A subway station in Wuhan. Population density is a known factor in the emergence and spread of infectious diseases.
Written by
Kamran Nayeri and first published at Our Place in the World
The Coronavirus
pandemic (1) underscores how infectious diseases are presenting the fourth
existential threat to humanity. All are caused by the crisis of the
anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. The other three are already
acknowledged: catastrophic climate change, the Sixth Extinction, and nuclear
holocaust. The trend has been marked by the outbreaks of Ebola, Zika, dengue,
Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS), and influenza, and by the looming threat of rising antimicrobial
resistance.
The danger is
increasing due to rapid population growth in areas with weak health systems,
urbanization, globalization, climate change, civil conflict, and the changing
nature of pathogen transmission between human and non-human animal populations
(Bloom and Cadarette, 2019). Not only does the deepening of each
existential threat undermines human society, beginning with its most vulnerable
groups and regions, but all threats interact in a nonlinear dynamic that amplifies
the overall crisis.
Unless this
crisis of civilization is addressed in the coming decades, the collapse of
global anthropocentric industrial capitalist society is nigh inevitable, and
humanity may not survive the consequences.
The
Coronavirus and the economic crisis
Global stock
markets lost $16 trillion in less than a month (CBS News, March 13, 2020) and
their losses continue as the evidence for an economic recession in the U.S. and
worldwide mounts (Officially a recession is always called well after the fact
since it is defined by two successive quarters of GDP decline) (2).
The financial
and economic crisis the Coronavirus has touched off is exposing the structural
weaknesses of the U.S. and world economies. As Warren Buffet
famously quipped, “You only find out who is swimming
naked when the tide goes out.” (April 2, 2009) There is mounting
evidence of a financial crisis. Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate
economist, has already remarked about the similarity with the 2008 Great
Recession: “In many ways, it’s far worse than 2008.” (Goodman, March 13, 2020)
As the crisis
spreads and deepens daily, the central banks in the U.S. and around the world
have employed what is left in their toolbox to slow, if not stop, the unfolding
recession. Republican and Democrat politicians, the Congress and the White
House have come together to devise fiscal policies to do the same.
There is
nothing in mainstream neoclassical and Keynesian economic theories or Marxist
economic theory that account for the emergence and the damage caused by
“natural” events such as the Coronavirus. In neoclassical theory,
Keynesian theory, and even Marxist economic theory (e.g., Shaikh 1978, 2014)
such events are treated as “external shock,” that is, a “given” factor external
to the economic system.
Philosophical
and methodological issues
It is important
to recall the philosophical and methodological underpinning of these theories
and why “natural events” fall outside their scope. Both neoclassical and
Keynesian theories are rooted in the liberal social philosophies of the
nineteenth century that view society as an aggregate of individual human action
driven by human nature — expressed as Homo economicus —
assumed to be most fully expressed in a capitalist market economy.
The labor
theory of value as developed by Karl Marx in his Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy is a specific application of his materialist
conception of history. What is often overlooked is the underlying philosophical
anthropology of Marx, who held human nature to be the sum total of social
relations among all humans:
“This mode of
production must not be considered simply as being the production of the
physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity
of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode
of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What
they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they
produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on
the material conditions determining their production.” (Marx and Engels, 1945)
Thus for Marx,
history is made through class struggle. In The Manifesto of
the Communist Party (1848) Marx and Engels argued that class struggle
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would lead to socialism. The
primary purpose of Marx’s critique of political economy was to lay bare the
laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production that invariably lead to a
systemic crisis, hence class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat.
Thus, neither
bourgeois economic theories nor Marxist economic theory require the inclusion
of ecology in the workings of the capitalist economy, except in limited cases
such as the theory of ground rent, where soil fertility or location of land
matters. But even then, this is mostly treated as a given.
In the last two
decades, John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues at Monthly Review have
provided important insight into what they call the ecological aspects in Karl
Marx’s writings, from which they derive the notion of “metabolic rift.” To put
this characterization in historical perspective, the term oekologie (ecology)
was coined in 1866 by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), a passionate
disciple of Charles Darwin whose On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection appeared in 1859.
If Marx’s
insights are to be characterized as ecological, then we must acknowledge
ecological insights in the Western tradition going back to the ancient Greeks,
particularly Theophrastus who
first described the interrelationships between organisms and between organisms
and their nonliving environment. And the host of writers with “ecological
insight” would even include for some scholars Thomas Malthus who is credited
with inventing “population ecology.”
Michael
Friedman, a biologist writing in Monthly Review summarizes
“metabolic rift” as follows:
“‘Metabolic
rift’ is the concept popularized by environmental sociologist John Bellamy
Foster, following Marx and others, to describe the disruption of ecological
processes and the tendency to sever the connection between ecological and
social realms. Foster attributes the metabolic rift to the intrinsic
dynamic of capitalist production, with its private ownership of the means of
production, drive for profits, ever-expanding markets, and continuous
growth.
Marx employed this idea to describe the effects of capitalist
agriculture on the degradation of soil fertility. Foster and his co-thinkers
have employed the concept in analyses of climate change, biodiversity,
agriculture, fisheries, and many other aspects of human interaction with our
biosphere.” (Friedman, 2018, emphasis added)
Thus, in this
rendition of “metabolic rift” the ecological crisis is seen as the outcome of
the process of capital accumulation (2). This raises a number
of questions.
First, how does
the discovery of Marx’s ecological concerns influences the makeup of ecological
socialist theories that also build on capitalist accumulation as the root cause
for the eco-social crisis, say for example, Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of
Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (2007)? Kovel
and others have also made critical assessments of Marx’s work. But
in terms of what is causing the ecological crisis, it would be hard to argue
that Kovel and Foster hold uncompromisingly different views.
Second, while
the scholarly work of Foster and his colleagues is a commendable enrichment of
our understanding of Marx, it offers no innovations as to the root cause of the
ecological crisis. To put it differently, the task of a scientifically based
study of the ecological crisis and the task of discovering what Marx thought
about the ecological damages done by the process of capitalist accumulation are
not one and the same thing. It is perhaps no accident that the entire
scientific effort to understand climate change and the Sixth Extinction is
carried by scientists in the related scientific disciplines, not by Marxists
generally or by those who subscribe to metabolic rift conception in particular.
Third, the
attempt to pack all knowledge and understanding about various ecological crises
into Marxist categories has blinded its practitioners to some factors so
obviously related causal factors. One example would suffice: exponential
population growth since 1800 is closely related to the rise, dominance, and
global expansion of the capitalist system. Is it lost on anyone that
the emergence and spread of the Coronavirus and the danger it poses to humanity
is closely related to high population density?
Yet, the
metabolic rift advocates like most other socialists have consistently ignored
or even labeled as “Malthusian” or “populationist” anyone who argued that the
exponential rise in human numbers is a contributing factor to the ecological
crisis such as species extinction. But that is what biodiversity and
conservation biologists have shown to be the case historically and in modern
times (Nayeri, 2017). For example, the authors of a 2017 review essay in Science conclude:
“Research
suggests that the scale of human population and the current pace of its growth
contribute substantially to the loss of biological diversity. Although
technological change and unequal consumption inextricably mingle with
demographic impacts on the environment, the needs of all human
beings—especially for food—imply that projected population growth will
undermine protection of the natural world.” (Crist, Mora, and Engelman,
2017)
The authors
propose:
“An important
approach to sustaining biodiversity and human well-being is through actions
that can slow and eventually reverse population growth: investing in universal
access to reproductive health services and contraceptive technologies,
advancing women’s education, and achieving gender equality.” (ibid.)
Finally, the
concept of “metabolic rift” leaves out non-economic and pre-capitalist factors
and in effect ignores the fact that ecological crises have been endemic to
human society since the dawn of civilization.
The
Ecocentric Socialist approach
For about a
decade, I have proposed another approach to rethinking Marx and Marxism that
takes a very long view of ecological and social crises (For the most recent
statement, see Nayeri, 2018; also, see, Nayeri, 2013A and 2013B). Central to my
reconsideration is the recognition of the scientific understanding of who are
and where we come from so that we can better understand where we are
going.
We are
literally the product of our natural and social history and the sum total of
our ecological-social (eco-social) relations in any given social formation. Marx
would have reconsidered his own philosophical anthropology as from the 1840s he
replaced philosophy in favor of scientific inquiry. Even in The German
Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
“The first
premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human
individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation
of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of
nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of
man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological,
hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out
from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history
through the action of men.” (Marx and Engels, 1845, emphasis added)
Thus, the
founders of the materialist conception of history believed that “the consequent
relation to the rest of nature” would matter to historical investigation even
though they clearly and consciously set aside the “actual physical nature of
man” and his/her “natural conditions” of which they named the “geological,
hydrographical, climatic” aspects.
But if we are
not just the sum total of our social relations but instead the sum total of
ecological and social relations, then we must revise and update the materialist
conception of history in light of 150 years of accumulated scientific
knowledge.
In recent
decades, the study of the human microbiome, the collection of all the microorganisms
living in association with human cells and organs, has advanced greatly,
although our knowledge of their relationships is still in infancy.
“These
communities consist of a variety of microorganisms including eukaryotes,
archaea, bacteria and viruses. Bacteria in an average human body number ten
times more than human cells, for a total of about 1000 more genes than are
present in the human genome. Because of their small size, however,
microorganisms make up only about 1 to 3 percent of our body mass (that's 2 to
6 pounds of bacteria in a 200-pound adult).” (National Institute of Health Human
Microbiome Project, accessed March 17, 2020)
Although most
biologists separate the microbiome from the human body, they also acknowledge
its essential role in human health:
“These microbes
are generally not harmful to us, in fact they are essential for maintaining
health. For example, they produce some vitamins that we do not have the
genes to make, break down our food to extract nutrients we need to survive,
teach our immune systems how to recognize dangerous invaders and even produce
helpful anti-inflammatory compounds that fight off other disease-causing
microbes. An ever-growing number of studies have demonstrated that changes in
the composition of our microbiomes correlate with numerous disease states,
raising the possibility that manipulation of these communities could be used to
treat disease.” (ibid. Emphasis added)
In his essay
entitled “Metabolic Rift and the Human Microbiome” cited earlier, Michael
Friedman notes that:
“Some
biologists conceive of our microbiota as a hitherto unrecognized organ or
organs fulfilling important physiological functions and networking with other
organ systems, while many microbial ecologists propose that we are not
‘individuals,’ but collective organisms comprised of the person (mammal) and
its entire microbiome. Many other species are also collective organisms, termed
holobionts, tightly bound by evolution ever since the earliest eukaryotic cells
arose from fusions of independent prokaryotes (non-nucleated cells, such as
bacteria).” (Friedman, 2018)
Thus, not only
humans but all other complex species might more fruitfully and accurately be
called “collective organisms.” In a scientific sense, a human is an organic
whole that is greater than the sum of its multiple constituent parts.
Biologists call such phenomena emergent properties. Life itself is understood as
an emergent property.
I suspect this
is much closer to the holistic view of Hegel (1817) and Marx, that "the
truth is in the whole." Indeed, recent research has found a
correlation between gut microbiota and personality in adults (Han-Na Kim,
et.al. 2018). If microorganisms in humans can affect even our personality, how
could they not have an impact on our history as a species?
This view of
the ecological nature of humans, as the interpenetration of multiple kinds of
beings, validates yet another reconsideration of Marx’s philosophical
anthropology. As revolutionary as Marx’s advance over Feuerbach’s materialism
was in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845) where humans are viewed
as the agency in history, his view still remained firmly anthropocentric. We now
know that other organisms and species play a decisive role in history. As I
will outline in a moment, infectious diseases caused by various pathogens have
been particularly crucial at certain moments throughout the history of
civilization.
But let me first
cite one example of how the application of the materialist conception of
history to explain the successful occupation of the Americas by the European
colonists fell short of the historical truth. As a young socialist,
one of my teachers was George Novack, an American Marxist philosopher. In
1975, I translated his essay “The Long View of History” (1974) into Farsi; it
was published in Iran after the 1979 revolution. Novack used the interpretation
of the materialist conception of history that privileges forces of production
to explain how the colonists overcame the Native American population.
In a nutshell,
Novack attributed this to the superior firearms of the Europeans who
overwhelmed the Native population armed with bow and arrow. However,
in the decades since, historical research has shown that the European colonists
exposed the Native Americans to new infectious diseases for which they lacked
immunity. These communicable diseases, including smallpox and measles,
devastated entire Native American populations which numbered in millions.
Smallpox was one of the most feared because of the high mortality rates in
infected Native Americans.
Marx’s
anthropocentric view was invalidated even in his own time with the publication
of Darwin’s researches. As Darwin clearly stated that “the
difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is
certainly one of degree and not of kind.” He went on:
“We have seen that the senses and
intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory,
attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be
found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the
lower animals. (Darwin, 1871/1981, p. 105)
The philosopher
James Rachel adds:
“In thinking
about non-humans, Darwin said, we have always under-estimated the richness of
their mental lives. We tend to think of ourselves as mentally complex,
while assuming that ‘mere animals’ lack any very interesting intellectual
capacities. But this is incorrect. Non-humans experience not only pleasure and
pain, but terror, suspicion, and fear. They sulk. They love their
children. They can be kind, jealous, self-complacent, and proud. They
know wonder and curiosity. In short, they are much more like us, mentally
and emotionally, than we want to admit.” (Rachels, 1990: 57)
Thus, human
nature is the sum total of our eco-social relations shaped by the dynamic
interrelation of three trends: (1) The transhistorical trend which recognizes
and celebrates our continuity with other animals, in particular the primates.
We are animals, mammals, an evolutionary cousin of the chimpanzee. Therefore,
we share certain traits with them. (2) The historical trend of our
species, Homo sapiens, that goes back at least 300,000 years,
including cultural heritage from earlier Homo genera: We
inherited the knowledge to use of fire from Homo erectus who
domesticated it 400,000 years ago. And, (3) the trend specific to
the mode of production influences, e.g. capitalistically developed global
culture today.
This dynamic
mixture of nature and nurture makes us who we are and is key to how history
unfolds.
In “The Crisis
of Civilization and How to Resolve It: An Introduction to Ecocentric Socialism”
(Nayeri, 2018) I began the task of reconsideration of the materialist
conception of history in the spirit of the above insight gained from Marx and
Engels including factors they acknowledged but never had the opportunity to
sufficiently elaborate, and drawing as well on the scientific knowledge we have
gained since the latter years of the nineteenth century. I will not
recapitulate that discussion here in the interest of brevity. Let us
now return to the Coronavirus pandemic from the perspective just laid out.
The origins
of the Coronavirus
Virologists and
other experts are not yet certain about the origins of the current Coronavirus
(there is a large
family of Coronaviruses). But there is little doubt among the experts
that a confluence of anthropogenic factors is responsible for the present
pandemic.
Rob Wallace
(2020), an evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer and the
author of Big Farm Makes Big Flu (2016), has highlighted
factors that may have played a role in the emergence of novel pathogens in
China.
"Expanding
industrial production may push increasingly capitalized wild
foods deeper into
the last of the primary landscape, dredging
out a wider variety of potentially protopandemic pathogens. Peri-urban
loops of growing extent and population density may increase the
interface (and spillover) between wild nonhuman populations and newly urbanized
rurality.
“Worldwide,
even the wildest subsistence species are being roped into ag value chains:
among them ostriches, porcupine, crocodiles, fruit
bats, and the palm
civet, whose partially digested berries now supply the world’s most
expensive coffee bean. Some wild species are making it onto forks before they
are even scientifically identified, including one new short-nosed dogfish found in
a Taiwanese market.”
Wildlife meat market in China
Thus, Wallace
highlights the complex interaction of traditional Chinese culinary preferences,
the newly emergent industrial capitalist economy, and the reshaping of the
ecology of China’s hinterlands to suggest the eco-social context of the
emergence of the Coronavirus.
Wallace’s
emphasis is on Chinese capitalist industrialization. However, Tong et. al. (2017) highlights the
interplay of economic growth, urbanization, globalization and the risk of
emerging infectious diseases in China.
“Three
interrelated world trends may be exacerbating emerging zoonotic risks: income
growth, urbanization, and globalization. (1) Income growth is associated with
rising animal protein consumption in developing countries, which increases the
conversion of wild lands to livestock production, and hence the probability of
zoonotic emergence. (2) Urbanization implies the greater concentration and
connectedness of people, which increases the speed at which new infections are
spread. (3) Globalization—the closer integration of the world economy—has
facilitated pathogen spread among countries through the growth of trade and
travel.
High-risk areas
for the emergence and spread of infectious disease are where these three trends
intersect with predisposing socioecological conditions including the presence
of wild disease reservoirs, agricultural practices that increase contact
between wildlife and livestock, and cultural practices that increase contact
between humans, wildlife, and livestock. Such an intersection occurs in China,
which has been a ‘cradle’ of zoonoses from the Black Death to avian influenza
and SARS. Disease management in China is thus critical to the mitigation of
global zoonotic risks.” (Tong, et. al. 2017; numerals inside parentheses are
added to emphasize contributing factors)
Key to the
development of any capitalist economy is division of labor, which depends in
turn on the extent of the market, which itself depends on population growth and
the rise in per capita income. Even though the Chinese economy has followed an
export-led growth model capitalizing on the international market for developing
its division of labor, hence industrialization, by hundreds of millions of
Chinese have been moved from rural areas to ever-expanding cities and lifted
out of poverty.
According to a
2013 report by McKinsey & Company, a major international business
consulting firm, by 2022, “more than 75 percent of China’s urban consumers will
earn 60,000 to 229,000 renminbi ($9,000 to $34,000) a year.” In 2018, some 823
million Chinese, more than half the population, was urban. The population density in China which in 1950
had 551,960,000 people (the Chinese revolution was 1949-51) in 2018 had
1,433,783,686 people, almost three times as many despite the one-child policy
introduced in 1979 and modified in the mid-1980s.
Meanwhile,
population density in China increased from 57.98 persons per square kilometer
in 1950 to 150.1 persons in 2019. (macrotrend.com, China Population: 1950-2020)
The epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak Wuhan had a population of slightly
more than 1 million in 1950. Today it has 8.3 million.
Live meat market in China
To better
understand the Chinese demand for exotic animals, let me cite a recent article
by Yi-Zheng Lian (February 20, 2020) that offers further insight into how
Chinese cultural mores have contributed to the emergence of novel viruses in
China. He discusses the ancient Chinese beliefs about the powers of
certain foods known as “jinbu" meaning roughly
“filling a void.” He writes:
“I’ve
seen snakes and
the penises of
bulls or horses — great for men, the theory goes — on offer at restaurants in
many cities in southern China. Bats, which
are thought to be the original source of both the current coronavirus and the
SARS virus, are said to be good for restoring eyesight — especially the animals’ granular feces,
called “sands of nocturnal shine” (夜明砂). Gallbladders
and bile harvested from live bears are good for treating
jaundice; tiger
bone is for erections.
“More mundane
yet no less popular is the palm civet (果子狸), a small, wild quadruped suspected of
having passed on the SARS virus to humans. When stewed with snake meat, it
is said to cure insomnia.”
Wildlife meat market in China
It must be
plain that the Coronavirus pandemic has as much to do with centuries-old
Chinese traditions as it does with the rise of China as the second-largest
industrial capitalist economy in the world.
Crisis of
civilization and infectious diseases
While the
“metabolic rift” writers focus attention on capitalist industrialization, the
deeper underlying cause of the ecological crisis lies in the emergence of fixed
human settlement and farming before the rise of early states between
approximately 10,000 to 5,000 years ago.
If we
wish to speak in the language of the metabolic rift in discussions of
infectious diseases, we must trace it all the way back to the dawn of farming
in Mesopotamia. The farm itself is an entirely human-made ecosystem, which, in
combination with the sedentary and crowded lifestyle of early farmers, also
attracted a host of species from ticks and flees to rats and cats, sparrows and
pigeons.
These brought
with them a host of infectious diseases. Yale University political
scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott (2017) argues these were a major
contributing factor in the collapse of many early civilizations. In a chapter
entitled “Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm” in his 2017 book, Against
the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Scott details the
confluence of factors that gave rise to the early chronic and infectious
diseases. He compares the chronic ailments of early farmers to the modern-day
repeated motion syndrome, a family of muscular conditions that result
from repeated motions performed in the course of normal work or daily
activities.
Scott calls
this the rise of drudgery in early farming. Hunter-gatherers’ rugged
mobile lifestyle in contrast never included such tedium as those introduced by
farming activities. Furthermore, sedentism brought with it crowding:
“[V]irtually
all infectious diseases due to microorganisms especially adapted to Homo
sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years, many of them
perhaps only in the past five thousand. They were, in a strong
sense, a ‘civilizational effect.’ These historically novel diseases—cholera,
smallpox, mumps, measles, influenza, chicken pox, and perhaps malaria—arose
only as a result of the beginning of urbanism and, as we shall see,
agriculture.” (Scott, 2017, p. 101)
A key role in
the rise and spread of infectious diseases was played by livestock, commensals,
cultivated grain and legumes, where the key principle of crowding again is
operative.
“The Neolithic
was not only an unprecedented gathering of people but, at the same time, a
wholly unprecedented gathering of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, dogs, cats,
chicken, ducks, geese. To the degree that they were already ‘herd’ or ‘flock’
animals, they would have carried some species-specific pathogens of crowding.
assembled for the first time to share a wide range of infective organisms.
Estimates vary, but of the fourteen hundred known human pathogenic organisms,
between eight hundred and nine hundred are zoonotic diseases,
originating in non-human hosts. For most of these pathogens, Homo sapiens is a
final ‘dead-end’ host: humans do not transmit it further to another host.”
(ibid. p. 103)
Thus, there is
an unmistakable similarity between the conditions that gave rise to infectious
diseases thousands of years ago and what we find happening in the twenty-first
century, including the current pandemic caused by the Coronavirus.
What is
markedly different is the scope, scale, and speed by which the Coronavirus has
impacted the world population. This is due to the anthropocentric
industrial capitalist civilization. Wallace cites the “connectivity”
of the world population in his discussion of the Coronavirus pandemic, and
Tong, et. al. (2017) cite “globalization.”
In 2018,
according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) there were
4.1 billion passengers on scheduled services, an increase of 7.3% over 2016. Air
travel is projected to reach 5.4 billion passengers by 2030 (this was before the
pandemic). Clearly, infectious diseases can and will spread across
the globe like wildfire in the coming years and decades.
Thus, there is
no doubt in my mind that infectious disease must be seen as the fourth
existential crisis humanity faces. Again, the other three are: catastrophic
climate change, the Sixth Extinction, and nuclear holocaust. Scott argues that
infectious diseases were a contributing factor in the collapse of earlier
civilizations. There is no reason to doubt that the collapse of anthropocentric
industrial capitalist civilization would be any different.
To overcome the
crisis, we must transcend civilization, a Herculean task no doubt given that
even Marxists, whether socialist or ecosocialist, still conceive of a
post-capitalist anthropocentric industrial civilization. This is in part
due to a theoretical blind spot. Marxists remain hostage to the anthropocentric
ideology that has been at the base of every civilization all based on
agriculture in which domination and control of nature are paramount for the
extraction of wealth from it.
The Marxian
theory promises only to do away with the exploitation of the working masses who
perform such extraction of wealth from nature. There is no environmental ethics
built into their socialist or ecosocialist theories which are based on
socialist humanism.
Ecocentric
Socialism argues that the root cause of social alienation, hence all forms of
exploitation since the dawn of civilization, is alienation from nature. Human
emancipation, even human survival, demands a process of de-alienation from
nature.
Transcending
civilization as de-alienation
All
civilization is based on a 10,000-year-old anthropocentric detour that
constitutes only a mere 3.3% of the history of our species which, as we
recently learned, emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago. During
the 290,000 years before the rise of early farmers, humanity lived and
prospered as ecocentric hunter-gatherers.
While it is
true that the successful life of hunter-gatherers which led to population
growth sometimes caused ecological damage, including extinction events,
by-and-large they lived in relative harmony with the rest of nature. There was
no systematic attempt to dominate or control nature, something that became the
cornerstone of every civilization since, reaching its zenith in the industrial
capitalism of the past 250 years.
The combination
of the anthropocentric world view, advances in science and technology, and the
capitalist drive for ever more accumulation of capital has brought us to the
Anthropocene (Age of Man) and the existential planetary crisis.
Ecocentric
ecological socialist politics is the wisdom and the art of undoing power
relations that have been thrown up during the past 10,000 years, relations of
subordination, oppression, and exploitation of humans and between humans and the
rest of nature. Thus, the class relations and class struggle that
Marx and Engels correctly placed at the center of their theoretical and
practical concerns must be supplemented with non-class struggles against the
subordination of various strata of people and with a cultural revolution that
aims to end anthropocentrism in all its manifestations.
Some of these,
like the struggle for gender, racial, sexual orientation, and national origin
equality must be seen as essential for fostering the unity of the working
people. Others like the fight to stop and reverse climate crisis, the ongoing
Sixth Extinction, and the sharpening threat of nuclear war involve existential
struggles. But struggle against all manifestations of anthropocentrism must be
seen as the core struggle because it is anthropocentrism that helped to create
the material basis of social alienation and has served as the ideological basis
for the Anthropocene.
The fight for
ecocentrism, like the fight for human emancipation, is a fight for universal
values. Without ecocentrism, that is not just an intellectual point
of view but a genuine love for nature and for life on Earth, there will be no
humanity and no human emancipation. They are one and the same fight, the fight
to overcome human alienation.
Dedication: I would like to dedicate this
essay to Panther and Siah (means black, in Farsi). They are two male black
tomcats whose names taken together mean "black panther," who live
with me in La Casa de Los Gatos. Their friendship enriches my life in ways few
humans ever have.
Acknowledgment: I am deeply grateful to Fred
Murphy who read a draft of this essay and made valuable suggestions for the
improvement of the text as well as corrected my grammar. He also directed me to
the Hegel’s text as the source for his well-known philosophical proposition
that “The truth is in the whole.”
Endnotes:
1. In this
essay, I use “Coronavirus ” and Coronavirus pandemic where others may use
2019-nCoV or Convid-19.
2. As I am
publishing this essay, I received in the mail today, Foster and Clark’s
“The Rubbery of Nature” (Monthly Review, 2020). I do not know if there is
anything in this new contribution that adds to the issues discussed here about
“metabolic rift.” Of course, if there is I would hope to address them in a
future essay as needed.
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