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6 Marx's Grundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism

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6 Marx's Grundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism 6 Marx’s Grundrisse and the ecological contradictions of capitalism John Bellamy Foster Introduction In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx famously wrote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circum- stances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1979: 103). The material circumstances or conditions that he was referring to here were the product of both natural and social history. For Marx production was a realm of expanding needs and powers. But it was subject at all times to material limits imposed by nature. It was the tragedy of capital that its narrow logic propelled it in an unrelenting assault on both these natural limits and the new social needs that it brought into being. By constantly revolutionizing production capital transformed society, but only by continually alienating natural necessity (conditions of sustainability and reproduction) and human needs. Recent research has revealed that an ecological–materialist critique was embedded in all of Marx’s work from The Economic and Philosophical Manu- scripts of 1844 to his Ethnological Notebooks of the late 1870s to early 1880s (see Burkett 1999; Foster 2000; Dickens 2004). This can be seen in his material- ist conception of nature and history, his theory of alienation (which encom- passed the alienation of nature), his understanding of the labour and production process as the metabolic relation between humanity and nature, and his co- evolutionary approach to society–nature relations. Nevertheless, because Marx’s overall critique of political economy remained unfinished, these and other aspects of his larger materialist conception of nature and history were incompletely developed – even in those works, such as Capital, volume 1, published in his lifetime. Moreover, the relation of his developed political–economic critique in Capital to the wider corpus of his work was left unclear. The Grundrisse has therefore become an indispensable means of unify- ing Marx’s overall analysis. It not only stands chronologically between his early writings and Capital, but also constitutes a conceptual bridge between the two. At the same time it provides a theoretical–philosophical viewpoint that is in some ways wider in scope than any of his other works. 94 J.B. Foster The form of the Grundrisse – the fact that Marx composed it as a set of notebooks primarily for his own self-edification in preparation for his critique of political economy – has made it a difficult work to interpret. One way to under- stand his general theoretical approach is in terms of the relation between ‘pro- duction in general’ – a conceptual category introduced in the opening pages of the Grundrisse, originally conceived as the basis of its ‘first section’ (Marx 1973: 320) – and specific historical modes of production. The latter included pre-capitalist economic formations and capitalism’s immediate historical pre- supposition, i.e. primitive accumulation – together with capitalism proper. Marx used the concept of production in general as a basis from which to develop his general theory of needs, which encompassed both natural prerequi- sites and historic developments – the production of new needs manifested in new use values. It was the conflict between production in general (as represented by use value) and specifically capitalist production (as represented by exchange value) that pointed to capitalism’s historical limits and necessary transcendence. A crucial part of the argument in the Grundrisse was the distinction between this approach to nature–society and that of Malthus. The nature–society or ecological dialectic embodied in the Grundrisse can thus be seen in terms of five interrelated realms: 1 the attempt to construct a materialist critique encompassing both production in general and its specific historical forms; 2 the articulation of a theory of human needs in relation to both society and nature – pointing beyond the capital relation; 3 the analysis of pre-capitalist economic formations and the dissolution of these forms through primitive accumulation, representing changing forms of the appropriation of nature through production; 4 the question of external barriers/boundaries to capital; and 5 the confrontation with Malthus on population and the earth. Production in general and natural–historical materialism The starting point for Marx’s critical ontology in the Grundrisse was that of pro- duction in general. Production in the most concrete sense was always histori- cally specific, i.e. production at a definite stage of social development. Nevertheless, an understanding of these specific forms gave rise to a more general, abstract conception, that of the ‘production process in general, such as is common to all social conditions, that is, without historic character’ (Marx 1973: 320). ‘All epochs of production’, Marx wrote, have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition.... For example. No production possible without an instrument of production, even if this instrument is only the hand. No production without stored-up, past labour, The ecological contradictions of capitalism 95 even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice. (Marx 1973: 85–6) Production in general in Marx’s analysis was tied to the production of use values. Use value ‘presupposed matter,’ and constituted the ‘natural particular- ity’ associated with a given human product. It existed ‘even in simple exchange or barter’. It constituted the ‘natural limit of the commodity’ within capitalist production – the manifestation of production in general as opposed to specifi- cally capitalist production (Marx 1973: 267–8). Closely related to production in general, was labour in general. ‘Labour,’ Marx wrote in Capital, is, first of all, a process ... by which man through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.... It [the labor process] is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence. (Marx 1996: 187, 194; translation according to Marx 1976: 283, 290)1 This approach to nature and production first appeared in the Grundrisse, where Marx discussed the metabolic ‘change in matter [Stoffwechsel]’ associ- ated with ‘newly created use value’ (Marx 1973: 667). Just as this metabolic relation constituted the universal condition defining production, so the alienation of this metabolism was the most general expression of both human alienation and alienation from nature, which had its highest form in bourgeois society. As Marx explained: It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appro- priation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital. (Marx 1973: 489) It was the historical alienation of human beings from nature under capitalist pro- duction rather than their unity in production in general that therefore required critical analysis. Here Marx was building on an earlier materialist–dialectical conception pre- sented in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where he had written that: Nature is man’s inorganic body – that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he 96 J.B. Foster must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s phys- ical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. (Marx 1975: 276) This dialectic of organic–inorganic relations was derived from Hegel’s Philo- sophy of Nature and was rooted ultimately in ancient Greek philosophy. In this context organic meant pertaining to organs; inorganic referred to nature beyond human (or animal) organs; the ‘inorganic body of man’ to the extension of the human body by means of tools. (The Greek organon encompassed both organs and tools; seeing the former as ‘grown-on’ forms of the latter, whereas tools were the artificial organs of human beings.) ‘In its outwardly oriented articula- tion’, Hegel wrote, ‘it [the animal] is a production mediated by its inorganic nature’ (Hegel 1970: vol. 3, 185; Foster and Burkett 2000). In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx gave this a more mate- rialist reading, arguing that: the life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more uni- versal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. (Marx 1975: 275) This was carried forward into the Grundrisse where he referred to ‘the natural conditions of labour and of reproduction’ as ‘the objective, nature-given inor- ganic body’ of human subjectivity. ‘The earth’, he stipulated, is ‘the inorganic nature of the living individual.... Just as the working subject appears naturally as an individual, as natural being – so does the first objective condition of his labour
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