Socialized Natural Processes

This is not an article, but a manuscript from the early 1980s which has not been published until now – not because of ideological censorship, but because the critique of the modernist dogma about the opposition between nature and society – a critique that is at the heart of Raychev’s discovery about socialized natural processes – was not comprehensible to the then mainstream. To those of us already working on the theory of structures of mediation, the manuscript in question was a revelation, giving us a chance for innovative thinking. After raising the problem of socialized natural processes as a problem of productive forces in their initial form, Raychev critically addresses a number of problems which were already on the theoretical agenda of Marxism at that time: from the opposition between activity and communication (in the solution of which Raychev proceeds from a revolutionary insight of historian Boris Porshnev) through the crises of everyday life and their resolution, to arrive at symbols and community relations – only as a problem requiring further theorizing, not as a proposed solution. The manuscript, which is held in the archives of the Institute for Critical Theories of Supermodernity, is published here with minor cuts concerning some debates from the 1970s and 1980s that – in our opinion – are no longer of interest to the present-day reader. The title highlighting Raychev’s discovery was chosen by us.