Between Marxism and New Materialism: More-Than-Human Agency, Monism, and an Ecological Critique of Capital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, tensions between eco-Marxism and new materialism have constituted an increasingly permanent fixture in the theoretical terrain of the environmental social sciences and humanities. These tensions have been exacerbated by polemical eco-Marxist texts, such as Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm (2018) and Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene (2023), that have dismissed any commensurability between a more-than-human ontology and a dialectical materialist critique of capital by rendering new materialism as "absolue monism." This paper refutes the eco-Marxist rendering of new materialism as “absolute monism,” while simultaneously recognizing that the pluralistic ontologies of new materialism can be prone to a theoretical slippage towards a “relational monism” that can pose methodological hurdles to the construction of radical political projects. However, instead of dismissing the political efficacy of new materialism entirely, this article refers to Levins’ and Lewontin’s dialectical ecology, arguing that an accounting of more-than-human agency in capital accumulation processes is entirely consistent with dialectical materialism. Overall, a critique of capital does not require a methodological reversion to an anthropocentric dualism; new materialism can provide Marxism with the theoretical tools to cultivate a more rigorous socio-ecological critique of capital through a dialectical materialist orientation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".