Marx and ecology

The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy
by John Bellamy Foster

This article from Monthly Review is an extended version of a talk delivered at the Marxism 2011 Conference, University College of London, July 3, 2011.

I recommend reading John Bellamy Foster’s book
‘The Ecological Rift Capitalism’s War on the Earth’ with Brett Clark and Richard York 2010 MRP.

“It is no secret today that we are facing a planetary environmental emergency, endangering most species on the planet, including our own, and that this impending catastrophe has its roots in the capitalist economic system. Nevertheless, the extreme dangers that capitalism inherently poses to the environment are often inadequately understood, giving rise to the belief that it is possible to create a new “natural capitalism” or “climate capitalism” in which the system is turned from being the enemy of the environment into its savior.1

The chief problem with all such views is that they underestimate the cumulative threat to humanity and the earth arising from the existing relations of production.

Indeed, the full enormity of the planetary ecological crisis, I shall contend, can only be understood from a standpoint informed by the Marxian critique of capitalism.

A common weakness of radical environmental critiques of capitalism is that they rely on abstract notions of the system based on nineteenth-century conditions. As a result many of the historically specific underpinnings of environmental crises related to twentieth- (and twenty-first) century conditions have been insufficiently analyzed.

Marx’s own indispensable ecological critique was limited by the historical period in which he wrote, namely, the competitive stage of capitalism, and thus he was unable to capture certain crucial characteristics of environmental destruction which were to emerge with monopoly capitalism.

In the following analysis, therefore, I will discuss not only the ecological critique provided by Marx (and Engels), but also that of later Marxian and radical political economists, including such figures as Thorstein Veblen, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Allan Schnaiberg.

Marx and the Capitalist Raubbau

It is seldom recognized that Marx’s very first political economic essay—“Debates on the Law on Theft of Wood,” written in 1842 during his editorship of Rheinische Zeitung—was focused on ecological issues. A majority of those in jail in Prussia at that time were peasants arrested for picking up dead wood in the forests. In carrying out this act the peasants were merely exercising what had been a customary right, but was disallowed with the spread of private property. Observing the debates on this issue in the Rhineland Diet (the provincial assembly of the Rhineland), Marx commented that the dispute centered on how best to protect the property rights of landowners, while the customary rights of the population in relation to the land were simply ignored. Impoverished peasants were viewed as the “enemy of wood” because the exercise of their traditional rights to gather wood primarily as fuel for cooking and warming their homes transgressed the ownership rights of private property holders.2

It was not long after this that Marx began his systematic research into political economy. It therefore should not surprise us that as early as his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 he was already focusing on the issue of primitive accumulation, i.e., the dispossession of the peasantry, who were being removed from the land in the course of capitalist development.

It was this separation of workers from the earth as means of production that he was later to refer to in Capital as the “historical precondition of the capitalist mode of production” and its “permanent foundation,” the basis for the emergence of the modern proletariat.3

Capitalism began as a system of encroachment on nature and public wealth.

Here it is important to recognize that at the very root of Marx’s critique of political economy was the distinction between use value and exchange value.

Every commodity, he explained in the opening pages of Capital, had both a use value and an exchange value, with the latter increasingly dominating the former.

Use value was associated with the requirements of production in general and with the basic human relation to nature, i.e., fundamental human needs.

Exchange value, in contrast, was oriented to the pursuit of profit. This established a contradiction between capitalist production and production in general (that is, the natural conditions of production).

This contradiction was most evident in Marx’s time in terms of what came to be known as the Lauderdale Paradox, named after James Maitland, the eighth Earl of Lauderdale (1759–1839).

Lauderdale was one of the early classical political economists, author of An Inquiry into the Nature of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase (1804). Public wealth, he explained, consisted of use values, which, like water and air, oftentimes existed in abundance, while private riches were based on exchange values, which demanded scarcity. Under such conditions—he charged against the system—the expansion of private riches went hand in hand with the destruction of public wealth. For instance, if water supplies that had previously been freely available were monopolized and a fee placed on wells, then the measured riches of the nation would be increased at the expense of public wealth.

“The common sense of mankind,” Lauderdale declared, “would revolt” at any proposal to increase private riches “by creating a scarcity of any commodity generally useful and necessary to man.” But the bourgeois society in which he lived, he recognized, was already doing that. Thus Dutch colonists had in particularly fertile periods burned “spiceries” or paid natives to “collect the young blossoms or green leaves of the nutmeg trees” to kill them off; while planters in Virginia by legal enactment burned a certain share of their crops to maintain the price. “So truly is this principle understood by those whose interest leads them to take advantage of it,” he wrote, “that nothing but the impossibility of general combination protects the public wealth against the rapacity of private avarice.”4

Marx saw the Lauderdale Paradox, arising out of “the inverse ratio of the two kinds of value” (use value and exchange value), as one of the chief contradictions of bourgeois production. The entire pattern of capitalist development was characterized by the wasting away and destruction of the natural wealth of society.5

“For all its stinginess,” he wrote, “capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society [public wealth] what it gains for the individual capitalist [private riches].”6

The domination of exchange value over use value in capitalist development and the ecological impact of this can also be seen in Marx’s general formula of capital, M-C-M′. Capitalism is commonly described as a system conforming to simple commodity production, C-M-C, in which money is simply an intermediary in a process of production and exchange, beginning and ending with particular use values embodied in concrete commodities. In sharp contrast, Marx explained that capitalist production and exchange takes the form of M-C-M′, in which money capital is advanced for labor and materials with which to produce a commodity, which can then be sold for more money, i.e., M′, or M + Δm (surplus value), at the end of the process. The crucial difference here is that the process never really ends, since money or abstract value is the object. The M′ is reinvested in the following period, resulting in M′-C-M′′, which leads to M′′-C-M′′′ in the period after that, and so on.

In order to maintain a given share of wealth under this system, the capitalist must continually seek to expand it. The law of value therefore constantly whispers to each individual capitalist and to the capitalist class as a whole, “Go on! Go on!” This, however, requires the incessant revolutionization of production to displace labor power and promote profits in the service of ever-greater accumulation.

Moreover, as production grows “the consuming circle within circulation” must grow correspondingly.

Intrinsic to the capital relation, Marx insisted, was the refusal to accept any absolute boundaries to its advance, which were treated as mere barriers to be surmounted. These propositions, intrinsic to Marx’s political economy, constituted the foundations for what Schnaiberg was later to call the “treadmill of production” model.7

Marx’s most pointed ecological contribution, however, lay in his theory of metabolic rift. Building on the work of the great German chemist Justus von Liebig, Marx argued that in shipping food and fiber hundreds and thousands of miles to the new urban centers of industrial production, where population was increasingly concentrated, capital ended up robbing the soil of its nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which instead of being returned to the earth created pollution in the cities. Liebig called this “Raubbau” or the robbery system. As Ernest Mandel put it in his Marxist Economic Theory:

Serious scientists, notably the German Liebig, had drawn attention to a really disturbing phenomenon, the increased exhaustion of the soil, the Raubbau, resulting from greedy capitalist methods of exploitation aimed at getting the highest profit in the shortest time. Whereas agricultural societies like China, Japan, ancient Egypt, etc., had known a rational way of carrying on agriculture which conserved and even increased the fertility of the soil over several thousand years, the capitalist Raubbau had been able, in certain parts of the world, to exhaust the fertile layer of soil…in half a century.8

For Marx this capitalist Raubbau took the form of “an irreparable rift” within capitalist society in the metabolism between humanity and the earth—“a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself”—requiring its “systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production.”

In the industrialization of agriculture, he suggested, the true nature of “capitalist production” was revealed, which “only develops…by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”

In order to understand the significance of this ecological critique for Marx’s overall critique of capitalism, it is necessary to recognize that the labor and production process was itself designated, in his analysis, as the metabolic relation between human beings and nature.

Marx’s primary definition of socialism/communism was therefore that of a society in which “the associated producers govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way…accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy.”

Along with this, he developed the most radical conception of sustainability possible, insisting that no one, not even all the countries and peoples of the world taken together, owned the earth; that it was simply held in trust and needed to be maintained in perpetuity in line with the principle of boni patres familias (good heads of the household). His overall ecological critique thus required that instead of the open rifts developed under capitalism, there needed to be closed metabolic cycles between humanity and nature. This allowed him to incorporate thermodynamic conceptions into his understanding of economy and society.9

The totality of Marx’s ecological insights went, of course, beyond the foregoing points. Space, however, does not allow full treatment of them here.

Still, it is worth noting that his analysis together with that of Engels also touched on such critical issues as the “squandering” of fossil fuels and other natural resources; desertification; deforestation; and regional climate change—already understood by scientists in Marx’s day as resulting in part from the human degradation of the local environment.10

Monopoly Capital and the Environment

Elements of Marx’s general ecological critique resonated with developments in material science, providing inspiration directly and indirectly for a number of important materialist scientists and philosophers of science in the decades that followed. Things were quite different, however, within Marxian political economy, where Marx’s critique of the capitalist Raubbau was rarely acknowledged (or drawn upon) between the close of the nineteenth century and the close of the twentieth century.11

The main discoveries of Marxian and radical political economy in the ecological realm in the twentieth century can be seen as arising out of responses to the changed conditions associated with the monopoly stage of capital, and the altered environmental regime that it brought into being. The earliest theorists of monopoly capitalism were Rudolf Hilferding in Germany and Thorstein Veblen in the United States. Hilferding, although building his analysis directly on Marx’s political economy, had surprisingly little to say about environmental conditions.

In contrast, Veblen—a socialist economist influenced by Marx but not himself a Marxist—saw the transition from free competition to the age of the monopolistic corporation as having immense implications for the environment, resource use, and economic waste.

Read the whole article here

http://monthlyreview.org/2011/09/01/the-ecology-of-marxian-political-economy<