Review of The Ecological Rift by John Bellamy Foster et al

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Paul Hampton

The Ecological Rift, the latest book by John Bellamy Foster and his co-thinkers Brett Clark and Richard York, epitomises the strengths and weaknesses of the Monthly Review school: “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future”, as Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto.

Some echoes of the past are done well in the book. The authors have done much to develop the metabolic approach to ecological questions pioneered by Marx. On this view, labour mediates the relationship between society and nature; capitalism (and other modern class societies such as Stalinism) generate a metabolic rift in the ecology of the earth; and metabolic restoration requires a new, more progressive socialist system. The book extends this approach to fossil fuels and climate change.

Foster, Clark and York also explain some elements of Marxist political economy clearly. For example they set out the Lauderdale paradox, namely the original distinction between use value and exchange value, or between wealth and prices under capitalism. Without this distinction, developed by Marx, it is impossible to understand the way capital treats nature and unpaid surplus labour as free gifts.

They also include a useful critique of the “treadmill of production” metaphor, which is popular among ecologists. Although the metaphor is compatible with Marx’s political economy, it “feeds into an abstract notion of growth divorced from the specific form that this takes under the regime of capital – as a system of accumulation... the treadmill of production framework is focused almost exclusively on scale and relatively little on system” (2010 p.203).

The book has an interesting discussion of Georg Lukacs, one of the founders of Western Marxism, who was principally responsible for creating the apparent chasm between nature and society within Marxist thought. Foster, Clark and York argue that the distinction was certainly made in History and Class Consciousness, but that the chasm was not entirely unbridgeable in Lukacs’ other work (2010 p.216). This seems fair enough. They are also right to assert that classical Marxism saw the nature-society relationship as continuous and coevolutionary, as argued by critical realists (and as opposed to various schools of relativism).

However their discussion of Western Marxism is unnecessarily truncated (in the case of Gramsci) or simply silent where they should elaborate. It is not clear why they would omit an account of Alfred Schmidt, whose book Marx and Nature (1962/1971) was the most developed (if ultimately flawed) treatment of the subject by anyone in the Marxist tradition for many decades. Schmidt was also the first to revive the metabolic conception, which was largely snuffed out by Stalinism at the end of the 1920s.

Second, the Foster, Clark and York list of the Marxist tradition includes well-known figures such as Marx and Engels, Morris, Bebel, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg and Bukharin – but specifically ignores others with at least as good a claim, particularly Plekhanov, Bogdanov and Trotsky. Rather they want to argue that the tradition was carried on by various Stalinists, particularly in Britain, which is utterly disingenuous.

However there are a number of arguments in the book which qualify as a menace of the future, and in some cases, more than half a menace. Firstly, there are some problems with their political economy of ecology. They write that, “Ecological degradation is influenced by the structure and dynamics of the world capitalist system, arising from the fact that a single world economy is divided into numerous nation-states, competing with one another both directly and via their corporations” (2010 p.346). This is doubly wrong: first, ecological degradation arises directly from the exploitation of waged labour by capital - competition between capitals is secondary; and second, the structure of the world economy is determined by capital relations prior to state relations, not the other way around.

Another problematic conception is their version of ecological imperialism and more specifically “ecological unequal exchange”. They quote the ideas of Stephen Bunker, who highlighted how “the extraction and export of natural resources from peripheral countries involved in the vertical flow of not only economic value, but also value in terms of energy and matter, to more developed countries” (2010 p.347). Underneath this is a mistaken division of states into centre and periphery. Of course there is extremely unequal competition between states to attract or retain a share of global surplus value to their territories. But all these states have an interest in the global exploitation of labour. Exploitation is not principally the exploitation of poor countries by rich countries, but of global labour by global capital.

Foster, Clark and York also offer a dystopian vision of the future, at least for workers in the imperialist core of capitalism. They write that “the wealthiest countries and the world as a whole must enter what classical economists called a “stationary state” (2010 p.396). By this they mean an economy that no longer grows in conventional terms (i.e. expanding GDP) or indeed in any sense (e.g. of growing use-values) at all. This seems to me to telescope unnecessarily their views on entropy and non-substitutability of natural resources. Perhaps such a demand will be necessary in the foreseeable future. But to make it now is to consign much of the world’s workers to an unacceptably low standard of living that is incompatible with socialism.

The main failing of the book is the same failing of the author’s previous work – namely on social agency. Although they note the contradictions in Venezuela’s dependency on fossil fuels and in its “oil rentier development model”, “significant attempts to alter the human metabolism with nature are being made through agrarian reform as part of the Bolivarian revolution” (2010 p.418, p.420). Apparently this is because Chavez is “developing Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution along socialist lines” and “in Venezuela, a historic transformation is under way, as a nation and its people work to transition to socialism” (2010 p.415, p.417). Similar eulogies are delivered for other bourgeois states with such as Bolivia and Ecuador, while Stalinist Cuba also gets a name check and more widely they hail the “socialist revolutions following the second world war, as exemplified by Vietnam, China and Cuba” (2010 p.440). They rightly reject the ecological strategies of the dominant powers, only to embrace those of lesser states and their ruling classes.

Perhaps sensing the inadequacy of this approach, the book throws up two other potential agents. The first, “meta-industrial labour” includes “those workers, primarily women, peasants, the indigenous, whose daily work is directed at biological growth and regeneration”. They are regarded as “rift-healing” (2010 p.414-415). The Monthly Review school long ago wrote off the proletariat of the imperialist centre as an agent for socialism, so this move so not surprising. It is also incoherent. The work of these groups, while important in their own terms, is not the central dynamic of capitalism. Without tackling the exploitation of waged labour and its connection with ecological degradation, which are the real core of the system, strategies built on the margins will remain marginal to fundamental change.

Almost as an afterthought at the end of the book, Foster, Clark and York concede that “it is conceivable that the main historic agent and initiator of a new epoch of ecological revolution is to be found in the third world masses most directly in line to be hit first by the impending disasters”. They point to workers in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta and Pearl River and Guangdong industrial region from Shenzhen to Guangzhou as the “global epicentre of a new environmental proletariat” (2010 p.440). This is far more fertile ground, since workers in China, India and elsewhere in Asia really do represent the great hope for the working class socialism in the twenty-first socialism. But these workers deserve more than recycled Stalinist and third-worldist conceptions if they are to garner anything valuable from the history of socialist ecology.

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Comments

Submitted by stuartjordan on Wed, 09/03/2011 - 10:39

“Ecological degradation is influenced by the structure and dynamics of the world capitalist system, arising from the fact that a single world economy is divided into numerous nation-states, competing with one another both directly and via their corporations”

I think Paul's criticism of this passage is only half the story. The point here is that for capitalism to remain progressive it often requires some state intervention. This is because capitalist competition prevents individual capitalists acting in their own class interests.

An example is the Factory Acts. In the 19th century for capitalism to develop and grow it required an educated population. However, progressive capitalists could not simply stop employing children and put them into schools because that would mean their more conservative competitors would be able to undercut them and put them out of business. The state had to intervene to ensure the capitalist class interest was upheld against the narrow small minded interests of individual capitalists. As a consequence success reforms were introduced that slowly got the children out of the factories and into schools.

With globalised capitalism this contradiction between private interests and capitalist class interests can only be resolved by some form of international agreement. In this case, there needs to be an agreement that everyone stops burning fossil fuels and chopping down rainforests. You can't make profit if you've destroyed the planet. However, any idividual corporation or nation state which tried to green their economy would quickly be destroyed by competition. The problem is that we don't have an international state and it doesn't look very likely that we will ever get one under capitalism. This, more than anything else, is why we should be deeply sceptical of capitalism's ability to adapt and survive the ecological crisis.

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