Moore’s thesis strongly hinges on European Imperialism as a historical disjuncture. Dialectics helps us to consider the importance of its stroboscopic preparations within medieval Europe. Of course, these were never completely internal to Europe, the challenges of other civilizations entering Europe from the South (e.g. North Africa) and the East (e.g. Huns, Tartans, Ottomans) have played a major role in the transformations of feudalism as well, if only because of technological and biological interventions. However, nothing that we can identify as relevant to the birth of European Imperialism suggests that dialectical and monistic modes of thought are oppositional. After all, the basic axiom of monism – something can only affect something else of both are of the same substance (Spinoza) – applies to everything that has been mentioned so far. For example, political decisions can affect technological developments when they are applied to funding, permission, available space and resources, because politics and technology are both abstractions, they affect each other in concrete material practices.
The development of, for example, navigation techniques involving the rotations of the sun and the stars enables ships to cross open seas, which in turn enabled European ships to access places that they would never have reached over land. Imperialism consists of concrete practices that involve manual and intellectual labour as well as many different actors in stabilized relationships. Dialectics, for example in terms of the transformation of reality through actual interventions, can only be understood in terms of monistic events (monads) from which both reality and actuality emerge. Thinking dialectically can only really be radically pursued if it is directed against thinking in dualisms, as dualisms themselves are the product of abstraction. As soon as we ask the question “what engenders a dualism” – as a good dialectician should – one engages with contemplating a monistic event.
Sociologists usually consider debates around dialectics and monism to be rather obsolete, because of their metaphysical character. The vast majority of sociological theories are derived from dualisms and they are never properly dialectical. Sociology has clearly also influenced Foster and Malm, when they insist on developing accounts of capitalism in relation to class struggle and the exploitation of scarce natural resources as exclusively human affairs. After all, it is Sociology that we can find a concept of the social and of society as meaning “between” and “among” humans exclusively. Politics, Science, Technology, Modes of Production, Interests, Power, the State etc. are all exclusively human entities.
This requires a kind of reductionism that is no longer capable of adequately understanding practices of abstraction as practices of real abstraction. In line with Marx’ critique of commodity fetishism, I refer to these as humanity fetishism. They are not opposites, but the same. Reducing everything that matters to a commodity is exactly the same as reducing everything that matters to a humanity. The separation between commodity and humanity is itself a product of real abstraction, and forgotten in the fetishism.
A clear example of this is slavery. Slavery reduces human beings to commodities, but this was only problematized in relation to a conception of humanity that accompanied practices of enslavement as legitimation. The language of humanism enforces absolute dualisms but its practices enable continuous dualities as variations. For example, when the notion of slavery is being contrasted with that of wage labour, it suggests that the latter exists in freedom, whereas the former does not. However, being forced to work out of fear of starvation, homelessness or – as is the case in the USA – losing access to health care are far more similar to actual conditions of enslavement than those of freedom. Humanity-fetishism obscures exactly that.
A similar argument can be made around gender. Humanity-fetishism does not acknowledge gender as a fundamental category, as it subsumes it under the assumed more generic category of “man”. It thereby also systematically obfuscates the history of engendering the libidinal economy of sexual desire as deeply rooted in material conditions of exploitation. It should not come as a total surprise that expressions of Marxism that struggle to differentiate between dialectical analyses and thinking in dualisms can only engage with feminist critiques as add-ons and as a result downplay the fundamental role of the heterosexist structures of libidinal economies as more than instruments of the capitalist mode of (re-)production.
It is important, however, to stress that criticizing humanity-fetishism does not automatically need to lead to relativizing the importance of human rights, human dignity etc. The critique does not simply reverse into reaffirming that which humanism opposed (normalizing slavery or the oppression of women). Again, we must think more dialectically than that. Humanism is a bourgeois philosophy and a response to internal contradictions in the bourgeois conceptions of for example “human”, “nature” and “human nature”. It does not deal with the underlying issues that constitute the relations of exploitation because it functions to perpetuate them in different forms (e.g. in “racism” or “sexism” which then become defined as pathological conditions within humanity that are both human and anti-human at the same time).
The dialectics of humanity-fetishism require us to engage historically-materially with the genesis of capitalism in relation to concrete interests before we allow the construction of more abstract theoretical accounts of systems or structures. This is not a surrender to historicism, but a commitment to empirical grounding. Any commitment to empirical grounding that is radically empirical is also monistic. Empirically, we can only engage with the actually of events as impact: actual occasions, prehensions and nexus (Whitehead). We can differentiate in terms of modes of extension (perception) and modes of thought (reflection) but only if the two are connected in experience and affect.
Disaffected Sociology 
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