Review - The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology

 

Written by Camilla Royle and first published at Science for the People

The Return of Nature is a genealogy of ecological thinking. The word ‘ecology’ was not in common usage until the twentieth century, leading many to consider ecological thinking a fairly recent development. However, in this impressive volume, John Bellamy Foster convincingly identifies a materialist ecological sensibility within works dating back a century prior to ecology’s popularization.

Starting with the funerals of Darwin and Marx in 1882 and 1883 respectively, the book traces how socialist thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were integral to developing an outlook that acknowledges the complex relationship between human production and the rest of nature. 

The scientific discipline of ecology is sometimes assumed to have developed from a series of scientific studies, free from social and political influences. By the same logic, some also suppose that the socialist thinkers of the nineteenth century had little interest in ecological concerns, and consequently that the left were latecomers to the environmental movement in the late twentieth century.

 Foster’s work, both here and in his earlier books, has been driven by a desire to counter these views and therefore demonstrate the importance of Marxism for today’s radical ecological movements. His aim is to show that Marx adopted an ecological worldview throughout his writings; Marx saw humans as part of nature but also able to actively relate to nature through their labor.  

The Return of Nature was published at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (which is briefly mentioned in the prologue), yet much of the discussion is relevant to how we might analyze its origins and effects. Victorian cities such as London suffered terrifying epidemics of diseases including typhoid, typhus and cholera. As with COVID-19 today, these disproportionately affected the poorest residents with the worst living conditions. This is something Marx was also familiar with, especially as the Marx family was living in Soho in central London during a particularly deadly cholera outbreak in 1854.

The story of how the source of the cholera epidemic was identified is well known. The physician John Snow convinced the authorities that cholera was a waterborne disease, rather than one spread through the air, and located the source at a water pump on Broad Street. When the handle of the water pump was removed such that people couldn’t drink the water, the epidemic subsided. 

Less well known is the mutual influence of science and socialism among some of the other protagonists of the story. After the epidemic, further investigations carried out by Edwin Lankester found that the well feeding the Broad Street pump was contaminated by a cesspit at 40 Broad Street, the site of one of the first cases of cholera. Lankester was part of a struggle against the conditions in which nineteenth century workers lived and worked, including crowded homes, overwork, and poor sanitation.

In the discussion of Victorian working conditions, Marx, in Volume 1 of Capital, cites Lankester’s investigation into the case of a dressmaker named Mary Ann Walkley, who died after being made to work more than twenty-six hours without a break.

Although not a revolutionary, Lankester had radical views and talked about being on the side of the masses. His son, E. Ray Lankester, was a similarly impressive figure, a member of the Royal Society who directed the Natural History Museum in London between 1898 and 1907 — although he was apparently dismissed from this role for his attacks on the museum establishment. The younger Lankester was also a close associate of Marx and one of the few people to attend his funeral.

Stephen Jay Gould, in “The Darwinian Gentleman at Marx’s Funeral,” referred to him as “a basically conservative biologist” and suggested that he saw in Marx’s friendship little more than an opportunity to discuss art and philosophy with another brilliant intellectual. However, Foster has a different take on their relationship. He accepts that Lankester did have some conservative views in later life. Depressingly, he did oppose women’s suffrage on the basis that he thought women did not have the same intellectual abilities as men.

But Foster also highlights Lankester’s critique of the way in which a capitalist system driven by the needs of the market would have dangerous ecological consequences, including the spread of new disease epidemics and the increasing extinction of species. Lankester once wrote that “the capitalist wants cheap labour, and he would rather see the English people poor and ready to do his work for him, than better off.”

Foster also makes much of Lankester’s views on degeneration. In essence, Lankester was critical of the assumption that biological evolution was a story of continual progress towards more complex forms and argued that it could also result in less complex organisms. This form of what he called “degeneration” could be said to apply to human civilizations when humans undermine the ecological conditions of their own existence.

So for Lankester, human history was, like the evolution of species, not simply a case of linear progress. Instead, he followed Marx in stressing the agency of humans to make their own history, though not under conditions of their choosing. Seeing the association between Marx and Lankester as a mere curiosity overlooks the radical implications of some of Lankester’s views as well as Marx’s own deep interest in Darwin and evolution. 

According to Foster, there are two lines of influence that can be detected by examining the thought of ecological socialist thinkers. One goes from Marx to Lankester and subsequently to figures such as ecologist Arthur Tansley and H. G. Wells, a Fabian socialist as well as an author. The other line runs from Engels via the 1930s generation of “red scientists” and into the late twentieth century.  

Engels was indeed one of the most important Marxist figures in the development of an ecological materialist worldview; a substantial portion of this book is devoted to “Engels’s Ecology.” Engels set out to produce an account of how the dialectical processes Marx had uncovered in his study of society could also be observed by studying nature.

As Foster explains, dialectics takes “as its fundamental reality the ever-changing character — as well as resulting contradictions, negations, and qualitative transformations — of both the material world at large and the human condition within it.” It is a philosophy that sees dynamism as inherent to the way the world works rather than assuming that things remain static unless they are influenced by an outside force. 

Engels’s notes were published decades after his death as The Dialectics of Nature with the help of JBS Haldane, one of the founding figures of modern evolutionary biology and a sympathizer of the Communist Party. From the early twentieth century, there has been a protracted debate among Marxists surrounding this text and, more broadly, whether Engels was right or wrong to argue that dialectical processes exist in nature — where human subjectivity does not play a role.

This is not helped by the fact that The Dialectics of Nature was not published in Engels’ lifetime and the various published editions have been translated and edited posthumously by others. Therefore, it is difficult to know what a final text from Engels would have looked like or whether he would have expressed his ideas in the same way if he had been able to finish working through his ideas.  

However, this does not mean that we cannot learn much from Engels. He developed an account of nature that recognized that it could be understood in historical terms. Processes of change and development, and sometimes abrupt or qualitative leaps, are inherent to the natural world. In the nineteenth century, this would have been demonstrated most strikingly by Darwin’s account of the evolution of new species.

Key to Engels’s thinking was the recognition that humans are a part of nature but are also able consciously to manipulate the environment around them and, in the process, change themselves. Engels’ dialectical materialism was at odds with the prevalent mechanical materialist views of the late nineteenth century, which tended to reduce the natural world to passive matter and treat it as fixed rather than dynamic.

As Foster demonstrates, if we want to address Engels’ ecological thought, we should also turn our attention to his other works, including The Condition of the Working Class in England, a much earlier book in which he describes the effects of water and air pollution and disease epidemics, and analyzes how capitalism has created the conditions for these environmental hazards. 

A later chapter, “A Science for the People,” discusses the organization of that name in the 1970s and 1980s (whose magazine, also called Science for the People, was a forerunner of this publication) and the nearest thing to a British equivalent, the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. Foster rightly points out that the original Science for the People was influenced by the 1930s generation in their critique of the idea that science is separate from social relations.

But they had some key political differences. As part of the New Left, they were less likely to be sympathetic to greater state control of science compared to previous generations. Several members of the organization were associated with developments in biological and ecological thinking. For example, Science for the People member Richard Levins was part of developing an ecological critique of the assumption that there is harmony in nature.

He described a co-evolutionary relationship of humanity and nature where processes of change are inherent to both. Foster also points to a 1973 editorial in the original magazine, “Ecology for the People,” in which members of the organization called for revolution as the solution to the social inequality and ecological devastation that is typical under capitalism. 

The example set by the likes of Levins or Lankester shows how scientific enquiry has often been influenced by the philosophical viewpoints of scientists and their concerns for social and environmental justice. It demonstrates that we cannot treat science as a neutral activity carried out by apolitical thinkers.

Indeed, as Foster argues, the politics of these scientists informed their ecological worldview and “it is this method of ecological critique arising out of the socialist critique of capitalist society that is seen here as most important, since it provides the indispensable means for a revolutionary dialectical ecology.”

Most of the key thinkers described in the book are men. However, Foster does point to some fascinating examples of women in science going back to the nineteenth century, whose work has not been so well known. For example, it is likely that the biologist Phebe Lankester (the wife of Edwin) was part of the investigation of the water from the Broad Street well. But as a woman, her work would have been carried out “behind the scenes.” Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England was first translated to English by an American woman, Florence Kelley, in the 1880s.

Kelley was the chief inspector of factories in Chicago, who investigated the brutal conditions of child laborers in the city and campaigned for an 8-hour day. She played a major role in the social history of the United States. 

The Return of Nature is focused on Britain, with a few exceptions including the section on Science for the People. This has allowed Foster to trace a coherent narrative, drawing out the influence of Marx, Engels, and Darwin in the country where they spent most of their lives.

Of course, any project of this type is bound to be limited in the amount of ground it can cover, but it is worth acknowledging some of the gaps as readers may want to consider how their own research could add to our knowledge of the contributions of women or thinkers from other parts of the world. The book also leaves open the question of whether we are now seeing the start of a new generation of scientific radicals in the twenty-first century. 

Rather than providing a conclusion, Foster ends the book with a short chapter on the Greek philosopher Epicurus, the subject of Marx’s doctoral thesis. It seems that Foster would prefer to let the thinkers whose work he discusses speak for themselves, rather than try to provide an overall summary of their varied thought — which would also be impossible to attempt in this short review.

Perhaps what we can say is that one of the central contributions of dialectical thinking is its rebuke to the assumption that “nature” is a fixed or stable realm separate from human society. This dualistic way of thinking so often results in the environment being treated as an afterthought in our understanding of social relations — or worse — as an externality to the economic calculations of capitalists.

By contrast, ecology as a scientific discipline addresses the relationships between living things and with their abiotic surroundings. This emphasis has led some ecologists towards an understanding of the role of human activity within such systems.

As Foster therefore argues, the legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers discussed in the book is one “that we can no longer afford to do without in our age of combined ecological and social crisis.”  

The Return of Nature shows how — if we want to understand issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, or the emergence of new pandemics today — it will take thorough research into ecological systems that also addresses the influence of human activity. That research will be driven by a demand for transformative societal change.

We can use the analytical tools of the thinkers presented here to start to make sense of the destructive influence of capitalism on the biosphere and also paint a more hopeful picture of what a more rational relationship to the rest of the natural world might look like. 

The Return of Nature introduces us to some of the key figures in the development of an ecological worldview. Some of them, such as the writer and designer William Morris or biologist JBS Haldane, are relatively famous.

Others, such as biologist Lancelot Hogben and the extraordinary British writer Christopher Caudwell are less widely known. Foster has shone new light on their lives and work. The book took years to write (at over 500 pages excluding the notes, Foster describes this as his “big book”) and involved dedicated research from numerous archival resources.

The result is a volume full of biographical detail as well as sketches of the key contributions of the various thinkers to ecological thinking. Readers of Science for the People will be rewarded with many examples of great scientific radicals from previous generations to admire, and an opportunity to find out more about the figures who are, in many ways, the forebears of the producers and readers of this magazine.   

Monthly Review Press

2020

672 Pages

$28

About the Author

Camilla Royle teaches Geography at King’s College London and the London School of Economics. Her PhD research addressed the ideas of Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, and other dialectical biologists. Her work has been published in International Socialism, Antipode, and Human Geography.

Editors

Erik Wallenberg (Lead Editor)
Cliff Conner (Co-Editor)
Rebecca Roskill (Technical Editor)
Sonja Soo (Copy Editor)

Dialectical Ecology

 

Written by Daniel Saunders and first published at https://danielsaunders.blog/

“If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.” Thus reads one of the Hopi prophecies which echo throughout Philip Glass’s haunting soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi (1982). As those familiar with Godfrey Reggio’s cult film know, the title itself refers to “a state of life that calls for another way of living,” a sharply polemical framing of what otherwise appears, at first, to be a detached, objective representation of humanity’s technological encroachment upon nature.

What Koyaanisqatsi pioneered still makes for exciting (and unsettling) cinema. Its cinematography, editing, tempo shifts, and music are all marshalled to the end of replicating in art how technology, as a totality of forms and methods, has drawn everything into its domination. (Here is Reggio speaking of this totalizing “environment of technology” as something more or less akin to ideology—the invisible background of existence which “is unseen and goes unquestioned.”)

But as the global climate crisis worsens, with more and more evidence linking ecological collapse to the limitless expansion of growth that characterizes the irrational logic of capitalism (in what has been aptly named the capitalist “treadmill of accumulation”), Koyaanisqatsi increasingly looks like a dire plea for planetary survival—we must urgently turn from the path of capitalist “business as usual,” specifically in the burning of fossil fuels, or face irreversible consequences for the biosphere, perhaps even for human life itself.

Critiquing Ecological Modernization

Koyaanisqatsi’s concerns, read in this way, overlap to a degree with the critical sociological project of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York—especially in their substantive compilation, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (2010). Foster, Clark, and York (henceforth FCY) have been at the forefront of a compelling project of Marxist ecosocialism, which seeks to revitalize the dialectical-ecological ideas of Marx and Engels in order to develop a robust socialist theory encompassing history, nature, the biosphere, climate change, and the social relations of production.

Many of FCY’s arguments critiquing capitalism as the instigator and sustainer of ecological destruction are becoming an integral feature of socialist discourse. These include their definition of capitalism as a “system of self-sustaining value,” a “treadmill of accumulation,” and (one of the most notable of Marx’s metaphors) a “metabolic rift” in the natural-social fabric of production. Capitalism is, as Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, an “endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barriers,” including especially planetary boundaries. 

Following climate scientists, FCY identify seven such planetary boundaries which serve to maintain an overarching, regulating metabolism conducive to life, only one of which is climate change. To cross any one of these boundaries—and we have already crossed three—”signifies the onset of irreversible environmental degradation.”

Another important component of FCY’s argument is a thoroughgoing critique of an ecological modernization approach, the proposition that the only “way out of the ecological crisis is by going further into the process[es] of modernization” which have led to the crisis in the first place. This is embodied in the weak attempts (or lack thereof) by mainstream economists and social scientists to address accelerating problems of climate change. 

These ostensible experts advocate a variety of dubious solutions, such as sacrificing the future liveability of the planet to maintain current levels of economic growth, waiting for a miracle technological fix that will “dematerialize” the economy from the physical earth, or even working toward explicitly non-socialist, modest reforms (along the lines of Greta Thunberg or the Democratic Party).

All of these “solutions” sought by ecological modernization, however, leave intact the basic structure of capitalist social relations and, by extension, feed into capital’s limitless accumulating drive. In addition, they espouse a view of nature which reduces the environment to mechanism and mere units of input and output to be optimized so that the economy can keep on running as it should. “Sustainability,” write FCY, like the market buzzword green, “is thus defined entirely in terms of economic growth, monetary wealth, and consumption, without any direct reference to the environment” (113).

Theorizing a Dialectical Ecology

But one of the more unexpected and fruitful arguments that emerges in The Ecological Rift out of FCY’s theoretical nexus has to do with the philosophy of science itself, as well as the potential contours of an all-encompassing scientific theory able to bring together the environmental, the economic, and the social—in other words, a dialectical ecology, or what amounts to a Marxist-infused natural science. There is a lot to say about many features of FCY’s project, but this last point is especially worth thinking about, given too how it builds on but complicates Koyaanisqatsi’s central themes.

One way to conceive this kind of dialectical ecology is to situate it against an alternative scientific paradigm, one tied to the processes of modernization. The natural sciences we know today were born concurrently with the philosophies initiating the modern world. As these sciences developed a positivistic form, they came to be associated with general, unchanging laws about fundamentally discrete objects or processes in nature. 

Ironically, although positivism rejected the arguments of metaphysics, the outline of its form remained vaguely metaphysical in this tendency toward universal explanation and categorization. This was the case whether the universe was conceived in terms of a causal, mechanistic contraption or, alternatively, a living vessel propelled by invisible sparks of vitality. 

The evolutionary ideas of Darwin grew out of this paradigm but presented a major route out of it. In part, Darwin’s materialism was a return to an older materialism—that of of Epicurus, in which contingency, rather than determinism or teleology, was the grounding principle of nature’s forces. This contingency at the heart of nature led Darwin in new directions; but, according to FCY, Darwin still veered toward an environmental determinism with his theories of adaptation and niche. For Darwin, evolution proceeds by chance, but the environment provides the more or less static ground for the direction of evolution. 

And so, to refocus dialectical ecology: in between Darwin and the “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, who reductionistically posit the gene, rather than the environment, as a determinative element, FCY bring in evolutionary scientists like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould to highlight the dual, interactive evolutionary interplay between the environment and the genetic. As Lewontin argued: “Evolution is not an unfolding but an historically contingent wandering pathway through the space of possibilities.” 

For these scientists, the “organism is both subject and an object in the physical world,” a scientific principle which draws from and extends Marx’s dialectical materialism to evolution itself:

“The dialectical view emerging from ecology is anything but lifeless or mechanical; it has generated a view of nature no longer shorn of life, interconnection, and sensuous realty—no longer deterministic—but a world of coevolution, contradiction, and crisis… Neither mechanism nor vitalism, neither determinism nor teleology, were adequate in the ecological realm—a realm that demanded an understanding that was at once genetic and relational.” (245)

Balance or Dialectics?

FCY’s argument here, following Marx, is that nature has a specific history. This is a history in which organic life, inclusive of humanity, acts on and changes the world, at the same time as the world acts on and changes organic life. The two are enmeshed in an ongoing, dialectical interplay, a “metabolic” relation that is never the same but that has a discernible historical contour. Thus, the best way to understand the world, in both social and scientific terms, is to look at not only social history but natural history, and to look at them together.

This highlights an important feature of the metabolic rift theory, one that differentiates it from the powerful but ultimately less substantive ideas about the environment and human action put forth by Koyaanisqatsi. 

In centering modern technological development itself as the underlying cause of humanity’s rupture with the natural world, Koyaanisqatsi swings toward an unchanging, idealistic view of nature, one that sees the environment in terms of an “ideal, natural state”—a lost Eden which could be regained with the removal of industrial civilization. Koyaanisqatsi shares this outlook with other trends in environmentalism like deep ecology and the Gaia hypothesis. The ultimate goal, for these proponents, is to achieve a grand balance between humanity and nature.

Such a view overlaps in part, of course, with FCY’s critique of ecological modernization and its mechanizing view of nature. But FCY astutely point out the limitations of this “balance of nature” theory:

“Why would there be a grand balance in nature? Natural history is a record of drastic changes and discontinuities in the biophysical world. The assumption of a natural harmony is not consistent with a critical historical understanding of nature.” (260)

(This, of course, raises some interesting questions for theology, which I can’t get into here, but even the most diehard proponent of Intelligent Design would have a hard time reckoning with the great imbalances nature presents. I think that Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is useful here as perhaps a covert meditation on theodicy in light of the chaos of nature.)

Moreover, rather than investigating the social and material forces that have driven history and environmental crisis—the advent and growth of capitalism, in particular—the balance of nature theory focuses almost exclusively on a moral imperative for change. “Change becomes a matter of adjusting values and developing the proper eco-ethics, and from there, it is assumed changes in the social structure will follow” (emphasis mine). “Life out of balance” must become “life in balance,” and our climate dilemma is solved.

As I mentioned, this overlaps to a degree with FCY and is certainly compelling in its own way. But FCY show how a dialectical, materialist ecological approach—one informed both by Marx and evolutionary biology—is better equipped to understand and address the challenges posed by ecological rupture, precisely because it is not about nature as balance but about nature as change itself:

“A dialectical materialist approach to nature provides the means for understanding the complex interactions throughout the natural world, the ability to explain the world in terms of itself. It involves both the capacity to recognize that contingency and emergence are inherent aspects of a living world, and the capability to study the structural constraints and the inherent potential for change.

In this, a materialist dialectic avoids the mechanistic reductionism of economistic approaches, where nature exists in the background… It also avoids the idealized notion that nature exists in a state of balance and that a return to such a state is simply a matter of developing the appropriate moral-ethical system.” (270, my emphasis)

Dialectical Theory for an Ecosocialist Practice

What does all this mean for ecology and socialism? First, that we confront the world as it is, full of its limitations and as a history of contingencies which have led only to this one, present set of circumstances, with all of its problems and potential. Part of the way human life has acted upon the world includes the development of the capitalist mode of production, which has threatened the planet’s functional boundaries.

But within this contingent reality lies also the possibility to do things differently; the world as it is now contains the seed and impetus of the world to come, not by teleological decree but by the social-ecological relations we politically choose to foster in our relationships of production. Ecology and the biosphere constitute a two-way interaction between humanity/life and nature. And so we are always in a position to shape our trajectory, not just through moral and scientific shifts but through political action.

Notably, this trajectory of change is not linear or progressive, but proceeds in an irregular series of fits and starts. FCY remind us that, for Marx and Engels, “change is not typically smooth and continuous but rather often occurs very rapidly following periods of stasis.” Long periods of inaction, in both the social and natural worlds, can give way to abrupt, decisive moments of revolutionary change, when the cries of the people and the planet meld together to push for an alternative way of life free of capitalist alienation. 

Although the outlines of this alternative path are necessarily blurry from the standpoint of the present, it must take the form of a “society of associated producers” in tune with nature’s boundaries—a vision famously sketched, in the negative, in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

In short, FCY’s theories equip us not just with a more accurate understanding of the interconnected physical and social world on its own terms, but in true Marxist fashion, they also enable us to more effectively change it, directing it toward an unalienated future.

Ecosocialism – A Brief Description

 

This is a write up of a talk I gave to my local Green Party meeting in Haringey, north London, a little while back, on ecosocialism. 

Ecosocialism is a green political philosophy - it is an ecocentric and democratic socialism, not to be confused with social democracy, at least in the longer run.

It is not like twentieth century socialisms, it is more like nineteenth century socialisms and owes a fair amount to anarchist theory. Twentieth century socialisms had, if anything, an even more dismal record than capitalism on ecology.

Ecosocialism is anti-capitalist, and sees the capitalist system as the effective cause of the ecological crisis.

Capitalism commodifies everything and puts a price on it, which is exchange value, and uses the earth as a resource for production and sink for the dumping of toxic waste from the production process, usually free of cost. Climate change is the most spectacular aspect of the ecological crisis, but not the only one. Capitalism releases toxic pollution, into the air, land and sea.

Capitalism is unable to solve the ecological crisis it has set going, because the logic of the system is to ‘grow or die’. Growth that is exponential and the earth is now close to its limit of being able to buffer the damage caused by this required infinite growth, on a finite planet.

I’m going to say something about the historical lineage of the philosophy, threads of which can be traced back for as long as human beings have formed communities, where some elements of ecosocialism can be found in the way people have lived in balance with nature. And today, many indigenous peoples around the world still practice some of these forms of social and economic management.

Karl Marx is somewhat of a controversial figure for ecosocialists, with some believing that he was essentially a ‘productivist.’ For myself, I believe that Marx’s work was of its time, and incomplete, but he certainly had a green side to him. Take this quote for example from the third volume of Capital:

From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. (Marx 1894: 776). 

In South America ecosocialism has found its way into government. Venezuela, has a Department of Ecosocialism, although the ecosocialism pursued is not the purest in form. Bolivia runs forms of ecosocialism in government and has fought off many capitalist corporations plunder of the country’s natural resources, in mining and gas extraction on common land.

There is an English line too. The first stories to be told about Robin Hood, were of a man fighting against crown enclosures of common land. He has become famous for ‘robbing from the rich to give to the poor’, but in fact what he was doing, was fighting to stop the rich robbing from the poor.

Then there were the Diggers during the English civil war, who set up communes on common land and called for a ‘common treasury of the land.'

And William Morris, the nineteenth century socialist and craft movement champion. If you read his novel News from Nowhere, it describes an ecosocialist utopia.

In the modern age, ecosocialism emerged in the mid 1980s, in the west, in the United States, although you can argue quite convincingly that in the US it goes back to Murray Bookchin’s social ecology movement in the mid 1960s. And in the east, in India, where to a lesser extent ecosocialism emerged but more so in the philosophy of ecofeminism, which is a similar philosophy to ecosocialism. 

For example, ecosocialists agree with ecofeminists that the oppression of women in our society is part and parcel of the system's domination of nature, reproduction in particular. This is done by the capitalist system co-opting the prevailing patriarchal practices, to extract extra surplus value from the workers, in terms of unpaid domestic labour, without which the system could not function. 

And all for free to the system.

Examples of modern day ecosocialism, to an extent, can be found in the Kurdish area of northern Syria called Rojava and the Zapatistas in Chiapas the most southern state in Mexico.

So, what are the component parts of ecosocialism? There are many, but I’ve selected four of the main ones:

Metabolic Rift

Nature contains billions of ecosystems, all connected in a finely balanced way, to form what we might call the ‘ecosphere’. Capitalism disrupts and eventually completely ruptures this balance, setting off chain reactions which cannot be cured easily, if at all. Human beings are ecosystems too, and the way the system forces us to live, causes a rupture between us and nature and leads to illnesses like stress, depression and obesity.

And to those who say the ways of capitalism are ‘human nature’, then if this is true, why have we only been living this way for a few hundred years? The only thing natural about capitalism, is that it was invented by creatures of nature, us. And we can just as easily un-invent it – and we should.

Ecosocialist writer James Bellamy Foster has managed to link this to Karl Marx’s notion of an ‘irreparable rift’ between humans and nature, in volume three of Capital.

The Commons

Historically, in Britain and other western nations, people were forcibly removed from common land as it was enclosed, with violence employed, to drive the people off the land and into the capitalist factories in the towns and cities. And today the same thing is happening in developing countries. By taking away people's alternative way of providing for themselves, they are left with no choice but to move into cities and work often 16 hours a day for meagre pay in factories, where health and safety is non-existent, and female workers are routinely harassed and molested.

When I visited Senegal in west Africa a few years ago, one day I spoke with some fishermen who complained about the factory ships from the European Union, Russia and Japan that were hoovering up all of the fish, so much so, that the local fisherman couldn’t catch enough fish anymore to earn a decent living. Here was a system of managed commons which had fed local people for thousands of years and provided a livelihood for the fishermen, destroyed by the capitalist factory boats. Robbing from the poor - to give to the rich.

You have probably heard of the ‘global commons’ on the internet, peer to peer sharing and free software, which ecosocialists welcome, with the possibilities it provides for living outside of the capitalist system, to some extent anyway.

Ecocentric Production

This is a quote from my favourite ecosocialist writer Joel Kovel describing our vision of ecosocialism: ‘a society in which production is carried out by freely associated labour, and by consciously ecocentric means and ends’.

I think this phrase covers the production process under ecosocialism neatly. The ‘freely associated labour’ bit refers to the absence of surplus value, profit for capital.

Production would be for ‘use-value’, not ‘exchange value'. It will require useful workers only, doctors, nurses, teachers etc. and there will be no need for work such as pushing numbers around on a computer in a bank in the City of London, which is useless to humanity - and indeed harmful.

What is produced will be of the highest quality, and beauty, and made to last and be repairable. My laptop packed up last week and I put it in for repair. But they couldn’t fix it because they couldn’t get the replacement part – this laptop is only a little over a year old, but it is obsolete. Throw it away, and get another was the advice. This is purposefully a planned obsolescence, to drive demand for new production within modern capitalism.

In Green Party circles you hear a lot about sustainability, or sustainable production, but we ecosocialists prefer the word sufficiency, or sufficient production. Only as much as is needed will be produced, and no more. It should go without saying that the production process will be in balance with nature too.

Radical Democracy

Democracy in an ecosocialist society will devolve all decisions down to the lowest possible level. A series of assemblies, local, town, regional and at least at first, national. The assemblies will be freely elected and each assembly will be subject to recall from the level below, and assembly members should serve only one term. Eventually, the central state will be dissolved.

All of this must seem like a million miles away – and it is. But now is not the same thing as the future. The ecological crisis will get worse, if we carry on like we are, and will present opportunities where radical solutions are sought. We must be ready to seize these opportunities.

And where does this all leave the Green Party? Well, interestingly The Guardian newspaper, during the UK 2015 general election campaign, twice, once by one of its columnists and once in an editorial, described the Green Party as ecosocialist.

I think what was meant by this, was concern for the environment and advocating things like nationalising the railways and energy companies – all of which is to the good, but it is not really ecosocialism.

The Green Party seems to have some hazy notions which are heading in the right direction, but for some reason, fails to follow through this thinking to its logical end – ecosocialism.

We in Green Left, try to push it along a bit, so that the Green Party fulfils its radical agenda, which logically means parting company with capitalism and championing ecosocialism.  

What is Ecological Marxism (Eco-Marxism)? Explained

 

Written by Sukanya Maity and first published at Sociology Group

Synopsis: Nature and Capitalism are in an enduring conflict as we witness the exploitation of labour and natural resources simultaneously – clearing of forests because of large scale corporatisation and destructiveness disguised as development. Ecological Marxism is a subfield of Sociology which seeks to study the dialectics of nature from a Marxian perspective and challenges the concepts of conservation and sustainable development. This article will focus on the brief history of its development and the possible reasons triggering its academic growth and importance in recent times.

Ecological Marxism: An attempt to ‘Ecologise’ Marxism

According to Clark and Foster, “the problem of nature is a problem of capital”. Ecological Marxism is the application of Karl Marx’s theories to the study and analysis of the environment and its related impacts and processes. The term ‘ecology’ was first coined in 1856 by Ernst Haeckel, a German.

The term, when initially coined, was used synonymously with Darwin’s loose concept of the “economy of nature”. This would later stimulate further developments in botanical studies and their complex plant components in the early twentieth century. Advances in ecosocialist theories speak volumes of the growing importance of Marx’s metabolic and materialist approach in studying the interchange between humans and nature and the relation they share. Marx’s ecology serves as the best foreground for studying environmental degradation, through his analysis of capitalism and how it favours the accumulation of private property and prioritises profit over the protection of the environment. 

In 1935, Botanist Arthur George Tansley, a Fabian-type socialist and the founder of British Ecological Society, introduced the concept of the ecosystem in a theoretical polemic against the racist ecological “holism” of General Smuts and his followers in South Africa. Tansley developed a materialist approach to ecology which incorporated both organic and inorganic processes. Related developments took place in the Soviet Union. Vernadsky, in his 1926 work The Biosphere argued that life existing on the superficial realm of a planetary sphere itself acted as a geological force affecting the earth and had an effect on the planet which grew extensive with time.

Nikolai Bukharin, a leading figure in the Russian Revolution and Marxian theory reframed historical materialism as the problem of “man in the biosphere”. Second-stage eco-socialists also known as eco-Marxists like Paul Burkett have majorly contributed to ecological thought associated with dialectics of nature. Marxian ecological theory, therefore, emphasizes unequal ecological exchange, or ecological imperialism.

Ecosocialist theories focused on Marx’s works on Capitalism to understand the “ecological concept of his materialism” as well as to understand his critique of political economy that emphasised on the capitalist society’s transformation of material conditions on which all life depends. Inspired by the ancient Greek Philosopher Epicurus, Marx established a materialist conception of history and nature, which were interrelated in their own ways.

Marx’s value analysis (concepts of use-value and exchange-value) provided strong backing to his development of a concept of sustainable human development. His ecological materialism serves both as a philosophical orientation as well as a critical standpoint to assess the internal contradictions of a particular mode of production. In his ecological method, “human society is embedded in the physical world”.

Also Read: Dalit Capitalism

Metabolic Rift between Nature and Humans

The aim of the Marxists was not to ‘Marxise’ ecology but to ‘ecologise’ Marxism. The concept of metabolism, on the other hand, was originally introduced by physiologists around 1815 to describe the physical exchange processes within the human body. German chemist Justus Von Liebig used the concept to refer to a series of natural cycles, which is also central to his critique of British agriculture. He analysed how irrational farming methods in the 19th century led to the depletion of the soil.

According to Foster, Marx “developed a theory of ecological crisis, now known as the theory of metabolic rift”. Marx perceived history and nature as one. Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology: “We know only one science, the science of history. History can be viewed from two sides: it can be divided into the history of nature and that of man. The two sides, however, are not to be seen as independent entities. As long as man has existed, nature and man have affected each other.” Hence, his historical materialism in itself embodies ecological materialism. Marx claimed that there was a “necessary metabolic interaction” between humans and the earth.

Natural processes like carbon cycle, soil nutrient cycle, production of fruits and so on makes it possible for humans to survive. Hence, he referred to the earth as a “universal instrument” since it not only provides the worker with the ground beneath their feet but also with sources of employment. It provides “the natural conditions of labour, such as fertility of the soil, mines, and so forth.” Labour, here, forms the basic component of metabolic interchange through which humans transform the earth. The development of Thermodynamics in 19th-century Physics conceptually integrated Marx and Engel’s analysis of metabolism.

With the advent of the capitalist economy which promoted the privatisation and centralization of capital, natural resources were heavily depleted and exploited to provide raw materials that would further fuel the growth of industries. This increase in social metabolism increased the demands placed on nature. As new technologies are used to curtail labour costs and expand production, capitalism and nature are caught in an “enduring conflict”. This drastically impacts the natural cycles, aids in climate change, and the regeneration of ecosystems.

Also Read: Green Economy

The social metabolic order of capital also gives rise to ecological imperialism coupled with the expansion of the economic system. In the 19th century, intensive agricultural production in England contributed to a global metabolic rift. Millions of tonnes of nitrates and guano were transferred from Chile and Peru to the North, to enrich the exhausted soil. This involved the exploitation of not only nature but also labour as over 90,000 Chinese workers were forcefully transported to Peru to work on railroads and plantations. Marx claimed that this Chinese coolie labour system was worse than slavery.

The workers in the guano Islands were physically beaten, malnourished and not allowed to leave. The fertilizers that enriched the soils of North resulted in the exploitation and shortened life span of Chinese workers, exhaustion of natural resource and debt-burden of Peru. Marx also pointed out that artificial solutions like chemical fertilisers and their excessive use without addressing the problems in the social causes of metabolic rift eventually shifts the problem elsewhere which further augments the process of environmental degradation.

Capitalist growth also stimulates the continuous burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Consequently, this increases the amount of carbon dioxide and the carbon metabolism of capitalism drives global climate change. Marx’s metabolic rift has also been used to study the marine environment which has been monopolised by humans leading to a transformation in the marine ecosystem through overfishing which has drastically impacted the population of aquatic species. Hence, socio-natural dislocations are by-products of capitalistic growth.

Also Read: Gendering Climate Change

Lauderdale Paradox – Major Influence

According to Clark and Frost, Marx is a scientist who seeks to trace the capitalist virus and is all the time searching for a remedy. Marx was highly inspired by James Maitland’s ‘Lauderdale Paradox’. Lauderdale informs the transformation of a fertile period through Dutch colonialists’ burning of spiceries and employment of native people to pluck young blossoms and green leaves from the nutmeg trees to kill them off and how the planters in Virginia were required to burn a certain amount of tobacco for every slave working on their fields.

These activities increased the accumulation of private wealth by destroying public wealth (here, public wealth refers to the produce of earth). Marx wrote that to transform natural resources into sources of exchange value, they were essentially monopolised and alienated. Hence, the accumulation of natural resources for the accumulation of wealth by a few resulted in the decrease of wealth in society as a whole.

Marx’s analysis of the destruction of natural wealth to augment capitalist production is evident in his rent theory which emphasises on the monopolisation of land and natural resources for the sake of private gain. Here, the analysis of metabolic rift and the destruction of natural resources through the valorization of capital that treats nature as a free gift, giving rise to Lauderdale Paradox are brought together. Hence, an elementary triangle of ecology emerges from Marx’s thought, which comprises of (1) social use and not ownership of nature, (2) rational regulation by the producers of metabolic relations between nature and humans and (3) satisfaction of communal needs, both of present and the future.

Herman Daly, an ecological economist pointed out that the return of Lauderdale’s Paradox has become more serious. He says that with the increase in the population, the free foods become scarce and get a price tag hence we notice an increase in private riches which are celebrated, but we fail to notice the decline in public wealth. In the 19th century, Lauderdale spoke about water as a potentially scarce resource. Today, drinkable water has become scarce and as a solution, the system is imposing on us private resources (through packaged drinking water) which furthers the problem of ecological scarcity.

Expropriation of the Commons

Lievens opines that capitalism attempts to turn away from human dependence on nature by turning nature into private property. However, the link between capitalism and ecological degradation doesn’t mean that pre-capitalist society was devoid of environmental crises, but, the crises remained limited to the local area but with the advent of capitalism globally, the environmental crisis has become global. Both labour and nature are exhausted by capitalist accumulation.

The property-owning class privately appropriated the traditional, community-based productions of the commons and hence, they had to face widespread popular resistance. Mass resistance movements arose as more and more forests were privatised. The German Peasants’ War of the 16th century which Engels referred to as the rock basis of modern class struggle, demanded an elected committee to protect common goods and prevent privatization or despoliation.

Lievens says that today, people are searching for a cure for the climate crisis which is compatible with private ownership but the privatisation of the commons has increased tenfold as the air (or oxygen) becomes a commodity which is privately owned in the context Kyoto Protocol.  

Also Read: Environmental Sociology

The ecosocialist movement has adopted the slogan “System Change, Not Climate Change” to signify how a globalised capitalist system influences the current reality. Marxist ecological thinkers opine that in the not-too-distant future, there will emerge an environment proletariat through the combination of ecological degradation and economic hardships stemming from the lowest rungs of the societal ladder.

This will inevitably lead these proletariats or the working population to revolt against the existing system. The middle class often referred to as the petty bourgeoisie will be drawn to this struggle, the youth will be radicalized as they become disenchanted and women, who have been historically marginalised as well as majorly dependent on natural resources, will be at the forefront of this struggle.

References

1. Burkett, P. (2006). Marxism and Ecological Economics. Boston: Brill Leiden.
2. Clark, B. & Foster, J.B. (2010). Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century. In World Review of Political Economy (pg. 142-157).
3. Foster, J.B. (2000). Marx’s Ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press.
4. Foster, J.B. (2015). Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts of a Great Transition. In Great Transition Initiative.
5. Lievens, M. (n.d.). Towards an Eco-Marxism.

Sukanya Maity is pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is a feminist, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist and hopes to document the lives of remarkable women so that their stories don’t vanish into anonymity

Review: The Robbery of Nature – Capitalism and the Ecological Rift

 

Written by Kate Doherty and first published at Marxist Left Review

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift. Monthly Review Press, 2020.

New Year’s Eve 2019: 5,000 people on the beach at Mallacoota, Victoria, watch pitch-black skies turn a deep red as the bushfire approaches. They huddle, powerless against the fury of this climate change-fuelled nightmare. By March 2020, 33 people, one billion animals, 3,094 houses and over 17 million hectares of land had been destroyed in fires across Australia.¹

June 2020: Coronavirus, a predictable product of industrial agriculture and deforestation pushing humans into the remaining reservoirs of wildlife, has killed over half a million people as we go to press, and the situation continues to escalate. Experts warn future pandemics are likely to increase in seriousness as environmental destruction worsens.

The scale and consequences of planetary destruction demand that we understand the ecological crisis and its roots. 

The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the ecological rift is a valuable contribution to this end. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark argue for a fundamental transformation of society based on workers’ control, and against the false solutions of green capitalism or hyper-technical state capitalism: “Ecological Marxism offers an opening up of humanity as a whole to creativity… to rebuild its world on ecological foundations in line with the earth itself” (p286). The serious application of Marx and Engels’ historical materialism to wide-ranging but interlinked environmental issues makes this analytical volume a rewarding read.

Potatoes and cotton

“As long as human beings exist, the history of nature and the history of human beings mutually condition each other.”

Karl Marx

The book’s 11 chapters both defend and apply Marx and Engels’ ecological thought. The authors respond to a range of historic and contemporary critiques and provide the reader with an opportunity to engage with Marxist understanding of nature from a number of angles.

Marx saw ecological destruction and that of humanity as intimately linked, as humans are both part of the natural world and rely on it for our survival. Capitalists expropriated the land, through brutal colonisation abroad and enclosures of peasant land in Britain. They ripped humanity from its natural connection with the land by creating private property from nature, and creating alienated human relations with the material world.

Capitalism involves “the exploitation and squandering of the powers of the earth”, just as it “squanders human beings… not only flesh and blood but nerves and brains as well” (cited on pp46-48). Whereas previously those who worked or lived from the earth were able to replenish it, capitalism introduced a “metabolic rift”.² Separation of town and country ruptured the historic process of returning nutrients to the soil, and demands on ecological systems increase as the needs of capitalism are imposed on nature.

The book’s opening chapters focus on the two equally monstrous pivots of English modern industry – the import of potatoes from Ireland and slave-grown cotton.

Rack renting, the Irish land tenure system named after an instrument of torture, led to soil degradation and monoculture crops, making the country vulnerable to potato blight which struck from 1845-1849. While one million Irish died and a million more emigrated, the British continued the export of grain from Ireland: “Ireland was the site of an extreme metabolic rift, caught in the vice grip of economic and ecological imperialism, from which arose the necessity of ‘ruin or revolution’” (pp72-77).

The triangular slave trade involved layers of robbery which enriched British capital. Humans were brutally stolen from Africa. Soil fertility, enriched by millennia of care by indigenous custodians, was also looted, exported as cotton fibre thousands of miles to England. The cotton industry rested on a “twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic” (cited on p50).

Robbery is at the centre of capital accumulation.

An encompassing theory

Marx’s ecology is inextricable from his social and economic analysis. The central section of the book demonstrates how environmental destruction is built into all facets of capitalism and how Marx and Engels’ theories apply equally to modern issues. Certain chapters are unnecessarily academic, however the authors present Marx and Engels writing on a useful spectrum of topics. It is impossible in an article of this length to address each chapter, so just those on work, food, and wealth are addressed.

Revulsion towards work is not a constant feature of human society, but a product of the alienated organisation of labour under capitalism which makes work degrading, meaningless, destructive, and dehumanising (pp188-189). Certain sustainability theorists focus on expanding leisure and shunning work, arguing for a no-growth society. By contrast, the authors argue that while we must reject destructive work, “the real potential for any future sustainable society rests… on its capacity to generate a new world of creative and collective work, controlled by the associated producers [workers]” (p174).

Marx’s labour theory of value has given rise to the accusation that he perceived non-human nature as valueless. Yet it is capitalist logic that uses nature as a “free gift”, as Marx observed. “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values… as is labour, which is… the manifestation of a natural force, human labour power” (p163). For capital, labour in extracting and processing makes natural resources marketable.

It is no solution to put a dollar value on natural resources, as some environmentalists recommend. A truly perverse element of capitalism is that it feeds on scarcity, thus planetary destruction can open up new markets, monetising products which were once freely available in abundance. Gerard Mestrallet, CEO of global water corporation Suez, stated: “Water is an efficient product. It is a product which would normally be free, and our job is to sell it. But it is a product which is absolutely necessary for life” (p170).

“Food… is only of passing interest to Marx”, asserted the 1992 book The Sociology of Food (p104). In fact, Marx was already grappling with the problems surrounding food in the 1850s. Chapter 4 charts Marx and Engels’ study of the production, distribution and consumption of food. It encompasses agricultural development under different modes of production, soil chemistry, industrial agriculture, livestock conditions, food adulteration, climate, food production technology and much more.

Their interest in food makes sense: a materialist conception of history is centred on humans as beings who must, before all else, produce the essentials – food, water, shelter etc. Capitalism makes a commodity of this essential good.

For revolution

In the final two chapters the authors outline the extent of the planetary crisis we face, and make a compelling case for the revolutionary potential of humanity to heal the rift with nature created under capitalism. “As bad as the climate crisis is… it is only a part of the larger global ecological crisis” along with ocean acidification, ozone layer destruction, biodiversity loss, freshwater shortages, pollution and others. The root cause of the ecological crisis lies in our socioeconomic system of capital accumulation (p244).

There are many who argue for substantial, but not revolutionary, changes to capitalism to combat ecological destruction.

Those who argued the coronavirus crisis was an opportunity for better climate outcomes are anti-human, but they’re also plain wrong. Common sense suggests financial crises would cause a sharp drop in carbon emissions. But data from 150 countries between 1960 and 2008 has comprehensively demonstrated that emissions don’t decline in the same proportion during downturns as they increase during growth.³ The system is not going to self-limit. The drive to accumulate continues, even in light of an unprecedented health and financial crisis caused in part by environmental destruction.

The most polemical section of the book is dedicated to a critique of the current which aligns socialism with ecomodernism. The authors choose the Jacobin special issue Earth, Wind and Fire as their focus, which includes pieces arguing for nuclear power as the alternative to fossil fuels, terraforming (reshaping the earth), geoengineering (such as cloud brightening), mass carbon capture and storage as technical solutions.

The Jacobin writers critique the environmental movement for “a politics of fearmongering and austerity” and urge the left to abandon the “aversion to ambitious technologies” and to love our monsters. “Green capitalists are the ones shaping the future”, so socialists should look to state management of technology, the market and urban development, together with progressive redistribution of resources.⁴ Their fundamental argument is that technological solutions are more realistic than, or preferable to, social revolution and workers’ power.

The authors rightly point out that the domination of nature does not represent a scientifically feasible, or desirable, solution to environmental devastation. There are much better and faster ways to address the climate crisis than unproven and resource-intensive technology like carbon capture and storage, which would almost certainly widen other ecological rifts (such as deforestation and biodiversity loss).

The current system is “built on waste. The [majority] of production is squandered… in such forms as military spending, marketing expenditures, and the inefficiencies, including planned obsolescence, built into every product” (p284). Thus drastic cuts in carbon emissions, pollution and wasted human labour are immediately possible through a revolution in social relations.

While their critique of the ecomodernists strikes true, the authors are on more shaky ground when they present their own solution to the crisis. They see the main impetus of environmental revolt in the “environmental proletariat”, which they hope may arise from La Via Campesina, a millions-strong international peasant movement (p259). 

While agricultural workers and small landowners, particularly in the developing world, are materially driven to resist environmental destruction and are an important ally of any serious climate movement, a successful social revolution must centre on the industrial working class at the heart of capitalist production, who have the most power to bring the system to a halt.

The authors conclude: “To overcome centuries of alienation of nature and human labour, including the treatment of the global environment and most people – divided by class, gender, race and ethnicity – as mere objects of conquest, expropriation and exploitation, will require nothing less than a long ecological revolution…  occurring over centuries” (p287). The history of revolutions indicates a socialist society focused on improving human life could make great strides towards these goals in the first months and years, though not without enormous difficulties.

Though the authors do not suggest it themselves, their conception of revolution does not preclude reformist interpretations. This is a missed opportunity: the seriousness with which their works are read in the broad environmental movement means they are uniquely placed to make revolutionary arguments to wider audiences.

Overall, the urgency of the environmental crisis demands we recommit to, and deepen our understanding of, revolutionary politics and the connection between climate crisis and capitalism as a system. The Robbery of Nature is an excellent tool to help us do just that.

References

Kandelaars, Michael 2016, “Marxism and the natural world”, Marxist Left Review, 11, Summer. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/marxism-and-the-natural-world/.

Richards, Lisa, Nigel Brew, Lizzie Smith 2020, “2019–20 Australian bushfires – frequently asked questions: a quick guide”, Department of Parliamentary Services, March https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1920/Quick_Guides/AustralianBushfires.

1. Richards et al 2020.
2. The term, coined by Marx, is explained in detail in Kandelaars 2016.
3. Richard York, “Asymmetric Effects of Economic Decline on CO2 Emissions”, cited in Bellamy Foster and Clark 2020, pp242-243.
4. Connor Kilpatrick, Angela Nagle and Daniel Aldana Cohen, cited in Bellamy Foster and Clark 2020, pp274-281.