Schorlemmer and Engels saw a lot of each other; Marx and his family were also drawn in to their social life. When Engels moved to London in 1870, the chemist often came to visit. They both went on holiday trips together. Schorlemmer also followed Engels to the United States, as did Eleanor Marx and her lover Edward Aveling. On his own, he visited Paul and Laura Lafargue in Paris.38
Schorlemmer the chemist first made a name for himself through his experiments. But gradually, he moved more and more of his activities from the laboratory to the writing desk. Together with Roscoe, he became a leading textbook author in chemistry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The magnificent three-volume work, Ausfürliches Lehrbuch der Chemie (A Treatise on Chemistry, 1877–84), was published in many editions and translations, including English. Writing a comprehensive handbook in the subject such as chemistry was not, unlike today, a pedagogical task. It was a question of creating a synthesis of many fields that had not yet been joined. According to Roscoe, Schorlemmer was the one who bore the heaviest burden in the work.39
Schorlemmer conducted his most important experiments back in the 1860s. We have reason to dwell upon what in Schorlemmer’s time were called paraffins, from the Latin parum affinis, ‘little related’; today we speak of alkanes. This concerns simple hydrocarbons, or the compounds constructed according to the formula CnH2n+2 – that is, methane (CH4), ethane (C2H6), and so on.
Schorlemmer’s discoveries have a direct connection with the great controversy over the electrochemical theory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius – the theory that radicals in organic chemistry corresponded to the elements in inorganic chemistry. They were, so to speak, the fixed building blocks whose electrical charge determined how they could be combined with other substances. Schorlemmer was able to add a piece of the puzzle to the new molecular theory, in which the radical could be defined in relation to the molecule. The radical was a ‘remnant’ of the molecule.
Schorlemmer encountered resistance from adherents of the older theory of radicals. Edward Frankland, who was regarded as a leading chemist in the 1860s, persistently defended it. He took his starting point in certain problems concerning hydrocarbon radicals. With support from the available empirical data, he maintained that there were two homologous series: the radicals (methyl, ethyl, propyl, and so on), on the one hand, and on the other the family of methanes, or hydrides (methyl hydride, ethyl hydride, and so on).
It was here that Schorlemmer made his contribution. He showed that methyl and ethyl hydride were identical and traced both of them back to ethane (C2H6). He could thus assume that there was only a single series, and the hydrides could go all the way. In a long series of reports to the Royal Society – which he would soon join – he continued to show his results concerning the simple hydrocarbons. He could show that Frankland was wrong when he maintained that radicals and hydrides would have different boiling points.40
This was important for the foundations of organic chemistry, but it also had massive practical significance. Knowledge of the boiling points within the methane series would later be of significance for the oil industry. Refinement of rock oil, or petroleum, is based on knowledge of the different boiling points of the hydrocarbons. The earlier members in the methane series are in gas form at normal room temperature, but the more complex compounds concerned, the higher the boiling point.
Obviously, Schorlemmer could not predict the enormous significance of oil in the future. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was still an unreasonable thought that it would take up the fight against coal; only the automobile industry changed the picture. Oil had certainly been extracted in small quantities for a long time, but it was only in 1859 – in Pennsylvania – that real development got its start. The export of kerosene to Europe began in 1861. By 1862, Schorlemmer had analysed ‘amerikanisches Steinöl’ (American rock oil – that is, petroleum). This seems to be the way by which he got into the problem of hydrocarbons. His interest continued. He was the one who synthesized octane, so important in oil.41
In our context, the crucial question is how Schorlemmer, with his research – which he later summarized in his textbooks on chemistry – influenced Marx and Engels. This, of course, he did. Having an outstanding chemist in their circle of acquaintances was of great significance for the both of them. As we know, Engels wrote more about the natural sciences than Marx did; above all he was eager to draw conclusions that could support what he saw as a scientific worldview. But it was Marx who first made use of the results of Schorlemmer’s research to strengthen his own line of argument.
Quantity Turns into Quality
While Marx was working on the final version of the first volume of Capital, he also found time to attend the popular lectures held by the German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann in London. He talked about them in a letter to Engels. He was not impressed by the lecturer, who nevertheless seems to have given him new ideas. Namely, he inserted a note in the proof sheets in which he compares the transition from handicraft to manufacture with the new chemical theory of molecules. He would not mention Hofmann, he told Engels; on the other hand, he would mention the three French chemists Auguste Laurent, Charles-Frédéric Gerhardt, and Charles Adolph Wurtz. The latter was ‘the real man’, he added. Engels did not react appreciably to the statement that the same kind of relationship of laws could be found in chemistry and in history. He only said that Schorlemmer said that Wurtz was a popularizer and that apart from Gerhardt, the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz was the one who had developed the theory concerning molecules. Incidentally, Schorlemmer was going to send Marx a book that had the correct information on the development of molecular theory.42
Marx took the correction only in part; in the brief note that remained unchanged through both German editions and the French translation, only Laurent and Gerhardt are mentioned.
But the significant thing is not the note, it is what Marx said in the text. He said that in history, as well as in chemistry, ‘is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his Logic), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes’.
It is correct that Hegel, in his great Science of Logic, wrote a lot about quality and in particular quantity; a large part of the first volume consists of different determinations of the concept of quantity, and at the end of the same volume quantity and quality are put in relation to each other. The increase of a quantity can yield a new quality.
But it would never have occurred to Hegel to call this a law. For him, a law in science was ‘etwas Ruhendé’ – something quiescent – whereas the dialectic deals with the constant changeability and development of reality. By speaking of laws, Marx introduces a concept that belongs to the modern natural sciences but not at all in the philosophy of Hegel. We have already seen that in other places in Capital as well, Marx speaks about laws in a way that lures him into quantitative calculations of a risky nature.43
The concept of ‘law’ in science is already ambiguous. On the one hand, we have laws that apply when certain conditions exist. Chemical reactions are of this type. Ammonia and sulfuric acid form ammonium sulphate within a given temperature interval. If ammonium sulphate is heated up to over 280°C, ammonia and sulfuric acid are re-created.
Laws of development are of an entirely different type. The second law of thermodynamics – which involves nature tending towards increased entropy – was known in Marx’s time. Heat can never completely be transformed into movement. This applies to both steam engines and human muscles. One popular metaphor that is easy to misunderstand is ‘heat death’. One does not die from heat; it is heat that dies.
It was German physicist Rudolf Clausius who first formulated the second law of thermodynamics; he was also the one who later introduced the concept of entropy, which is the measure of how much heat energy cannot be transformed into kinetic energy. Marx did not react with any intensity to the second law of thermodynamics, but Engels did so much more eagerly. Like M
arx, he had studied the principle of energy (first called the law of conservation of energy) that William Robert Grove proposed in his 1846 book Correlation of Physical Forces. Grove, a judge and physicist, is today chiefly known as the father of the fuel cell, but his work on how forces transformed into each other was very influential. Marx read the books more by accident, whereas Engels was more deeply influenced by it. He saw it as a brilliant example of a materialism that did not assume that all forces could be reduced to mechanical movement. As he understood the energy principle, it involved matter in movement under quantitatively determined conditions passing from one form of movement into another. It was always a question of attraction and repulsion, but in different forms. Engels wrote: ‘Mechanical motion of masses passes into heat, into electricity, into magnetism; heat and electricity pass into chemical decomposition; chemical combination in turn again develops heat and electricity and, by means of the latter, magnetism; and finally heat and electricity produce once more mechanical movement of masses.’ These words are found in the important section of The Dialectics of Nature that he called ‘Grundformen der Bewegung’ (Basic Forms of Motion), written in 1880–81.44
This harmonious image of a number of forces that are quantitatively related to each other but qualitatively different had now been disrupted by Clausius’s calculation of the inevitable heat loss. Back in 1869, Engels complained in a letter to Marx about the new idea running rampant in Germany that ‘the world is becoming steadily colder’. The theory of heat death had its popular breakthrough with the lecture Über den zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Wärmetheorie (On the Second Law of Thermodynamics) that Clausius held in 1867 at the Natural Research Society in Frankfurt am Main, which was later published in a separate pamphlet. Engels heard about it directly through Schorlemmer, who had taken part in the meeting, and was shocked.45 In some of the notes that posterity has collected in The Dialectics of Nature, he continued his somewhat bizarre polemic. Obviously, it was not only the idea concerning the content of the principle of energy that riled him, but also the deathblow to the idea of the eternity of the universe that he, like many other materialists, embraced.
Gradually, the name of Clausius stopped being like a red rag to a bull for him. Quite the contrary, he referred with respect to Clausius’s chief work from 1876, Die mechanische Wärmetheorie (The Mechanical Theory of Heat). Most likely, he realized that the second law of thermodynamics was a great development, and that in his world of ideas it could thereby be compared with Darwin’s theory of biological evolution and Marx’s theory of historical development.46
But back to Marx and the parallel between the transition from handicraft to manufacture, and the relationship between, for example, the various compounds in the alkane series such as methane (CH4), ethane (C2H6), and so on. At first, the parallel seems strange. Marx maintained that handicraft became manufacture when the number of employees reached a certain level that made the typical forms of work in handicraft, with masters, journeymen, and apprentices impossible. In its place, a form of production develops in which the division of labour is important and natural.
The relationship between the different hydrocarbon compounds in a series such as the alkanes is of an entirely different type. Methane does not develop into ethane. Only through analysis can the striking regularity in the atomic setup be found. One carbon atom binds four hydrogen atoms, two carbon atoms six, and so on. These purely quantitative similarities are not matched by any similarity as regards properties. On the contrary, the substances in the series are strikingly different; that is why they were previously called paraffins.
What, then, was the connection Marx saw between hydrocarbons and the path from handicraft to manufacture? Obviously this: that a certain increase in quantity (in the one case, the number of employees, in the other the number of atoms) leads to something qualitatively new. The similarity does not lie in the processes (no process can be spoken of as regards the hydrocarbons). Nor is there similarity between any theories. The similarity that can be spoken about concerns a phenomenon, examples of which can be found in many areas of reality. In connection with changes in temperature, the substances can transition from solid form to liquid, and from liquid to gas. People assembled for a common task behave differently if they are only five than if they are twenty – or 10,000. When one type of air pollution reaches a certain limit, it has catastrophic consequences. As the popular phrase goes: It is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Hegel saw the transition from quantity to quality as a regularity to dialectical thinking – in brief, what Hegel called logic. It is actually a line of thought that is a consequence of his idealism. Reality is, in essence, thinking. But Marx was not an idealist. What is it, then, that he concurs with when he cites Hegel? Does he mean something that has its basis in material reality? Or can we talk about quantity passing over into quality only at the theoretical level? In the first case, it would concern a kind of super-law that would apply in principle to all areas of reality. But the question of why reality agrees with this law would have different answers in different areas. The relationship between the different hydrocarbons included in the alkane series is of a different type than the one prevalent among different groups of people, work communities, or projects.
If validity is limited to the theoretical level, we come significantly closer to Hegel’s own ideas, with the substantial difference that this theoretical level – for a materialist such as Marx – only deals with our method of organizing knowledge and not with the reality the knowledge is about. We could say that theories in all areas must reckon with limits of different types. A handicraft company may not grow over a given level in order to preserve handicraft production. One carbon atom in the alkane series can only be combined with four hydrogen atoms. Two carbon atoms are inevitably combined with six, three with eight, and so on.
John Bellamy Foster opened the way for a third possibility, namely that Marx was following in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant. In his 1790 work Critique of Judgment, Kant dealt with humanity’s way of experiencing functionality in their world. He deals with two areas, separate today but often brought together in Kant’s time – even more so under the following Romantic era: art and organisms. It is said of both that they are so functional, regarded as totalities, that we inevitably imagine them as created by some intelligent being. As regards a work of art, this is in fact so – but living creatures? Within the horizon of human experiences, there is no organizer of the living. Creatures are born and develop according to a fixed pattern; in their bodies, there are numerous processes taking place that interlock in an artistic manner. We have no right to imagine an independent creator – we have the right to imagine that we better understand how organisms function if we look for the functional within them. This is a regulative idea, Kant says. It regulates our thinking, but does not lead us to any certain conclusions of the type that science advances.
Foster, of course, is very familiar with the fact that Marx asked no questions about organisms and their method of function. But he maintains that the dialectical method he seems to see in Marx is a more radical alternative to Kant’s way of thinking. ‘Dialectical reasoning can thus be viewed as a necessary element of our cognition, arising from the emergent, transitory character of reality as we perceive it,’ Foster says.47
The concept of emergence plays a key role in many different scientific and philosophical contexts; it means that a more complex structure arises from a less complex one. Relatively simple patterns can give rise to more complicated ones. This applies to both inorganic and organic nature, as well as to society. Meteorology talks about how small changes in the weather can trigger hurricanes. At one point, life arose from complex organic compounds – a splendid example of emergence. The human species, with its large brain, its singularly useful hands, and its larynx placed so low that it can pronounce vowels, involves something crucially new in the development of species. And the history of humanity and its societies is full of examples of
similar leaps. A range of circumstances are joined together and give rise to something new. Marx spoke about the transition from handicraft to manufacture. In the Grundrisse, he made a bigger move and spoke about relationships that constituted the preconditions for capitalism without being an element of it. Here, capitalism stands out in an eminent sense as an example of an emergent phenomenon. There is nothing mysterious in its origin. But it entails something qualitatively new.
Foster thus has an important point when he introduces the concept of emergence into the context. It is much more apposite than the concept of limit that we recently examined. But Foster is definitely wrong when he introduces Kant into the line of argument, thereby limiting the scope of Marx’s idea. Marx did not talk about reality ‘as we perceive it’, but about reality quite simply as what we gain admission to through observing it, and above all through working on it.
This does not mean – as is often said in the tradition after Marx – that human knowledge is a reflection of reality. Marx has a few explanatory lines to say about this in the postscript to the second edition of Capital, which we previously dwelt upon. In research, the whole material is assimilated in its diversity, which is hard to grasp. There is no obvious order in this mass of material; this order is only created in the description. The dynamic in the material is ‘ideally’ reflected in what may appear as an a priori construction, Marx said. There is thus no question of any reflection of reality, nor of reality as we imagine it. It is the result of an aggregate process of work and description – a production, if you will.48
The concept of emergence also helps us to realize that the example that Marx gave in his note about quantities passing into qualities is entirely misleading. The transition from handicraft to manufacture is a fine example of emergence – but the hydrocarbon series in chemistry is definitely not. The alkanes may all be constructed according to the formula CnH2n+2, but there is no process that leads from methane to ethane, and so on. There, a conformity to law applies that says that one carbon atom binds four hydrogen atoms, but two carbon atoms bind six hydrogen atoms. So it always remains – it is ‘something quiescent’, something stable, as Hegel said.
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