"Materialists at Last": Critical Theory in the Anthropocene

In this dissertation, I set out to examine critical theory from the perspective of the Anthropocene, i.e. the present epoch of human-caused planetary transformations which currently imperil the material conditions of life on earth.
The first part of my argument consists in defending Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s materialism as the correct framework for the Anthropocene (Chapter 1). However, I identify an “idealist” remnant in their idea of history, in that they assume, without argument, the successful outcome of humanity’s productive relationship with nature. I call this assumption the “success of production” (Chapter 2). Hence, I claim that this form of materialism leaves an ambivalent legacy: it provides the correct philosophical framing for the Anthropocene, but its critique of society relies on the assumption that the mastery of nature will be successful. I then examine how this legacy is received in the works of Georg Lukács (Chapter 3) and the first generation of the Frankfurt School (Chapters 4 and 5). I argue that the theoretical twist given to nature by Lukács leaves untouched the “success of production” assumption. In the Frankfurt School, on the other hand, this move is pushed even further and leads to unsolvable contradictions. Here the concept of nature becomes twofold: nature exists both as the material of production and as the victim of humanity’s “domination”. Lastly, I contrast my materialist position with Jürgen Habermas’s “communicative turn” (Chapter 6) as well as with Hartmut Rosa’s critique of “social acceleration” (Chapter 7). In the former case, the question of nature regains its materialist features but is excluded from critique, which instead focuses on intersubjectivity. In the latter case, the critique of an “accelerated” temporality of society ignores the novel temporality of nature and is therefore unable to address the Anthropocene.
Overall, my thesis aims at defending the pertinence of materialism in the time of the Anthropocene while arguing that from the start critical theory has overlooked, and excluded from the domain of critique, the dimension of social existence posited by materialism as primal: namely, the production of physical subsistence. Nowadays, it is no longer possible to ignore this dimension. To be materialist “at last”, so to speak, requires us to take that dimension adequately into account in the critique of society.