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From International SocialismAutumn Copied with thanks from the International Socialism Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature. Marx wisely left nature other than human nature alone. Yet this same outlook would be regarded by most socialists today as laughable. My own view of the history of ecological thought and its relation Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature socialism is different. Hence the questions that they raised about capitalist society and even about the relation between society and nature were often more fundamental than what characterises social and ecological thought, even on the left, today. It is true that technology has changed, introducing massive new threats to the biosphere, undreamed of in earlier times. This reflects the fact that it is not technology that is the primary issue, but rather the nature and logic of capitalism as a specific mode of production. Socialists have contributed in fundamental ways at all stages in the development of the modern ecological critique. Uncovering this unknown legacy is a vital part of the overall endeavour to develop an ecological materialist analysis capable of addressing the devastating environmental conditions that face us today. In the great German chemist Justus von Liebig published the seventh edition of his pioneering scientific work, Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology first published in The edition contained a new, lengthy and, to the British, scandalous introduction. Whole countries were robbed in this way of the nutrients of their soil. For Liebig this was part of a larger British imperial policy of robbing the soil resources including bones of other countries. It has raked up the battlefields of Leipsic, Waterloo and the Crimea; it has consumed the bones of many generations accumulated in the catacombs of Sicily; and now annually destroys the food for a future generation of three millions and a half of people. Like a vampire it hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its lifeblood without any real necessity or permanent gain for itself. The population in Britain was able Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature maintain healthy bones and greater physical proportions, he argued, by robbing the rest of Europe of their soil nutrients, including skeletal remains, which would otherwise have gone into nurturing their own soils, allowing their populations to reach the same physical stature as the English. But none of this altered the long term decline in soil productivity. England was able to maintain its industrialised capitalist agriculture, by importing guano bird droppings from Peru as well as bones from Europe. Guano imports increased from 1, tons in totons only six years later. But existing sources were drying up without additional sources Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature found. By the early s North America was importing more guano than all of Europe put together. To live in the Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature of the discovery of new beds of guano would be Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature folly. The minerals taken from the earth had to be returned to the earth. In these passages Marx makes a number of crucial points:. Further there is the question of the sustainability of the earth — ie the extent to which it is to be passed on to future generations Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature a condition equal or better than in the present. As Marx wrote:. Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature the standpoint of a higher socio- economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature patres familias [good heads of the household]. The issue of sustainability, for Marx, went beyond what capitalist society, with its constant intensification and enlargement of the metabolic rift between human beings and the earth, could address. In analysing the metabolic rift Marx and Engels did not stop with the soil nutrient cycle, or the town-country relation. They addressed at various points in their work such issues as deforestation, desertification, climate change, the elimination of deer from the forests, the commodification of species, pollution, industrial wastes, toxic contamination, recycling, Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature exhaustion of coal mines, disease, overpopulation and the evolution and co-evolution of species. How did this relate to the concept of the alienation of nature, which along with the alienation of labour was such a pronounced feature of his early work? Could it be that this materialism was not adequately viewed simply in terms of a materialist conception of human history, but also had to be seen in terms of natural history and the dialectical relation between the two? Let me mention just a few highlights of the story I uncovered — since I do not have the time to explore it all in detail here, and because Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature of my purpose here is to add additional strands to the story. Along with German idealism Marx was struggling early on with ancient materialist natural philosophy and its relation to the 17th century scientific revolution, and the 18th century Enlightenment. In all of this Epicurus loomed very large. For Marx, Epicurus represented, most importantly, a non- reductionist, non-deterministic materialism, and articulated a philosophy of human freedom. In Epicurus could be found a materialist conception of nature that rejected all teleology and all religious conceptions of natural and social existence. In the Epicurean materialist worldview knowledge of the world started with the senses. For Epicureans there was no scale of nature, no sharp, unbridgeable gaps between human beings and other animals. His study of ancient and early modern materialism brought Marx inside the struggle over the scientific understanding of the natural world in ways that influenced Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature of his thought and was deeply ecological in its significance, since it focused on evolution and emergence, and made nature not god the starting point. Darwin had similar roots in natural philosophy, linked to the anti-teleological tradition extending back to Epicurus, which had found its modern exponent in Bacon. Suddenly it became clear that the human species or hominid species had existed in all probability for a million years or longer, not simply a few thousand. Today it is believed that hominid species have existed for around 7 million years. Many major works, mostly by Darwinians, emerged in just a few years to address this new reality, and Marx and Engels studied them with great intensity. Out of their studies came a thesis on the role of labour in human evolution that was to prove fundamental. In this conception, human beings were to be distinguished from animals in that they more effectively utilised tools, which became extensions of their bodies. Engels was to develop this argument further in Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature pathbreaking work, The Part Played by Labour in the Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature from Ape to Man written inpublished posthumously in In this way:. Thus the hand is not only the organ Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature labour, it is also the product of labour. As a result early humans hominids were able to alter their relation to their local environment, radically improving their adaptability. Those who were most ingenious in making and using tools were most likely to survive, which means that the evolutionary process Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature selective pressures toward the enlargement of the brain and the development of language necessary for the social processes of labour and tool- makingleading eventually to the rise of modern humans. All of this points to the fact that Marx and Engels had a profound grasp of ecological and evolutionary problems, as manifested in the natural science of their day, and were able to make important contributions to our understanding of how society and nature interact. There were in fact numerous Marxist contributions to the analysis of the nature-society relation, and socialists played a very large role in the development of ecology, particularly in its formative stages. But it is not just a question of the direct inheritance of certain propositions with respect to nature-ecology. A very large part of this was reflected in both socialist and scientific thought in the immediately succeeding generations. Among the socialists who incorporated naturalistic and ecological conceptions into their thinking, after Marx and up through the s, we can include such figures as William Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Henry Salt, August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, V. Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, V. Vernadsky, N. Bernal, Benjamin Farrington, J. Kautsky in his The Agrarian Questionfollowing Liebig and Marx, addressed the problem of the soil nutrient cycle, raised the question of the fertiliser treadmill, and even referred to the dangers of the intensive application of pesticides — all in ! Luxemburg addressed ecological problems in her letters, discussing the disappearance of songbirds through the destruction of their habitat. Lenin promoted both conservation and ecology in the Soviet Union, and demonstrated an awareness of the degradation of soil fertility and the breaking of the soil nutrient cycle under capitalist agriculture — the Liebig-Marx problem. The Soviet Union in the s had the most developed ecological science in the world. Vernadsky had introduced the concept of the biosphere in a dialectical framework of analysis that reaches down to the most advanced ecology of our day. Vavilov used the historical materialist method to map out the centres of the origin of agriculture and the banks of germ plasm throughout the globe, now known as the Vavilov areas. Yet this early Marxist ecological thought, or rather the traditions that sustained it, largely died out. Ecology within Marxism suffered something of a double death. Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature the East in the s Stalinism literally purged the more ecological elements within the Soviet leadership and scientific community — not arbitrarily so since it was in these circles that some Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature the resistance to primitive socialist accumulation was to be found. Bukharin was executed. Vavilov died of malnutrition in a prison cell in At the same time in the West, Marxism took an often extreme, avidly anti- positivistic form. This affected most of Western Marxism, which tended to see Marxism increasingly in terms of Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature human history severed for the most part from nature. Nature was relegated to the province of natural science, which was seen as properly positivistic within its own realm. There was no materialist conception of nature. Hence genuine ecological insights were rare. If an unbroken continuity is to be found in the development of socialist nature- science discussions and ecological thought, its path has to be traced primarily in Britain, where a continuous commitment to a materialist dialectic in the analysis of natural history was maintained. A strong tradition in Britain linked science, Darwin, Marx and dialectics. Any account of the ecology of British Marxism in this period has to highlight Caudwell, who, though he died at the age of 29 behind a machine-gun on a hill in Spain, left an indelible intellectual legacy. His Heredity and Developmentperhaps the most important of his science-related works, was suppressed by the Communist Party in Britain due to the Lysenkoist controversy he was anti-Lysenkoist and so was not published until All indicated profound respect not only for Marx and Darwin but also for Epicurus, who was seen as the original source of the materialist conception of nature. The influence of these thinkers carries down to the present day in the work of later biological and ecological scientists, such as Steven Rose in Britain, and Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins and the late Stephen Jay Gould in the US. I want to concentrate here on two figures who are less well known, more Fabian than Marxist, but clearly socialists — namely Ray Lankester and Arthur Tansley. He was the most famous adamantly materialist biologist of his day in Britain. When he was a boy Darwin had carried him on his shoulders. Lankester was also a young friend of Karl Marx and a socialist, though not himself a Marxist. Marx and his daughter Eleanor also visited Lankester at his residence in London. Marx and Lankester had in common, above all, their materialism. Lankester was to become one of the most ecologically concerned thinkers of his time. He wrote some of the most powerful essays that have ever been written on species extinction due to human causes, and discussed the pollution of London and other ecological issues with an urgency that is not found again until the late 20th century. Arthur Tansley was the foremost plant ecologist in Britain of his generation, one of the greatest ecologists of all time, and the originator of the concept of ecosystem. He was to become the first president of the British Ecological Society. Like Lankester, Tansley Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature a Fabian socialist and an uncompromising materialist. In the s and s a major split occurred in ecology. But in a much more controversial move, Clements and his followers extended this analysis to a Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature of super-organism meant to account for the process of succession. This ecological approach inspired other innovations in ecological theory in Edinburgh and South Africa. Smuts, who was usually referred to as General Smuts because of his military role in the Boer War he fought on the side of the Boerswas one of the principal figures in the construction of the apartheid system. Ecology & Marxism: Andreas Malm | Historical Materialism

Many people on the Left — myself included — were for a long time in the habit of shrugging off issues of ecology as Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature matters, peripheral to the real struggle. Indifference or lukewarm commitment to environmentalism sometimes still characterise Marxist intellectuals consult, for instance, the last one hundred or so issues of New Left Review. Thankfully, however, many have experienced the materialist epiphany and realised that literally everything is at stake in the ecological crisis. For Marxists and other socialists with a newfound ecological curiosity, however, a good starting point is some recent literature that spells out, with brilliant clarity and popular appeal, the basic contradiction between capitalism and sustainability. I have the two following titles foremost in mind:. This tome deserves its status as the Bible Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature the radical climate movement and a basic reference point in ecosocialist debates. Mandatory reading. This short essay very effectively surveys the biodiversity crisis — arguably the only aspect of the ecological crisis that can match climate change in Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature and magnitude — and identifies capitalism as the culprit. So, did Karl Marx himself have any insights into problems of environmental degradation? It turns out he did: research over the past two decades has reconstructed a highly significant strand of ecological thinking in the oeuvre of Marx and Engels! An analysis of the ecological destructivity of capitalism can gain massively from engagement with the founding fathers. The two classics in the field of eco-marxology, dense with quotations but analytically clear and relatively easy to follow, are:. The social rift leads to multiplying ecological rifts. Some key titles:. A wide-ranging collection of articles that brings out the power of metabolic rift theory but beware of repetitive restatements of the core arguments. Drawing on his previous work, Burkett here contrasts Marxism to more mainstream approaches in ecological economics. A sophisticated but occasionally somewhat technical work. Stefano B. An excellent empirical case study, demonstrating the utility of the metabolic Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature theory Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature explaining ecological crises, in this case the catastrophic decline in fish stocks around the world. This book represents perhaps the highest stage of eco-marxology, in that it goes to extraordinary length to defend Marx as a green prophet against anyone who has criticised him and by extension Foster and Burkett for lacunae or blind spots. Marxists engaged with ecology long before the present millennium. The new Left of the s and s had to relate to the emerging green movement and revisit its political agenda in the light of the environmental issues of their day, and this encounter generated some work that is still of great value. Ted Benton ed. It says, in short, that capital has a tendency to produce crises not only through the mechanisms long studied by Marx and his followers, but also through the tendency to damage and destroy ecosystems; since these are the foundations of all economic activities, capital thereby undermines its own basis and induces a fall in the rate of profit. The theory fell out of favour with Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature rise of the metabolic rift school see e. Indebates Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature ecological Marxism to a great extent revolve around the figure of Jason W. Hugely controversial, hardly an easy read, his Capitalism in the Web of Life London: Verso, is a book that red-green intellectuals but perhaps not so much activists need to have a position on. The ensuing debate can fairly easily be followed by some googling. Not only capitalism is implicated in ecological destruction: so is patriarchy. This realisation animates ecofeminism, which has produced some work that is also aligned to Marxism, although much more needs to be Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature in this sphere. Other prominent ecofeminists with various degrees of Marxist commitment are Val Plumwood and Ariel Salleh. See also Soper below. Capitalist destruction of ecosystems clearly emanates from the Northern core, while peoples in the Southern peripheries carry the bulk of the burden. World-systems theory has consequently proved amenable to ecological deployment. The most original, highly idiosyncratic theory in this field has been developed by Alf Hornborg, who argues that modern technology is built on the appropriation of labour and land from the peripheries; all talk of progress or development or technical ingenuity simply masks the ecologically unequal exchange on which the Northern machines are based. Hornborg is the leader here, but far from alone: to mention just one more book: J. Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature Roberts and Bradley C. Much of it can be skipped, but chapters four and five offer a superb overview of the global injustices of climate change — caused by the Northern core, suffered by the Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature peripheries — anchored in world-systems theory. How to cut this knot? Several notable works have been published in recent years, among them:. Highly acclaimed, thought-provoking account of how and why capitalist states shifted from coal to oil as the preeminent fossil fuel and the political consequences of this shift, particularly in the Middle East. Matthew H. An attempt to understand the historical origins of the climate crisis, focusing on the contradictions that prompted early British Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature to abandon traditional energy sources — notably water — and turn to coal and steam. There are a thousand facets of the climate crisis that call for Marxist analysis. Gratifyingly, the field Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature to be undergoing rapid development. Some outstanding titles from the past decade:. David Ciplet, J. Timmons Roberts and Mizan Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature. Draws on the theories of Antonio Gramsci to explain international climate politics as a form of global class struggle. Largely journalistic in nature, written by a leading Marxist climate scholar, this dispatch from some of the tropical frontiers of global warming paints a very gloomy picture of the conflicts likely to intensify as temperatures rise: between poor and rich, but perhaps also between different ethnic groups and communities. Scary and sobering. Why do they do so very little? To understand this, a bit of psychology is necessary. Judging from their Antipode article with the same name, this will be an agenda-setting Marxist study of climate politics. A book to read and reread and reread. Ecocriticism, Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature the study of nature in literature, is an exciting and rapidly developing field of inquiry. The classical thinkers of the Frankfurt school were intensely preoccupied with human domination of nature as a source of all sorts of social, political and ecological ills. Apart from reading works such as The Dialectic of Enlightenment through an eco-Marxist lens, one can now engage with a not insignificant secondary literature:. Andrew Biro ed. An anthology with texts of uneven quality and varying views, including some piercing critiques of the ideas about environmental degradation found in Adorno and Horkheimer. An environmental philosopher offers his quirky, provocative reading of Western Marxism, issuing in the conclusion that nature does not exist other than as a reified category: we construct nature through our labour and should face up to it. A brilliant philosophical analysis of how and why we are alienated from nature reaching conclusions opposite to those of Vogel. There is far too much reactionary, nationalist, xenophobic green though swirling around for red-greens to feel comfortable. There is a very rich tradition of cutting-edge biological research rooted in Marxist dialectics, which sheds light not only on evolution and ecosystems and the workings of the biosphere as a whole, but also on the Marxist method. Not for the Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature The main house organ of ecological Marxism remains the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism. Proponents of the metabolic rift school publish regularly in Monthly Review. Eco-Marxist stuff can be found in the pages of journals such as Historical Materialism and Capital and Classwhile the Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature Climate and Capitalism climateandcapitalism. And there is much more out there! Starting off Many people on the Left — myself included — were for a long time in the habit of shrugging off issues of ecology as secondary matters, peripheral to the real struggle. Marx and ecology So, did Karl Marx himself have any insights into problems of environmental degradation? Earlier ecological Marxism Marxists engaged with ecology long before the present millennium. The world ecology school Indebates on ecological Marxism to a great extent revolve around the figure of Jason W. Feminism and ecology Not only capitalism is implicated in ecological destruction: so is patriarchy. The political ecology of the world-system Capitalist destruction of ecosystems clearly emanates from the Northern core, while peoples in the Southern peripheries carry the bulk of the burden. Climate politics There are a thousand facets of the climate crisis that call for Marxist analysis. Some outstanding titles from the past decade: David Ciplet, J. Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature Ecocriticism, or the study Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature nature in literature, is an exciting and rapidly developing field of inquiry. The Frankfurt school The classical thinkers of the Frankfurt school were intensely preoccupied with human domination of nature as a source of all sorts of social, political and ecological ills. Apart from reading works such as The Dialectic of Enlightenment through an eco-Marxist lens, one can now engage with a not insignificant secondary literature: Deborah Cook: Adorno on Nature Durham: Acumen, Reactionary environmentalism There is far too much Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature, nationalist, xenophobic green though swirling around for red-greens to feel comfortable. Marxist biology There is a very rich tradition of cutting-edge biological research rooted in Marxist dialectics, which sheds light not only on evolution and ecosystems and the workings of the biosphere as a whole, but also on the Marxist method. Some other resources The main house organ of ecological Marxism remains the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism.