THE ROBBERY OF NATURE Capitalism and the Ecological Rift The Robbery of Nature John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS New York Copyright © 2020 by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the publisher. ISBN 978-158367-839-8 paper ISBN 978-158367-778-0 cloth Typeset in Minion Pro and Brown MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK monthlyreview.org 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface Introduction 1. The Expropriation of Nature 2. The Rift of Éire 3. Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution 4. Marx as a Food Theorist 5. Marx and Alienated Speciesism 6. Capitalism and the Paradox of Wealth 7. The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Socialist Society 8. Marx’s Ecology and the Left 9. Value Isn’t Everything 10. The Planetary Emergency, 2020–2050 11. The Long Ecological Revolution Notes Index Preface As long as human beings exist, the history of nature and the history of human beings mutually condition each other. —KARL MARX THE ROBBERY OF NATURE draws on the classical historicalmaterialist critique associated with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to explain how capitalist commodity production robs human society and life in general of the conditions of natural and social reproduction, generating a planetary rift that today knows virtually no bounds.1 The result is an existential crisis in the human relation to the earth that can only be overcome through a long ecological revolution. In Marx’s classical critique of capitalism, human production alters the material form of physical existence, but can do so only in conformity with natural laws and processes—if it is not to create an “irrevocable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”2 This insight forms the basis of Marx’s famous theory of metabolic rift. In this perspective, the labor process constitutes the vital “social metabolism” mediating the relationship between humanity and “the universal metabolism of nature,” that is, natural processes as a whole.3 Capitalist commodity production, however, introduces an “alienated mediation” of this essential ecological relationship through its one-dimensional pursuit of the “value form” (exchange value) at the expense of the “natural form” (use value).4 The result is the metabolic rift. This requires a revolutionary reconstitution of society as a whole in order to restore a viable socioecological metabolism—one that will sustain the elemental conditions of life for the “chain of human generations.”5 In this book, we seek to elaborate on Marx’s theory of metabolic rift by employing his notion of the “robbery” or “expropriation” of nature—which, since human beings are inherently a part of nature, is undermining the natural-material bases on which humanity’s existence rests.6 This degradation of the human relation to the earth results from treating “Nature” as a “free gift to … capital,” and from the violation of the basic “conditions of reproduction” and ecological sustainability, including those of the Earth System as a whole.7 The expropriation of nature is at one and the same time the expropriation of land/ecology and the expropriation of human bodies themselves. Much of this book is therefore concerned not simply with the robbing of nature but also the robbing of the physical bases of human existence, through various forms of oppression, associated with class, race, gender, and imperialism. In extreme cases, this manifests itself as what Engels called “social murder.”8 The ecological rift is thus also a corporeal rift, reflecting the interdependent character of the social metabolism, which connects human beings with nature and their own corporeal organization. Capitalism’s degradation of the earth depends ultimately on an “alienated speciesism,” according to which to be “an animal,” or indeed a “living thing,” means to be an object of expropriation. Yet, for Marx, following Thomas Müntzer, “all living things must also become free.”9 We first articulated the notion of the expropriation of nature, around which the present argument revolves, in our article “The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Environmental Destruction,” appearing in Monthly Review in November 2009, now revised and updated in this book as chapter 6, “Capitalism and the Paradox of Wealth.” The Introduction and most of the other chapters (chapters 1–5 and 8)—“The Expropriation of Nature,” “The Rift of Éire,” “Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution,” “Marx as a Food Theorist,” “Marx and Alienated Speciesism,” and “Marx’s Ecology and the Left”—were all written, beginning in 2016, as extensions of this notion of the expropriation or robbery of nature, as perceived from a historical-materialist perspective, and with this book explicitly in mind. Exceptions to this are chapter 9, “Value Isn’t Everything,” written by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett in response to attacks on the labor theory of value by ecosocialists; chapter 7, “The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society,” which was part of a debate on the role of work in a future green society; chapter 10, “The Planetary Emergency, 2020–2050,” addressing the question of a climate change exit strategy, which is extensively revised and updated for this book; and chapter 11, “The Long Ecological Revolution,” emerging out of a debate on ecology, technology, and ecosocialism. These chapters have all been included to round out the argument and to give more concrete meaning to the long ecological revolution to which the entire argument necessarily leads. All of the previously published essays have been adapted to form integral components of this book. Chapter 2, “The Rift of Éire,” appears here for the first time. This book is focused on putting forward a critique of capitalism’s catastrophic degradation of the environment. But in the process, we are often compelled to question other left-environmental views that approach these issues in partial, one-sided ways. In doing so, our intention is not to create further divisions within the left, but rather to unite the movement by insisting that the age-old revolutionary principle of the masses, “I am nothing and I should be everything,” be extended to the world of life itself, merging the calls for substantive equality with ecological sustainability in a universal struggle for sustainable human development.10 This demands a much deeper and more revolutionary materialism, one that only an ecohistorical materialism can provide. The multifaceted analysis provided in the following chapters would not have been possible without the help of those with whom we have (between the two of us) written on these topics over the years, including Daniel Auerbach, Kelly Austin, Paul Burkett, Rebecca Clausen, Hannah Holleman, Stefano B. Longo, Fred Magdoff, Brian Napoletano, Pedro Urquijo, Richard York, and Karen Xuan Zhang. We are also deeply indebted to our colleagues at Monthly Review, including, in addition to Hannah and Fred, Susie Day, R. Jamil Jonna, John Mage, Martin Paddio, Al Ruben, John J. Simon, Intan Suwandi, Camila Valle, Colin Vanderburg, Victor Wallis, and Michael Yates. Ian Angus, editor of Climate and Capitalism, has given us continual support and encouragement. Our friend Desmond Crooks generously helped in the design of the book’s cover. In the process of developing our ideas, we have benefited from interactions with a wide range of thinkers. We would particularly like to acknowledge in this respect Lazarus Adua, Elmar Altvater, Samir Amin, Robert J. Antonio, Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Amanda Bertana, Jordan Besek, Ted Benton, Natalie Blanton, Paul Buhle, Alex Callinicos, Michael Carolan, Matthew Clement, Julia B. Corbett, Michael Dawson, Peter Dickens, Ricardo Dobrovolski, Sue Dockstader, Liam Downey, Adam Driscoll, Wilma Dunaway, Riley Dunlap, Eric Edwards, Martin Empson, Andrew Feenberg, Jared Fitzgerald, Joseph Fracchia, R. Scott Frey, Michael Friedman, Paul Gellert, Martha E. Gimenez, Jennifer Givens, Patrick Greiner, Ryan Gunderson, Gregory Hooks, Leontina Hormel, Alf Hornborg, Cade Jameson, Andrew K. Jorgenson, Naomi Klein, Peter Linebaugh, Delores (Lola) Loustaunau, Andreas Malm, Philip Mancus, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, Robert W. McChesney, Julius McGee, István Mészáros, Marcello Musto, Kamran Nayeri, Kari Norgaard, Frank Page, Marcel Paret, Mauricio Betancourt De La Parra, Thomas C. Patterson, David Pellow, Paul Prew, Camilla Royle, Kohei Saito, Ariel Salleh, Jean Philippe Sapinski, Keith Scott, Helena Sheehan, Eamonn Slater, Richard Smith, Christian Stache, Joanna Straughn, Stephen Tatum, Howard Waitzkin, Kyle Powys Whyte, Chris Williams, Ryan Wishart, and Christopher Wright. Our ideas on ecology and society are inextricably interwoven with those of the two people with whom we share our lives on a daily basis, and without whose support and encouragement these pages would be blank. We therefore dedicate The Robbery of Nature, with deep humility, to our earthly “muses,” Carrie Ann Naumoff and Kris Shields. Introduction THE CHAPTER on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital closes with this statement: “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil…. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.” “Robbing the worker”