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D.Scientific issuesWoody, 2020 (Gus. “Revolutionary Reflections: Moving towards an ecological Leninism” rs21. December 18, 2020. https://www.rs21.org.uk/2020/12/18/revolutionary-reflections-moving-towards-an-ecological-leninism/ ///MF) A final question is that of the wider ways of approaching concerns like ‘nature’ and ‘science’ in ecological Leninism. After all, in his extensive philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin attempted to sketch out an approach to matter, science and similar philosophical concerns which could be brought in line with Marxism. [32] In part a crude rebuke to rivals like Bogdanov, the work also became foundational to questions of science and philosophy within the Soviet Union, an important issue given the status of ‘scientific socialism’ Marxism-Leninism garnered. [33] At the same time, the wider translation of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks presented a wider and more nuanced approach to questions of dialectics, nature, and science, the developments of which should be crucial to ecological Leninism. [34] Of course, the relations of science within nations like the USSR have been critically analysed in several spaces. Most notably, Loren Graham, [35] Helena Sheehan, [36] and others have pointed out how Lenin’s philosophy and its further bowdlerisation into the doctrines of ‘dialectical materialism’ influenced the scholarship and work of scientists across the world. Whilst this saw many leading scientific lights attempting to integrate Marxist philosophy with science studies, such as the British Social Relations of Science Movement in the 1930s, [37] it also saw controversies like the Lysenko affair. [38] Whilst Marxists have gone back and forth on these particular historical incidents, there have been significant developments around the critical philosophies of nature and science during the 20th century. Histories of the social construction of nature and science, and how these categories are subsumed in processes of domination such as patriarchy, racism, and colonialism have exploded on the scene. Donna Haraway’s theories of cyborgs and situated perspectives, [39] with its own approach to theory and the partiality of viewpoints is a critical challenge to those constructing totalising theory today. At the same time, the critical realism of Bhaskhar also emerged as an approach to the gordian knot of knowledge and science. [40] These histories and philosophies should be counterposed and read with Lenin’s philosophical works, to tease out the revolutionary kernels which can be salvaged. Ultimately, it must be recognised that the necessity of these interventions is due in part to the failures of the crudest readings of Empirio-Monism and other Marxist writings on science. As new discoveries in science and matter emerged across the last century, so too did nuances have to be developed against official accounts of Leninist philosophy. Such themes are most explicitly adopted in Caudwell’s Crisis in Physics, [41] but today even philosophy factories like Zizek [42] have produced works considering how dialectical materialism or any ‘Leninist’ account of matter, science and nature can keep up with the new discoveries of physics and science. Quantum mechanics, geo-engineering, biotechnology – all these disrupt interpretations of science and nature, which poses a problem to an ecological scientific socialism. Lenin’s turn to dialectics and his Philosophical Notebooks, given their traditional counterposing to Empirio-Monism, may be the space to square these new developments with a Leninist philosophical outlook. With the rise of climate change, an ecological Leninism is forced to seriously grapple with these questions of science, nature, and the wider social ontology. Whilst this may seem a distraction compared to the above questions, I would suggest the very opposite. In questions of ecology, a binary has emerged between techno-optimist and techno-critical schools with regards to mitigation and adaptation. Let us paint crude pictures. One side focuses on a vision of eco-modernism, where technologies bring the potential for luxury and a restructuring of production towards liberatory and greener horizons. The other, adopts a wider rejection of technologies’ potentials, arguing instead for the necessity of a crude degrowth or in some case primitivism. Now these are caricatures, but a good ecological Leninist theory should be able to steer a course between these two poles, rejecting their fundamentally misguided assumptions. Rather than focusing on the necessity or problem of science and its relationship with nature, ecological Leninism should return to questions of the social relations of science and nature. Technology is neither inherently liberatory or oppressive, instead it is the social relations of its production and implementation which determine its social effect. In short, contemporary ecological Leninism should, whilst adopting some form of critical realism in line with the broad thrust of Empirio-Monism, focus on how capitalism develops and mobilises forms of science and nature to the detriment of humanity. Starting from Lenin here, despite the many exceptional thinkers who have come since, is crucial precisely because Lenin sought to furnish Marxism with a wider philosophical foundation which could complement militant struggle. An ecological Leninism needs an underpinning which not only can explain the historic development of science and nature, but which can comfortably take lines in the current struggle. Thus far, debates on the philosophical underpinnings of ecological Marxism have focused on the frustrating topic of dualisms and metabolisms. The volley of shots between scholars in this area, which don’t deserve rehashing, are a side distraction when it comes to the meat of an ecological Marxist worldview. Ultimately the response must be designing a historical and dialectical materialism which incorporates the insights of thinkers who have pointed to the role of a racialised and gendered capitalism in constructing certain sciences, technologies, and natures. Download 2.09 Mb. 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