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ABSTRACT
What is referred to here as the Needham thesis, after Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilization in China, points to the strong affinity in China for dialectical materialism, and through it to modern ecological science, arising from the parallel roots in organic materialism associated with ancient Epicureanism in the West (which influenced classical Marxism) and ancient Daoist and Confucian philosophies in China. This parallel development of organic materialism in Europe (where it was largely submerged in the dominant capitalist culture) and in China embodied in each case deep ecological conceptions. Hence, dialectical materialism, once it arrived in China, served to mediate between these organic traditions within the framework of modern materialist science. It was in this general context that the notion of ecological civilization, arising initially in the last years of the USSR, was carried forward to China, where it took on added meaning. China’s own peasant-based revolution has induced further ecological developments. As a result of this general convergence, and due to China’s reemergence on the world stage, ecological Marxism is now rapidly coevolving in both East and West.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This article is the presentation to the School of Marxism of Shandong University at the International Voices of Fangwu Forum, March 28, 2023.
2 The foundational role Epicurean materialism in the development was a proposition also present in most of the other major thinkers of the second foundation of Marxist thought with British red science and cultural materialism, figures such as Benjamin Farrington, Joseph Needham, J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, Christopher Caudwell, and Jack Lindsay. Other non-Marxian socialists, like Arthur G. Tansley, also drew on Epicurean materialism (see Foster Citation2020, 369, 526–630). On the “second foundation of Marxism” see Foster (Citation2023).
3 On the extraordinary impact of Epicurus and Epicureanism on Marx’s thought see Foster (Citation2000, 1–65).
4 On the problem of imperialism and Marxism in the West see Xu (Citation2021).
5 It is the inability to perceive or to take seriously the central role that Needham gave to dialectical materialism as an outgrowth of Greek organic materialism, which then had an affinity for Chinese organic naturalism such that dialectical materialism almost seemed to be the perennial Chinse philosophy now clothed in natural science, which leads historians of science to claim that Needham’s arguments “on the relations between Chinee organic materialist science and modern science” were paradoxical, lacking “a coherent philosophical explanation” (Bala Citation2020, 73; Qian Citation1985, 133).
6 This was most clearly articulated in the general introduction to Max Weber’s sociology of religion, commonly published as the introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber Citation1930, 13–31).
7 Needham used the earlier conventions on translation/transliteration from Chinese (“Tao,” “Taoists” and “wu chi erh thai chi”) since these were still the conventions at the time he was writing.
8 Follows Needham’s modification of W. E. Leonard’s 1921 English-language translation of Lucretius’s ancient text. See Lucretius (Citation1921, 85–86) and Needham (Citation1969, 91).
9 On the role of Epicureanism in the development of modern science see Floris Cohen (Citation2010) and Steven Greenblatt (Citation2012).
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Notes on contributors
John Bellamy Foster
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written extensively on political economy and the environment. Some of his works include The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (1986, 2014), The Vulnerable Planet (1994), Ecology vs. Capitalism (2002), Naked Imperialism (2006), The Ecological Revolution (2009), The Global Financial Crisis (with Fred Magdoff, 2009), The Ecological Rift (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010), What Every Enviornmentalism Needs to Know About Capitalism (with Fred Magdoff, 2011), The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney, 2012), The Robbery of Nature (with Brett Clark, 2020); The Return of Nature (winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, 2020), and Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022)—all published by Monthly Review Press. He is also the author of Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett, Brill, 2016).