Paul Hampton reviews 2006, Marxism and Ecological Economics by Paul Burkett (Amsterdam: Brill)

The conventional wisdom among Greens is that, so far as environmental struggles go, the organised labour movement is only occasionally an ally and often an opponent. Most ecologists dismiss Marxism as having little to offer today’s environmental concerns such as climate change.

Paul Burkett is probably the foremost Marxist writing on the environment in recent years who, together with John Bellamy Foster, puts Marxism at the centre of ecological discussions. Burkett’s chief merit is to have nailed a series of myths about Marxism and ecology, helping to clear the ground (or perhaps clearing the air) for the emergence of a distinctive Marxist perspective on the environment.

Myth: “Marxism ignores natural limits”

Marx and Engels conceptualised the nature-society interchange in a number of ways. They regarded alienation from nature as one aspect of humanity’s wider alienation arising from class society. They also understood the estrangement of humanity from nature as part of the separation of town and country, which predated capitalism.

However in my view, the most fertile idea developed by Marx and Engels — and emphasised by Burkett, Foster and others, is the metaphor of “metabolism” to describe the relationship between human society and nature, mediated by labour.

In Capital volume 1, Marx wrote: “Labour is first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces that belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” (p.283)

He went on to describe the labour process as “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence.” (p.290)

In one of his last economic writings in 1881, some notes on a book by Adolph Wagner, Marx reiterated the importance of this conception: “I also used the word [Stoffwechsel] in the “natural” process of production for the material exchange [metabolism] between man and nature has been borrowed from me, where exchange of matter first occurs in the analysis of C-M-C and interruptions in the exchange of form, later also termed interruptions in the exchange of matter.” (MECW 24 p.553)

It is this conception of metabolism, arising out of the forms of labour under different class societies, that best encapsulates the dialectic between humanity and nature.

Myth: “Marxism champions the domination of nature”

Many Greens dismiss Marxism after reading a few loose phrases about “subjection of Nature’s forces to man” (The Communist Manifesto), the “unlimited increase of production” and the “mastering” of nature (Anti-Dühring).

They often argue that Marxism embraces anti-ecological industrialism, what they call the “Promethean” or “productivist” faith in economic growth. (Prometheus was a mythical Greek figure famous for stealing fire from the gods). Marx was certainly an admirer of Prometheus’ defiance of religion, though this hardly amounts to the worship of growth for its own sake.

Sadly most don’t get as far as Engels’ short essay, The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man, part of his Dialectics of Nature, where he wrote:

“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… Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” (MECW 25 pp.460-61)

Of course Marx and Engels were writing when most of the world was not industrialised and in a period when the scale of environmental destruction wrought by climate change was barely visible. They also wrote at a time when the incomes and standards of living for most people were significantly lower than they are today.

For sure, real human freedom, understood in terms of the free time after basic needs have been met – has material prerequisites. Those prerequisites have been met for decades on a global scale. But Marx and Engels’ emphasis on the development of the productive forces did not blind them to ecological destruction in their own time – and certainly doesn’t prevent modern Marxists from incorporating them in our analysis.

Myth: “Industrialism is the problem, not capitalism”

One of Burkett’s chief contributions is to establish the importance of Marx’s labour theory of value to any ecological critique of capitalism. He argues that, “Marx’s analysis contains a powerful ecological indictment of capitalism’s valuation of natural wealth… [which] derives from its establishment of inner connections between market valuation of nature and capitalism’s core class relation: wage labour.” (p.54)

In his discussion of commodities at the beginning of Capital, Marx distinguishes use value and exchange value. This basic distinction is the basis of his explanation for the exploitation of wage labour by capital. But it is also the key to understanding the inherent destructiveness of capitalism and why it can never adequately “value” nature.

As Burkett puts it in an earlier book, in Marx’s conception, “capitalism has a specific antagonism toward nature that is manifested in a particular kind of undervaluation of natural conditions, and this undervaluation is a basic form of the contradiction between use value and exchange value”.

For Marx, “Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value…” (Capital I p.254)

This means that “In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.” (Engels, Dialectics of Nature MECW 25 pp.463-464)

Capitalism treats nature as a “free gift”, enclosing land and raw materials as private property in order to throw them into production. Burkett argues that the process continues today whenever public or communal lands are privatised, and whenever corporations are given freer reign to exploit national forests and other natural resources. (p.54)

Marx made it very clear that the capitalist mode of production was unsustainable. Capitalist production only develops by “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker”. (Capital I p.638)

For Marx and Engels, “the capitalist system works against a rational agriculture”, because “Instead of a conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property, as the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations, we have the exploitation and the squandering of the powers of the earth…” (Capital III p.948-49)

This was summed up in the idea that capitalism “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and nature”, that “it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The results of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.” (Capital I pp.637-638 Capital III p.949)

Myth: “Marxism does not conceive of the environmental crisis”

Greens often point to environmental crises such as climate change and argue that there is no space within the Marxist framework to understand them.

Another service Burkett does is to disentangle different forms of crises Marxists have conceptualised. He argues that trends such as “global warming, declining diversity of plant and animal species, the build up of carcinogens and other poisons in the environment, the greater and greater reliance on pharmaceuticals and other drugs to mentally and physically cope with life, and ongoing mass hunger and disease” implicate the ecological contradictions of capital, value, markets and money. In classical Marxist terms, they represent the tension between capitalist production relations and sustainable development of human-natural productive forces. (p.137)

In particular he distinguishes “environmental crises of capitalist reproduction from capitalistically-induced crises in the conditions of human development”. (p.136)

In the first kind, capital accumulation is threatened by environmental constraints on supplies of its requisite material use-values. Burkett points to examples such as the nineteenth-century cotton crises, and more recently to oil and other materials-price shocks.

The second kind of environmental crisis involves capitalism’s degradation of the conditions of human development. Burkett says that, “Marx studied this second kind of crisis in connection with the unhealthy circulations of matter produced by capitalism’s spatial separation and industrial integration of manufacturing and agriculture”. In Capital Marx discussed the waste, excremental and otherwise, created by urban living and the way it was dumped into rivers like the Thames. Marx also saw capital’s tendency to deplete human labour-power through long and intensive working times as a direct threat to human reproduction and development. (p.294)

Burkett does not fall into the trap of conceiving the degradation of the environment as leading to some automatic breakdown of capitalism. He argues that, “given capitalism’s innovative capacities and the flexible character of its material requirements, environmental crises of accumulation tend to be periodic and to not in and of themselves seriously threaten the system’s reproduction. Short of human extinction, there is no sense in which capitalism can be relied upon to permanently ‘break down’ under the weight of its depletion and degradation of natural wealth”. (p.137)

For Burkett, “the crucial insight of the Marxist perspective is that, even apart from accumulation crises, capitalism’s ecological-entropic dynamics produce a never-ending crisis in the natural conditions of human development. This permanent crisis can only be overcome through an explicit communalisation of production and its material conditions by the producers and their communities”. (p.173)

In other words, the crisis in the natural conditions of human development “can only be resolved through a direct confrontation with the system’s core relations: wage labour, production for profit, market competition, and monetary valuation. (p.138)

Myth: “Marxism downplays capitalism’s reliance on materials and energy”

A more sophisticated criticism of Marxism is that it is not consistent with the laws of thermodynamics, and in particular the second law — that energy is only transformed from more ordered to less ordered forms. Heat, for example, can only dissipate. One form of this criticism is the Podolinsky myth – that Marx and Engels responded indifferently or even negatively to Sergei Podolinsky’s attempt to introduce certain elements of thermodynamics into socialist theory. (p.174)

In the early 1880s, Podolinsky published an energetic analysis of human labour and tried to reconcile Marx’s labour theory of value with the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy). Green writers argue that Marx simply ignored it, while Engels abruptly dismissed it without giving it a serious thought – even though Podolinsky had personally contacted them seeking their comradely opinions and approval.

Burkett provides a detailed refutation of the Podolinsky myth in this book, by going back to original texts and examining exactly what Podolinsky argued.

Podolinsky’s analysis was published in four different languages over the years 1880-83, and there were significant differences among the four versions. The first version appeared in Russian in Slovo (1880); the second in French in La Revue Socialiste in June 1880; the third in Italian in La Plebe in 1881; and the final version in German, in Die Neue Zeit magazine in 1883, after Marx’s death.

Burkett found that Marx had actually taken detailed extracts from Podolinsky’s work, but only with reference to a French-language version that Podolinsky had mailed to him in early April 1880. This version seems to have been an early draft of the Revue Socialiste article. Although we know from Podolinsky’s own correspondence that Marx wrote back to him at least once, neither that letter nor any other letter that Marx sent to Podolinsky has survived. Still it seems likely that Marx sent comments on the draft to Podolinsky some or all of which were incorporated into the published French version. The most likely reason no copy of Podolinsky’s original draft was found in Marx’s papers and that all we have is extensive verbatim extracts from Marx’s notebooks is that Marx, as was customary and expected in those days without copying machines, sent the manuscript back to Podolinsky with marginal notes on the manuscript.

Burkett argues that the text of the Revue Socialiste article, as far as we can deduce from Marx’s extracts from the draft version sent by Podolinsky, contains significant additions to the earlier draft sent to Marx. Among these additions are the main reference to Marx’s concept of surplus labour, the calculation of energy equivalents for agricultural labour and its output, and the attempt to analyse the energy efficiency of labour utilisation under the feudal, slave, capitalist and socialist modes of production. pp.177-178)

Burkett and Foster arranged for a full translation of the Italian version published in La Plebe. Their conclusion was that “Podolinsky had not even come close to establishing a plausible thermodynamics basis for the labour theory of value that could have been adopted by Marx and Engels”. (p.178)

Engels letters on the matter not only reject Podolinsky’s energy-reductionist conception of human labour, posing a more metabolic alternative, but also emphasises the failure of Podolinsky’s energy-productivity calculations to take into account the great extent to which human production has heretofore operated as “squanderer of past solar heat”, especially by “squandering our reserves of energy, our coal, ore, forests, etc”. (Engels to Marx, 19 December 1882, MECW 46 p.411)

In other words, Engels’ responses were far more advanced ecologically than Podolinsky’s analysis. He criticised the crude mechanistic and energy-reductionist purposes to which thermodynamics had been put in some analyses of human labour.

Burkett argues that Engels’ argument against energy reductionism emphasises the irreducible biochemical character of human labour and its products, and the fact that use-value is not reducible to pure energy.

As Engels put it, “Podolinsky went astray” when he “sought to find in the field of natural science fresh proof of the rightness of socialism”, thereby “confused the physical with the economic”. (MECW 46 p.412)

Myth: “Socialist society will not necessarily be sustainable”

Greens often point to the experience of the USSR and similar formations to prove that socialist society is just as environmentally destructive as capitalism. As a criticism of Stalinism this is absolutely right — but then that is exactly what Marxists would expect from such class societies. Stalinism is not socialism. Stalinism is a different form of class society from capitalism, but another exploitative society all the same.

In fact Marx and Engels’ conception of communism from the beginning was consistent with the sustainability. For example in 1843, Engels wrote in the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy that communism would be “the reconciliation of mankind with nature and with itself”. (MECW 3 1975 p.424)

Soon after that, Marx wrote in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that communism restores man's intimate links to the land in a rational way, no longer mediated by serfdom, lordship, and an imbecile mystique of property. This is because the earth ceases to be an object of barter, and through free labour and free employment once again becomes authentic, personal property for man.” (MECW 3 p.268)

These views were developed in his mature political economy. In Capital III, Marx wrote that: “From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private ownership of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].” (p.911)

A society of freely associated producers would “govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control, instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.” (Capital III p.959)

Engels expressed similar sentiments in Anti-Dühring: “The present poisoning of the air, water and land can put an end to only by the fusion of town and country.” (MECW 25 p.282)

Burkett’s contribution in this book is to integrate this conception of communism with the idea found throughout ecological literature, namely sustainable development. Ecologists conceive of sustainable development in terms of: (i) the ‘common good’ character of natural resources; (ii) co-evolution of individual human beings, society and nature; (iii) common property management of natural resources. ( p.15)

Marx and Engels’ vision of communism integrates these dimensions. First, “communism protects the individual’s right to a share in the total product for her private consumption”. The second way in which communist property promotes individual human development is by “assuring all individuals access to the expanded social services – education, health care, utilities, and old-age pensions”. Third, communist property includes “the individual’s right to progressively shorter working time”. (pp.322-324)

Crucially, Burkett emphasises free time as the touchstone of communism rather the unlimited development of the productive forces allows him to reconcile the new society with sustainability. It is also consistent with Marx’s own conception of freedom.

In his second draft of Capital, Marx wrote that: “Free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for free activity which – unlike labour – is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfilment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty.” (Economic Manuscripts 1861-63 MECW 32 p.391)

Myth: “There is no privileged agent in ecology”

Greens emphasise the “newness” of their politics as going beyond the old class parties. Some subscribe to the sociological view that the working class has diminished as a social force. Even some eco-socialists uncouple the goal of communism from the agency of liberation, the working class.

Burkett rejects this dichotomy. He argues that, “What is needed is a critical engagement with the ongoing struggles of workers and communities everywhere to defend and improve their material-social conditions, and to forge new forms of human development”. (p.172)

He argues: “The working class is the agency whose everyday life-activities and (individual and collective) struggles are rooted in, but not limited to, capitalism’s dominant form of productive activity: wage-labour and capital accumulation. It is the only systemically essential group that directly experiences the limitations of purely economic struggles over wages and working conditions as ways of achieving human development, given the increasingly communal and global character of the environmental problems produced by capitalist production. It is therefore the only agency capable not just of envisioning but of practically undertaking a planned and life-guided recombination of economic and environmental reproduction.” (p.300)

Myth: “Green politics”

Although Burkett’s work is explicitly about a reconstruction of Marx’s approach rather than its application, he does offer some pointers in relation to Green politics.

He argues that, “Capitalists only broach environmental initiatives insofar as they are consistent with healthy profit-and-loss statements and maintenance of their economic and political power. As shown by Earth Day, the ideology of green capitalism, and big business and government (non)responses to global warming, there is no shortage of subterfuges and figleafs that capitalists and their functionaries can use to deflect attention from the fundamental contradiction between environmental health and the exploitative and competitive pursuit of abstract wealth.” (p.293)

At a deeper level, the undervaluation of nature is built into the DNA of capitalism and cannot be reformed away.

“Stated differently, the tension between the system’s economic signals and the environment is not a matter of ‘missing markets’. The problem is that economic signals and incentives generated by the wage-labour relation do not, and cannot, encompass the requirements of a healthy and sustainable economy-environment interaction. They can only encompass the environmental requirements of value accumulation with all its contradictions. No matter how efficient, complete or undistorted the price system may be, there is no way that its one-dimensional measuring rod of money can be an adequate measure of, or guide to, the sustainable production of use-values by human labour enmeshed with nature. (p.293-94)

For one thing, he is critical of market environmentalist “solutions” such as current recycling and waste management, which have become a profitable area of capital investment. This would extend to a healthy scepticism towards the much-touted carbon trading scheme, most green taxes and other palliatives to “internalise” environmental costs into price signals.

Instead he emphasises waste prevention, through changes in production technologies, increased durability of goods, and a transformation of needs toward less matter-energy intensive needs. Particularly important is his emphasis on cutting labour time, both as a social measures to enhance the freedom of the working class and to tackle the lifestyle changes needed to tackle environmental problems.

Climate change raises hard questions for Marxism. Burkett has shown it is possible to understand this new reality in Marxist terms and to build in solutions to it within the programme of working class self liberation.