Richard Hebbert
Introduction
Of all the issues currently facing humanity, there is none so existential as the climate and environmental crisis. Its effects are everywhere; drought, flooding, crop failure, soil erosion, forest despoliation, food and water shortages, economic dislocation, surges in food prices and forced migration. Yet, despite warnings over decades, the world’s political, economic and business leaders have consistently failed to take action sufficient to adapt to or mitigate the environmental changes which now present a major threat to life on earth as we know it.
It is not hard, for those who care to look, to see why there is such a lack of will to tackle the issue. Since the 18th and early to mid-19th centuries’ explosion of industrialisation, the developed world has become addicted to economic growth and the capitalist demand for profit holds the world in what John Bellamy Foster called the capitalist system’s “…destructive creativity”, adding, “Capital’s endless pursuit of new outlets for class-based accumulation requires for its continuation the destruction of both pre-existing natural conditions and previous social relations.1 To change from a full-on drive for profit to an economic model which might question the need for incessant growth, and work to mitigate the effects of production on the environment, requires change of a magnitude which poses a threat to ‘business as usual’ and so also to profit.
The effects of environmental and climate change are felt by everyone – but not equally. Generally, the Global North, having been most responsible for the industrialisation which has led to environmental degradation, feels the effects less than the countries of the Global South. The latter have suffered centuries of capitalist, colonialist and imperialist exploitation, and their later and poorer development is the result of the distortion of agricultural production, the exhaustion and theft of raw materials, the exploitation of cheap labour and the structuring of their economies in the interests of Western capital. This role of colonialism in climate change was acknowledged in the sixth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2022.2
As such, the environment is a profoundly political issue – a class issue – and yet many see climate and environmental action as in some way beyond politics, as something which transcends political analysis because the survival of the planet is too important to be left to politicians. There may be arguments, for example in Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell’s The Climate Majority3,to say that, in order to raise mass consciousness and stimulate mass action, political differences should be set to one side; but any serious analysis of ‘how we got here’ must concern itself with the political and productive causes of the current crisis.
Communists naturally look for a Marxist analysis of environmental change. This article attempts to trace a line of Marxist ecology and to suggest where such analysis can be found, from Marx and Engels’ acknowledgement of the effect on nature of industrialised production to current ideas on de-growth communism and ecological civilisation. It doesn’t claim to be comprehensive, but looks at some of the key Marxist ecological writers through whose work that line can be traced.
The Marxist ecologist John Bellamy Foster wrote in 2010;
“It is impossible to exaggerate the environmental problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Available evidence now strongly suggests that, under a regime of ‘business as usual’ with no substantial lessening of the drivers of environmental destruction, we could be facing, within a decade or so, a major ‘tipping point’ leading to irreversible and catastrophic climate change…The moment of truth for the earth and human civilisation has arrived.”4
Marx and Engels: ecologist or productivist?
For many years it was the opinion of many political/environmental commentators – including some Marxists – that Marx had, at best, only marginal insight into environmental questions. The focus of his work was on unremitting industrialisation and the social and political conditions which flowed from that; his political outlook was ‘productivist’ or ‘promethean’. Indeed some argue that Marx couldn’t have had ecological insight because, at the time he was writing, ecology was not then an issue. The Communist Manifesto talked about the proletariat using its supremacy to control the means of production in order to “increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”5
Fingers are also pointed at Engels who in his Dialectics of Nature wrote, “in short, the animal merely uses his environment … man, by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it”,6 but in fact both Marx’s and Engels’ writings display considerably more ecological insight than they were, for many years, given credit for.
At the time Marx and Engels were writing The Communist Manifesto, Marx was considerably influenced by Justin von Liebig. Writing in 1840-62, von Liebig claimed that British agriculture amounted to a “robbery system” requiring the transportation over long distances of food and fibre from the country to the cities, with no recirculation of soil nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The result was that Britain, along with other imperialist nations, simply stole the resources of other countries, for example, guano from Latin America and, most egregiously, raking through the former Napoleonic War battlefields for the bones of the dead.7 It is no surprise then that we find in The Communist Manifesto, where it lists measures which the proletariat must take in order to revolutionise the modes of production, “…the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.”8
In Capital Marxwent on to develop his theory of ‘metabolic rift’ – the idea that capitalism, by its drive for profit through the industrialisation of production, had created an irreparable rift between human beings and the earth. Marx argued that the growth of industrialised production, large-scale agriculture and long distance trade extended the rift and that all of this was an expression of an antagonistic relationship between town and country under capitalism. A systematic restoration of that metabolism was required as a “regulative law of social production”, along with a demand for a rational regulation of the metabolic relationship between human beings and the earth pointing beyond capitalist society to socialism and communism.9
Despite the earlier quote, Engels’ writing also shows ecological insight – not least in Dialectics of Nature. Indeed almost immediately after talking of how man ‘masters’ nature, he goes on to say;
“Let us not, however flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expect, but in the second and third places it has quite different and unforeseen effects which often cancel the first.”6
He talks of how nothing in nature takes place in isolation and that everything affects and is affected by everything else. Engels also makes the link between humanity’s productive activity and its effect on nature:
“… we are getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise and hence control, even the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities.”10
Finally, Engels directly addresses the link between profit and environmental degradation. The industrial capitalist, he says, is only concerned with production and exchange for immediate profit and cares little or nothing for the natural effects of the production required to generate the profit. He cites Spanish planters in Cuba who burn down forests in the production of coffee exposing the soil to be washed away by tropical rainfall.11
The basis for Marxist analysis is of course historical materialism and dialectics, where the dialectic is drawn from the historicity of material conditions. There has been debate as to whether dialectics can be applied to nature – particularly in relation to the works of Engels. We will see this later when looking at the work of Gyorgy Lukacs. The debate centres on whether dialectics applies to social conditions, but not to nature because nature stands apart from human practice. Marx’s work however is not confined to society alone, but very clearly considers the interaction (the metabolism) between society and nature and, in considering the effects of the capitalist mode of production, sees both the ‘rift’ – the damage caused to nature and the restrictions nature is capable of imposing on production.
In the same way, Engels too demonstrably considers the relationship between humankind and nature – a dialectics of nature and society as can be seen from the passages quoted above from Dialectics of Nature.
Some modern Marxist ecology writers, most notably Kohei Saito, propose an idea of ‘de-growth communism’. Saito claims that recent examination of Marx’s writings on the natural sciences shows that, in later life, Marx himself proposed some ideas for future de-growth economic models. The idea has been the subject of debate as we shall see when we return to this later on.
Clearly both Marx and Engels saw that the capitalist drive for profit through increased production had an effect on nature, they were not however the only ones looking at the relationship between industrialised production and natural resources. In 1865 William Jevons provided a pioneering insight into ecological economics, in his book The Coal Question – a work concerned with the potential economic consequences of a shift from mining cheap coal to more expensive deep seam mining.12 In what became known as the ‘Jevons Paradox’ he explained that increased efficiency in using a natural resource did not, as might have been expected, mean that less of the resource would be required, rather that the increased efficiency generated a demand to increase productivity requiring more, not less, resource – so increased efficiency leads to increased demand for resources and increased effect on the natural world from their use.
Of course, Marx and Engels were writing in a time of industrial expansion, the shift from town to country, increased productivity and the ascendency of capital, but there is a clear thread of ecology where both Marx and Engels addressed their minds to the effects on nature of the huge changes in agriculture and industry. Marx’s theory of metabolism reappeared, as we shall see, in the work of later Marxist ecological writers, who were to take up the idea of a dialectical relationship between society and nature.
Beyond Marx: the late 19th and early 20th centuries
In the immediate aftermath of the publication of The Communist Manifesto, it would, of course take time for the ideas of its writers to filter through and generate response; however, there were those whose scientific work reflected some of the ideas that Marx and Engels had articulated on the relationship between humanity and the earth.
E Ray Lankester and Arthur Tansley, both socialists (though not Marxists), produced work which addressed the relationship between historical materialism and materialist ecology. Lankester was a zoologist and biologist, lecturing at University College London and Oxford, he was a friend of Marx and was later to attend Marx’s funeral. Lankester was a Darwinian scientist and so a materialist and his work was concerned with degeneration, the idea that evolution did not simply go forward. He was very much concerned with ecology and wrote essays on species extinction due to the influence of human endeavour, and pollution in London.13
Arthur Tansley was a plant ecologist, much influenced by Lankester, a socialist and materialist. He was the architect of the idea of ecosystem and, in later life, was concerned with conservation, formulating policy on nature reserves. Tansley wrote against ideas of evolutionary ecology as being non-materialist.
For a continuation of Marxist thought in the early twentieth century we need look no further than Rosa Luxemburg and Accumulation of Capital. In her work Luxemburg attempts to bring together ecology and political economy and we see there some ideas we have seen elsewhere – the colonial robbery of important means of production and the effects of capitalist expansion, not just on labour, but also on nature. She saw that the unrestricted use of natural resources in capitalist production caused problems in nature, but acknowledged that capital would accept no limits on its expansion:
“… the very condition of continuous improvements in labour productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of surplus value, is unrestricted utilisation of all substances and facilities of nature and soil. To tolerate any restriction in this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole mode of existence.”14
Luxemburg goes on to develop an idea of globalisation and colonialism in the pursuit of the means of production. She says that capital expansion would be restricted if it were only to rely on the resources of its own part of the world and so capital is impelled to look abroad where, for the means of production and, for the purposes of exploitation it “ransacks the whole world, it procures the means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary, by force .…”15
Luxemburg argues here against Marx, who she claims saw English capitalism as unique, and her argument is that the metabolism is the same wherever capital seeks to accumulate:
“Accumulation is more than an internal relation between the branches of the capitalist economy; it is primarily a relationship between capital and a non-capitalist environment.”16
Finally, Luxemburg suggests that there might be a limit to capital where it depends on an unequal exchange with the non-capital system of the country from which it plunders labour and resources. Capital seeks to expand over the whole of the earth and will not tolerate any other system of political economy, and yet it drives “the non-capitalist” to exhaustion, which leaves the non-capital country unable to be capitalist. The progressive disintegration of non-capitalist organisations makes the accumulation of capital possible; however,
“As soon as this final result is achieved – in theory of course because it can never actually happen – accumulation must come to a stop.”17
Of course, over the period in which Rosa Luxemburg was writing, the Bolshevik revolution took place in Russia led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. So what, if anything, did Lenin and the Soviet Union have to say on ecology and the environment?
In truth Marxian thought on the natural consequences of production and accumulation were lost in the need to produce in order to modernise the newly-created nation. It may be that this perception of communism’s productive drive is responsible for the view that Marxism had little to say about the natural world, but there were some green shoots amongst the red.
Karl Kautsky wrote in his The Agrarian Question about the exploitation of the country by the town and the impoverishment of the land of its nutrients;18 and Nikolai Bukharin wrote about ecology in a chapter entitled ‘The Equilibrium Between Society and Nature’ in his book Historical Materialism. In it Bukharin adopts Marx’s use of the term “metabolism” in speaking of the transfer from nature to society and the consequences if the balance is wrong.19
As for Lenin himself, like Marx before him he is predominantly thought of as a productivist, forever associated with Soviet industrialisation, whereas in fact he had some insight into the balance of humankind and nature and had a personal role in promoting conservation. In 1917 the Soviet government issued the decree, ‘On Land’, which declared all forests, waters and minerals to be the property of the state; and in reaction to the destruction of forests a further decree, ‘On Forests’, was followed by a meeting chaired by Lenin which divided ‘Forests’ into zones of exploitable forests and protected ones, the purpose being to control erosion, protect water basins and the preservation of ‘monuments of nature’.20
Following discussions with agronomist Nikolai Podiaposki and others such as VI Vernadsky, Lenin approved the creation of zapovedniki – nature preserves which were intended for ecological study and as ecological havens for all species of flora and which would preserve a “natural equilibrium, crucial to nature”.
After Lenin’s death productivity became the priority for the USSR under Stalin, which, while we might regret the abandonment of ecological endeavour, was itself a product of the material conditions in the Soviet Union and elsewhere at the time (the same could be said for Mao’s China).
But important work was being done, as Bellamy Foster has outlined:21 in the 1940s Vladimir Nikolaevitch Sukachev developed a concept of biogeocoenosis – a rival to Tansley’s theory of ecosystem − and from the 1960s onwards the Soviet Union saw some significant advances in scientific thinking about the relationship between humanity and nature. These advances were nowhere more apparent than in climatology, in the work of EK Federov and Mikhail Ivanovich Budyko in relation to the Arctic and the melting sea ice and Greenland ice sheet. Federov’s 1972 book Man and Nature addressed the issue of natural resource limits to economic growth, in particular the challenge represented by climate change. Soviet climatologists, primarily based on the work of Budyko and GS Golytsin, first developed the nuclear winter theory; and Budyko, in his 1980 book, Global Ecology, indicated that all economic analysis was modelled on metabolism, “the process of material exchange between life and environment.”
The advances were not only scientific, but also philosophical. There were important contributions in the 1970s and 80s from Ivan T Frolov who, Bellamy Foster says, began once again to place “ecological and humanistic values into dialectical materialism”; and from PG Oldak, who, at the same time was calling for the replacement of economic growth as the basis of economic calculations by an idea of “gross social wealth”.
Bellamy Foster goes so far as to claim that:
“It was in the Soviet Union, based on the theories of the biosphere and biogeocoenosis, that the analysis of accelerated climate change began, and it was in Moscow and Leningrad, not Washington and New York, that the first warnings of runaway global warming and the theory of nuclear winter emanated.”
The advent of environmentalism: the mid to late twentieth century
Many writers on ecology and the environment see the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as the start of a modern environmentalist movement. Carson’s book was concerned with the effects on the environment of the widespread practice in the United States of spraying crops with pesticide; and although it would be false to claim that Carson was successful in that campaign, we can say that her work (not just Silent Spring) represented an important trigger for the articulation of growing concern about the effects of humankind’s activities – including the dangers of the testing and spread of nuclear weapons – on nature.
Carson was not a Marxist, but she did show some insight into the relationship between accumulative capital and ecological degradation, and also into the hegemony which suppresses dissent. In Silent Spring she points to “an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at any cost is seldom challenged”; and she goes on to say that:
“When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilising pills of half truth.”22
In another work she claims that environmental decline is caused by “the gods of profit and production.”23
It is worth diverting for a moment to pick up on Carson’s comment about “tranquilising pills of half truth”. It raises the issue of the suppression of dissent by the cultural hegemony of the ruling class, in a clear example of Gramsci’s theory. In the mid-twenty-first century, we can see the same thing happening: what Robert Bolt, in his play A Man for All Seasons, called “the canvas and the rigging of the law”, is used as an anti-dissent tool (the excessive sentences given to Just Stop Oil and other protestors) and the media are used to stir up anti-environmentalist sentiment, for example in working to reduce support for net zero.
For Marxist ecology in the mid-twentieth century we turn to the work of György Lukács. In his History of Class Consciousness there are three significant ideas on Marxism and nature. Firstly, in a footnote,Lukács questions the place of using dialectics in the consideration of nature, arguing that the crucial determinants of dialectics – the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice and the “historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought etc” − do not feature in the knowledge of nature.24 The result of this is that dialectics can only be used in the consideration of social issues. So, specifically Lukacs criticised Engels’ dialectics of nature.
The natural result of this was that there were two methods; one for natural science and one for social analysis – a dualism which was opposed by other Marxist thinkers. They argued that this dualism was incompatible with Marxian materialism and that its effect was to allow Marxism to avoid the question of nature where any concept of ‘labour’ was absent, and it allowed Western Marxism to concentrate on analysis of society. Lukács was later to alter his view on the issue in his later work Tailism and the Dialectic.
Lukács’ second idea was to extend the theory of metabolism. He argued that knowledge of nature is not only materially but also socially and historically mediated, ie that there is a social context arising from capitalist society, which forms the basis of the metabolism between humanity and nature which underpins the material basis of natural science.
Thirdly, there is a need to consider how nature is mediated by society − social relations organise the metabolism between humans and nature. Under the capitalist mode of production the metabolism is set by capital’s drive for profit; and, as we saw earlier in Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the limits of capitalism, capital seeks to expand over the whole of the earth and will not tolerate any other system of political economy. In so doing, it exhausts nature which becomes a tool of capital without any acknowledgement of its own purpose. This contradiction leads to crisis – which the world is now experiencing increasingly day by day.25
Another Hungarian Marxist writing on ecology in the the twentieth century was István Meszaros. In the 1970s, he had discussed environmental issues, warning of the nuclear threat and ecological destruction under capitalism. He wrote:
“Another basic contradiction of the capitalist system of control is that it cannot separate ‘advance’ from destruction nor ‘progress’ from waste – however catastrophic the results.”26
In his two main works, Philosophy, Ideology and Social Science (1986) and Beyond Capital (1995), Mészáros noted that the earth is finite and so there are natural limits to capitalist accumulation – but that capital is unable to acknowledge this nor to limit itself. He used the Marxian idea of metabolism to analyse the degradation and destruction of nature by capital. Capital is incapable of distinguishing “natural necessity” – what is actually required as the means of production – from its own historical requirements. Natural necessity is limited by “universal metabolism”, but capital behaves as if it can go beyond these natural limits, possibly with the help of science and technology, in order to extract further value; and the result is damage to the environment and the exhaustion of resources.
In Beyond Capital and The Nature of Social Control (2014), Meszaros, following Lukács, went on to look at “social metabolism” (a term used by Marx) as a way of analysis to allow reorganisation of the metabolism between man and nature. He says that man can reflect and adapt, but if we ignore the limits of nature as a material condition in production, the result is ecological contradictions such as pollution, resource scarcity and exhaustion:
“Capital’s limits can no longer be conceptualised as merely the material obstacles to a greater increase in productivity and social wealth and so a brake on development, but as a direct challenge to the very survival of mankind.”27
By the end of the twentieth century few could doubt that the environment was in a rapidly escalating crisis. Warnings as to the effects of the unrestricted use of fossils fuels were made to the US government as long ago as 1972;28 however, it was evidence in the 1980s and 90s of the damage to the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbons which raised mass consciousness that there was a growing threat to the environment from the activities of humans. But raising general awareness of the threat to the planet raised consciousness of another threat – that to the profits of the polluters; and so the battle lines were drawn for the twenty-first century struggle between those seeking to rescue the environment and those in whose interests it is to carry on with what became known as ‘business as usual’.
The race against time: the twenty-first century fight to save the Earth
The fight in the twenty-first century to save the planet is framed by ever more pessimistic global warnings (for example, the reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and, in the UK the Climate Change Committee) as to the what will happen if we continue to do too little to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. Alongside that we can see on a daily basis the effects of global inaction; drought, wildfires, floods, winds, crop failure, food chain disruption, water shortage and forced migration. We can also see the inequality of environmental damage, where these effects are felt predominantly in the Global South − in areas of the world which have contributed least to the causes of environmental breakdown.
The task of modern Marxist ecology is to look beyond ‘business as usual’ to how to organise a new metabolism between humankind and nature which might mitigate or even reverse the damage done to the Earth by the productive forces of capitalist accumulation. We will look at the ideas of four Marxist ecologists writing at the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century: James O’Connor, Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito. All of these writers sought to re-establish Marxist ecology’s contribution to the discourse around accelerating climate and environmental change and to link Marxist thought to the current crisis.
In 1991 James O’Connor introduced his theory of the “second contradiction” of capitalism. His argument was that the first contradiction arose from the juxtaposition of the exponential increase of capitalist productivity and profit against the poverty of the proletariat, leading to overproduction and crisis in the capitalist system. He went on to say that there was a second contradiction which arises from the relationship between capitalist production and nature where, as production increases, the resources of nature become exhausted leading to rises in the cost of materials, energy and labour, resulting in a decline in the rate of profit and capital accumulation is thrown into crisis.29
There was some criticism of the theory – not least from Paul Burkett – which argued that O’Connor underestimated the “elasticity” of capital, its ability to adapt to circumstances so as to continue to generate profit. The issue goes to the question of ‘limits to growth’, a discussion since the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972.30 Marx’s view was that contradiction “drives further technological progress and modifications in the production and circulation processes.”31
Paul Burkett in Marx and Nature (1999) was perhaps the first twenty-first century voice to attach the necessary importance to answering the often made criticism that Marx was a productivist or ‘promethean’, concerned only with the social relations of production and with little or nothing to say on the relationship between the social relations of production and nature. It was a key intervention and Burkett’s arguments would later be taken up by others as the basis for a new perspective on Marx and ecology.
Burkett made three points in defence of Marx. First, that Marx demonstrated that human wealth was not simply reducible to labour and that nature was an “inherent component of human wealth”. Secondly that Marx saw that human production – not only under capitalism – is restricted by natural, physical, biological and ecological laws and that natural laws shape the material and social forms of production and wealth. Finally, Marx was aware that the human development of productive forces had had a destructive impact on natural wealth.32
Beyond these points, Burkett claimed two major shifts in his analysis. One was that, whereas Marx’s idea of class struggle envisioned the politicisation of the proletariat, resulting in socialist revolution, Burkett saw working class struggle involving many popular movements running counter to the power of capital and that this was consistent with ecology as a key part of socialist revolution. The other was to return to Marx’s emphasis on communism as a system of human development which “recognised the centrality of struggles against private ownership and exploitation of natural conditions (‘the land’) to this revolutionary process.”33
Burkett’s lead was taken up by John Bellamy Foster over a number of publications, in which he effectively reviewed Marx’s work in its roots and its detail, to provide the evidence to sustain the idea that Marx did indeed have insight into the relationship between capitalist production and nature, and that Marxist ecology has much to say on the modern climate and ecological crisis.
Beginning by looking at the influences on Marx, such as the agrarian revolution and von Liebig’s writings, Bellamy Foster arrives at the metabolic rift as the cornerstone of Marxist ecology, and from there develops an analysis of capitalism and ecology. He concludes that there must be an eco-social revolution “which draws on alternative technologies where necessary, but emphasises the need to transform the human relation to nature and the constitution of society at its roots within the existing social relations of production.”34 This calls for a move towards “egalitarian and communal forms of production, distribution, exchange and consumption … breaking with the logic of the dominant social order.”
Bellamy Foster acknowledges that this means finding a way beyond the capitalist system of production – the present period of destructive human civilisation. Others were to come up with some ideas.
In his Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the idea of degrowth communism, Kohei Saito takes up the twenty-first century analysis of Marxism and ecology. He says that the climate and environmental crisis provides an opportunity for Marxism to demonstrate its relevance after its marginalisation following the collapse of the European socialist states, if:
“… it can contribute to enriching debates and social movements by providing not only a thorough critique of the capitalist mode of production but also a concrete vision of post-capitalist society.”35
Saito too identifies the metabolic rift theory as a vital tool for a critique of contemporary capitalism, but his main claim is that examination of Marx’s later work, specifically the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), shows that Marx’s position shifted from ‘productivist’ to de-growth. Saito argues that Marx came to consider pre-capitalist society where co-operative production and communal property gave a more sustainable metabolic relationship between man and nature. Taking this idea and the context of the current ecological crisis, Saito argues for a shift away from growth as the measure of a successful society to a model of ‘steady-state economy’ which provides and renews rather than produces and grows – degrowth communism.
However Saito’s theory has faced criticism, notably from Brian Napoletano. He makes a number of points. Firstly, that Saito fails to define what he means by growth, whereas growth may not necessarily be bad and indeed may be needed in certain conditions. Secondly, no other “current of Marxism” has ever claimed that Marx’s view of post-capitalist society was characterised by a rejection of growth – de-growth and growth are not absolutes, but strategies dependent on material conditions. Thirdly, Napoletano argues that Saito’s claim of a radical break in Marx’s thought is in effect a repudiation of historical materialism; that specific parts of Marx’s writings and thought cannot be analysed in isolation; but taken in the context of the totality of his work. Finally he has concern at the relationship between ecosocialism and Saito’s degrowth communism where he says Saito views ecosocialism as no more than a step towards de-growth, missing the “social rift in response to the metabolic rift.”36
Theory and practice
What is abundantly clear is that humanity cannot, if it wants to survive, carry on with ‘business as usual’ and that capitalism is incapable of saving us from catastrophe. Here a number of Marxist thinkers have interpreted Marxist ecology’s ideas for the world in various ways; but, as someone once said, the point, however is to change it, so finally let us consider an example of the synthesis of theory and action – modern China.
In his article The Dialectics of Ecology and Ecological Civilisation37 Chen Yiwen considers some of the criticisms of the dialectics of nature, concluding that Marx’s dialectics is not confined to social history and that Engels saw dialectics as a “practical guiding framework for understanding and transforming the world”38 and thus the two were aligned, offering a view of nature and society.
Chen then goes on to consider the dialectics of ecology, arguing that for materialist dialectics to evolve it must provide both a theoretical approach and practical wisdom to deal with the Anthropocene crisis. He says that the dialectics of ecology “aims to achieve a revolutionary reconciliation between humanity and nature, advocating for a social-ecological revolution that opposes capitalism.”39 He then sets out three tasks: to change the exploititative system of capitalism; to reconstruct the socioeconomic base towards a social and ecological transformation; and to identify the subjects of change. Class action, he says, is vital in challenging capitalist domination, while defending the environment is a key aspect of class struggle.
Chen offers “ecological civilisation” – a “state of peaceful coexistence and harmony between humanity and nature”,40 an idea which grew through ecological Marxism, most notably in socialist countries such as China. He then looks at how the theory becomes practice in China, arguing that ecological civilisation can only be achieved by socialism:
“China’s progress in ecological civilisation reflects the dialectics of ecology, as it demonstrates a socialist state’s effort to achieve the dialectical unity of environmental protection and civilisational development, as well as the organic integration of social justice and ecological sustainability.”41
Carlos Martinez provides a view of that theory in practice in modern China in his article ‘China at the Forefront of the Green Energy Revolution’.42 While China is endlessly characterised as the world’s biggest contributor of carbon emissions, Martinez points out that its per capita emissions are about half those of the United States, Canada and Australia, and that China is a developing country where its industry drive is improving living standards rather than luxury consumption. The increased focus on ecology is partly because China has experienced the effects of climate change in droughts, floods, heat waves and air pollution, but is chiefly at the initiative of the governing Communist Party of China. Martinez paints a detailed picture of China’s ambitious drive towards reducing the use of fossil fuels (peak carbon emissions by 2030 – possibly already reached – and carbon neutrality by 2060) and of how China is the world’s biggest producer of renewables, to the benefit of not only the Chinese economy, but also the global one.
Martinez makes the point that “China’s crucial advantage is its political system” – the same point made by Chen Yiwen −and he cites Bellamy Foster, as having pointed out that China is implementing ecological civilisation while the West talks about a Green New Deal, but does nothing.43 In the New Cold War and, more recently, the US trade war, China faces constant economic and other reaction from the US and its allies to suppress its economic and technological rise. But, as Martinez points out:
“All countries, and developed counties in particular, face a critical challenge of decarbonising their economies and it will be impossible to meet that challenge without intense global cooperation.”44
To which one might add that, in the bigger picture, it will be impossible to meet the challenge of the environmental and climate crisis without socialism.
Notes and References
- J Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution, Monthly Review Press, 2009, p 40.
- See H Mercer, ‘Colonialism: why leading climate scientists have finally acknowledged its link with climate change.’ in Morning Star, 28 April 2022.
- R Read, L Kavanagh and R Bell: The Climate Majority Project, London Publishing Partnership, 2023.
- Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Rift, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p 151.
- Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party Penguin, 1983, p 104 (and see D Losurdo, Western Marxism, Monthly Review Press, 2024, p 132).
- Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition From Ape to Man,in Dialectics of Nature, Wellred Books, 2022, p 182.
- J von Liebig, Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, 1840 and 1862.
- Marx and Engels, Manifesto, op cit, p 105.
- Marx, Capital, Vol 3, pp 949-50, ‘The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent’; also Capital, Vol 1, pp 637-8, ‘Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture’
- Engels, op cit, p 183.
- Ibid, p 185.
- W Jevons, The Coal Question: An inquiry concerning the progress of the nation and the probable exhaustions of our coalmines, Macmillan & Co, London/Cambridge, 1865
- See ER Lankester, Effacement of Nature by Man, and J Bellamy Foster: The Ecological Revolution, op cit,p156-7 and Marx’s Ecology, Monthly Review Press, 2000, pp 221-5.
- R Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Ch 26, Routledge Classics, 2003, pp 337-8.
- Ibid, p 338.
- Ibid, Ch 29, p 398.
- Ibid, p 397.
- Kautsky, The Agrarian Question,Vol 2, Pluto Press, 1988, pp 214-5.
- See Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution pp 90-91, and N Bukharin, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (1925), Routledge Revivals, Abingdon, 2011.
- See L Proyect, Ecology in the Former Soviet Union, 1988, at https://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/ussr_ecology.htm.
- Bellamy Foster, ‘Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis’ in Monthly Review, Vol 67, No 2, June 2015, pp 1-20, online at https://monthlyreview.org/2015/06/01/late-soviet-ecology-and-the-planetary-crisis/.
- R Carson, Silent Spring (1962), Penguin, 2000, p 29.
- Carson, Lost Woods, Canongate Canons, 2022 (ref by Bellamy Foster in The Ecological Revolution, op cit, p 68, fn 1).
- Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, Verso, 2023, p 24, fn 6.
- See discussion in K Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp 73-96.
- I Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control, Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture,1971, republished in compendium under the same title, Monthly Review Press, 2014, p 49.
- Saito, op cit, quotes this with the citation of Mészáros, 2014, p 599, but this seems to be in error due to insufficient pagination; it is more likely from Beyond Capital, NYU Press, 1995 (994 pages).
- See E Pattee, ‘The White House memo that should have changed the world’, in The Guardian, 14.6.2022.
- J O’Connor, ‘On the Two Contradictions of Capitalism’ in Capital, Nature, Socialism, Vol 2, 1991, pp 107-9.
- The Limits to Growth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,1972
- See discussion by Saito in op cit, p 126, referring to Marx in Capital, Vol 3, Penguin, 1981, p 357, and Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973,p 421.
- P Burkett, Marx and Nature,Haymarket Books, 2014 edn, p xv.
- Ibid, pp xxiv-xxvi.
- Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution, op cit,p 12.
- Saito, op cit, p 2.
- BM Napoletano, ‘Was Karl Marx a Degrowth Communist?’ in Monthly Review, Vol 76, No 2, pp 9-36 (and in particular p 24), online at https://monthlyreview.org/2024/06/01/was-karl-marx-a-degrowth-communist/.
- Chen Y, ‘The Dialectics of Ecology and Ecological Civilisation’ in Monthly Review, Vol 76, No 11, April 2025, pp 23-41, online at https://monthlyreview.org/2025/04/01/the-dialectics-of-ecology-and-ecological-civilization/.
- Ibid, p 27.
- Ibid, p 32.
- Ibid, p 34.
- Ibid, p 35.
- C Martinez, ‘China at the Forefront of the Green Revolution’ in CR113, Sept-Oct 2024, pp 12-20.
- Bellamy Foster, ‘Ecological Civilisation, Ecological Revolution’, in Monthly Review, Vol &4, No 5, October 2022, pp 1-11, particularly p 8, online at https://monthlyreview.org/2022/10/01/ecological-civilization-ecological-revolution/.
- Martinez, op cit, p 16.
Leave a reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.