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ABSTRACT
Natural scientists have pointed to the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, with the precise dating not yet decided, but often traced to the Great Acceleration of the human impact on the environment since 1945. Thus understood, the Anthropocene largely coincides with the rise of the modern environmental movement and corresponds to the age of planetary crisis. This paper looks at the evolution of Marxian and left contributions to environmental thought during this period. Although Marx’s ecological materialism is now widely recognized, with the rediscovery of his theory of metabolic rift, the debate has recently shifted to ecological dialectics, including dualism, monism, totality, and mediation, generating a conflict between ecological Marxism and radical ecological monism. It is argued here that only an ecological Marxism, rooted in a materialist dialectic of nature and society, is able to engage effectively with the Great Climacteric that increasingly governs our times.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Ian Angus, Jordan Fox Besek, Paul Burkett, Brett Clark, Riley Dunlap, Joseph Fracchia, Hannah Holleman, R. Jamil Jonna, John Mage, Andreas Malm, Robert W. McChesney, Carrie Ann Naumoff, Kohei Saito, Ryan Wishart, and Richard York for various comments and/or discussions related to ideas conveyed in this article at the time it was being written. The views presented here do not necessarily conform to those of any of these individuals. The author takes sole responsibility for the contents of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
John Bellamy Foster is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, and Editor of Monthly Review (New York). His books include The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (1986, 2014), The Vulnerable Planet (1994), Marx’s Ecology (2000), Ecology against Capitalism (2002), Naked Imperialism (2006), The Critique of Intelligent Design (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2008), The Ecological Revolution (2009), The Great Financial Crisis (with Fred Magdoff, 2009), The Ecological Rift (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010), What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism (with Fred Magdoff, 2011), and The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney, 2012)—all published by Monthly Review Press; and Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett, 2016)—published by Brill.
Notes
1 Schellnhuber was referring to Earth system analysis, rather than the Anthropocene. Yet, the two today are inextricably related, and the phrase is therefore equally applicable to the concept of the Anthropocene.
2 It was in Shantser’s (Citation1973) The Great Soviet Encyclopedia article that Pavlov’s concept of the Anthropocene first appeared in English.
3 For a long-term perspective on the notion of a geological “golden spike” separating each major period of Earth geohistory, see Rudwick (Citation2005, 21–22).
4 On Weber's environmental views and their relation to the Frankfurt School, see Foster and Holleman (Citation2012).
5 The reference to a “modern synthesis” is meant to refer back to the synthesis of Darwinism with Mendelian genetics that occurred in the 1930s, in which geneticists like Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane reached back to Darwin's original doctrines and demonstrated that the new knowledge did not displace the theory of natural selection, but gave it a new complexity and importance, bringing out more fully the significance of Darwin's classical theory for the present. An analogous process is occurring with respect to Marx and ecology today.
6 None of the previous forms of left ecological thought have entirely gone away. The Frankfurt School's negative dialectic of the domination of nature—in which Horkheimer opined that “men cannot utilize their power over nature for the rational organization of the earth but rather must yield themselves to blind individual and national egoism under the compulsion of circumstances and of inescapable manipulation”—naturally persists in some quarters on the left, leading to a grim negativity (quoted in Leiss Citation1974, 154). Criticizing this view in his 2004 book Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, Changing Ourselves, Dickens (Citation2004, 10; also Jay Citation1985, 14–61) characterized Horkheimer and Adorno's “fearsome anti-Enlightenment critique” as sheer “pessimism.” This fearsome critique had a negative effect on the interpretation of Marx that still persists in some quarters. Thus first-stage ecosocialism—which draws much of its motivation from the attempt to disgorge itself of a strong relation to Marxism—has gained a second life in recent years in its repeated attempts to demonstrate a “fundamental flaw” in Marx's ecology (e.g. Tanuro Citation2013, 136–43). For a critique of this tendency see Foster and Burkett (Citation2016, 15–50).
7 It is noteworthy that Smith, who continued to write on the production of nature up to 2008, ignored works such as Burkett Citation2014 (originally published in 1999), Foster (Citation2000), and Burkett (Citation2006), while Castree (Citation2000) mentions Burkett only slightly. The implicit assumption is that Schmidt's (Citation1971) interpretation of Marx on nature, which has been largely abandoned elsewhere, remains valid.
8 The struggle over Cartesian dualism is a long-standing one in philosophy. See Lovejoy (Citation1930). It is only recently that this has been directed against Marx and Marxism. Marx's philosophical outlook, embodying a dialectical critical realism/materialism, is hardly a likely target for those seeking to attack dogmatically dualist views. On Marx's epistemology and its relation to critical realism see Bhaskar (Citation1983).
9 The tendency to deny natural-physical and environmental processes in social analysis, and their theoretical absorption within the social, was decried by Dunlap and Martin (Citation1983, 204) more than three decades ago as the rise of a “new brand of determinism—socio-cultural determinism.”
10 Bertell Ollman's influential work (Citation1976, Citation1993), interpreting Marx's dialectics in terms of “the philosophy of internal relations,” accounts, in part, for this exclusive emphasis on internal relations. Drawing on the metaphysical and idealist traditions of Leibniz, in particular, as well as Spinoza, Hegel, and Whitehead, together with the early Marxist Joseph Dietzgen (Citation1906, Citation1908), Ollman (Citation1993, 35) writes that,
In the history of ideas, the view that we have been developing is known as the philosophy of internal relations. Marx's immediate philosophical influences in this regard were Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel. . . . What all had in common is the belief that the relations that come together to make up the whole get expressed in what are taken to be its parts. Each part is viewed as incorporating in what it is all its relations with other parts up to and including everything that comes into the whole.
11 This same phrase of ecology as “the new opium of the masses” is used in a positive way as well in Badiou (Citation2008) and Swyngedouw (Citation2010, 304).
12 Despite his frequent anti-ecological and even anti-nature statements, Žižek, who is hardly known for his consistency, is capable in certain contexts of rational discussion of the ecological crisis and its relation to capitalism (Žižek Citation2010, 327–36).
13 Vogel's strong anthropocentrism is even more clearly evident in the title to his most recent work, Thinking like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Vogel Citation2015).
14 Marx's concept of the “universal metabolism of nature” clearly refutes Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro's (Citation2014, 141) objection to Marx's use of metabolism on the grounds that it “excludes the importance of material exchanges not involving people.”
15 In addressing Carl Fraas's discussion of desertification in pre-capitalist class society, Marx made it clear that he saw this as a problem that only worsened globally under historical capitalism—a view based on his theory of metabolic rift (see Saito Citation2016, 34–39). The only real answer to such contradictions was a society of associated producers that rationally regulated the social metabolism between human beings and nature. He therefore characterized this growing ecological contradiction of civilization as an “unconscious socialist tendency.” The significance of Marx's statement here was to be emphasized in late Soviet ecology. Thus the geophysicist and climatologist (a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet) E. K. Fedorov (Citation1972, 146–47) used Marx's argument here to explain why today's environmental scientists and activists “display (possibly unconsciously) certain ‘socialist tendencies.’”
16 In Fredric Jameson's (Citation2004, xxii) interpretation of Sartre's position, Sartre was arguing for a “dualism which functions as a moment in the reestablishment of monism proper.”
17 Sartre (Citation2004, 161–65) did introduce an intriguing environmental discussion at one point in his treatment of “counter-finality,” or “matter as inverted practice,” where he employed the example of peasant deforestation in China, leading to the counter-finality of floods, engendering an organized, collective response on the part of society.
18 Monism of any variety raises serious philosophical objections. See, for example, James (Citation1955, 89–108), Joad (Citation1936, 428–31), and Bhaskar (Citation1993, 354–65).
19 Moore (Citation2014, 11) begins with the sentence: “Metabolism is a seductive metaphor.” It is in these terms that he then constructs his notion of a “singular metabolism”—itself defined in terms of the metaphor of “the web of life” (Moore Citation2014, 12). This essentially idealist approach contrasts with Marx's materialist dialectic, in which metabolism was seen not as a mere metaphor but as reflecting a natural-physical process, related to material reproduction. Moore's approach with its idealist emphasis, thus departs sharply from Marx's materialism with its deep links to physical science.
20 The concepts of totality and mediation, as Lukács above all taught, are central to the Marxian dialectic, and transcend simple notions of monism and dualism. See Mészáros (Citation1972).
21 Moore's main target in this respect is Foster, Clark and York (Citation2010). On Marx's use of the wider conceptual framework of social metabolism, the universal metabolism of nature, and the metabolic rift, see Foster (Citation2013, Citation2015c).
22 Bruno Latour and Noel Castree, with their philosophies of bundling, are presented by Moore as constituting the most advanced forms of so-called “relational critiques of dualism” (see Moore Citation2014, 14, 18). The basis of Latour's analysis in “neutral monism” is noted by Morelle (Citation2012, 255). The concept of bundling used by Latour and other actor-network theorists, and adopted by Moore as a way of transcending dualism, has of course a long history in theories of “neutral monism,” as advocated by thinkers such as Bertrand Russell (Citation1966, 131–46). See also Maclean (Citation2014, 119–31), and Stubenberg (Citation2014). In Russell's thought, the neutral monist concept of the bundling of particularities was introduced as a way of attacking dualism, while excluding dialectics (to which Russell was violently opposed). In his earlier work, Russell (Citation1992, iv–5, 10, 382–83) had himself developed a powerful critique of monism, which, however, only led to his subsequent adoption of neutral monism as he sought to counter Marxian theory in the 1930s. In Russell's version of neutral monism, reality consisted of what we now call bundled entities which in large part obviated the need for the distinctions between mind and matter.
23 For Bhaskar (Citation1993, 205, 397), the “anthropic fallacy,” whereby being is reduced to human being, is frequently concealed behind the “epistemic fallacy,” whereby being is reduced to knowledge.
24 Smith criticized the “left romancing of nature,” questioning in this regard both ecofeminism and indigenous peoples for their conceptions of “the earth mother” (Citation1998, 279–80).
25 Castree refers again and again in his various writings to Smith's vulnerability to the interpretation of hyper-social constructionism. He thus raises it as a fundamental issue that needs to be fixed—in Castree's case by providing a more Latourian version of Smith's production of nature perspective. Nevertheless, Castree has recently suggested that, despite appearances to the contrary, he doesn’t think that it was Smith's real intention to put forward a hyper-constructionist argument (Castree Citation2015a, 286). But with all the evidence that Castree has himself provided on Smith's tendencies on this score, coupled with his own predilections toward a strong social constructionism, this weak attempt to defend Smith in this respect has a very hollow ring to it. For example, Castree resorts to arguing that Smith was “anthropomorphic without being anthropocentric and Promethean” (Citation2001, 205; emphasis in original).
26 Castree is somewhat ambivalent about this Latourian critique of Smith, despite putting this forward as a rational critique, and giving it more than a little credence. He suggests in the end, however, that it is overdrawn, and there is more to say in Smith's favor. Yet, Castree's own disquiet in this respect, in which he signals that Smith's position has major weaknesses, has led him to seek a synthesis between the Smithian production of nature and the Latourian bundled hybrids.
27 On the role of Leibniz in Latour's thought, see McGee (Citation2014, 16–17, 42, 56, 83, 85–86).
28 The same favorable position towards Smuts as representing ecological holism was advanced by Merchant (Citation1980, 252, 292–93), who also criticized Tansley as mechanistic.
29 For an opposing interpretation on Marx and Engels and the intrinsic value of nature, see Foster and Burkett (Citation2016, 34–56).
30 Castree has adopted a more realistic approach to climate change and other environmental changes in some of his recent work, where he is no longer simply dismissive of thinkers such as Naomi Klein (see Castree Citation2015b). Nevertheless, he characteristically attributes society's failure to address global environmental problems to “dualism” rather than to capitalism itself, thereby excluding the reality of alienation.
31 The general views of many of these thinkers (though not their ecological analyses) are treated in Sheehan (Citation1985).