TITLE: The
Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth
AUTHORS: John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark,
Richard York.
PUBLISHER: Monthly Review Press
PUBLISHED: January 2011, soft cover, pp544, £14.95
It
may come as a surprise to modern readers to be told that Karl Marx was an
ecologist, largely because of the conspicuous environmental devastation
committed in his name in the former Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic.
Yet that is precisely the message of this important collection of essays by
three US Marxist sociology professors. Making their case involves the authors
in a deep examination of what is meant by Marxism, by "in the name
of" and even by ecology itself. Bellamy Foster, Clark and York are all
affiliated to the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review (founded in New York at the start of the Cold
War in 1949 by Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, and broadly anti-imperialist in
outlook, without sectarian entanglements). They make their case most
convincingly in certain crucial respects, though are perhaps inevitably less
convincing with practical recommendations.
The
main thesis of The Ecological Rift is
derived from original research by Bellamy Foster which demonstrated that Marx,
an admirer of the great German biological chemist Justus von Liebig, formulated
early in his career a theory of the "metabolic" relationship between
human beings and their natural environment. The development of this theory spans
the 1844 Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, through the Grundrisse
and right up into Volume 1 of Capital.
In essence the argument runs roughly thus: in pre-capitalist societies people
consume the produce of the land where they live and their waste products are
returned directly to that land, but the division of labour under capitalism
moves most of the population into towns and cities, to where most produce
(food, clothing fibres, building materials) gets transported and consumed. The
waste is no longer returned to the land which results in depletion of the soils
together with pollution of the cities.
This
is a structural characteristic not only of capitalism but of any urbanised industrial
economy, so it's not altogether surprising that gross environmental despoilment
accompanied the industrialising drives of the Chinese and Soviet states. What
is however characteristic of capitalism is an imperative toward continual
growth. The pursuit of profit requires companies to continually expand
production, seek greater productivity to reduce the share of labour, and seek
new geographically remote markets. This imperative to perpetual growth combines
with the metabolic "ecological rift" to guarantee that capitalist
economics must eventually use up all the resources of the planet, which are
limited by its finite size. Reconnecting the metabolic cycle by returning all
waste to the land is not feasible, for the economic reason that it can never be
made profitable, and for technological reasons, such as plastic not making good
fertiliser. This argument is propounded and analysed in great detail, for
example in chapter 15, Imperialism and
Ecological Metabolism, which traces the depletion of European soils during
the Industrial Revolution; the discovery of Chilean guano fertiliser deposits
in the early 1800s and the imperial wars they triggered; and Fritz Haber's
discovery, just before WW1, of an industrial process to fix atmospheric
nitrogen into ammonia for fertilisers and explosives. That discovery linked the
fertility of the land to the energy sources required by the Haber process,
which meant oil, so triggering another set of imperial wars that continue to
this day. During this historic sequence not only was the metabolic rift not
closed, but the ecological cycles being disrupted spread out from solely the
nitrogen cycle to the carbon and water cycles too, digging up fossil fuels and
burning them into atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Foster
and co. are making a radical political point, that there can be no stable
solution to our environmental crisis based on capitalist relations of production.
With the rise of the BRIC economies we're currently living through a climactic
phase of the spread of capitalist production methods across the whole planet.
There are no farther geographical markets left so growth can only be via
greater intensity, with environmental consequences that – according to
reputable scientific opinion, and notwithstanding orchestrated campaigns of
scepticism – will very likely render the planet uninhabitable.
In
earlier chapters the authors argue that neo-classical economists inadvertently
conceal the urgency of our plight by treating the environment as being without
market value, distorting our metabolic relationship to nature by treating raw
materials only as inputs and products as outputs (which tempts a false belief
in their inexhaustibility). A complete analysis regards raw materials also as
outputs from nature and products as inputs back into nature. Other chapters
make detailed criticisms of various reform proposals such as the UK's Stern
report, of various strains of environmental sociology, and of various
"holistic" ecological theories like James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis
and the racist ecology of Jan Christian Smuts.
In
their analysis no remedy that involves market forces – such as carbon trading –
can ever succeed, because it does not and cannot inhibit the inexorable growth
of the market. In support of this position they draw on two famous paradoxes of
classical economics. "Lauderdale's Paradox" was the observation that
private wealth can be created by destroying public wealth (eg. the enclosure of
common land; charging for water supply; speculative restriction of supply of, for
example, foodstuffs, diamonds or metals to increase their price), while
"Jevon's Paradox" is the observation that under capitalism increasing
the efficiency of utilisation of some resource almost invariably leads to more of it being consumed rather than
less, thanks to expansion of the market.
Such
a brief summary may suggest a return to strict Marxist orthodoxy, but that
would be misleading: in their criticisms of opposing ecological positions, the
authors deploy various revisions that set them apart from most current Marxism.
In two central and rather difficult chapters they discuss materialist
ontologies, suggesting that previous strands in Marxism can be divided between "naive
realists" – Leninists and Maoists – and those social constructionist
"Western Marxists", including most French post-structuralist and
post-modernist schools, whom they see as verging on idealism. (They quote with
approval Kate Soper’s aperçu that “it is not language that has a hole in its
ozone layer”).
Proper
understanding of the metabolic rift demands a more rigorous materialism that
transcends realism and idealism, something close to the "critical
realism" of Roy Bhaskar or late Santayana (we do perceive real external
objects, but filtered, perhaps imperfectly, through our mental apparatus). The
authors embrace the nuanced Darwinism of Stephen Jay Gould, the sociology of
science of Robert K. Merton and Imré Lakatos, and Thorstein Veblen's idea that
capitalist marketing "produces customers" rather than goods. In this
reviewer's opinion they might profitably have gone further still in this
direction. Veblen, in The Socialist
Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers (1907), criticised the Marxists of
his time for indulging in romantic Hegelian teleology, namely the
"historic inevitability of socialism" with all its quasi-religious
millenarian implications – the rejection of all teleology is a constant theme
of this book. Perhaps replacing more still of Marx's Hegelian terminology – say
"dialectic" and "quantity versus quality" – with more
scientific causal descriptions drawn (cautiously) from evolutionary biology and
systems/information/complexity theory might diminish the opacity and vagueness
displayed by so much of today's radical writing. To be fair, Foster et al are
positively readable compared to many current theorists, and in the introduction
they apologise for any excessive repetition in this book due to its being a
compilation of edited and extended papers and magazine articles.
Bellamy
Foster, Clark and York make an entirely convincing case that the crises we face
over climate change and resource depletion cannot be tackled by any reforms
that fall short of breaking the capitalist market's mindless dependency on
uncontrolled growth, but they’re less successful in delineating plausible
routes to achieve such an enormous transformation of human organisation. While
quoting from Keynes with approval in several places, they’re more approving of István
Mészáros’ theory of transition to socialism and the political achievements of his
follower Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. In particular they quote Chavez's
three-part "triangle of socialism" as the precondition for any
effective solution to the ecological rift:
1) social use, not ownership, of nature.
2)
rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolism between
humans and nature.
3)
the satisfaction of communal needs of both present and future generations.
Worthy as these aims are, terms like "rational regulation", "associated producers" and "communal needs" are worryingly vague and result in a formula sufficiently ambiguous, in the wrong hands, to justify a Pol Pot. Notable by its absence is the equally problematic term "democracy", toward which they display a rather unwise old-Marxist reticence that grates particularly since this review is being written in the midst of March 2011's "Arab Spring" and Libyan uprising. It would have been good to see Lula's Brazil considered alongside Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, and some discussion about the extent to which the muscular, radical-Keynesian social democracy advocated by James K. Galbraith could fulfill these conditions. This book is nevertheless a very important contribution to environmental politics, and a powerful antidote to the illusions of moralistic green activists and opportunistic green capitalists alike.
Dick
Pountain, March 2011
