Marxism has often been criticized for its reduction of nature to mere passive content, given form only by the human productive activity that bestows value upon it. However, from the very start – in his earliest writings – Marx placed the natural world at the center of his theories. In this, Marx was not only drawing upon German Romantic philosophies of nature, but also contemporary developments within science in general and biology in particular. Though Marx’s emphasis on the malleability of human nature would seem to contradict later developments in evolutionary theory, there has been a “turn to Marx” in recent decades on the part of some evolutionary biologists, expressing itself in everything from the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium” (described by Gould himself as a form of dialectical materialism) to his colleague Richard C. Lewontin’s Marxist-influenced account of the interaction between “human nature,” as a set of innate potentialities, and the environmental factors which condition its expression.
What significance do these scientific developments have for Marxist theory, and how does Marx equip us to interpret them? How can a Marxist understanding of “life” help us understand debates in biopolitics and the “new materialism” that has come to occupy contemporary continental philosophy? The editors of theory@buffalo’s eighteenth volume seek papers that will address these and related issues. All submissions should be no longer than 10,000 words. Please send your submission electronically as an MS Word attachment to brianone@buffalo.edu or juanroba@buffalo.edu, re:theory@buffalo 18.
All submissions are due September 1, 2013.