Written by Chris Williams and first published at International Socialist Review
A
long-standing critique of the writings of Marx and Engels has been their
supposed lack of concern for or even analysis of the environmental damage
caused by capitalism. Worse, even as they envisaged and fought for a world of
human freedom, their conception of socialism showed a comprehensive disregard
for how humans interact, or should interact, with nature.
Marx has been
viewed as Promethean: as soon as the proletariat had taken over the factories
and dispensed with the bosses, its job would be simply to build more factories,
in ever-expanding spheres of production. Given that the regimes claiming the
mantle of Marx in the twentieth century took exactly that pathway, and that
many self-described Marxists seeking to defend Stalinist states were disdainful
of an environmental ethic or responsibility, it’s not hard to understand why
this charge gained such credence.
However, that
position has become wholly untenable first and foremost thanks to two decades
of scholarship by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett. Both have forcefully
demonstrated that Marx and Engels were profoundly ecological thinkers who
embedded our relationship to nature deep within their critique of capitalism.
As shown by Foster and Burkett, Marx and Engels believed that to be truly free,
humanity not only needed to overcome the alienation of labor but simultaneously
our alienation from nature, both bestowed on us by capitalism.
In one sense,
Foster and Burkett’s unearthing of the extensive concern with natural limits
and ecological issues within the writings of Marx and Engels should hardly be
surprising. As assiduous materialists, how could they possibly have neglected
the material surroundings that our species exist within and that human labor
power works upon to live, produce, and reproduce? Marx and Engels go far beyond
a mere utilitarian conception of nature and ascribe an appreciation of nature
as a primary axis of human fulfillment and, furthermore, it is the duty of a
socialist society to look after the air, water, and soil for the benefit of
future generations of humans and other species. Marx’s tremendously important
concept of the “metabolic rift” furnishes us with the analytical tools to
understand why capitalism is inherently anti-ecological—and thereby
anti-human—and furthermore, how a socialist society must operate to repair
those rifts and overcome human alienation from nature.
Building on
their previous work, Foster and Burkett have published Marx and the Earth as an
anti-critique in the spirit of Frederick Engels and Rosa Luxemberg. Moving on
from a thorough demonstration of the ecological sensibilities of Marx and
Engels (and many other early Marxists) established in their previous writings,
Foster and Burkett seek to extend and deepen their analysis by addressing six
more recent ecological critiques arising from a range of leftwing environmental
theorists and writers. They make the case that ecosocialist thought has gone
through its own period of evolution.
A serious
engagement with environmental questions by Marxists first began to reemerge in
response to the movements of the 1960s and 70s, what Foster and Burkett term
the “first stage ecosocialism”: it was influenced by Marx but also highly
critical of Marxism; in many cases these theorists wanted to distance
themselves from Marx’s writings. Later developments in ecosocialist thought,
the “second stage ecosocialism” (or ecological Marxism), of which Foster,
Burkett, and a range of other thinkers took part, began in the 1990s, and
sought to flesh out a more comprehensive Marxist analysis of nature. In many
ways in contradiction to first-stage ecosocialism, these Marxists brought about
a synthesis of red and green ideas. Beginning with a reexamination of the
writings of Marx himself, they effectively combatted the idea, developed more
forcefully in the 1980s, that Marxism and environmentalism where incompatible
and in opposition to one another.
Since
demonstrating how deeply Marx and Engels wove ecology into their conception and
application of historical materialism, more dialectical critiques have arisen
of classical historical materialism around specific questions related to Marx
and Engels’s supposed lack of consideration of thermodynamics, failure to
differentiate between sources of energy (fossil fuels vs. renewables),
dismissal of the analysis of Sergei Podolinsky who attempted to formulate a
labor theory of value connected to energetics, and their supposedly
anthropocentric and utilitarian perspective on nature.
It is this
further deepening of historical materialist analysis and methodology with
regard to environmental questions and against these more concentrated
ecological critiques of Marx from a range of leftwing writers that Foster and
Burkett engage in their anti-critique. As the authors note of the book’s
purpose, “The systematic nature of this anti-critique will serve, we hope, to
bring out both the enormous dialectical power of Marx’s theory and its
historically specific character.” Foster and Burkett are careful to note that
the point is not to be “primarily scholastic,” but to develop “an ecological
materialism organically connected to historical materialism itself. The goal is
to bring this to bear on revolutionary praxis.”
A long
introduction deals with two of the more recent criticisms of Marx’s ecological
method made by Belgian Marxist Daniel Tanuro regarding renewable versus
nonrenewable energy, and accusations of anthropocentrism made by Donald Worster
and Joel Kovel. As Foster and Burkett definitively show, Marx and Engels did
differentiate between forms of energy (coal versus wood and water) and evinced
strong acknowledgement of the importance of other species and an appreciation
of the non-human world that went far beyond how directly useful it could be to
humans.
As the authors note, there is something of a false dichotomy between an
anthropocentric versus ecocentric outlook: “Human consciousness, human capacities,
and human needs are irrevocably human-based, and in that sense inescapably
anthropocentric. But there is a great deal of difference between an
anthropocentrism that promotes clear-cuts for purposes of unconstrained
economic expansion, and one that attempts to sustain old-growth-forest
ecosystems for the sake of the species within.” Human beings clearly have the
capacity for both but it is equally clear from Marx’s writings that he
considered the latter to be what human nature must strive for.
The following
five chapters examine to what extent Marx and Engels neglected or even rejected
the first and second laws of thermodynamics (the law of conservation of energy
and the law of entropy), whether they were too dismissive of Podolinsky’s work
on the law of value, and whether they saw the economy as a closed, linear
system, in contradistinction to writers in the field of ecological economics
such as Herman Daly, Juan Martinez-Alier, Daniel Bensaïd, and others.
Through an
extremely detailed and thorough analysis of Marx and Engels’s writings and
those of their critics, Foster and Burkett vindicate the pair’s deep engagement
with technologies and scientific concepts that were only beginning to fully
emerge toward the end of Marx’s life. Marx and Engels were insightful and
appreciative commentators on forms of energy and fully engaged with the
complexities and controversies surrounding the new field of thermodynamics.
They integrated energetic and ecological considerations into the methodology of
historical materialism without falling into the trap of energy reductionism.
The picture
that emerges from this book illustrates just how widely read the founders of
historical materialism were with respect to the cutting-edge scientific
discoveries of their time and how amazingly contemporary in their ecological
thinking, particularly due to Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift, which
prefigures modern systems ecology. Their book lays the groundwork for a “third
stage” development of ecosocialism that builds on Marx’s methodological
approach to open-systems thermodynamics and the intrinsic and aesthetic value
of nature from a human perspective.
Marx and the
Earth thus offers a fascinating portrait of Marx and Engel’s thinking on
ecological Marxism, successfully refutes the criticism made by recent
ecosocialist detractors, and represents a significant development in
ecosocialist thought in its own right.
As such it should be read by everyone
interested in gaining a better understanding of the historical materialist
approach to nature that Foster and Burkett so artfully and comprehensively show
began with Marx.
