In a recent article, I addressed the issue of dialectics in Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, in connection with the publication of Juan Dal Maso’s book Marxism and Dialectics: Notes and Reflections. On this occasion, I am interested in discussing how dialectics appears in the emergentist materialist approach I proposed in my book Red Fire: Communist Reflections on the Ecological Crisis. Here I go a step further, highlighting the importance of dialectics at the ontological level (the idea of what reality is like), the epistemological level (how it can be known), and the methodological level (the procedural tools for producing knowledge about reality).

The intersection between dialectics and emergentist materialism makes it possible to integrate, within a single framework, a stratified ontology of reality, an epistemology that shares points of contact with what is today identified as critical realism, and a methodology for analyzing the metabolism between society and nature under contemporary capitalism. This intersection, which draws on contributions from the Marxist tradition enriched by more recent ecosocialist theoretical work, offers categories for thinking about the current ecological crisis without falling back on either nature/society dualisms or flat monisms that dissolve the specificity of the social.

1. Ontology: Stratified Material Totality and Emergence

Emergentist materialism is based on the idea that the material world constitutes a totality; that is, it does not accept the sharp division between society and nature that characterizes dualist thought. But this monism does not imply conceiving reality as a homogeneous substance; there is no indistinct or undifferentiated fusion. The nature-society unity is conceived as a structured totality in which different forms of organization of matter — physical, biological, social — exhibit distinct properties. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola argued, society “continues to exist within nature,” but it does so on an “artificial terrain” that has been interposed between human beings and their immediate environment1Antonio Labriola, The Materialist Conception of History, Mexico City, El Caballito, 1973, pp. 191. This artificial terrain — technology, artifacts, production, urbanization — does not nullify natural constraints, but rather modifies and reconfigures them. The relationship is one of continuity in substance, but of difference in the forms of movement.

The concept of stratified totality encapsulates this view. The material world is described as a multilevel structure in which mutually interconnected strata can be distinguished: the physical conditions the biological, the biological conditions the social, and social configurations feed back into their natural foundations. No level is self-sufficient; all are embedded in a web of upward and downward conditioning.

Levels or strata of emergence are central to understanding this structure. We speak of emergence when, based on certain configurations of processes, qualitatively new properties appear that distinguish a part from the whole. Life emerges from specific physicochemical arrangements; subjectivity, from biological configurations endowed with complex nervous systems; and the social, from the deployment of biological capacities (hand, language, brain) through practices such as cooperative work. These emergent properties depend on the lower levels but are not reducible to their laws: they establish their own regularities and mechanisms.

From this perspective, matter is not an immutable block but a historical process of self-organization. Historicity is not restricted to the social realm: nature itself exhibits a history of level formation, evolution, coevolution, and the emergence of new forms of movement. Engels had already insisted on the need to abandon static views of nature; contemporary emergentism systematizes that intuition: material reality is constitutively evolutionary, organizes itself into strata over time, and each new stratum introduces irreducible novelty.

The social realm is a distinct layer within the material realm, with properties of its own (intentionality, normativity, institutions, economy) that are not found anywhere else in nature. Society is composed of nature — human bodies, energy, matter — but the specific arrangement of these elements gives rise to a system with laws of motion that cannot be reduced to either mechanics or biology.

On this basis, ontology can be characterized, as the ecosocialist Andreas Malm proposes in *The Progress of This Storm*, as a “monism of substance with a dualism of properties.”2Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, London, Verso, 2018, p. 53. There is only one material substance, but the properties that describe an electron, a cell, a brain, or a state do not belong to the same order; rather, they are distinguished by exhibiting distinct attributes. Density, temperature, and electric charge characterize certain physical levels; homeostasis, reproduction, and natural selection correspond to the biological realm; and value, surplus value, the state, and social class denote properties that emerge from the social stratum.

This distinction allows us to critique two symmetrical deviations. On the one hand, the dualism of substances, which radically separates nature and society as incommensurable orders, rendering their actual interaction incomprehensible. On the other hand, there is the flat monism of certain actor-network or “new materialist” currents, which erase the differences between the human and the non-human under the category of “actants” or “distributed agencies,” thereby diluting the specificity of human subjectivity and social structures. In the face of ecological challenges, it is more urgent than ever to clarify the extent to which human action affects the ability of planetary systems to function. In contrast to both of these perspectives, emergentist materialism maintains that the social is a distinct stratum within the material unity, with properties of its own (intentionality, normativity, institutions, economy) that cannot be reduced to mechanics or biology.

In this context, the notion of agency takes on a key role. Perspectives that distribute agency uniformly across all matter — from worms to clouds — based on the criterion of “making a difference” tend to lose sight of the specificity of human agency. Many nonhuman species profoundly transform their ecosystems.

Identifying certain elements that allow us to speak of human agency — which is not found in the rest of nature, without this necessarily reducing the latter to a purely static setting — is of fundamental importance for establishing a social ecology. As Facundo Nahuel Martín warns, “extending subjectivity or agency to all matter exposes us to the risk of denying the specificity of human subjectivity and intentional agency in nature.”3Facundo Nahuel Martín, Sensitive Enlightenment: Toward a Materialist Turn in Critical Theory, Buenos Aires, Ediciones IPS, 2023, p. 47. Such approaches “can be overly subjectivist when dealing with matter in general, and at the same time fiercely anti-subjectivist when referring to human agency and experience in their particularity.” What distinguishes human agency is its intentionality and reflexivity, which are in turn mediated by language and structured by complex social relations.

This intentional agency is a natural emergent property of a higher order: it does not correspond to fundamental particles nor is it present in all matter, but rather arises in very specific layers (complex nervous systems, cooperative work, language development).

Applying subjectivity or agency indiscriminately to all matter carries the risk of obscuring the specificity of human subjectivity and its intentional agency. From the perspective of a social ecology, preserving the distinction between reflective and intentional social acts, on the one hand, and physically determined events, on the other, is a prerequisite for identifying specific historical agents — classes, factions of capital, states — responsible for ecological destruction.

Against this ontological backdrop, dialectics emerges as an appropriate approach for accounting for — and acting upon — a reality that is, at the same time, a totality, stratified, and in motion. A totality, because nature and society form a single material fabric; stratified, because that fabric is organized into levels with emergent properties; in motion, because it undergoes historical processes of formation, consolidation, and dissolution of strata driven by internal contradictions.

Materialist dialectics is not an external method imposed on the object, but rather a necessary approach for conceptually expressing the structure of a reality constituted as a complex and stratified totality. The notion of the emergence of levels — with its leaps, thresholds, and fractures — converges with the dialectical conception of qualitative change, provided that it is situated within the concrete historical-material totality.

In short, the reality we wish to describe is structured into contradictory units, emerging levels, co-evolutions, and processes of qualitative transformation that compel us, in order to ultimately represent it, to draw upon what — referring to Karel Kossik — we can define as a dialectic of the concrete.

2. Epistemology: Stratified Realism and Dialectical Criticism

On an epistemological level, emergentist materialism entails assuming that a) the material world exists independently of our theories and discourses; b) this material world is structured into levels endowed with specific causal mechanisms; c) the task of knowledge consists in identifying those mechanisms, distinguishing between observable phenomena and underlying structures.

Different types of mechanisms and causalities correspond to different levels. The laws of thermodynamics, natural selection, and the dynamics of value in capitalism are not expressions of a “single” causality in a flat sense, even though they are interconnected. This calls for an epistemology that recognizes levels of analysis, the partial irreducibility of concepts and methods, and, at the same time, the need for transdisciplinary integration.

Ontological stratification translates into an epistemological requirement: to distinguish and articulate levels of analysis. The ecological crisis cannot be addressed from the perspective of a single discipline; it requires cooperation between the natural and social sciences (physics, biology, economics, sociology, history, political science, etc.). But this cooperation must not lead to unstructured eclecticism, but rather to a dialectical reconstruction of the mediations between levels. This implies recognizing that:

• Each discipline captures specific aspects of the same stratified process
• The concepts at each level are neither commensurable nor reducible to one another
• The articulation between levels must be achieved by reconstructing the actual mediations: how the dynamics of accumulation translate into patterns of energy consumption, how these affect biogeochemical cycles, and how ecological changes feed back into the economy and politics

Any analysis of phenomena such as massive deforestation must simultaneously take into account: ecological mechanisms (nutrient cycles, biodiversity, ecosystem resilience); economic dynamics (land rent, inter-capitalist competition, global value chains, the integration of dependent countries); and political determinants (state policies, environmental legislation, the balance of class forces, and social movements). The interconnection between these levels must be approached in a way that avoids both naturalistic and culturalist reductionism.

On the epistemological level, then, dialectics operates through the articulation of levels. In contrast to eclecticism, it seeks principles of connection; in contrast to reductionism, it defends the relative irreducibility of each stratum. This operation requires reconstructing the real process in its unity, something that can only be done if one assumes that reality is, in itself, nonlinear, permeated by contradictions, and a source of emergent phenomena.

3. Methodology: Metabolism, Critique of Capital, and the Eco-Communist Horizon

Methodologically, the intersection between dialectics and emergentism is encapsulated in the category of the society-nature metabolism, mediated by labor. Human labor is the process by which human beings, using their physical and cognitive faculties, appropriate and transform natural materials to produce use-values. This activity always takes place within the framework of historically determined social relations that shape the forms of appropriation of nature, the distribution of the product, and the reproduction of social classes.

Emergentist materialism reinforces the centrality of labor as the key mediator in the emergence of the social as a distinct stratum: cooperative labor is both the result of emergent biological capacities and a condition for their further expansion (language, abstract thought, social organization). At the same time, it constitutes the axis of socio-natural metabolism: through labor, the flows of energy and materials between society and nature are organized.

From the perspective of emergentist materialism, this can be interpreted as:

• Labor is the central mediating factor through which the human species establishes itself as a distinct, emerging stratum within the material totality
• This mediation is historical: different social formations organize labor in different ways, giving rise to distinct configurations of the socio-natural metabolism
• Therefore, the relationship between society and nature cannot be understood without a theory of relations of production and class

Taking metabolism as a methodological starting point means that empirical analysis must reconstruct how, in each mode of production, the appropriation, transformation, and return of matter and energy to nature are concretely organized.

This gives rise to two requirements for a consistent analysis of metabolism under capitalism. First, we must avoid “crude” versions of materialism that conceive of social history as merely the result of natural or technological conditions. The relationship with nature is always socially mediated and takes on specific forms in each mode of production (ownership of the means of production, organization of labor, mechanisms for the extraction of surplus value).

Second, we must avoid constructivism that underestimates the constraints arising from the properties and dynamics of non-human nature. Social forms cannot arbitrarily shape the material content of production and reproduction: they are constrained by carrying capacities, resilience, regeneration times, and thresholds of ecological irreversibility. The notion of “planetary boundaries” expresses the idea that there are biophysical thresholds beyond which the dynamics of the Earth System can enter qualitatively different states.

Methodologically, this means that any analysis must:

• Position the social form of the organization of production (for example, capitalism) as the explanatory framework
• Recognize biophysical limits and ecosystem functions as objective, material constraints on that social form
• Study the specific ways in which that relationship generates imbalances, crises, and metabolic breakdowns

The relationship between nature and society constitutes a contradictory unity, shaped by class interests and positions: capital versus labor, the imperialist center versus the dependent periphery. At the same time, it encompasses distinct temporal and spatial logics: capitalist accumulation demands expansion and acceleration; ecosystems have slow rhythms, thresholds, and irreversibilities. On the one hand, society emerges from nature and depends on it; on the other, especially under capitalism, it develops capacities for intervention that reconfigure natural processes at multiple scales. This dual relationship manifests itself in forms of upward causality (from the natural to the social) and downward causality (from the social to the natural). Methodologically, analyzing this totality requires the articulated consideration of different levels and causalities. It demands a concrete analysis of:

• How decisions made by actors at higher levels (transnational corporations, states, financial institutions) reshape patterns of resource extraction, land use, and energy consumption
• How these changes bring about shifts in the structure and functioning of ecosystems, which in turn trigger events (droughts, floods, pandemics) that feed back into the economy and politics

Applied to the climate crisis, this perspective involves recognizing the role of greenhouse gases and radiant forcing mechanisms; analyzing how specific social structures — the fossil-fuel energy matrix, consumption patterns, urbanization, and transportation — are driven by the logic of profit and inter-capitalist competition; and studying how the effects of climate change (extreme events, population displacements, infrastructure damage) feed back into economic crises, geopolitical tensions, and authoritarian political dynamics. A methodology consistent with emergentist materialism requires reconstructing this multiscale framework, placing the logic of capital accumulation at its center as the structuring mechanism of metabolism. This is how we can understand the complex web of causalities at play in each phenomenon. For example, climate change cannot be explained solely by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases: we must connect these data to the energy matrix, to the capitalist mode of technological development, to the structure of global trade, to state policies, and to the balance of power between classes and countries.

In short, the articulation between dialectics and emergentist materialism allows us to conceive of reality as a stratified material totality, to develop an epistemology attentive to levels and mechanisms, and to formulate a critical methodology centered on the society-nature metabolism shaped by capitalism. This framework sheds light on the origins of the contemporary ecological crisis and offers criteria to guide a praxis aimed at overcoming it.

Originally published in Spanish on May 6 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translation by Otto

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