Marxism isn’t being singled out for special treatment in Humankind. Indeed, I’m going to be showing how, with its theories of alienation and use-value, Marxism holds out more promise of ways to include nonhumans than capitalist theory. Such concepts don’t so critically depend on a labor theory of value snagged in ideas about property that are ineffective at scales on which humans are just one lifeform among many, beings whose enjoyment considerations are on the same footing.
But in practice, Marxism hasn’t included nonhumans. Consider the following sentence, which indicates Marx’s commitment to an anti-ecological concept of “away”: “The coal burnt under the boiler vanishes without leaving a trace; so too the oil with which the axles of the wheels are greased.”8 And communist solutions to ecological-scale problems have so far strongly resembled capitalist ones: put more fertilizer in the soil, become more efficient … This is the kind of thing that reactionary ecocriticism used to observe in the early 1990s: the Soviets and the capitalists are just as bad as the other, green is neither left nor right. So, I understand why it might be disconcerting to find sentences like that one in a Verso book.
Since capitalism relies on the appropriation of what are handily called “externalities” (indigenous lands, women’s bodies, nonhuman beings), communism must resolve to not appropriate and externalize such beings. It seems fairly simple put like that.9 Unfortunately, including nonhumans in Marxist thought will just be disconcerting, and there is a good reason for this.
You can argue about Marx’s relation to ecological issues in various ways. The most popular is a theological mode in the key of Hegel: Marx was already there, and he anticipated everything we can now say about ecology. The other approach condescendingly extends Marxism to nonhumans: Marxism is flawed because it doesn’t include them, but we can allow at least some of them in, subject to an entry requirement.
Humankind’s approach begins by being honest: Marx is an anthropocentric philosopher. But is that intrinsic to his thought? Humankind is going to argue that it’s a bug, not a feature. What happens when we remove the bug?
The bug was hugely exacerbated in New Left theory domains. Environment is not quite the same as race or gender, because these domains are “strongly correlationist” and therefore irreducibly anthropocentric. Correlationism has been part of the Western philosophical consensus since Kant. It’s how science functions, as well as the humanities, so playing with it or rejecting it involves tackling some very deeply ingrained strictures on what counts as thinking and what counts as true. Still, it is being done, the very doing of which might be a symptom of incipient planetary awareness beyond awareness of global capitalism. The speculative realism movement that has been prominent since the mid 2000s might be symptomatic.
Correlationism means that there are things in themselves (as Kant would put it), but that they aren’t “realized” until they are correlated by a correlator, in the same way a conductor might “realize” a piece of music by conducting it. The correlatee requires a correlator to make it real: sure, things exist in some inaccessible sense, but things aren’t strictly real until they’ve been accessed by a correlator. For Kant, the correlator is what he calls the transcendental subject. This subject tends to be found hovering invisibly behind the heads of only one entity in the actually existing universe—the human being.
There are things, and there’s thing data. Raindrops are wet and splashy and spherical, but this data is not the actual raindrop—it’s how you access the raindrop when it falls on your human head.10 If you think about it carefully, the idea that there is a correlator and a correlatee, and a drastic, transcendental gap between them (you can’t point to it), is disturbing. It means, in its most extreme formulation—the one Kant gives but himself ignores—that things are exactly as they appear (they always coincide with their data) but never as they seem (they never coincide with their data). This is a blatant contradiction, and contradictions aren’t allowed in conventional Western philosophy.
Kant had accepted Hume’s sabotage of the default Western metaphysical concept that cause and effect were easy to identify mechanical operations happening below appearances in some reliable way. According to this, cause and effect are statistical; you can’t with a straight face say that one billiard ball will always hit another one and “cause” it to move. Kant gives the deep reason for this: cause and effect are on the side of data, appearances rather than part of the thing in itself; they are phenomena that we intuit about a thing based on a priori judgment. If you think this is outrageous or bizarre, remember that this is just exactly the logic of modern science. It’s why global warming scientists are constrained to broadcasting a percentage concerning the likelihood that humans caused it. It allows us to study things with great precision, unhampered by metaphysical baggage. But it also means that science can never directly talk about reality, only about data.
Kant unleashed a picture of the world in which things have a deeply ambiguous quality. Now, we could accept that some things can be contradictory and true, and so accept that things are what they are yet never as they appear. Or, we could try to get rid of the contradiction. Kant himself pins down the problem by limiting access to data to thinking—or at least positing thinking as the top access mode—and by limiting thinking to mathematizing reason (regarding extensional time and space) happening within the transcendental (human) subject. Raindrops aren’t really weird all by themselves: there is a gap, but it’s not in the raindrop (despite how Kant actually puts it when he talks about them); the gap is in the difference between the (human) subject and everything else.
But even this “weak correlationist” gap was too much for Hegel. For Hegel, the difference between what a thing is and how it appears is internal to the subject, which in the largest sense for him is Geist, that magical Slinky that can go up stairs all the way to the top, where the Prussian state hangs out. The thing in itself is totally foreclosed, thought of only as an artifact of the strong correlationist thought space. Abracadabra! There is no problem, because now the subject is the grand decider of what gets to count as real! The gap isn’t irreducible; at certain moments in the historical progression of thought it might look as if there is a gap, but not forever. This is strong correlationism. Philosophers have volunteered a variety of beings to be the decider. For Hegel, it’s Spirit, the necessarily historical unfolding of its self-knowing. For Heidegger, it’s Dasein, which he irrationally restricts to human beings, and even more irrationally (on his own terms, even) to German human beings most of all. For Foucault, it’s power-knowledge that makes things real.
Correlationism is like a mixing desk in a music recording studio. It has two faders: the correlator and the correlatee. Strong correlationism turns the correlator fader all the way up and the correlatee fader all the way down. Thus arises from strong correlationism the culturalist idea that culture (or discourse or ideology or …) makes things real. The similarity between all the “deciders” is that they are all human—a major error on Heidegger’s part, since Dasein is what produces the category “human” as such, not the other way around. You can easily see the circularity in Heidegger’s case. Strong correlationism is anthropocentric: any attempt to include nonhumans is ruled out in advance. The correlator has all the power. The correlatee is reduced to a blank screen. Is a blank screen really an improvement on a colorless lump of pure extensionality, which is what things had been according to the default, pre-Kantian, Aristotelian ontology? At least colorless lumps don’t have to wait around for whatever movie the decider is projecting onto them to know what they are and how to behave.
Sensitive to cultural difference, the strong correlationist allows other people to include nonhumans, but this also means that these other people aren’t very acceptable