If culture, as Marx at times insisted, was but a
reflex of the economic, and if nature’s brute
facticity underpinned, enabled and was some-
times threatened by the gyrations of economic
life, then culture and nature existed in different
registers altogether. It was all very well for the
Marx of the Grundrisseto insist famously that all
reality is a complex ‘unity of the diverse’, but his
own writings tended to dissociate two key
moments of that unity as if ‘culture’ and ‘nature’
were somehow held apart by an ‘economic’
middleman. Added to this was his well-known
ambivalence about science. Though Marx was
frequently critical of certain types of scientific
thinking, several of his writings instantiate a
remarkably conventional distinction between
‘natural’ and ‘social’ science (Aronowitz, 1988:
Part I; Wilson, 1991). Armed with this distinc-
tion, Marx could claim that his own ‘critical
science’ of society would explain culture as the
ideological clothing on the body of capitalism,
while leaving nature to the biologists, physicists
and chemists who, during the late nineteenth
century, were fast achieving disciplinary legiti-
macy in the new western universities (Vogel,
1996). Again, the result was to hold nature and
culture at a distance. After all, the former was the
domain of a trenchant materialism which could
be known ‘objectively’ – and after Marx’s death
Engels (1956) controversially went on to specify
nature’s ‘dialectical laws’ – while culture was
the paper house erected duplicitously on the
foundations of production.
Depending on how Marx is read, then, his
various writings on culture and nature seem to
instantiate two materialities and one ideality.
While nature undoubtedly ‘mattered’ to Marx, he
seemed to take its materiality for granted as both
condition and resource for human labour^8 –
hence the lack of a full explication of the natural
in his work. The materiality that fascinated Marx
much more, of course, was the domain of prac-
tices and relations captured by the abstraction
‘the economy’: hence the thousands of pages
Marx devoted to developing a theoretical vocabu-
lary to anatomize capitalism. It remains unclear
which of these two materialities mattered most
for Marx – Schmidt, for example, argued that
Marx gave priority to the motive force of modes
of production,^9 while Italian Marxist Sebastiano
Timparano (1975) insisted on nature’s primacy –
but they were, it seems, posited as ontologically
different and distinct.^10
This ‘two materialities’ approach was to
become particularly clear in the agrarian political
economy of Mann and Dickinson (1978) who,
revisiting Marx, famously identified the problem
that nature’s stubborn physicality posed forcapital. Taking the case of commercial agricul-
ture, Mann and Dickinson showed that the physi-
cal properties of soils and plants posed a ‘barrier
to accumulation’ for rural capital – in particular,
by slowing down capital turnover time, which
directly affects profitability (see Henderson,
1998). A similar, though more abstract, focus on
the intractable physicality of nature also arguably
animates the new ‘eco-Marxist’ theorizing of
Elmar Altvater (1993), Ted Benton (1989),
James O’Connor (1998) and Paul Burkett (1999).
Finally, boasting about his ‘tough-minded mate-
rialism’ as a counterpoint to German philosophi-
cal idealism and bourgeois ideology, culture was
figured by Marx as an ontological poor relation:
real enough, to be sure, but somehow phantom-
like and insubstantial. It was, in short, a domain
of ideas that could have no existence if nature
and economy did not together materially under-
gird it.
The problems here are plain to see. On the one
hand, it’s not unreasonable to insist that nature,
economy and culture are irreducible to one
another (and this is the kind of argument that crit-
ical realists like Andrew Sayer, 1999, would
make today). After all, if nature is seen as a realm
of physical processes, the economy as a domain
of instrumental-technical practices and culture as
a sphere of symbolic interaction then they
deserve, quite properly, to be theorized in rela-
tive isolation prior to any attempt to grasp their
mutual interactions.^11 But Marx’s approach is
implausible in other key ways. First, the ontologi-
cal hierarchy installed between economy and
culture – and by implication nature and culture –
these days looks decidedly shaky. Quite how one
can claim that culture is somehow ‘less material’
than other moments of socio-environmental life
is difficult to fathom. Moreover, the attempt to
deny culture any real autonomy outside the
marionette movements dictated by the economic
base (itself erected upon natural foundations)
seems today to be theoretically crude. In short,
Marx’s severation of the natural and the cultural
is operationalized through a set of dubious
distinctions and causal hierarchies.
Of course, if one reads Marx’s work as imply-
ing that capitalism is a culturally specific and
expansive economic system, originating in
western Europe, then the argument that he sepa-
rated nature and culture falls apart. From this
perspective – which sees modes of production as
distinctive ‘ways of life’ – Marx’s scattered
remarks about nature can be seen as a tantalizing
commentary on how capitalism materially
remakes nature in its image. As such, the minor
cottage industry on what Marx ‘really’ said about
nature – from Schmidt through to the recent170 CULTURENATURES3029-ch08.qxd 03-10-02 10:47 AM Page 170