Beginning with Hasana Sharp’s appeal to Spinoza’s “nature” and its blurring of human/nature relations, the chapter is an anatomy of the new materialist assumptions about the relation of humans and nature, especially as they are articulated in one of the most influential statements of new materialism, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost's collection New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, itself deeply informed by Jane Bennett’s Spinoza-inflected materialism. Against these spiritualizing tendencies that suspend history through a mutational theory of change, the chapter theorizes materialism in relation to the dialectical role of labor and labor relations in mediating the relation between humans and nature, taking as a concrete example the developing research into the microbiome and the property relations that limit its potential to meet human need.