Marx's Ecology, John Bellamy Foster

[blindpig]

A great many analysts, including some self styled eco-socialists, are prepared to acknowledge that Marx had profound insights into the environmental problem, but nonetheless argue that these insights were marginal to his work, that he never freed himself from 'Prometheanism' (a term usually meant to refer to an extreme commitment to industrialisation at any cost), and that he did not leave a significant ecological legacy that carried forward into later socialist thought or that had any relation to the subsequent development of ecology.3 In a recent discussion in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism a number of authors argued that Marx could not have contributed anything of fundamental relevance to the development of ecological thought, since he wrote in the 19th century, before the nuclear age and before the appearance of PCBs, CFCs and DDT--and because he never used the word 'ecology' in his writings. Any discussion of his work in terms of ecology was therefore a case of taking 120 years of ecological thinking since Marx's death and laying it 'at Marx's feet'.4

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Marx's two main discussions of modern agriculture both end with an analysis of 'the destructive side of modern agriculture'. In these passages Marx makes a number of crucial points: (1) capitalism has created an 'irreparable rift' in the 'metabolic interaction' between human beings and the earth, the everlasting nature-imposed conditions of production; (2) this demanded the 'systematic restoration' of that necessary metabolic relation as 'a regulative law of social production'; (3) nevertheless the growth under capitalism of large-scale agriculture and long distance trade only intensifies and extends the metabolic rift; (4) the wastage of soil nutrients is mirrored in the pollution and waste in the towns--'In London,' he wrote, 'they can find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense'; (5) large-scale industry and large-scale mechanised agriculture work together in this destructive process, with 'industry and commerce supplying agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil'; (6) all of this is an expression of the antagonistic relation between town and country under capitalism; (7) a rational agriculture, which needs either small independent farmers producing on their own, or the action of the associated producers, is impossible under modern capitalist conditions; and (8) existing conditions demand a rational regulation of the metabolic relation between human beings and the earth, pointing beyond capitalist society to socialism and communism.9

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The issue of sustainability, for Marx, went beyond what capitalist society, with its constant intensification and enlargement of the metabolic rift between human beings and the earth, could address. Capitalism, he observed, 'creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the forms that have developed during the period of their antagonistic isolation'. Yet in order to achieve this 'higher synthesis', he argued, it would be necessary for the associated producers in the new society to 'govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way'--a requirement that raised fundamental and continuing challenges for post-revolutionary society.12

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After having the power and coherence of Marx's analysis of the metabolic rift impressed on me in this way, I began to wonder how deeply embedded such ecological conceptions were in Marx's thought as a whole. What was there in Marx's background that could explain how he was able to incorporate natural-scientific observations into his analysis so effectively? How did this relate to the concept of the alienation of nature, which along with the alienation of labour was such a pronounced feature of his early work? Most of all, I began to wonder whether the secret to Marx's ecology was to be found in his materialism. Could it be that this materialism was not adequately viewed simply in terms of a materialist conception of human history, but also had to be seen in terms of natural history and the dialectical relation between the two? Or to put it somewhat differently, was Marx's materialist conception of history inseparable from what Engels had termed the 'materialist conception of nature'?13 Had Marx employed his dialectical method in the analysis of both?

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All of this points to the fact that Marx and Engels had a profound grasp of ecological and evolutionary problems, as manifested in the natural science of their day, and were able to make important contributions to our understanding of how society and nature interact. If orthodoxy in Marxism, as Lukács taught, relates primarily to method, then we can attribute these insights to a very powerful method, but one which, insofar as it encompasses both a materialist conception of natural history and of human (ie social) history, has not been fully investigated by subsequent commentators. Behind Marx and Engels' insights in this area lay an uncompromising materialism, which embraced such concepts as emergence and contingency, and which was dialectical to the core.
Some environmental commentators of course continue to claim that Marx believed one-sidedly in the struggle of human beings against nature, and was thus anthropocentric and unecological, and that Marxism as a whole carried forth this original ecological sin. But the evidence, as I have suggested, strongly contradicts this. In The German Ideology Marx assailed Bruno Bauer for referring to 'the antitheses in nature and history as though they were two separate things'. In fact, 'the celebrated "unity of man with nature",' Marx argued, 'has always existed in industry...and so has the "struggle" of man with nature.' A materialist approach will deny neither reality--neither unity nor struggle in the human relation to nature. Instead it will concentrate on 'the sensuous world', as Marx said, 'as consisting of the total living sensuous activity of those living in it'.30 From this standpoint, human beings make their own environments, but not under conditions entirely of their choosing, but rather based on conditions handed down from the earth and from earlier generations in the course of history, both natural and human.

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm

[kristopher]

1. Reinventing the horse?

I don't claim a profound depth of understanding regarding the philosophical underpinnings of modern scientific strategies, but it seems to me that this article looks to find by inference in Marx elements of the physical/cultural world that are much more clearly identified and expanded upon by later thinkers in the materialist tradition.
I don't believe you can make the case that ecological concerns as we know it were part of the landscape Marx was viewing and writing about. How else would you explain the omission of reproductive pressure in his writings?

My preference for a paradigm from which to analyze the interplay of culture and environment is 'cultural materialism', one of the less popular fields since the ascension of King capitalism and his Queen idealism to the governing throne of the industrializing world.

Recommend: "Cultural Materialism" by Marvin Harris for the theory and "Cannibals and Kings" by Harris for examples of the strategy being used to explain cultural riddles that are much less satisfyingly covered by other theoretical frameworks. I would also recommend reading them concurrent with each other.



http://www.cultural-materialism.org/cultural-materialism/cm_preface.asp

(Free use applies)
The Preface to CULTURAL MATERIALISM: The Struggle for a Science of Culture

Cultural Materialism is the strategy I have found to be most effective in my attempt to understand the causes of differences and similarities among societies and cultures. It is based on the simple premise that human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence. I hope to show in this book that cultural materialism leads to better scientific theories about the causes of sociocultural phenomena than any of the rival strategies that are currently available. I do not claim that it is a perfect strategy but merely that it is more effective than the alternatives.

In its commitment to the rules of scientific method, cultural materialism opposes strategies that deny the legitimacy or the feasibility of scientific accounts of human behavior - for example, humanist claims that there is no determinism in human affairs - and it opposes the currently popular attribution of the malaise of industrial society to too much rather than too little science. Cultural materialism, with its emphasis upon the encounter between womb and belly and earth and water, also opposes numerous strategies that set forth from words, ideas, high moral values, and aesthetic and religious beliefs to understand the everyday events of ordinary human life. Aligned in this regard with the teachings of Karl Marx, cultural meterialism nonetheless stands apart from the Marx-Engels-Lenin strategy of dialectical meterialism. Condemned by dialectical materialists as "vulgar materialists" or "mechanical materialists," cultural materialists seek to improve Marx's original strategy by dropping the Hegelian notion that all systems evolve through a dialectic of contradictory negations and by adding reproductive pressure and ecological variables to the conjunction of material and conditions studied by Marxist-Leninists.

Although significant numbers of anthropologists have adopted the cultural materialist strategy, most of my colleagues continue to prefer one of several available alternatives. The most popular of these denies the need to have a definitive strategy at all. This I call the strategy of eclecticism. Eclectics argue that the strategic commitments of cultural meterialism or any of the other self-identified strategies such as dialectical materialism or structuralism prematurely close off possible sources of understanding. To be an eclectic is to insist that all research strategies may be relevant to the resolution of some puzzles and and that it cannot be foretold which strategies will be the most productive in any given case. Eclecticism presents itself as the defender of the "open mind." Yet eclecticism represents as much of a closed strategic commitment as any of its rivals. To uphold all options indefinitely is to take a definitive strategic position. Moreover, it is not a conspicuously open-minded attitude to insist a priori that better scientific theories will result from the use of more than one strategy per problem. This claim actually happens to be wrong. It is not eclecticism but the clash of strategic options, eclecticism among them, that is the guarantor of an open mind. In arguing for the superiority of cultural materialism, therefore, I have no intention of advocating the annihiliation of rival strategies. I insist only that the systematic comparision of alternative strategies be an intergral part of the scientific enterprise.

Eclecticism reigns triumphant because it seems no more than common sense that there must be a little bit of trugh in each of the rival isms, and that none can contain the whole truth. I disagree, however that it is common sense to abandon the quest for the possibility of larger truths in order to settle for the certainty of smaller ones. I also disagree that it is common sense to suppose that the alternative strategies are equally well endowed with truth and nonsense. No strategy has the whole trugh, but the whole truth is not the sum of all strategies.

Although I did not invent "cultural materialism," I am responsible for giving it its name (in The Rise of Anthropoligical Theory). Let me explain why I chose these two words and not some others. By the mid-1960s many colleagues shared my conviction that as long as anthropologists underestimated the importance of Karl Marx, there could be no science of human society. Marx had come closest in the nineteenth century to being the Darwin of the social sciences. Like Darwin, Marx showed that phenomena previously regarded as inscrutable or as a direct emanation of deity could be brought down to earth and understood in terms of lawful scientific principles. Markx did this by proposing that the production of the material means of subsistence forms "the foundation upon which state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have evolved, and in the lights of which these things must therefore be explained instead of vice versa as has hitherto been the case" (see p. 141). The "materialism" in "cultural materialism" is therefore intended as an acknowledgement of the debt owed to Marx's formulation of the determining influence of production and other material processes.

Now I am aware that a strategy which calls itself materialism runs a special risk of being dismissed by the general public as well as by the academic professorate. Materialism is a dirty word among the young, who aspire to be idealistic in their thought and behavior. Materialism is hwat happens to you when you abandon your ideals and sell out. (Never mind that the more money people make, the more likely they are to think of themselves as idealists.) But cultural materialists have idealistic motives just like everyone else. ANd as for pure, unselfish devotion to humankind, rightly or wrongly, a large segment of world opinion today ranks Marx as the equal or superior of Jesus Christ. Needless to say, the technical distinction between cultural materialism and idealism has has nothing to do with such invidious comparisions. It refers exclusively to the problem of how one proposes to account for sociocultural differences and similarities. Despite the negative images the word "materialism" evokes, I would be intellectually dishonest not to use it.

It was also obvious when I began to write The Rise of Anthropological Theory in 1965 that a genuine science of society would not develop, Marx or no Marx, as long as Marxist-Leninists (and other social scientists) continued to avaoid or ignore the facts and theories of modern anthropology. Marx's strategic assumptions, like Darwin's are burdened with ninteenth-century philosophical concepts which reduce their plausibility and usefulness for twentieth-century anthropologists. Because Marx's materialism is wedded to Hegel's notion of dialectical contradictions, Engels gave it the name "dialetical materialism." Under Lenin, the dialectical tail was made to wag the materialist dog. Marxism-Leninism came to represent the triumph of dialectics over the objective and empirical aspects of Marx's scientific materialism.

Cultural materialism is a non-Hegelian strategy whose epistemological assumptions are rooted in the philosophical traditions of David Hume and the British empiricists - assumptions that led to Darwin, Spencer, Tylor, Morgan, Frazer, Boas, and the birth of anthropology as an academic discipline. Yet cultural materialism is not a monistic or mechanical alternative to dialectics. Rather, it is concoerned with systemic interactions between thought and behavior, with conficts as well as harmonies, continuities and discontinuities, function and dysfunction, positive and negative feedback. To drop the word "dialectical" is not to drop any of these interests - it is simply to insist that they must be pursued under empriical and operation auspices rather than as adjuncts to a political program or as an attempt to express one's personal.

Now for the cultural part of cultural materialism. The word "cultural" comes to the fore because the material causes of sociocultural phenomena differ from those which pertain strictly to inorganic or organic determinisms. Cultural materilsim, for example, stands opposed to biological reductionist materialisms such as those embedded in racial, sociobiological, or ethological explanations of cultural differences and similarities. And the term "cultural" conveys more adequately than such alternatives as "historical" or "sociological" the fact that the phenomena to be explained are human, synchronic as well as diachronic, and prehistorica as well as historic. "Cultural" also draws attention to the fact that the strategy in question is a distinctive product of anthropology and its subfields - that it is a synthesis which seeks to transcend disciplinary, ethnic, and national boundaries.

The task of cultural materialism is to create a pan-human science of society whose findings can be accepted on logical and evidentiary grounds by the pan-human community. In view of increasing national, ethnic, and class interests in subordinating science to politics and to short-term sectarian benefits, I must confess that the prospects for a pan-human science of society appear dimmer today than at any time since the eighteenth century. I cannot therefore appeal to the reader to follow my brief for cultural materialism in the name of the jubilant enlightenment. I make no utopian claims. I merely ask all those who fear the onset of a new dark age to join together to strengthen the barriers against mystificaiton and obscurantism in contemporary social science.