakým způsobem se významný český marxista meziválečného období Jaroslav Kabeš snažil rozpracovávat subjektivní stránku marxistické filosofie ve formě specifické etiky. Tuto jeho koncepci autor stati nazval „etikou vůle k přetvoření světa“. Kabešovo úsilí je v textu rámováno „krizí“ marxismu po říjnové revoluci, která vyvolala debatu o dalším směřování marxistické filosofie. Jednou z radikálních odpovědí na tuto situaci byla rehabilitace jejího revolučního charakteru skrze znovuoživení prvků hegelovské dialektiky v Marxových spisech (K. Korsch, G. Lukács). Kabeš se naopak obrátil k tradici voluntaristické filosofie (A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche), ale rovněž k nejranějším Marxovým spisům a Leninově korespondenci, aby zde našel podněty pro svůj projekt materialisticky chápaného etického postoje. and The text attempts to follow the path that Jaroslav Kabeš, a notable Czech Marxist of the interwar period, took to work out the subjective side of Marxist philosophy in the form of a specific ethics. The article’s author calls Kabeš’ conception an “ethics of the will to transform the world.” Kabeš’ efforts are framed in the article by the “crisis” in Marxism that followed the October Revolution and which triggered a debate on the direction that Marxist philosophy should take in the future. One of the radical responses to this situation was to rehabilitate its revolutionary character by reviving the elements of Hegel’s dialectic in Marx’s writings (K. Korsch, G. Lukács). Kabeš, by contrast, turned not only to the philosophical tradition of voluntarism (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) but also to the earliest writings of Marx and to Lenin’s correspondence so as to find the stimuli for his project of a materialistically understood ethical position.