RETHINKING MARXISM, 2018

https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2017.1417085

Marx on Steam: From the Optimism of

Progress to the Pessimism of Power

Andreas Malm

In the light of climate change, the steam engine appears as one of the most momentous
productive forces in history. This essay traces Karl Marx’s shifting thoughts on that
particular technology, arguing that his oeuvre exhibits a break: the young Marx
espoused productive-force determinism and considered the steam engine a force of
progress while the mature Marx tended to regard the relations of production as
determinant. Steam power then arose as a result of contradictions in the relations
between capital and labor—not as the origin of those relations. Ecological Marxism
needs to reckon with these tensions and ruptures in Marx’s works. By elaborating on
his constructivism, we may approach a theory of fossil-fuel technologies as material
manifestations of capitalist power—the general obstacle, so far, to any meaningful
politics for mitigating climate change.

Key Words: Ecology, Determinism, Marxism, Productive Forces, Steam Power

As the atmospheric concentration of CO2 continues inexorably to rise, the history

of certain hitherto existing societies appears in a new light: what mode of living has
bequeathed to us—not to speak of the generations soon to follow—this accursed
heat? In the discovery of the carbonizing past, James Watt’s rotative steam
engine stands out as perhaps the most fateful productive force ever adopted. It
coupled the combustion of fossil fuels straight to the production of commodities
for profit, thereby touching off the spiral of ever-increasing CO2 emissions. In
the chronologies of the purported new epoch of the Anthropocene, Watt’s inven-
tion is regularly singled out as the big bang (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2011). En-
vironmental writers as diverse as Mark Lynas (2011) and Naomi Klein (2014) trace
our current predicament back to steam. According to ecocritic Timothy Morton
(2013, 7), “The end of the world has already occurred”; it happened in “April
1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine.” The latter hyperbole aside,
there is a strong case for regarding steam power as the gateway to the era of
global warming—but not, of course, by dint of a patent. Words on a piece of
paper cannot transform the composition of an industry or an atmosphere. The
engine only built up a good head of steam by being adopted and diffused, first
of all in the British cotton industry, vanguard of the industrial revolution, where

© 2018 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

2 Malm

capitalists eventually abandoned the water wheels they had so long preferred and
switched to the novel prime mover. It happened in the second quarter of the nine-
teenth century.
In 1849, Marx moved to London. What did he have to say about the steam
engine? He saw it racing ahead as the material locomotive of industrial capitalism.
How did it fit into his analytical categories? Do his accounts of steam, in the light of
what we now know, offer lessons for how to rethink Marxism? Are there insights
into the rise of that force—and by extension, the era to which it gave birth—to be
gleaned from him? This essay begins by situating Marx himself in the fossil
economy of his time. It then examines his and Engels’s writings on steam and iden-
tifies a break between two very different—indeed, incompatible—accounts, one of
which provides an excellent point of departure for analyzing the role of fossil-fuel-
based technologies in capitalist development and for ecological Marxism more
generally. The other account must be promptly discarded. Toward the end, the
essay offers a very rough sketch of a theory of the power now invested in fossil
fuels.

Steam-Powered Marx

The works of Marx and Engels—counting from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, written by Marx in 1843, to Engels’s posthumous publication of the third
volume of Capital in 1894—spanned the period when steam rose from being one
of several power sources deployed by capitalists in the most advanced manufactur-
ing branches to being the sole dominant force. Marx’s cicerone into the mid-nine-
teenth-century English world of capital and cotton was, of course, the son of a
prosperous German textile manufacturer. Originally based on the waters of the
Wupper River, the Engels firm in 1838 entered a partnership with Peter Ermen,
a fortune seeker operating in the cotton business of Manchester who oversaw
the construction of the Victoria Mill as the English pillar of the multinational
company of Ermen & Engels. The mill was steam powered, the firm’s expansion
into England corresponding with a turn from water to the new source of power.1
During the general strike or “Plug Plot Riots” of 1842, crowds roamed through
the manufacturing districts and systematically pulled the plugs out of all the
steam engines they could lay their hands on—a mode of halting production but
also, it seems, of demonstrating hostility to this new technology, hotly contested
since its birth. One of the mobs dashing through the streets of Manchester
stopped before the Victoria Mill and exhorted the workers to join the strike, and
so they did (Faux and Cooper 1842). But when the mob tried to enter the premises,
police and special constables blocked the gates. On 27 August 1842, the company
inserted a paid advertisement on the front page of the Manchester Guardian:

1. For details, see Henderson (1971, 1976, 1989), Marcus 1975, and Hunt (2009).
 Marx on Steam 3

“Ermen & Engels beg to express their deep sense of obligation not only to the au-
thorities, police, and special constables, but also to their kind neighbours, for the
very efficient and prompt measures adopted, and ready assistance given, to afford
protection to their works, and the people in their employ, during the late distur-
bances.” The steam engine of Ermen & Engels was spared the violence of the
mob. Two years later, the firm became a member of the city’s Chamber of Com-
merce; three years later—when Engels had returned to Germany to write his
The Condition of the Working Class in England—it was among 353 companies
signing a petition against the Ten Hours Bill (Henderson 1989, 45; Ward 1962,
337). Opposition did not stop at words: in July 1849, the factory inspectors took
Ermen & Engels to court for working two female employees at the Victoria Mill
for more than ten hours. The defendants were pronounced guilty (“Ten-Hours
Bill,” 1849).2
Specialized in the spinning of sewing thread, the Victoria Mill was a milch cow
to its owners. The capital invested in the establishment by Friedrich Engels Sr.
doubled between 1838 and 1851, but the mill’s truly golden age was in the 1850s
and 1860s. Total profits quadrupled between 1855 and 1859 (Henderson 1976, 199–
200; Henderson 1989, 38–40). Despite commercial fortunes, however, relations
between management and the approximately 400 operatives were not always har-
monious. In August 1856, an overseer dismissed operative Mary Burke for “quarrel-
some conduct,” whereupon she forced her way into his office and pounded his
head with a heavy brass hammer. According to the report in the Manchester Guard-
ian, the man “was confined to his bed for a week afterwards; and he appeared in
court yesterday with his head almost enveloped in bandages.” Mary Burke was un-
repentant: “I have not done enough: I wish I had given him more: I should like to
have finished him,” she proudly proclaimed to the court (“Murderous Assault by a
Woman,” 1856). Two years later, the Victoria Mill was the scene of another crime
when someone broke into the engine house and stole parts from the steam engine
(“Breaking into a Factory,” 1860).
During this period the mill was, of course, the material base for the Marx family.
Responsible for managing the offices, overseeing sales, and expanding outlets,
Engels received a minor share of the profits on top of his salary. When his
father died in 1860, he assumed the role of managing partner and, taking out
first 10 and then 20 percent of the profit, became a minor cotton lord in his own
right. It was this money that kept the destitute Marx family barely afloat down
in London. To take but one random example, a desperate Karl Marx, working fe-
verishly on the notebooks that later became known as the Grundrisse, begged his
benefactor for assistance in January 1858: “Dear Frederick, The freezing weather
which has set in here and the real shortage of coal in this house compels me—al-
though there’s nothing in the world I loathe more—to impose on you again”

2. See also “Reports of the Inspectors of Factories for the Half-Year Ending 31 October 1849,”
British Parliamentary Papers no. 23, 1850, 7.
4 Malm

(Marx and Engels 1975–2004, 40:254–5, emphasis in original). After 1870, when
Engels finally retired from his position and moved to London to devote himself
to the cause full time, he and the Marx family lived off his capital from the firm,
in addition to an ample portfolio of stocks in, inter alia, the South Metropolitan
Gas Company, the London and Northern Railway Company, and the Foreign
and Colonial Government Trust Companies. At the end of the nineteenth
century, Ermen & Roby, as it had been renamed after Engels’s retirement,
merged with several other cotton-spinning firms; it survives today as Coats PLC,
the world’s leading manufacturer of sewing thread and needlecrafts and a produc-
er of a range of other textile goods, with 25,000 employees and plants in more than
sixty-five countries, including nine in southern China (Baird and Rasmussen 2002,
761; “Our Heritage” 2011). Some things endure.
Throughout Engels’s twenty-year stint in Manchester, he served his intellectual
companion not only with money but also with knowledge of the nitty-gritty of cap-
italist business management. Operating as a scout in enemy territory, he supplied
Marx with balance sheets detailing how much a spinning manufacturer invested in
machinery, figures on the cost and depreciation rates of the Ermen & Engels steam
engines, reports on strikes in nearby factories, estimates of the growth in steam and
the relative decline of water power, answering an unceasing stream of requests for
information on all sorts of details (Marx and Engels 1975–2004, vols. 40, 42, 43).
There is no extant record of Marx popping into the Victoria Mill, though the
event does not seem unlikely. But the main role of Ermen & Engels was, quite lit-
erally, to maintain the metabolism of the great founder of historical materialism—
or in other words, after 1850, the literary output of Karl Marx was directly financed
by the steam-powered production of cotton commodities.
The point of drawing attention to these facts is not, of course, to cast doubt on
the loyalty of Marx and Engels to the cause of the working class, but rather to in-
dicate just how closely they were positioned to the issues of interest. It is not unfair
to say that their lives were soaked in the contemporary emerging fossil economy.3
They were infinitely better placed than, say, Smith, Ricardo, or Malthus to observe
the world-historical importance of the transition to fossil fuels in general and
steam power as a prime mover in the cotton industry in particular. Consistently
focusing on British capitalism in the mid nineteenth century, with his eyes on
cotton and a personal connection to a steam-powered mill, Marx was exactly
where we would have wanted him to be. And yet there is not a single text of
Marx and Engels where steam, coal, or any other energy phenomenon is the dom-
inant theme. None of this was a central concern of theirs (cf., Tanuro 2010). And

3. The fossil economy can be most simply defined as an economy of self-sustaining growth pred-
icated on the increasing consumption of fossil fuels and therefore generating a sustained increase
in emissions of carbon dioxide; this economy’s beating heart since the nineteenth century has
been fossil capital, although there have also been noncapitalist Stalinist fossil economies. See
Malm (2016a, 2016b).
 Marx on Steam 5

while it has been amply demonstrated that insights into energetics and even ther-
modynamics informed Marx’s analyses of labor,4 it remains a fact that neither he
nor Engels isolated energy as a problem in its own right.
But could they possibly have done so? Who cared about energy in the 1840s or
1860s? Dozens of books from this time had steam power as their main topic.
William Stanley Jevons’s On the Coal Question was published two years before
the first edition of Das Kapital (and Marx was an avid reader of British economists).
Marx and Engels simply chose to foreground other phenomena. But while never
honing in on energy per se, they did sprinkle discussions of steam power across
their writings, all the way from the early 1840s to the early 1890s. This textual
legacy—a dearth of systematic treatment, an abundance of scattered comments
—applies, of course, to a wide range of themes in the works of Marx and
Engels, from literature, law, and nationalism to the nature of the state, the dynam-
ics of capitalist crises, and the virtues of the dialectical method, to name but a few,
fragments of which have subsequently been stitched together through close
Marxological readings. A similar exercise is possible for steam. It is to that task I
now turn.

Steam Gives You the Industrial Capitalist

“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with
the industrial capitalist” (Marx and Engels 1975–2004, 6:166). Thus runs what is un-
doubtedly the most famous of Marx’s statements featuring steam. It appears in The
Poverty of Philosophy in the context of an attempt to explain not the rise of steam
power but the development of capitalist relations of production. Steam is here
the explanans, not the explanandum, but this does not make the proposition any
less germane to the present subject. In his gnomic saying, Marx spells out an un-
equivocal, eminently testable, and within the wider Marxist tradition, highly influ-
ential hypothesis on the arrow of causation in an industrializing economy such as
Britain’s: steam begets capital, not the other way around.
More precisely, steam engenders the division and organization of labor we rec-
ognize as typically capitalist. “Labour is organized, is divided differently according
to the instruments it disposes over. The hand-mill presupposes a different division
of labour from the steam-mill” (Marx and Engels 1975–2004, 6:183). Some script en-
closed within the technology of steam power dictates, it seems, a certain cast of cap-
italists and workers, foremen and assistants, and other roles to be occupied inside
the factory and then spilling out into society at large. Reversing the terms—putting
relations before machinery in the causal sequence—would be tantamount to “slap-
ping history in the face”; in Poverty, no doubt is left as to the determining instance

4. See Burkett (1999), Foster (2000), Foster and Burkett (2004, 2008), and Burkett and Foster
(2006).
6 Malm

(6:183). “In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production;
and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their
living, they change all their social relations” (6:166). It is this historical law that is
illustrated, in the immediately following sentence, by the hand mill/steam mill
aphorism, with steam chosen by Marx as the emblematic productive force
molding society in its own image.
That aphorism was no slip of the tongue. It epitomized a lucid conception of his-
torical change in general and steam power in particular as developed by Marx and
Engels during the 1840s (cf., Shaw 1979). We find this conception in the opening
sentence of The Condition of the Working Class: “The history of the proletariat in
England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the
steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as
is well known, to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole
of civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to
be recognized” (Engels 2009, 15; emphasis added). Note the use of the term “indus-
trial revolution”: The Condition of the Working Class is today considered the first
analysis based on this concept (Hobsbawm 2011, 91). The agents of that revolution
are the new machines, led by “James Watt’s steam-engine, invented in 1764, and
used for supplying motive power for spinning since 1785” (Engels 2009, 19–20).
In the first draft of the Communist Manifesto, here called a “Confession of Faith,”
Engels likewise poses the question, “How did the proletariat arise?” He provides
a straightforward response: “The proletariat came into being as a result of the in-
troduction of the machines which have been invented since the middle of the last
century and the most important of which are: the steam-engine, the spinning
machine and the power loom” (Marx and Engels 1975–2004, 6:99).
Steam is here the prime instantiation of historical progress, conceived through
the lens of productive-force determinism, whose core tenets may be summed up
something like this: the developing productive forces will at some point come
into contradiction with the prevailing relations of production and, after a period
of upheaval, inevitably usher in a new set of relations that better allow for
further development (see Rigby 1987). The locus classicus of this idea is the
preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, but we encounter it
in every phase of Marx’s thinking: from The German Ideology—“All collisions in
history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between
the productive forces and the forms of intercourse” (Marx and Engels 1998, 83)—
to the Grundrisse—“The growing incompatibility between the productive develop-
ment of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in
bitter contradictions, crisis, spasms” (Marx 1993, 749)—all the way to the third
volume of Capital—capital is not the final or absolute mode “for the production
of wealth but actually comes into conflict at a certain stage with the latter’s
further development” (Marx 1991, 350). Similar statements could be multiplied
on end. Applied to the case of steam, productive-force determinism suggests that
the engine together with its associated forces was incompatible with previous
 Marx on Steam 7

relations of production, such as those between a master and artisan apprentices.

An imperative prime mover, the engine had to restructure workplaces, call forth
new functions, shatter the remnants of feudalism, and open the epoch of the bour-
geoisie for its full powers to come to fruition while also begetting, as an integral
part of its existence, the very proletariat as a class.

Saturated with the Optimism of Progress

Such determinism came to exert a singular material influence by virtue of its cod-
ification in the Second and Third Internationals. All prominent interpreters of
history in classical Marxism subscribed to it, including the particular conception
of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature that tended to come
along with it (see Reinfelder 1980). Karl Kautsky derived history from “the exten-
sion of our knowledge of nature” that “enables us to advance technologically,”
while Georgi Plekhanov believed in a hermetically sealed sphere where “a
genius discovers laws the operation of which does not, of course, depend upon
social relations” but that reshape social relations as the sphere expands (Kautsky
and Plekhanov, quoted in Reinfelder 1980, 14–5). A particularly flagrant case is
that of Leon Trotsky. Throughout his life, Trotsky (2007, 24) held fast to the
most doctrinaire version of determinism, as in Results and Prospects from 1906:
“Marxism teaches that the development of the forces of production determines
the social-historical process.” On the other side of the Stalinist Thermidor,
Trotsky (2004, 35) opened The Revolution Betrayed on the same exuberant note:
“Marxism sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental
spring of progress, and constructs the communist program upon the dynamic of
the productive forces … Marxism is saturated with the optimism of progress.”
The deformities of the Stalinist state emanated from the low level of productive
forces, the persistent material scarcity, and the long lines at bakeries and gas sta-
tions. Communism would arrive on the day when every Soviet citizen could “use
an automobile in any direction he chooses, refilling his gas tank without difficulty
en route” (44; and see Josephson 2010)—cars and oil for everyone: the road to
freedom. Writing in 1899, Lenin (quoted in Tanuro 2010, 95) banked instead on
coal: “The coal industry creates mobility of the population, establishes large indus-
trial centers and inevitably leads to the introduction of public control over
production.”
The first generations of Marxists could disagree on any number of things, but
productive-force determinism was a sort of minimal unifying credo, not infre-
quently expressed in the hand mill/steam mill shibboleth; even Stalin and
Trotsky could embrace each other on this point (see Rigby 1987, 46, 60–9; Rein-
felder 1980, 17–8; Chibber 2011, 61). The ecological implications of this theory of
history were always dubious, to say the least. One erstwhile believer in the
causal primacy of the productive forces, Jon Elster (1985, 246), refers to “one
8 Malm

central idea in Marx’s thinking—that the development of the productive forces re-
flects the progressive mastery of nature by man”—and indeed, Marx (1993, 488)
really does speak of “the full development of human mastery over the forces of
nature” as the essence of wealth and progress.5 This is the strand of thought
that could lead someone like Trotsky (quoted in Josephson 2010, 62) to declare
that “socialist man will rule all nature by the machine” and “drive the dark
forces of nature out of industry and ideology,” with human liberty consummated
the moment ecological tyranny is complete: “The gendarme will bridle mankind
only until man shall thoroughly bridle nature.”
Some ecological Marxists have, however, vehemently denied the existence of
any such strand of thought in Marx’s writings. Since the Grundrisse emerged
from under the archival dust in the 1950s, few if any rediscoveries of Marx have
been as revolutionary as those presented in John Bellamy Foster’s (2000) Marx’s
Ecology: Materialism and Nature and Paul Burkett’s (1999) Marx and Nature: A Red
and Green Perspective. Whole thematic territories have been charted for the first
time, bound together by the concept of “the metabolic rift,” whose value as a heu-
ristic device has proven immense. Both Foster and Burkett (1999, vii) make the
daring contention that, in the words of the latter, “Marx’s approach to nature pos-
sesses an inner logic, coherence, and analytical power that have not yet been rec-
ognized even by ecological Marxists.” They aspire not only to bring an ecological
gold seam to the surface but also to reinterpret Marx’s entire oeuvre as shrouded in
environmental sensibilities. To back up this view, Foster and Burkett dispute the
reading of Marx as having at least partially advocated “Prometheanism,” defined
by Burkett as the idea that “human progress hinges on the subjugation of nature
to human purposes” (147). This idea is at the very root of productive-force deter-
minism, but Foster and Burkett refuse to concede that it has any presence in the
writings of Marx: jarring against the main thrust of his analysis, any “anthropocen-
tric preference for material wealth over nature” held by Marx “would be self-con-
tradictory, to say the least” (Burkett 1999, 149). Hence this preference cannot be
there. When Marx and Engels in the Manifesto praise the bourgeoisie for its “sub-
jection of nature’s forces to man,” what they really mean, Foster (2000, 138–9)
argues, is that men should obey the laws of nature.
There seems to be some wishful reading going on here. Foster and Burkett take
the Marx they like best and claim that no other Karl can be found. But if there is
not a trace of Prometheanism in his writings, the fact that it was undisputed ortho-
doxy among the generations of classical Marxism simply becomes inexplicable.
Rather, a dissonance between ecology and Prometheanism should be located
within the thought of Marx and Engels (as well as the political tradition they
ushered in). “It may well be that Marx had the unique capacity never to contradict
himself,” S. H. Rigby (1987, 53) points out, with only a tinge of irony, but “until this is
proven it seems a little unwise to make it the hidden assumption underlying our

5. For the primary modern exponent of productive force determinism, see Cohen (1978).
 Marx on Steam 9

interpretation of his works.” A scientific interpretation of Marx’s texts ought never

to allow itself to paper over such dissonances and impurities in order to produce a
faultlessly cogent Marx; more importantly, one has to separate the question of the
validity of productive-force determinism from its presence in his writings. It is em-
inently possible that even this man held incorrect views. Rather than engaging in
an act of greenwashing, ecological Marxism should recognize the dubious legacy of
productive-force determinism and consistently develop the alternative conception
on offer in Marx.

An Antagonist of Human Power

As Marx settled down in London, living off crumbs from the Victoria Mill, he
began his first systematic studies of the capitalist economy surrounding him.
The immediate results were several series of notebooks, the most famous of
which is, of course, the Grundrisse, followed by the less well-known, less philo-
sophically subtle, more empirically oriented Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63. At
some point in his investigations, he apparently realized the need to research
water power to understand the roots of capitalist production. Thus the Manu-
scripts include enormous excerpts from the German Geschichte der Technologie,
published in 1807, through which Marx traced the winding path of the water
wheel from Asia and Rome via the seigneurial monopolies of feudal Europe
to the mills for fulling and hammering, boring and veneering and, finally, the
spinning of cotton. Then he proceeded to steam, with excerpts on the history
of the Savery and Newcomen engines, lengthy calculations of the proportions
of steam and water in the British textile industry, and an analysis of Watt’s
patents (Marx and Engels 1975–2004, 33:340–1, 33:425–52). To fully comprehend
the mechanical workings of the rotative engine, Marx drew a detailed picture
of one.
A new historical sequence now emerged. A revision of the analysis of “the indus-
trial revolution, which characterises the capitalist mode of production,” was called
for; having studied the historical records, Marx was forced to give up his and
Engels’s earlier narrative:

The spinning machine was not really complete until a large number of such
machines, a reunion of such machines, received their motion from water [em-
phasis added] and later from steam. The organisation and combination of
labour resting on the machinery first becomes complete with the establish-
ment of the mechanical workshop [i.e., factory], where an automaton sets
the whole process in motion … That the use of water power to set a mecha-
nism in motion was, of course, seen as a particular principle, emerges from
the fact that the later factories were baptised “mills,” and indeed they are
still called mills [emphasis in the original] in England. (Marx and Engels
1975–2004, 33:391–2)
10 Malm

Marx here grasps the fact that the industrial organization of labor ripened with
water, or in other words: the relations most distinctive for the capitalist mode of pro-
duction rode forth on a technology known since antiquity. The productive force
setting “the whole process in motion” had been around for centuries, and so
had another device of critical importance for capitalist relations: the clock. “The
rereading of my technological-historical excerpts has led me to the view,” Marx
(1979, 168) reports in a letter to Engels, that the water mill and the clock were “nec-
essary preconditions of bourgeois development … the two material bases” for
mechanized industry. Both were “inherited from the past” (Marx and Engels
1975–2004, 33:403).
In the first volume of Capital, the lessons appear in refined form: the Roman
Empire, we read, “handed down the elementary form of all machinery in the
shape of the water-wheel.” Capitalist industry was born on the British riverbanks,
but for its rather special purposes, the liquid had drawbacks. “The flow of water
could not be increased at will, it failed at certain seasons of the year, and above
all it was essentially local” (Marx 1990, 468). Steam, on the other hand, had one
very tangible advantage:

Not till the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting steam-
engine was a prime mover found which drew its own motive power from
the consumption of coal and water, was entirely under man’s control, was
mobile and a means of locomotion, was urban and not—like the water-
wheel—rural, permitted production to be concentrated in towns instead of
—like the water-wheels—being scattered over the countryside and, finally,
was of universal technical application, and little affected in its choice of resi-
dence by local circumstances. (Marx 1990, 468)

At a certain point in its development, in other words, capital came to require a

source of power that could impel surplus-value production in any place—and at
any time—of its own choosing (see Malm 2013). With these reversals, Marx
(1990, 496–7) explicitly corrects the account he and Engels had offered in the
1840s: “The steam-engine itself did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It
was, on the contrary, the invention of machines [by which Marx means machines
for spinning cotton, above all] that made a revolution in the form of steam-engines
necessary.” The threads are pulled together in a dense passage:

Machinery does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on
the point of making him superfluous. It is a power inimical to him, and capital
proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it. It is the
most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the
working class against the autocracy of capital. According to Gaskell, the
steam-engine was from the very first an antagonist of “human power,” an an-
tagonist that enabled the capitalists to tread underfoot the growing demands of the
 Marx on Steam 11

workers, which threatened to drive the infant factory system into crisis. (562–3; em-
phasis added)

Part of that crisis was, of course, the struggle over the working day, in which labor’s
thrusts were countered by energetic offensives. Culminating in the Ten Hours Act
of 1847, factory legislation necessitated “more machinery and the substitution of
steam as motive power in the place of muscles” (604). In the drawn-out confronta-
tion over the factory system, labor lost to capital in a disaster Marx considered
typical: “The substitution of the steam-engine for man strikes the final blow in
this, as in all similar processes of transformation” (603; emphasis added).
In his mature works, then, Marx discovered the fundamental problem with pro-
ductive-force determinism as applied to the case of steam: it is factually incorrect.
In reality, the steam mill did not give us society with the industrial capitalist but
precisely the other way around (cf., Marglin 1974, 104). The arrow of causation
can be in little doubt once we recognize that (1) capitalist relations of production
antedated the steam engine, (2) such relations coalesced in a factory system
based on water power, and (3) certain contradictions between these relations
and water induced the transition to steam. The relations chose the force, not
vice versa. That is not, of course, to suggest that productive forces exerted no influ-
ence on the relations of production—to the very contrary. Steam engines eventu-
ally became so highly prized by capitalists because they enhanced the exploitation
of labor, and seen from this angle, it is perhaps not very surprising that the young
Marx perceived the steam engine as the wellspring of bourgeois power. Steam did
indeed consolidate this power, but only after the industrial capitalist had decided
to adopt the engine. To the many breaks identified in Marx’s oeuvre we may thus
add another one: Marxian thinking on steam divides itself into an early stage of
determinism and a stage of constructivism, with the Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63
forming the bridge between the two. The mature Marx sketched a truly original
narrative of steam power, but other questions linger: Did he use his newfound in-
sights to rewrite his general theory of history? What happened to productive-force
determinism once steam had been reinterpreted as a product of the contradictory
relations between capital and labor?
If Marx had been deeply committed to determinism, one would expect him to
point to some tugboat pulling along forms of intercourse, the bourgeoisie its
native captain; he should have defined the capitalist mode of production and ex-
plained its victory over feudalism by some productive force peculiar to it. But in
Capital he does none of this. It has long been recognized that the concrete analysis
of capitalist development in Marx’s magnum opus runs counter to the articles of
productive-force determinism (e.g., Miller 1981, 99–102; MacKenzie 1984, 481–9;
Sherwood 1985, 860; Rigby 1987, 150–1; Bimber 1990, 344–5; Wickham 2008, 6).
Capital is not identified with any particular technology; the transition from feudal-
ism to capitalism is attributed to a seismic shift in property relations; the rise of
machinery is portrayed as a consequence of these novel relations. In the vivid
12 Malm

accounts of historical processes in the late works of Marx, the productive forces do
not grow naturally, do not impinge on society from a sphere outside it, do not in-
stigate transitions from one mode of production to another, and do not dress them-
selves in relations they find seasonable. The constructivist account of steam is just
one string in a tight weave of history writing held together by a frame that seems to
turn the earlier theory inside out (cf., Wood 1995, 137).
Yet Marx went on, as we have seen, to restate the formulas of productive-
force determinism even after his countervailing discoveries. This inconsistency
has been a headache for many a modern Marxist and Marxologist, some con-
cluding that the mature Marx went in one direction in his historical practice
while remaining attached to the theoretical axioms of his youth (e.g., Young
1976, 215–6; Miller 1981, 115; 1984, 217–8; Wickham 2008, 6–7). Put differently,
Marx never accepted the full implications of his own empirical findings and de-
clared that humans develop forces in correspondence to their relations and that
novel relations at a certain stage of development come into conflict with old
forces, which thereby assume the role of fetters—and then begins an epoch
of technological revolution. Indeed, the tension between forces and relations
seems to have remained unresolved in Marx’s work. On this matter—so
crucial to historical materialism—there never was one Karl, but at least two:
the younger philosopher of the progress of the human species and the older his-
torian of the capitalist mode of production, disunited. “Marx did hold contradic-
tory views,” writes Rigby, and “our task is not to decide what he really meant
(assuming it is possible to decide such matters), but rather to decide which el-
ements of his theory we wish to use” (Rigby 1987, 52). That decision must now be
informed not only by historical evidence but also by the ecological sensibilities
the present so urgently demands.

The Relations Are in the Forces

Small sparks of antideterminist critique were lit already in the interwar period (see
Reinfelder 1980). In his critique of Bukharin, Georg Lukács (1966, 29–30) argued
that belief in technology as the motor of history flew in the face of the soul and
the “specific feature of Marxism”: namely, the contention “that all economic or ‘socio-
logical’ phenomena derive from the social relations of men to one another.” Gramsci
(quoted in Reinfelder 1980, 27) noticed that the machine “expresses a social relation
which in turn corresponds to a particular historical period,” and even Trotsky
(quoted in Josephson 2009, 40; emphasis added) had his moments of clarity: “Tech-
nique and science develop not in a vacuum but in human society, which consists of
classes. The ruling class, the possessing class, controls technique and through it con-
trols nature”—the alternative view in a nutshell. But these were not much more
than passing fancies. Not until the 1960s did the winds begin to shift for real.
 Marx on Steam 13

When Louis Althusser (2005, 71) declared war on reductionist “temptations,” he

knew to take aim on “that well-thumbed piece on the steam engine” from The
Poverty of Philosophy, epitome of “economism and even technologism”—two
dogmas that constituted nothing less than “the primary danger threatening the
very foundations of working-class consciousness” (Althusser 2014, 44). Just as the
history of steam teaches us, and contrary to the notion of a sphere of innovations
made by the human species and manifested in patents, “Productive forces are
nothing at all if they are not rendered operational, and they can only operate in
and under the aegis of their relations of production” (21). Hence the latter must
play the determinant role. Indeed, Althusser emphasizes that the relations radical-
ly condition everything we perceive as technical; the productive forces are always
—and never more so than under capitalism—cast, designed, and tainted by the re-
lations between the classes. Economism, or what we have called productive-force
determinism, is a false hangover from bourgeois ideology, but “unfortunately” one
with textual support in Marx (209).
This was not, however, the unique view of Althusser. Just as most quarrelling
Marxists had hitherto agreed on putting the cart of force before the horse of rela-
tions, in the 1960s and 1970s, many now rearranged the carriage of history: Maoism
and autonomism (Walker 2012), Harry Braverman (1998) and Herbert Marcuse
(2002), E. P. Thompson (1966) and Robert Brenner (1977, 1985) all pivoted toward
a constructivist view. One particularly perceptive iconoclast was Raniero Panzieri,
founder of the legendary autonomist journal Quaderni Rossi. For Panzieri (1976, 9),
capitalist machinery will be adopted only insofar as it operates “as a power that
dominates” the workers. Or put simply: “The relations of production are within the
productive forces” (12). Now, if despotism and technological rationality merge in
actual machines, if the relations are in the forces, it follows that any hope invested
in the latter as the redeemers of the proletariat will be dashed. “Faced by capital’s
interweaving of technology and power,” the workers cannot satisfy themselves by a
“simple overturning of the relations.” Panzieri stops short of saying it aloud, but it
would seem that pieces of machinery would have to be smashed and factories set
ablaze again. Rather than undermining the relations, the forces undergird them
ever more effectively and stably: “The process of industrialization, as it achieves
more and more advanced levels of technological progress, coincides with a contin-
ual growth of the capitalist’s authority,” each wave of new machines serving capital
with a “consolidation of its power” (Panzieri 1980, 48–9). Perspicacious pessimism
has replaced the saturating optimism of progress.
The debate on forces and relations has been labeled the most fundamental
dispute within all of Marxism, or in the words of Althusser (2014, 214): one could
“write a history of the Marxist workers’ movement by considering the answer
given to the following question: Within the unity productive forces/relations of
production, to which element should we assign primacy, theoretically and political-
ly?” The ecological question, with its burning core in global warming, raises the
stakes even further. Productive-force determinism rests on the same conception
14 Malm

of the relation between humans and the rest of nature that animated the Stalinist
disaster; ecological Marxism must reckon with these deep roots, not pretend that
they never existed, and unequivocally align itself with the alternative. Only within
this framework is a theory of the capitalist degradation of the environment possi-
ble. Only constructivism can posit the crucial sequence of causation: relations of
production → productive forces → nature.

The Obstacle of Fossilized Power

“Man’s power over Nature,” C. S. Lewis (quoted in Adams 1975, flyleaf) once ob-
served, “turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with
Nature as its instrument.” Herein lies a fundamental truth about the structure of
social power and that of environmental degradation. Using Lewis’s statement as
his epigraph, anthropologist Richard Newbold Adams (1975, 13; cf., Russell et al.,
2011), in a book now mostly forgotten, outlined a theory intended to fuse the two
aspects: “It is the actor’s control of the environment that constitutes the base of
social power.” More specifically, power itself can be defined, Adams (1975, 12) sug-
gested, as the control that one actor exercises “over some set of energy forms” that
constitutes “part of the meaningful environment of another actor”; having this power in
his hands, actor A may submit actor B to his will. Power, in other words, is a tri-
partite relationship. Human being A is superordinate to human being B due to
the former’s utilization of the forces of nature C.
Now, one can imagine modes of power in which the control over strictly physical
thermodynamic energy is at most of tangential importance—think of the spiritual
authority a teacher has over students or the psychological manipulation a man
might use against his partner—but in the sphere of production, energy is what
makes everything work, and so control over it will prop up power-as-domination.
Indeed, all economic activities are ultimately a matter of energy conversion, be
they manufacturing or transportation or construction or commerce or drilling:
objects in the world can only be transformed, transferred, and treated in any
way by means of energy (see Alam 2009). At the point of large-scale commodity
production, that universal force has to be concentrated. The power of capital
over labor is conditional upon control over energy—particularly over its mechan-
ical forms, which set the instruments in motion, without which all production
would stand still.
The road to enhanced power over labor thus passes through nature, and resis-
tance from B may curve back upon A, prompting it to dig deeper into C to preserve
and expand domination—precisely what happened in the shift from water to
steam. With fossil energy as a power at their absolute command, capitalists inflated
their power vis-à-vis workers; capital became more powerful in both senses of the
term: as in “a powerful explosion” and “a powerful proprietor” (cf., Russell et al.,
2011, 250). By dint of their exceptional purchasing power, capitalists could buy
 Marx on Steam 15

steam engines and coal alongside slices of human lives, over which they could then
exercise reinforced power on the shop floor in an original construction of the fossil
economy neatly fitting into Adams’s (1975, 299) formula: the transition expressed
“an increase in control over the environment” indistinguishable from “an increase
in the power within the human system.”
Such an analysis has consequences for Marxism as it now stands before a steamy
mirror. In 1856, in a speech at the fourth anniversary of the Chartist People’s Paper,
Karl Marx conjured up a panorama of paradoxes in modern society, starting with
stupendous forces of industry and science developing alongside horrendous decay.
“In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.” Machinery has the po-
tential of shortening labor, but instead we behold overwork and starvation; wealth
is a source of want; art brings about the loss of character, and most fundamentally,
“At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to
other men” (Marx 2010, 299). A mainstay of socialist agitation from at least the mid
nineteenth century onward, this latter paradox was intended to arouse both indig-
nation and a sense of endless possibilities. Humankind is learning to master nature
but—monstrous contradiction!—one man is oppressed by another.
The insights of Lewis, Adams, and others would turn that naive surprise into a
melancholy recognition of precisely the typical configuration of power. The real
paradox would be a situation of intrahuman enslavement without a concomitant
subordination of extrahuman nature (or the other way around, Trotsky’s utopia
of a bridled nature without any gendarme bridling mankind). What forces could
the rulers then draw on? What spectral beings could shackle each other in
chains forged by nonmatter? How could power relations envelop the globe in
ever denser, more solid, and more complex layers and strings if not through an ac-
celerated mobilization of nature—energy above all—thereby necessarily used up
and degraded?
Now there is, as we have seen, no shortage of sketches for such a truly critical
materialism in the works of Marx and Engels, albeit within persistent ambivalenc-
es toward the machine. In Capital we find Marx expressing what seem to be deep
sympathies for the praxis of machine wrecking: “Only since the introduction of ma-
chinery has the worker fought against the instrument of labour itself, capital’s ma-
terial mode of existence. He is in revolt against this particular form of the means of
production because”—an apparent justification—“it is the material foundation of
the capitalist mode of production” (Marx 1990, 553–4; emphasis added). Not by
chance, the enormous chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” in
which these words are found, ends with the famous declaration that capitalist pro-
duction only develops “by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all
wealth—the soil and the worker” (638). And yet the technophilic current within
Marxism continues to rear its head, even in a rapidly warming world. It has recent-
ly been restated with unshaken confidence by Amy E. Wendling (2009) in her Karl
Marx on Technology and Alienation, in which she focuses on the steam engine.
Workers who opposed it and smashed its associated machines were simpletons,
16 Malm

victims of “false consciousness,” misguided reactionaries whom Marx taught to

love mechanization; the obvious strands of hostility to machinery in his own
works and the early labor movement were nothing more than aristocratic vestiges,
romantic deviations, even inherently, unavoidably anti-Semitic forms of ressenti-
ment (6–7, 100–5, 147–9, 152–3, 200–2, 207–9).
One chooses one’s Marx. Wendling goes for the machine lover and spins him
out of control. Steam is a “godly power” at the beck and call of humanity, the
fount of all progress, the beginning of the march by which humans will supplant
“natural force” for drudgery and achieve complete freedom (Wendling 2009, 140,
187). The problem with capitalist production is that it “is not mechanized
enough!”—but rest assured, the fetters will burst one day: “Technicization alone
is even a sufficient condition for the communist mode of production” (105, 126; emphasis
added). Incredibly, Wendling asserts that science and technology “can have nothing
but positive consequences for humanity as a whole,” their progress leading “only
forward in time” (127, 212; emphasis added). Somehow, this future utopia was
already inaugurated in the nineteenth century, and more exactly by the steam
engine, the great instrument “appropriate to a new, communist economic era”
(170). Totally unbridled in her steamophilia, Wendling never as much as notices
any environmental repercussions of steam power and other fossil-fueled technol-
ogies. The fact that such an argument can be submitted in the year 2009, after four
IPCC assessment reports and countless indications of the unfolding disaster,
speaks to the depth of the technophilic current and the mechanisms of denial
still at work within (some) Marxism (see also Ketabgian 2011).
Rather to the contrary, climate change should settle the Marxist debate on hith-
erto existing machinery once and for all. Since the days of steam, the bulk of cap-
italist technology has been soaked in fossil fuels. The idea of a simple shift in
property relations—a socialist takeover of the machinery found at hand—always
constituted a false solution. If not before, we know this now. A people’s steam
engine would have been exactly as damaging to the conditions for life on earth
as a tyrant’s. The fact that no such engine ever appeared seems to lend credence
to what we could call an ecological-constructivist Marxism, according to which
the relations become objectified in the productive forces, at once despotic and de-
grading; the more such forces there are, the harder to break out of the relations cast
in iron. Once adopted by the ruling classes, the technologies really do exert causal
power over—but not determination in the last instance of—further developments
in the social realm (cf., Marx and Smith 1994, xiv).
Andrew Feenberg (2010, 18) has theorized such feedback loops as the “bias” of
the instruments. “Once introduced, technology offers a material validation of the
social order to which it has been preformed,” most conspicuously in cases such
as assembly lines and surveillance systems. In the same vein, Thomas P. Hughes
(1994) has conceptualized “technological momentum” as a process by which—as
a Marxist would call them—productive forces proceed from being effects of re-
lations to something more like causes and props. As they sink into the earth,
 Marx on Steam 17

permeate society, and grow in scale and complexity, the forces once shaped by
their surroundings gain “momentum” and begin to shape their surroundings in
turn; constructivism implies its own diminishing relevance over time. In flat con-
tradiction with the fetters-bound-to-burst model of history, but in line with Pan-
zieri’s pessimism, this implies that capitalist power is progressively bolstered and
ossified by technological development, and as usual, there is in Marx’s work an
intimation of this logic. “All the progress of civilization, or in other words every
increase in the powers of social production”—as we read in one of the more deject-
ed passages of the Grundrisse, referring to machinery—“enriches not the worker
but rather capital; hence it only magnifies again the power dominating over
labour … Since capital is the antithesis of the worker, this merely increases the
objective power standing over labour” (Marx 1993, 308, emphasis in original).
Imagine global capital deprived of every one of its technical conquests over
the past two centuries: its electrical cables, conveyor belts, motors, planes, plat-
forms, computers, cameras, robots, all erased in an instant. Such capital would
stand empty-handed, disembodied, back at square one. It would be a purely
formal locus of power, easily swept aside.
If such an analysis is at least broadly correct, increased stability of capitalist
power on a global scale and increased instability of the climate have been, ever
since the days of steam, two sides of the same coin. It throws the challenge of a
break with business-as-usual under a sobering light. Leaving the remainder of
the fossil fuels untouched in the ground—the essence of any meaningful policy
of mitigating climate change—would be tantamount to an abstention from the
further exercise of an immensely powerful form of control over the environment.
But that is a terrifying prospect only, or at least primarily, to humans who draw
their power from fossil fuels and who suddenly stand to lose the “material founda-
tion” of their positions. If only at this general level of abstraction, here is the giant
obstacle on which all climate policies have hitherto foundered. Any success then
presupposes a confrontation, head-on, with the aim to smash that obstacle to
pieces.

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