Part 03 The “GENTRIFICATION” of MEXICO CITY: The Terminology & the Phenomenon

This is part three of a series on capitalism, gentrification and the housing crisis.

[PART ONE] [PART TWO]

Gentrification is not Progress, It’s Dispossession” Photo Foto: Moisés Pablo (Cuartoscuro)

THE TERMINOLOGY

The trend in urban development that we have been describing in parts 01 and 02 of this series has been dubbed “gentrification”, which is defined as “a process in which a poor area (as of a city) experiences an influx of middle-class or wealthy people who renovate and rebuild homes and businesses and which often results in an increase in property values and the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents”. The term has had mostly negative connotations since it came into common use in the 60’s but seems to reflect contradictory world views: one in which it is a normal kind of development and another which suggests that it is nearly criminal. The phenomenon could just as well be and indeed has been variously described as “progress”, “urban renewal”, “urban planning”, “densification”, “liberation”, “housing shortage”, “housing crisis”, “displacement”, “dispossession”, “colonization”, “social cleansing” or even “blanqueamiento” (“whitening” when the victims of eviction are indigenous residents).  The meaning of the term we use to describe the phenomenon is determined by our relationship to the phenomenon itself.

Nor are the terms “housing crisis” or “housing shortage” adequate to describe the phenomenon. As Madden & Marcuse (2016) argue,

 

The idea of a housing crisis is politically loaded…Discrete moments when housing crises become acute tend to be interpreted away as exceptions to a fundamentally sound system… [but] housing crisis is a predictable, consistent outcome of a basic characteristic of capitalist spatial development: housing is not produced and distributed for the purposes of dwelling for all; it is produced and distributed as a commodity to enrich the few. Housing crisis is not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as it is intended… homelessness exists not because the system is failing to work as it should, but because the system is working as it must. [1]

For the purposes of this investigation, we use “gentrification” to be interchangeable with “displacement”, or depending on the context, with “housing crisis” or “housing shortage”. We will argue that the slow and stealthy transformation of Mexico City that is taking place almost imperceptibly before our very eyes, but at an ever-quickening pace, is coming at a very high human cost by displacing the original inhabitants of urban neighborhoods, thereby destroying the cultural identity, character and sense of community that has developed in these quarters over decades, generations or, as we shall see, in some cases even centuries.

One investigator sums up the situation in Mexico City in this way:

The urban peripheries have continued to grow while at the same time, new exclusionary spaces are being built. These have included private shopping centers, gated communities, and “megaprojects” such as luxury apartment buildings. Urban displacement has also been a growing phenomenon, with a growing number of poor inhabitants of the central areas of the city being priced out and pushed towards the outer peripheries …The city’s building boom has fostered mass real estate speculation across the city. Apartments are increasingly sold for millions of pesos, a price unaffordable to most in a city where the monthly income for the majority of the population is below 7,000 pesos (around 350 USD). Of particular note is a real estate boom in the central boroughs of the city, especially the borough of Cuauhtémoc. [which] was cited by an Oxfam study as a point of encounter where different social classes inhabit the same spaces. Mexico City has become Latin America’s most expensive city, based on relative cost of living. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2017 Worldwide Cost of Living Survey found Mexico City had the fastest rise in the relative cost of living (up 23 percent) out of 133 cities surveyed. [2]                                               

And this is happening all over the city as real estate developers target certain neighborhoods, mostly in the centrally located Cuauhtémoc borough, for investment and development including not only the boroughs of Roma and Condesa (two of the first boroughs in the city to be so transformed) but boroughs such as Benito Juarez, Doctores, Obrera, Escandon, Guerrero, San Rafael, Tabacalera, Santa María la Ribera, Tacubaya, and the list goes on. Some of these boroughs are even being renamed to reflect their new upscale demographic. What makes these areas attractive to investors is their location and proximity to work, educational and recreational spaces, public services, transportation, the presence of historic landmarks, and even their green spaces such as parks and trees.

Furthermore, this process of transformation in Mexico City often results in the violent evictions of long-time residents from apartment buildings and houses whose ownership is disputed or legally in doubt and which are sometimes carried out illegally in the middle of the night by hired thugs with little or no advanced warning or notice being given to the tenants of the building, robbing them of any valuables they may have, and leaving the tenants and all their belongings scattered helter-skelter in the street.

These evictions in the city follow a certain fixed modus operandi on the part of what is called a “mafia” or a “real estate cartel” which involves threats against tenants, corporate fraud, government complicity and general corruption. Criminal elements find disputed, poorly maintained properties in the city that have been abandoned, or whose ownership is in question and whose tenants are often elderly, and then falsify deeds or contracts which they validate in court. They sell the property to an unwitting buyer and obtain court orders for eviction.

“Across the city”, says Bloomberg News, “roughly 2,000 evictions take place every year. Neighborhood displacement can be a violent process. Since 2014, academics have seen an increase in violent evictions, which can involve hundreds of “granaderos” (riot cops)—who arrive to evict residents, often without an official eviction notice from the courts. [3]

Massive eviction in the historic center of the city on August 27, 2025 when several families were violently evicted from a large old apartment building without warning early in the morning

As one of the victims of a violent eviction is quoted as saying, “No temenos donde ir.” “We have nowhere to go”.

In short, we can say that there is nothing that better illustrates the ever-widening inequality gap in Mexico City than the gentrification process by which the future of the city is being shaped and determined by real estate developers and the city government in such a way that favors a social sector with greater purchasing power than the original residents thereby raising the cost of living in the area and forcing original residents out. The city has become a sort of visible expression for class struggle in Mexico under capitalism.

Mitikah Towers under construction Photo Alejandro Saldivar

THE PHENOMENON

Shortly after the debacle of the Mortgage Debt crisis of 2008, I looked out at the skyline of Reforma Avenue, the main business corridor of Mexico City visible from the rooftop of my modest three-story walk-up apartment building in Colonia Santa Maria la Ribera from where I could see two high-rise office buildings that had long been under construction and wondering if they would now ever be completed. How little did I understand what was happening!

In the years that have since passed, not only have those two high-rise buildings been expeditiously completed, but more than a dozen others have sprouted up like mushrooms after a rain along Reforma Avenue and around the city, and even more “mega-projects” are being planned.  

MITIKAH vs XOCO

The Mitikah Towers

The latest of these high-rise mega-projects is a monstrous 65-story structure, a “mixed-use” commercial center, (i.e. part-commercial and part-residential) luxury tower called Mitikah, now the tallest skyscraper in Mexico City beating out what had been the tallest, Torre Reforma at 57 stories, which was completed in 2016.  (Mitikah is not the tallest building in the country, however. That distinction goes to El Obispado in Monterrey.) The Mitikah Tower, part of a larger complex called “Mitikah Ciudad Viva”, was initiated in 2009 and officially opened to the public thirteen years later in 2022 after construction was halted for a year in 2015 because of financial problems , protests and opposition from the inhabitants of the local neighborhood, and issues with government building permits. The financial and bureaucratic problems were solved when Fibra Uno, a real estate development trust, stepped in and rescued the project.

According to Wikipedia, Fibra Uno, now the sole owner of the Mitikah Tower is, is one of the largest real estate investment trusts (REIT)[4]   in Mexico, which acquires, develops, and operates real estate projects. It was founded in 2010 and was the first to be listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange. The real estate portfolio of investments lists more than 600 properties including shopping centers, industrial parks and corporate buildings. It has also been accused of defrauding its stockholders and as of 2020 is under investigation by the city government for possible money laundering and tax evasion.

The website of Pelli Clarke & Partners, one of the participants in the Mitikah Tower project, goes into raptures describing it as an architectural feat -- an example of sheer technological prowess:

Torre Mítikah soars above the Mexico City skyline and landscape, commanding views from every direction with its striking silhouette and elegant façade, creating an iconic landmark for the city of 21 million residents. Mítikah is the signature residential high-rise building of Ciudad Viva in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City…a mixed-use commercial center of the city, hub for world-class food and entertainment, Class-A office space, and a state-of-the-art hospital. A cultural milestone in the greater metropolitan region, beloved and admired by many, Torre Mitikah has elevated Mexico City in its evolution into a leading world capital.

 An Architectural Website does not describe the project in quite such glowing terms referring to it as a project:

that encourages the segregation of the population and promotes limited interaction among its residents [which] can lead to resentment on both sides, potentially exacerbating existing conflicts, especially if it intensifies problems related to access to water and quality public spaces.

Inside will be the largest shopping mall in Latin America, with over 120,000 square meters of leasable area spread across five levels, representing an investment of 22 billion Mexican pesos, approximately 1.1 billion euros [1.15 billion USD].

The complex is not just a shopping mall; it also includes office towers, the tallest tower at 267 meters high, dedicated to more than 600 apartments, a tower housing medical offices, a private hospital, and a hotel. Furthermore, the residential building…will feature an event hall, movie theater, swimming pool, spa, gym, and a variety of other amenities.

In numerous YouTube videos about the Mitikah/Ciudad Viva complex on the Mitikah website and here, here, here  and  in Proceso magazine designers and promoters of the project boast that the Mitikah complex:

·      will change the whole area of the city where it is located

·      is especially designed to resist earthquakes

·      is a self-contained city making it unnecessary for residents to ever leave

·      will serve as a model for the future development of the entire city

·      incorporates the latest advances in technology and is a watershed in the history of the city’s development.

Two more large buildings (but not as tall as Mitikah) are planned for the Ciudad Viva complex, but their construction has been halted, at least temporarily, first by Claudia Sheinbaum during her term as city mayor and now by her successor, Clara Brugada, for violating ecological guidelines for construction.

As Proceso says, the Mitikah Tower is emblematic of how the government has been giving free rein to private real estate developers to determine the future of the city without regard to the will or needs of the people who reside in it:

[The Mitikah tower is emblematic] not for being a real estate development per se, but for the way Mexican authorities have facilitated huge projects with government instruments at the service of the developers… The [government] authorities and the developers decided to insert the tallest tower in the city in a small barrio as part of its plan without taking into account the residents of the area or the severe impacts on its environment. [5]

Again, according to Proceso, the abdication of urban planning by the city government to private real estate developers has been going on since at least the year 2000 when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, then the PRD mayor of the city, quietly passed decrees without consulting the city legislature, supposedly facilitating the construction of “social housing”, but which in reality gave private contractors more freedom over what and where to build within the city. According to one government insider, this initiated a virtual boom in real estate speculation in the city. This policy continued through the successive city administrations of Marcel Ebrard, Miguel Ángel Mancera and Claudia Sheinbaum, a specialist in sustainable development. Sheinbaum, though opposed to the construction of the Torre Mitikah, found herself compromised because it was too late to stop construction, and because members of her own political party, Morena, had been involved in giving it the green light.

As Proceso says:  

Since [the decrees of Lopez Orador], the city government has been at the service of urban developers. Aside from the problems of financing, there have been no obstacles that haven’t been resolved in their favor…The Mitikah complex is the clearest example of how real estate developers have been favored by [government] decisions through opaque mechanisms that have resulted in constructions that are “red flags” for the capital because of their impact on the urban environment. [6]

Xoco

The local residents of Xoco (pronounced Hoko in the dialect of the local residents) were never consulted or even informed of the plan for the megaproject negotiated between the government and the developers and as Proceso describes it, they only realized what was happening in 2009 when heavy equipment began circulating in their narrow streets. As one commentator says, nobody informed them of what would be the beginning of the biggest building project in Latin America until it was already under way. For the residents of Xoco it was also the  beginning of a years-long battle involving law suits, protests and passive resistance for which they were little prepared.

Xoco is one of the oldest and most traditional residential areas of the city, in the Benito Juarez borough, which has been continuously inhabited for centuries dating from before the rise of the Aztec Empire in the Valley of Mexico and is included in a list of 141 areas in the city which have been denominated “Pueblos Originarios” of the city, a dispensation which guarantees them certain rights and privileges. The Mexico Desconocido website states that according to COPRED, the governmental department designed to prevent discrimination, “Pueblos Originarios are defined as those groups that existed before colonization and have inhabited the area continuously since then, preserving their own socio-cultural structures, habits and customs. In the case of Mexico City these groups exist and developed autonomously in respect to the central urban area. Nevertheless, with the demographic explosion and growth of the city these groups have ended up by being absorbed.” [7]

Like many of the small “barrios” or neighborhoods that compose Mexico City, Xoco has its own particular character and identity and even the atmosphere of a small rural Mexican village. One local YouTube reporter and other anecdotes [8] depict the colorful character of the neighborhood which includes a resident who breeds roosters for cock fights thereby exercising the patience even of his  neighbors in the barrio when they crow in the morning; a colonial church dating from the 17^th century dedicated to San Sebastian, the barrios’ patron saint; annual celebrations of San Sebastian Saint’s Day on January 20 complete with the traditional fireworks, rockets and noisy processions in the street which characterize Mexican celebrations and manage to annoy Xoco’s neighbors in the Ciudad Viva complex and the surrounding areas.  

The Church of San Sebastian with Mitikah Tower in the background Photo by the author

There have been conflicts between the new residents of the neighborhood and the old in which the inhabitants of the towers have not only complained, but have harassed, confronted and even attacked these celebrations by throwing stones, bottles and glass on them from the towers above. There have even been physical confrontations in which the residents of Xoco have blocked the entrances to the complex in protest.      

 

Demonstration by residents of Xoco against Torre Mitikah complex  Photo Benjamín Flores Proceso     

The complaint of the local residents of the barrio, on the other hand, has been not only that construction of the Mitikah Tower has destroyed the character and sense of community in their neighborhood, but that it has tripled its population density, that it has caused serious problems with traffic as the subterranean parking levels are built to accommodate 13 thousand automobiles, that the main street of the community has been privatized and appropriated as an auto entrance into the parking structure, which, in turn, has complicated  pedestrian traffic in the area and resulted in the illegal felling of dozens of trees, that the new structure has  interfered with Xoco’s access to electricity and water, the latter which is monopolized by the tower, that it adds to an increase in sewage disposal in the area, that the towers either block the sun entirely or its smart windows reflect the sunlight into the barrio, which becomes unbearably hot, and worst of all, that it has increased the cost of living and property taxes in the barrio to levels that the residents cannot afford.

Jorge Pigeon, vice president of a capital markets investment firm, argues that while property taxes have risen, the nearby properties have actually benefitted from the construction of the Mitikah Tower complex because the value of their own property has risen. That, of course, is precisely the problem if you think of it in human terms instead of profits. The residents don’t want to sell their properties. They want to live in them. What is happening with the construction of such mega-projects as Mitikah Tower is that the public nature of the urban space is being privatized and the original residents are now faced with three possible choices: to leave, to stay and adapt, or to stay and resist. Many have chosen to stay and resist.

The huge, outsize dehumanizing scale of Mitikah Tower which looks down in contempt on the residential district below like an alien enclave from another planet can almost be considered a symbol of how the city government is at the service of powerful real estate developers in search of profits rather than of the residents of the city who consider the neighborhood of Xoco their ancestral home.

As the president of the Xoco neighborhood Citizen’s committee contesting the Mitikah project says:

They didn’t notify us. That is one of our greatest complaints. Never did they inform us of anything in spite of legal norms that mandate [consulting] the opinion of the residents. Everything was done between the government and the developers. [9]

The Violence of the Vertical

As Alejandro Porcel Arraut argues, Mitikah represents  a kind of gentrification that is distinct from that which takes the form of “exclusive, affluent gated communities on the city's outskirts—aimed at privileged classes seeking areas removed from the anxieties of urban life”, or those older historical boroughs in the inner city which have become fashionable and occupied by affluent outsiders seeking “authenticity”, or those isolated urban islands like shopping centers or exclusive condominiums scattered throughout the city accessible only by automobile.

[The Mitikah complex] tries to be a city unto itself, as the name of the project suggests, Ciudad Progresiva (the former name for Ciudad Viva)….This constitutes the basic contradiction that arises between the neighbors in Xoco, between physical proximity and the enormous socio-cultural distance that separates them. This creates a place of passive hostility and conflicting visions of the city, which like other great social, urban centers, has lost its socializing function. [10]

 

Giant high-rise megaprojects such as Mitikah represent what Porcel Arraut calls the “violence of the vertical”:

[G]iant real estate developments vulgar and arrogantly tall, inserted into dense, central spaces of the city amid older residential areas next to single-family homes, extremely exclusionary, surveilled and completely directed to life within [a space] ‘you will never have to leave’ because all of the amenities you need are inside.

[The] vertical city is a product for those seeking a central location … without …encountering neighborhood life, with its challenges, and unsavory low-life. Verticality [insures] a different kind of distinction. … with walls, fences, surveillance cameras, security guards, and identification systems: an exclusionary architectural design... The populations that inhabit them are generally unaware of the businesses next door, do not walk the streets of the neighborhood, and constantly look toward the main avenues, which they use to reach other enclosed spaces within the island city.

[Its] verticality [exresses] …an overwhelming power sustained by money, real estate speculation and economic rationality. The developers of the vertical city are not interested in adapting to the locality or in modifying their projects by reason of their environmental and urban impact. [11]

CONCLUSION

But despite it particular characteristics of gentrification as manifested by Mitika Tower we can also see it as the general tendency towards the privatization of public space which also demonstrates what is happening to democracy under capitalism, in which large corporations are dictating how we live rather than vice versa. What we see is that the concept of progress implies the imposition of a model of development which is completely alien to the resident communities requiring that entire populations in these communities who have inhabited these urban spaces for decades if not centuries be displaced and dispossessed from what has become their home.

Lastly, in the case of Mexico, we see that the city is unusual in the respect that it is really the product of the “clash of two civilizations”, the European and the indigenous Americans, and that what has evolved over a period of centuries is a sort of syncretism in which traces of pre-Columbian peoples and culture have not only survived but shaped the character of the modern capital of Mexico and that these peoples and cultures will continue to struggle for their rightful claim to form part of the urban space.

As Barbara E. Mundy (2015) says:

…While the Conquest changed an indigenous New World capital, and it was remade into the hub of the global empire of the Habsburg kings in the sixteenth century, it did not destroy indigenous Tenochtitlan, either as an ideal, as a built environment, or as an indigenous population center. Instead, indigenous Tenochtitlan lived on.  Looking beyond the triumphant accounts of Cortés and the despairing accounts of Las Casas to other representations of the city, and focusing on ones created by and about its indigenous occupants, will reveal the endurance of the indigenous city once known as Tenochtitlan within the space of Mexico City. [12]

In the next instalment of this series we will look at some of the other possible immediate causes of gentrification as it is evolving in Mexico City.

NOTES

---

[1] In Defense Of Housing The Politics of Crisis by David Madden Peter Marcuse VERSO London. « New York First  published by Verso 2016

[2] Anti Gentrification Activism in Mexico City’s Digital Public Space (2016) Paula Martín Jason Pagan Tamara Velasquez The New School International Affairs

https://mxc.com.mx/2025/09/08/estas-son-las-colonias-mas-gentrificadas-de-cdmx-por-airbnb/

[3] The Restaurant at the Center of a Gentrification War: Rising housing costs have triggered a wave of displacement in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico. But residents are finding creative ways to resist. By Martha Pskowski Bloomberg June 4, 2019

[4] According to Investopedia REITs allow investors to own shares in income-producing real estate without managing the properties themselves leading to steady income streams for investors. REITs are mostly traded publicly like stocks, providing liquidity and accessibility not commonly found in direct real estate investments.

[5] Un “Foco Rojo” Para La Ciudad Jorge Carrasco Araizaga Y Juan Carlos Cruz Vargas Proceso Agosto 2019

[6] Mitikah, un gigante que impone su ley en la Ciudad de México Proceso no. 2234 August 25, 2019

[7] Pueblos originarios de la Ciudad de México, cuáles son y dónde están (mapa y listado)

https://www.mexicodesconocido.com.mx/pueblos-originarios-de-la-ciudad-de-mexico-cuales-son-y-donde-estan-mapa-y-listado.html

[8] La crónica como antídoto / No. 203 Las batallas en Xoco Juan Paulo Pérez Tejada

[9] Mitikah, un gigante que impone su ley en la Ciudad de México Proceso no. 2234 August 25, 2019

[10] Desarrollo inmobiliario en Xoco: relato de ciudades enfrentadas Alejandro Porcel Arraut Nexos, octubre 16, 2018

[11] Ibid

[12] Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City Barbara E. Mundy (2015) by  University of Texas Press p. 3

 

Share:

Read More

Marxism vs. Mechanical Materialism Part One: Sexuality, Mechanism and Vitalism

Michelangelo: God breathing the life force into Adam

This essay was intended as a response to Daniel Lazare’s polemic against me, Meeting Judith Butler halfway: Science, Darwin, and adaptation to postmodernism.  In his article Lazare makes a number of patently false statements attributing to me positions I do not hold. He also fails to respond to the bulk of my essay, Marxism, psychoanalysis and human sexuality. That essay was in turn written in response to his article, Materialism and Gender Theory: Anatomy of a bourgeois-radical train wreck. I challenged the theoretical conclusions Lazare drew in that essay about gender theory, psychology, human sexuality and evolutionary theory. After reading Lazare’s response to my critique I was reminded of a statement by Engels when he characterized the arguments of a group of social Darwinists in Germany in the 1870’s. He wrote,

The puerility of …[ this method of argumentation]… is self-evident, and there is no need to waste words on it.[1]

I will therefore concentrate on the philosophical and scientific issues that Lazare touched on and spare the reader, as far as possible, a blow by blow account of his puerile arguments. I did consign a bit of that to the footnotes for those who are interested.

The first of the topics I will deal with is vitalistic biology, its history and the role it plays within gender theory.

Vitalistic Biology as one reaction against the dark side of mechanistic materialism

We got to this topic by way of a quote from Judith Butler,

Any theory of the culturally constructed body ... ought to question ‘the body’ as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse.  There are Christian and Cartesian precedents to such views which, prior to the emergence of vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century, understand ‘the body’ as so much inert matter, signifying nothing or, more specifically, signifying a profane void, the fallen state: deception, sin, the premonitional metaphorics of hell and the eternal feminine.[2]

Lazare serves up this quote from Butler but later he changes her reference from “vitalistic biologies in the nineteenth century” to “modern biology.”  By way of this thoroughly dishonest sleight-of-hand Lazare then goes on to castigate Buttler as being an enemy of “modern biology”.  Whatever one thinks of Butler this is, to say the least, a shoddy piece of journalism.

Now one can legitimately say that vitalistic biology made significant contributions that were later incorporated into modern biology. There is certainly some truth to seeing an area of continuity between this form of 19^th century science and modern biology, but that hardly justifies saying they are the same. I once made a similar point about the precursor to the  Scientific Revolution of the 17^th century when I wrote,

When it comes to the history of science … the form of magic may be irrational, [but] the magical traditions of the Renaissance contained in embryo some of the seeds that would later mature to fruition in the Scientific Revolution.[3]

That being said, the magical tradition of the Renaissance is not the same as the Scientific Revolution that followed that gave us the science of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.

In the above quotation Butler references “Christian and Cartesian precedents” of the concept of the human body. While she does not specify more than that, it is likely that the Christian theologian she has in mind is St. Augustine who literally believed that the sexual organs of the human body are an invasive product of original sin that constantly divide man from his better nature. Thereby all manner of proscriptions against unregulated sexual behavior follow.  The Cartesian precedent is a reference to the school of mechanical materialism that subscribed to Descartes’s dualism. According to Descartes the mind, which is further identified with the soul, exists apart from matter and vice-versa. The mechanists inspired by Descartes considered that animals, because they have no soul, are therefore mechanical devices with no consciousness and no feelings. Descartes called them, bête-machine, ‘beast machines’. Therefore all manner of horrific experiments were conducted on helpless animals which they thought did not experience pain.  Here is an account of this practice, one that I referenced in my earlier article:

A visitor in the 1650s, to the Port Royal School at Paris, reports that pupils were dissecting dogs who were nailed alive to wooden planks by their four paws. The purpose was apparently to inspect the circulation of the blood, a subject of controversy. Hammering in the nails inevitably caused pain to the victims, an ordeal dismissed by the experimenters. “Their [animal] cries when hammered were nothing but the noises of some small springs that were being deranged” (Gombay 2007:ix). The justifying associations of mere clockwork fit the Cartesian theory of animals as automata. The molesters made fun of persons who pitied the creatures feeling pain. The cruel situation was reported by Nicolas Fontaine (1625-1709), who employed a testimony of his niece. Fontaine included the details in his Memoires pour servir a l’histoire de Port-Royal, published in 1736 (Delforges 1985:97).[4]

 Whereas we can say that Cartesian mechanical materialism was a positive moment in the history of science and the history of philosophy when it first emerged, overturning the previous scholastic and theological dogmas, it soon exhibited its dark side as the torture of animals at the Port Royal School showed. Vitalistic biology was a reaction to this dark side of the mechanical materialism that was empowered by Cartesianism.  Yet the vitalistic biology of the 19^th century had its precursors. It turns out that Descartes’ “bête-machine” had a larger application than those helpless animals being tortured at the Port Royal School.  Workers were also conceived of as machines whose miserable lives were seen as a necessary sacrifice for the cause of commercial progress. When the Industrial Revolution arrived in 18^th century England entire cities such as London and Manchester were turned into a living hell, a capitalist version of the Port Royal School of horrors re-imagined on a colossal scale. These conditions gave rise to the eloquent protests of the artisan-poet William Blake.

Blake understood that the factories of London were not only destroying the way of life of his fellow artisans and farmers but were literally poisoning the air they breathed, the land they cultivated and were enslaving the proletariat, including small children, condemned to work under horrendous conditions until the spark of life they were born with was snuffed out. Blake’s poetry borrowed  from the images of the English Revolution of the 17^th century and spoke in the prophetic Biblical language that marked the most radical voices of that bygone age.  To quote from an essay on Blake by Cyril Smith,

The visionary artist and poet William Blake (1757-1827) and the revolutionary thinker Karl Marx, born 60 years later, were equally hostile to eighteenth-century individualistic materialism, the predominant way of thinking of their own times, and, in a cruder form, of ours. In an early work, There is no Natural Religion (1788), Blake attacked the outlook promoted by John Locke, who he often linked with Bacon and Newton.[5]

It is one of the great ironies of history that Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” was adopted as a patriotic hymn and turned into an unofficial national anthem of England.  Blake despised the monarchy and traditional religion, opposed nationalism and was aligned with the American radical Tom Paine in his support of the American and French Revolutions at a time when such sentiments were considered treasonous and subject to severe punishment. One can only guess what a great parody Blake would have written about the kidnapping of his poem to serve as a celebration of “little England”.

Marx also broke with mechanical materialism early in his intellectual life when he wrote in his Thesis on Feuerbach,

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

The point is further clarified in the Third Thesis:

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated.[6]

It is noteworthy that Lenin came to similar conclusions after the outbreak of World War I when he embarked on a study of Hegel’s Science of Logic.  Having been educated up to that point in the version of Marxism espoused by Plekhanov – who minimized the difference between Marxism and mechanical materialism --Lenin was astounded by the revelation that, “…intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism”.[7]

Or take this quote from Lenin in which he explicitly places Plekhanov as sharing the conceptual outlook of vulgar materialism,

Plekhanov criticizes Kantianism .. more from a vulgar-materialistic standpoint than from a dialectical-materialist standpoint ...Marxists criticized (at the beginning of the twentieth century the Kantians and Humists more in the manner of Feuerbach (and Buchner) than of Hegel.[8]

One can also produce numerous quotes from Trotsky that illustrate his approach to philosophy was the polar opposite of mechanical materialism.[9]

Finally,  one should be forewarned that sometimes critical remarks against ‘vulgar materialism’ are employed as a kind of back-handed defense of mechanical materialism.  It’s a phenomenon that we identified long ago as “the vulgar critique of vulgar materialism”:

Vulgar materialism isn’t some quaint, old annoyance that can be dismissed with a passing remark: it is, in the form of positivism, a default position of bourgeois ideology. The vulgar critique of vulgar materialism ignores this…[10]

When it comes to biology,  there is no shortage of criticisms of earlier theories that are today considered “vulgar materialism”. But that does not mean that the critic has overcome mechanical materialism. In many cases it indicates that the critic is proposing a more sophisticated version of mechanical materialism to replace an earlier one.  Thus a contemporary mechanist may claim that we can explain consciousness solely through the action of neurons in the brain and that earlier theories based on the structure of the face (physiognomy) or bumps in the skull (phrenology) were vulgar and unscientific.  Their criticism of the earlier theories would be completely valid but their own theory remains mechanical and reductionist.  It’s a phenomenon we will see over and over again -- and one often employed by vulgar Marxists – more sophisticated versions of reductionism still remain reductionist.

Who were the vitalistic biologists?

In any discussion of the vitalistic biology of the 19^th century it is important to distinguish the theories developed on behalf of vitalism from a practitioner such as Louis Pasteur. Pasteur has sometimes been placed in the camp of vitalistic biology because he was sympathetic to the argument  that fermentation requires the participation of a living tissue. But those who place Pasteur in this camp go way overboard.[11] He was a working scientist and was one of the first biologists to test theory with well-designed experiments. While there is some justification in seeing Pasteur’s work as aligned with vitalism early in his career, when he  studied fermentation and incidentally discovered the role of microbes, Pasteur also dealt the death blow to one of the most important principles defended by vitalistic biology, the idea of spontaneous generation. To quote a scientific review of his work in this area,

Since Aristotle (sixth century bc), it had been generally believed that the metamorphosis and decomposition phenomena, such as decay, putrefaction, rotting, fermentation and mouldering, resulted from a ‘vital force’ existing within the organic substances. Many living things came forth from non-living matters because the non-living material contained pneuma or ‘vital heat'. This theory of the spontaneous generation of living creatures was still prevailing in Pasteur's time, despite remarkable experimental and premonitory works by the Italians Francesco Redi (1626-1697) and Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799). Using well-designed experiments, Spallanzani had produced evidence in 1765 for the preventive role of heating on broth infusions, suggesting that the air was a source of contamination of the culture broth. Pasteur reproduced these experiments using yeast infusions (1861-1865).[12]

The rise of vitalistic biology was an important moment not only in the history of science but also in the history of philosophy.  For vitalistic biology grew out of the necessity to provide an alternative to the reductionism of mechanistic biology that was one of the outcomes of Cartesian dualism. Vitalism as a philosophical movement was responding to the problem of reductionism in the life sciences.  The Cambridge History of Philosophy provides a succinct summary of these debates:

While vitalism can be traced to ancient Greece (Aristotle’s On the Soul is a vitalist work), modern vitalism arose as a rejection of Descartes’s mechanistic view that plants, animals, and even living human bodies are kinds of machines. Early modern vitalists such Georg Ernest Stahl maintained that what distinguishes living things from nonliving things is that the former contain an irreducible component that is responsible for animating the body. By the start of the nineteenth century, however, a number of researchers had followed Antoine Laurent Lavoisier’s lead in applying the new chemical theory to physiology. And the debate between vitalists and mechanists became focused on whether it is possible to give chemical accounts of vital behaviour such as metabolisation, respiration, and fermentation (Asimov 1964). Many vitalists argued that an account of these vital behaviours would require the discovery of fundamental, vital forces, while mechanists argued that there are no fundamental vital forces, and that organic and inorganic processes differ only in complexity (see Bechtel and Richardson 1993 and 1998).[13]

The vitalists were correct in insisting that an explanation of a living organism is not possible in purely mechanical terms.  Some vitalists however completely dismissed all mechanical explanations as being irrelevant.  That was clearly a misstep as there is no denying that mechanical and chemical processes occur in any organism.  For example, William Harvey used the mechanics of a pump to explain the role of the heart in the circulation of blood. But mechanical explanations are clearly insufficient when it comes to life. For example, through the miracle of modern medical technology you can remove a heart from a body and when hooked up to the right machinery keep it beating.  Clearly it is a type of pump, but is it still a heart now that its function, the role it played as a critical part of an organic whole, a living organism, has been lost?  The vitalists were however wrong in attributing what was unique about living organisms to a vital force, a type of immaterial substance. It took a lot of experimental work throughout the 19^th and early 20^th century to disprove the theory of a “vital force”.  But the problem of reductionism remained and is still an issue that has been contested in modern biology. There is in fact a huge literature in the discipline known as the ‘philosophy of biology’ that deals with reductionism in modern biology.[14]

The philosophical solution to the problem of reductionism lay in understanding that newly emergent properties arise in a living organism, properties that cannot be understood as simply more of the same mechanical processes although more complex, but are instead defined through their relation to the whole of the living body and its interaction with its environment. This insight was articulated by Hegel, in the early part of the 19^th century, prior to the great discoveries in the biological sciences that were to follow.  Hegel’s anti-reductionist and dialectical understanding of a living organism was summed up by one commentator,

Hegel’s core position on the organic is as follows: he believes that organisms cannot be fully understood without the categories that are proper to them alone, and organic life is irreducible to inorganic nature. However, this position does not imply that the laws, as well as specific causal mechanisms that operate in inorganic nature, do not also operate in living organisms.[15]

It should be understood that Hegel was not doing philosophy completely removed from the individual sciences. His understanding of the philosophical issues in biology was firmly rooted in the science of his time. Engels, in his Dialectics of Nature, praised Hegel’s engagement with the biology of his time. For example, take this statement by Engels in which he credits Hegel’s dialectical conception of a living organism as in one fell swoop refuting both mechanistic materialism and vitalistic theories of biology,

Life and death. Already no physiology is held to be scientific if it does not consider death as an essential element of life (note, Hegel, Enzyklopädie, I, pp. 152-53), the negation of life as being essentially contained in life itself, so that life is always thought of in relation to its necessary result, death, which is always contained in it in germ. The dialectical conception of life is nothing more than this. But for anyone who has once understood this, all talk of the immortality of the soul is done away with. Death is either the dissolution of the organic body, leaving nothing behind but the chemical constituents that formed its substance, or it leaves behind a vital principle, more or less the soul, that then survives all living organisms, and not only human beings. Here, therefore, by means of dialectics, simply becoming clear about the nature of life and death suffices to abolish an ancient superstition. Living means dying.[16]   

Of course there have been several revolutions in our understanding of biology in the last two centuries, but the problem of reductionism remains with us, largely because the discipline of modern biology, as a byproduct of increasing specialization and compartmentalization, has walled itself off from philosophy. A modern dialectical understanding of biology requires an engagement between dialectical philosophy and contemporary biology. Working scientists in the field, if they have not reflected on the philosophical issues behind biology, do not thereby escape philosophy.  Rather they unconsciously adopt a “default” philosophy which in our time is a version of positivism.[17] 

However,  the announcement of the death of vitalistic biology has proven to be premature. Although an outlier when it comes to what we understand to be modern biology, a 20^th century version of vitalistic biology was championed by the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem.  Canguilhem’s version of vitalistic biology was strongly influenced by his reading of the early Marx.  According to one reading of Canguilhem’s work, he was the key representative of an undercurrent of European philosophy called “Vitalist Marxism”, designating "a theoretical position that not only recognizes ‘life’ as an essential foundation of the production process in modern societies, but also considers it a critical resource for resistance to the capitalist logic of exploitation".[18] Canguilhem was also a critic of 19^th century vitalistic biology.  While recognizing their legitimate criticism of mechanism, he rejected their metaphysics of a living substance.  He was therefore not only inspired by Marx but was very much aligned with Hegel’s anti-reductionist conception of a living organism.  He held a very prominent position within French philosophy and directly influenced thinkers such as Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Althusser. The connection with Foucault raises a number of intriguing questions, for Butler was heavily influenced by Foucault. Could she have appropriated Canguilhem’s critique of 19^th century vitalistic biology by way of Foucault? This remains an open question as Butler has never written on Canguilhem.

The hermeneutical dimension of vitalistic biology in gender theory

If you want to understand the role of vitalistic biology in gender theory then there is more going on than a strictly historical explanation. Rather you need to understand how this historical episode has been interpreted by gender theorists. That means that there is a hermeneutical dimension with which we must engage if you are going to critique gender theory or Judith Butler. This is just as important as getting the history right. I made reference to this hermeneutical tradition in a quote by another gender theorist that I provided:

Rogers argues that vitalism, in alliance with an emergent liberal feminism contested theories that stressed the passivity of matter and legitimized the imposition of masculine power on a natural world gendered as female.[19]

What the quote illustrates is a common practice among gender theorists, where concepts taken from the history of philosophy or the history of science become “sexed”. In the narrative of many gender theorists, one outcome from Cartesian dualism, mechanistic biology, represents the oppressed female principle of passivity in nature.  Its opposite, vitalistic biology, represents the oppressive male principle of life and activity that must be implanted in a passive nature to fulfill its destiny.  Understood in this manner it is easy to see why a gender theorist like Judith Butler would be singling out “vitalistic biology”. To return to the quote from Butler, what she is actually saying is  that both mechanistic biology and vitalistic biology fail to understand that they are social constructs, that working together, reinforce social norms that create an oppressive society for women and non-binary gendered people in general. While the narrative of mechanistic biology pushes the idea of the passive female body, claiming the authority of the natural sciences, its complement, the vitalistic biology, claimed the authority of essentialist metaphysics in categorizing male principles as animating and dominant. Thus, the vitalistic biology of the 19^th century did indeed posit an immaterial essence, an élan vital, that animated matter, lending credence to the gender theorists schema, which is undoubtedly why Butler specifically identified “vitalistic biology” in her statement.  Her case would be harder to make had she spoken of “modern biology” as the latter does not posit an immaterial essence explaining life.  It is impossible to understand Butler’s statement without this historical and hermeneutical background.  And it is necessary to understand what she is saying before writing an honest critique of her theories. I refer to my previous article, Marxism, Psychoanalysis and human sexuality,  for such a critique. 

The problem of reductionism

What mechanical materialism leads to is the problem of reductionism, as we have shown in the discussion of vitalistic biology.

What is reductionism and what is the attitude of Marxism towards it? This is perhaps the single most important philosophical problem of our time.

Oftentimes we see critiques of reductionism from postmodernists. This is typically phrased as a questioning of “meta-narratives, by which they mean the materialist conception of history. The post-modernists question any philosophy that claims history can be understood rationally.  In this they are joined by anti-Marxists of the past century like Karl Popper. But of course it does not follow that every critique of reductionism comes from a postmodernist and anti-Marxist perspective.[20]   Reductionism has in fact been at the center of the Great Debate that have rocked the foundations of Marxism for well over a century. Reductionism was an issue that Engels felt compelled to address way back in 1890 when some followers of Marx thought that the materialist conception of history can be reduced to a doctrine of economic determinism, as if all the other layers of a social formation, its political dynamics, its legal institutions, its cultural forms, not to mention the psychology of the masses, are mere epiphenomena that automatically follow. He wrote,

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.[21]

Despite Engels intervention in his later years, reductionism remained a huge problem in the Second International, particularly in the versions of dogmatic Marxism expounded by Kautsky and Plekhanov. To explore this topic would require an entire volume but suffice it to say that reductionism lay behind the debate within the Second International on the theory of permanent revolution.[22]

If reductionism has proven to be a major problem in historical analysis, it is even more so when it comes to biology.  There, reductionism has been largely the rule rather than the exception.  There were good historical reasons for that, as noted by the dialectical biologists Lewontin and Levins,

Inevitably people see in physical nature a reflection of the social relations in which their lives are embedded, and a bourgeois ideology of society has been writ large in a bourgeois view of nature. That view was given explicit form in the seventeenth century in Descartes's Discours, and we practice a science that is truly Cartesian. In the Cartesian world, that is, the world as a clock, phenomena are the consequences of the coming together of individual atomistic bits, each with its own intrinsic properties, determining the behavior of the system as a whole. Lines of causality run from part to whole, from atom to molecule, from molecule to organism, from organism to collectivity. As in society, so in all of nature, the part is ontologically prior to the whole. We may question whether in the interaction new properties arise, whether the "whole may be more than the sum of its parts," but this famous epistemological problem comes into existence only because we begin with an ontological commitment to the Cartesian priority of part over whole.[23]

Lewontin and Levins then proceed to clarify the critical distinction between this “ontological commitment”, which has been called “Cartesian reductionism” with the methodology employed in many sciences of analyzing the parts and building up a picture of the whole from there. The latter, as a methodology, has been extremely successful, while at the same time passing over huge gaps in our understanding of the whole. But these partial successes reinforce the ontological commitment.  The ontological commitment on the other hand reinforces confidence in reductionism as a method. As Lewontin and Levins indicate,

“In actual practice, reduction as a methodology and reductionism as a world view feed on and recreate each other…”

Lewontin and Levins then go on to provide a materialist explanation of the success of the reductionist world view despite its numerous lacunae,

The great success of Cartesian method and the Cartesian view of nature is in part a result of a historical path of least resistance. Those problems that yield to the attack are pursued most vigorously, precisely because the method works there. Other problems and other phenomena are left behind, walled off from understanding by the commitment to Cartesianism. The harder problems are not tackled, if for no other reason than that brilliant scientific careers are not built on persistent failure.[24]

We will explore this issue further in Part II devoted to the “Darwin Wars”.

 

NOTES

---

[1] MECW, vol. 25, 584.

[2] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 42-43, 164.

[3] Downward Spiral, Chapter 5, p. 137. https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch05.pdf

[4] https://www.citizenphilosophy.net/Rene_Descartes.html#vivisection

[5] Cyril Smith, Marx and the Fourfold Vision of William Blake, 2002, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/blake.htm

[6] See https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

Numerous commentators have explored Marx’s break with mechanical materialism, particularly in relation to the Theses on Feuerbach. My contribution to this literature can be found in The dialectical path of cognition and revolutionizing practice, 2004, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/dialectical_path.pdf

[7] Lenin. C.W. Volume 38, p. 276.

[8] Ibid. p. 179.

[9] See for instance, Kunal Chattopadhyay, The Marxism of Leon Trotsky, Progressive Publishers, 2006 and Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development:  The Theory of Permanent Revolution, Haymarket Books Chicago, Illinois, 2010, and Trotsky as a Marxist Theoretician: The Evidence in the Notebooks, Critique, Volume 47, 2019 – Issue 2, by Alex Steinberg.

[10] Frank Brenner, On the vulgar critique of vulgar materialism, 2008, 

https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/vulgar_critique.pdf

[11] Lazare claims that I dismiss vitalistic biology as a “pseudo-science” where in fact what I said was that “Some would even call it a pseudo-science”.  Clearly my use of the pronoun “some” should have tipped off Lazare that I am characterizing the opinion of others and not necessarily my own. I also said nothing at all about Louis Pasteur, but Lazare insinuates that I would have called Pasteur a “quack”.

[12] Berche P: Louis Pasteur, from crystals of life to vaccination. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2012, 18 Suppl 5:1-6. 10.1111/j.1469-0691.2012.03945.x

[13] 1. McLaughlin B. Vitalism and emergence. In: Baldwin T, ed. The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Cambridge University Press; 2003:629-639.

[14] One volume that discusses the problem of reductionism in modern biology is Promises and Limits of Reductionism in the Biomedical Sciences, Edited by Marc H. V. Van Regenmortel and David L. Hull, John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

[15] Anton Kabeshkin, Hegel’s anti-reductionist account of organic nature,

 Intellectual History Review, 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 479–494

https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2021.1956073

[16] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, pp. 295-311; Progress Publishers, 1934, 6th printing 1974;

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07g.htm

[17] Adam Becker makes this observation about physicists, but a similar one can be made about biologists:

“Physicists had simply adopted a caricature of the positivists attitude. If something can’t be seen, why worry about it? Things that can’t be seen are meaningless anyhow. And if anyone still wasn’t convinced, there was a large pile of borrowed and bastardized arguments from the positivists about why this kind of reasoning worked, enough to keep most people from worrying – especially with the wide variety of interesting work using the mathematical machinery of quantum physics.”

There is a no less wide variety of “interesting work” for biologists to do today using the mathematical models that have been developed in 21^st century biochemistry.

Adam Becker, What is Real: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, Basic Books, 2019, p. 177.

[18]   Prinz, Benjamin; Schmidgen, Henning (2024). "Vitalist Marxism: Georges Canguilhem and the Resistance of Life". Theory, Culture & Society. 41 (4): 3–21, p.4. doi:10.1177/02632764241240399

[19] Alvin Snider, Cartesian Bodies, Modern Philology, Vol. 98, No. 2, Religion, Gender, and the Writing of Women: Historicist Essays in Honor of Janel Mueller (Nov., 2000), p. 303, Published by: The University of Chicago Press.

The reference is to the book by John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution

[20] One of Lazare’s puerile arguments is that because I bring up the problem of reductionism that I must be holding out an olive branch to postmodernism. Enough said!

[21] Engels letter to J. Bloch In Königsberg, 1890,

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21.htm

[22] See the book by Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development:  The Theory of Permanent Revolution, Haymarket Books Chicago, Illinois, 2010

[23] Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 1-2.

[24] Ibid. p.3. 

Share:

Read More