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Marx's Vision of Communism and Sustainable Human MARX’S VISION OF COMMUNISM AND SUSTAINABLE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT PAUL BURKETT1 INDICE I. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................................. 2 II. BASIC ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES OF MARX'S COMMUNISM.................................................................. 3 1. THE NEW UNION AND COMMUNAL PROPERTY ................................................................................. 3 2. PLANNED, NON—MARKET PRODUCTION ........................................................................................... 8 III. MARX'S COMMUNISM, ECOLOGY, AND SUSTAINABILITY ................................................................... 10 1. MANAGING THE COMMONS ................................................................................................................ 10 2. EXPANDED FREE TIME AND SUSTAINABLE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT ........................................... 13 3. WEALTH, HUMAN NEEDS, AND LABOR COST................................................................................... 14 IV. CAPITALISM, COMMUNISM, AND THE STRUGGLE OVER HUMAN DEVELOPMENT ......................... 17 V. NOTES ........................................................................................................................................................ 20 VI. REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................... 22 1. Department of Economics, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN, 47809, USA (email: [email protected]). In addition to authoring Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (St. Martin’s Press, 1999), he is on the executive board of the Eugene V. Debs Foundation and President of the Indiana State University chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). He is a longtime member of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) and the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE). MARX'S VISION OF COMMUNISM... 1 means by which humans could outsmart and I. INTRODUCTION conquer nature.” Evidently Marx “consistently saw human freedom as inversely related to 1. Debates over the economics of socialism humanity's dependence on nature” (Eckersley, have concentrated on questions of information, 1992, p. 80). Environmental culturalist Victor incentives, and efficiency in resource allocation Ferkiss asserts that “Marx and Engels and their (Lange and Taylor, 1964; Science & Society, modern followers” shared a “virtual worship of 1992, 2002). This focus on “socialist modern technology,” which explains why “they calculation” has tended to override any concern joined liberals in refusing to criticize the basic with socialism as a form of human technological constitution of modern society” development.1 With global capitalism's (Ferkiss, 1993, p. 110). Another environmental worsening poverty and environmental crises, political scientist, K.J. Walker, claims that however, sustainable human development Marx's vision of communist production does comes to the fore as the primary question that not recognize any actual or potential “shortage must be engaged by all twenty—first century of natural resources,” the “implicit assumption” socialists. It is in this human developmental being “that natural resources are effectively connection, I will argue, that Marx's vision of limitless” (Walker, 1979, pp. 35—6). communism can be most helpful.2 Environmental philosopher Val Routley 2. The suggestion that Marx's vision of describes Marx's vision of communism as an communism can inform the struggle for more anti—ecological “automated paradise” of healthy, sustainable, and liberating forms of energy—intensive and “environmentally human development may seem paradoxical in damaging” production and consumption, one light of various ecological criticisms of Marx which “appears to derive from [Marx's] that have become so fashionable over the last nature—domination assumption” (Routley, several decades. Marx's vision has been deemed 1981, p. 242).3 ecologically unsustainable and undesirable due 4. An engagement with these views is important to its purported treatment of natural conditions not least because they have become influential as effectively limitless, and its supposed even among ecologically minded Marxists, embrace, both practically and ethically, of many of whom have looked to non—Marxist technological optimism and human domination paradigms, such as Polanyi’s (1944), for the over nature. ecological guidance supposedly lacking in 3. The well—known ecological economist Marx (Weisskopf, 1991; O’Connor, 1998). The Herman Daly, for example, argues that for under—utilization of the human developmental Marx, the “materialistic determinist, economic and ecological elements of Marx’s communist growth is crucial in order to provide the vision is also reflected in the decision by some overwhelming material abundance that is the Marxists to place their bets on a “greening” of objective condition for the emergence of the capitalism as a “practical” alternative to the new socialist man. Environmental limits on struggle for socialism (Sandler, 1994; Vlachou, growth would contradict 'historical necessity'. 2002). “ (Daly, 1992, p. 196). The problem, says 5. Accordingly, I will interpret Marx's various environmental political theorist Robyn outlines of post—capitalist economy and Eckersley, is that “Marx fully endorsed the society as a vision of sustainable human 'civilizing' and technical accomplishments of development.4 Section II sketches the human the capitalist forces of production and developmental dimensions of associated (non— thoroughly absorbed the Victorian faith in market) production and communal property in scientific and technological progress as the Marx’s view. Section III draws out the MARX'S VISION OF COMMUNISM... 2 sustainability aspect of these principles by labour,” and communism as “a new and responding to the most common ecological fundamental revolution in the mode of criticisms of Marx’s projection. Section IV production” that “restore[s] the original union concludes the paper by briefly reconsidering the in a new historical form” (1976, p. 39). connections between Marx's vision of Communism is the “historical reversal” of “the communism and his analysis of capitalism, separation of labour and the worker from the focusing on that all important form of human conditions of labour, which confront him as development: the class struggle. independent forces” (1971, pp. 271—2). Under capitalism's wage system, “the means of II. BASIC ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES OF production employ the workers”; under MARX'S COMMUNISM communism, “the workers, as subjects, employ the means of production ... in order to produce 6. There is a common misperception that Marx wealth for themselves” (Marx, 1968, p. 580; and Engels, eschewing all “speculation about ... emphasis in original). socialist utopias,” thought very little about the 8. This new union of the producers and the system to follow capitalism, and that their conditions of production “will,” as Engels entire body of writing on this subject is phrases it, “emancipate human labour power represented by “the Critique of the Gotha from its position as a commodity” (1939, p. Program, a few pages long, and not much else” 221; emphasis in original). Naturally, such an (Auerbach and Skott, 1993, p. 195). In reality, emancipation, in which the laborers undertake post—capitalist economic and political production as “united workers” (see below), “is relationships are a recurring thematic in all the only possible where the workers are the owners major, and many of the minor, works of the of their means of production” (Marx, 1971, p. founders of Marxism, and despite the scattered 525). This worker ownership does not entail the nature of these discussions, one can easily glean individual rights to possession and alienability from them a coherent vision based on a clear set characterizing capitalist property, however. of organizing principles. The most basic feature Rather, workers' communal property codifies of communism in Marx's projection is its and enforces the new union of the collective overcoming of capitalism's social separation of producers and their communities with the the producers from necessary conditions of conditions of production. Accordingly, Marx production. This new social union entails a describes communism as “replacing capitalist complete decommodification of labor power production with cooperative production, and plus a new set of communal property rights. capitalist property with a higher form of the Communist or “associated” production is archaic type of property, i.e. communist planned and carried out by the producers and property” (1989b, p. 362; emphasis in original). communities themselves, without the class— 9. One reason why communist property in the based intermediaries of wage—labor, market, conditions of production cannot be individual and state. Marx often motivates and illustrates private property is that the latter form “excludes these basic features in terms of the primary co—operation, division of labour within each means and end of associated production: free separate process of production, the control over, human development. and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of 1. THE NEW UNION AND COMMUNAL PROPERTY the social productive powers” (Marx, 1967, I, p. 7. Marx specifies capitalism as the 762). In other
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