On Eco-Revolutionary Prudence: Capitalism, Communism, and the Precautionary Principle

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Notes

1 “Capitalism's Burning House: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster,” WIN Magazine, Winter 2009, https://www.warresisters.org/win/win-winter-2009/capitalism%E2%80%99s-burning-house-interview-john-bellamy-foster.

2 Ward Churchill, Struggle for the Land (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993), 451.

3 John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).

For the encroachment on planetary limits (and here climate change is only the tip of the iceberg) see Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature, Vol. 461, No. 24, September 2009, 472–475; Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries,” Science, Vol. 347, No. 6223, 2015, 736–746.

4 Peter Hudis, Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013).

5 Steven R. Hickerson, “Instrumental Justice and Social Economics,” Review of Social Economy, Vol. 44, No. 3, December 1986, 268–280; see also Paul Burkett, “Instrumental Justice and Social Economics: Some Comments from a Marxian Perspective,” Review of Social Economy, Vol. 45, No. 3, December 1987, 313–324.

6 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 42–43; emphasis in original.

7 Ibid., 43.

8 Ibid., 49.

9 Ibid., 135; emphasis in original.

10 Ibid., 75; Hudis quoting Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 93.

11 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (New York: Vintage, 1976), Chapter 25.

12 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 207. Hudis's interpretation of capitalist alienation as a primary theme in Marx is closely related to the notion of capitalism's “fundamental contradiction” which was developed in my book Marx and Nature (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), Chapter 12. There, I argued that “the conflict between production for profit and production for human needs, the alienation of the conditions of production vis-à-vis the producers and their communities, and the tension between social production and private appropriation, are all equivalent expressions of capitalism's fundamental contradiction in Marx's view” (178). I went on to suggest that “Marx treats accumulation crises as one of many symptoms of capitalism's fundamental contradiction” (182; emphasis in original). By comparison, Hudis's interpretation is focused more tightly on the alienation of human activity as the system's primary contradiction; but this contrasting emphasis does not necessarily reflect a substantive disagreement.

13 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 182; emphasis in original.

14 Ibid., 208.

15 Ibid., 209.

16 Ibid., 208.

17 Ibid., 182.

18 Ibid., 41–42.

19 Ibid., 78; emphases in original. See also Alan Shandro, “Karl Marx as a Conservative Thinker,” Historical Materialism, No. 6, Summer 2000, 21–23.

20 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 80–81; emphases in original.

21 Ibid., 212–213. It is worth quoting Hudis at length on the role of revolutionary theory as pioneered by Marx: “I would argue that Marx was not interested in writing a history of social or economic development as much as detailing the process by which a new, free society is compelled to come into being. If Marx were engaged in historical analysis for the purpose of developing an empirical sociology, he would need to give as much weight to tendencies toward stability and equilibrium as to dissolution and decay. Yet Marx does not do so: his historical analyses are decidedly one-sided, insofar as they emphasize the constraints faced by social formations in the face of changing historical circumstances. He does so because his real object of analysis is not so much the past as the future. In tracing out how various formations undergo dissolution, Marx is elucidating the factors immanent in the present that point to a future state of affairs.” Ibid., 123; emphases in original.

22 Hickerson, “Instrumental Justice” (note 5); Burkett, “Instrumental Justice” (note 5).

23 Hickerson, “Instrumental Justice,” 268–269.

24 Ibid., 269.

25 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 209.

26 Ibid., 213.

27 Hickerson. “Instrumental Justice” (note 5), 275.

28 Ibid., 278.

29 Ibid., 275; emphasis added.

30 Ibid., 277–278.

31 Ibid., 278–279.

32 This is basically the interpretation of Marx's thinking offered by Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971). For a critique of Schmidt's interpretation, see Paul Burkett, “Nature in Marx Reconsidered,” Organization & Environment, Vol. 10, No. 2, June 1997, 164–183.

33 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 91.

34 Ibid., 90 (quoting from Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 1 [New York: International Publishers, 1975], 337). For further discussion of this aspect of Marx's worldview, see John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2016), 50–56.

35 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 90. Obviously, one can recognize that humanity has a unique capacity to engage in conscious socially organized productive activity, and to thereby modify the environment, without denying that other species have the same kind of capability in less developed forms. See Burkett, Marx and Nature, 28, 269.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 210; emphasis in original.

38 Ibid., 162, 168.

39 Ibid., 168. Notice that workers may experience nature as an alien, exploitative force even in cases where natural conditions are not owned by the capitalist, but are still freely appropriated as means of competitive profit-driven production. The same goes, of course, for social products, such as science, which are freely appropriated by the capitalist. For a detailed discussion of capitalist free appropriation see Burkett, Marx and Nature, 69–78.

40 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 163.

41 Ibid., 162–170; see Burkett, Marx and Nature, 79–98.

42 On the connections between capitalist alienation, value, and environmental crises, see Burkett, Marx and Nature, Chapters 5 through 10; and John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

43 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 191.

44 See Hudis's interesting discussion of energy content as a possible metric for comparing the intensities of different labors for distributive purposes in the early phase of communism (Ibid., 197).

45 Ibid., 120–121.

46 Burkett, Marx and Nature, 223–257; “Marx's Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” Monthly Review, Vol. 57, No. 5, October 2005, 34–62; Marxism and Ecological Economics (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), 301–332.

47 The need for a system-wide perspective on alienation and de-alienation is reinforced insofar as communism can ultimately only take root on the global level. On this point see Hudis, Marx's Concept, 79, 167.

48 This list reflects common usage among authors and international declarations that support the application of the Precautionary Principle to environmental decisions. See, for example, Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 270–271; Peter Montague, “The Precautionary Principle,” Rachel's Environment and Health News, No. 586, February 18, 1998; United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (reaffirming Stockholm statement of June 1972) (New York: United Nations, June 1992); http://www.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163; Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Montreal, January 29, 2000. (New York: United Nations, 2000); Robert Andorno, “The Precautionary Principle: A New Legal Standard for a Technological Age,” Journal of International Biotechnology Law, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2004, 11–19; Marco Martuzzi and Joel A. Tickner, editors, The Precautionary Principle: Protecting Public Health, the Environment and the Future of Our Children. (Copenhagen: World Health Organization, 2004). For the best statement of feature 3 (alternatives assessment), see Mary O’Brien, Making Better Environmental Decisions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

49 Noah M. Sachs, “Rescuing the Strong Precautionary Principle from Its Critics,” University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2011, August 1, 2011, 1295; emphases in original.

50 Cass R. Sunstein, “The Paralyzing Principle,” Regulation, Winter 2002–2003, 32–37; Paolo F. Ricci et al., “Precautionary Uncertainty and Causation in Environmental Decisions,” Environment International, Vol. 29, No. 1, April 2003, 1–19; Gregory N. Mandel and James Thuo Gathii, “Cost-Benefit Analysis Versus the Precautionary Principle,” University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2006, No. 5, September 14, 2006, 1037–1080; Gary Marchant et al., “Impact of the Precautionary Principle on Feeding Current and Future Generations,” CAST (Committee for Agricultural Science and Technology) Issue Paper, No. 52, June 2013; Tracey Brown, “The Precautionary Principle is a Blunt Instrument,” The Guardian, July 9, 2013; https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2013/jul/09/precautionary-principle-blunt-instrument.

51 Sachs, to his credit, adds to the strong Precautionary Principle Proper the auxiliary stipulation that “the burden of overcoming the presumption in favor of regulation lies with the proponent of the risk-creating activity or product” – basically equivalent to our feature (2). Sachs, “Rescuing the Strong Precautionary Principle” (note 49), 1295.

52 The guideline “first do no harm” is the primary theme in Otis Webb Brawley's monumental critique of establishment medical practices in the United States. See How We Do Harm (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2011).

53 For an attempt to root the Precautionary Principle Proper in the thinking of Aristotle, see Andorno, “The Precautionary Principle” (note 48), 11.

54 “The Constitution of the Iroquois Nations,” prepared by Gerald Murphy, Portland State University (National Public Telecomputing Network, October 2001), http://www.iroquoisdemocracy.pdx.edu/html/greatlaw.html. On common property systems more generally, see Burkett, Marx and Nature, 246–248; “Marx's Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” 46–47; Marxism and Ecological Economics, 310–319.

55 World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, The Precautionary Principle (Paris: UNESCO, 2005), 9; Andrew Jordan and Timothy O’Riordan, “The Precautionary Principle: A Legal and Policy History,” in Martuzzi and Tickner, eds., The Precautionary Principle, 33. Dating the principle to the 1970s ignores among other things its prominence in the work of Rachel Carson on the need to regulate the introduction of pesticides. See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Paul Brooks, The House of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 305 and passim.

56 Kenneth T. Arrow and Anthony C. Fisher, “Environmental Preservation, Uncertainty, and Irreversibility,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 88, No 2, May 1974; Richard T. Woodward and Richard C. Bishop, “How to Decide When Experts Disagree,” Land Economics, Vol. 72, No. 4, November 1997, 492–507; Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, Priceless (New York: New Press, 2004), 224–229.

57 For useful examples, see Sachs, “Rescuing the Strong Precautionary Principle” (note 49), 1307–1311.

58 Sunstein, “The Paralyzing Principle” (note 50).

59 This is clear from even the simplified hypothetical examples outlined by the studies cited in note 56 above.

60 Montague, “The Precautionary Principle” (note 48); Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 381.

61 On the likely development of eco-revolution from an initial democratic phase to an openly eco-communist or eco-socialist phase, see John Bellamy Foster, “Marxism and Ecology,” Great Transition Initiative, October 2015, www.greattransition.org/publication/marxism-and-ecology. On indigenous communities fighting for sustainable communal alternatives to capitalism, and employing advanced scientific knowledge, see David Barkin, “Commentary on ‘Marxism and Ecology’,” Great Transition Initiative, October 2015, http://www.greattransition.org/commentary/david-barkin-marxism-and-ecology-john-bellamy-foster.

62 Hudis, Marx's Concept, 214–215; emphases in original.