Abstract
Since the 1990s, John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett have argued that the foundation for an incisive “historical materialist ecology” focusing on “metabolic” processes (i.e., between humanity and other parts of the natural world) and “metabolic rift” (i.e., ecological disruption driven by capitalist accumulation), is embedded within Marx and Engels’s political economy. In Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique, Foster and Burkett draw on their previously published articles, which they have edited heavily, reorganized, and forged into a relentless “anti-critique” aimed at neutralizing opposing thinkers on the ecological left—”first-stage ecosocialists” who argue that Marx and Engels were plagued by major ecological blind spots or were anti-ecologists. Foster and Burkett contend that these thinkers fuse critical themes with liberal “Green” views that undercut the “revolutionary” analytical and normative resources in Marx and Engels’s ecology and truncate potentialities of post-Second World War era “prefigurative” Marxian ecologists (e.g., Scott Nearing, Barry Commoner, Allan Schnaiberg).
Foster and Burkett see their own work as the leading edge of a “second-stage ecosocialism” that has recovered Marx’s ecology and aims to develop a “third stage” capable of addressing the mounting planetary ecological crisis and spearheading efforts to overcome it. They intend their anti-critique to clear the path for the third stage project, underway via the research and practices of their students, collaborators, and other theoretical fellow travelers. The ultimate aim, they hold, is “epochal change” that institutes environmental and social justice and “metabolic restoration” that overcomes rift and averts climatic and wider ecological catastrophe.
Although focusing on “newer, more complex, more dialectically oriented” first-stage ecosocialist positions, Foster and Burkett identify their opponents’ gross distortions of Marx and Engels’s views (p. 7). For example, they explain how Marx’s critics’ ignorance of his use of the Hegelian organic-inorganic distinction has led them to misinterpret his reference to nature as humanity’s “inorganic body” and make bogus claims about his alleged anthropocentrism, instrumentalism, and dualistic vision of humanity’s separation from nature, views opposite his actual position.
Foster and Burkett analyze extensively leading ecological economist Joan Martinez-Alier’s charge that Marx and Engels’s failure to engage a manuscript sent to them by Ukrainian socialist Sergei Podolinsky, supposedly applying thermodynamics and energetics to economics, is evidence of their inattention to ecology and related science. Martinez-Alier and José Manuel Naredo have elevated Podolinsky into a major forerunner of ecological economics. Foster and Burkett demonstrate that Marx and Engels engaged Podolinsky’s essay and intently followed and understood the related science. Engels’s letters to Marx, they argue, provide definitive evidence that the two theorists closely assessed Podolinsky’s work. However, they explain that Marx and Engels deemed his work to be energy reductionist, unrelated to Marxian value theory and economics, and plagued by crude errors in calculation. Consequently, their unwillingness to employ or tout Podolinsky’s ideas is hardly indicative of their alleged inattention to ecology. In addition, the version of the essay that Martinez-Alier and Naredo criticize Marx for ignoring appeared after he died. Foster and Burkett explain in detail similar misunderstandings and flawed scholarship by critics of Engels’s arguments about entropy and the “heat death hypothesis” and Marx’s analysis of reproduction schemes, which purportedly manifest their scientific and ecological blinders. Against such arguments, Foster and Burkett demonstrate that Marx’s arguments about metabolic processes evidence their serious concern with science and ecology.
Foster and Burkett’s highly detailed account of Marx and Engels’s views about nineteenth-century science and errors of their late twentieth and early twenty-first century ecological critics will not likely interest general sociological readers. Yet this volume illustrates a broader problem—how critical claims, lacking adequate scholarly support, can become conventional knowledge, circulate widely, and shape thought. Environmental sociologists and interdisciplinary social scientists, especially followers and critics of Foster and Burkett’s work on Marx’s ecology and metabolic rift, will likely find this text useful because it brings together closely related essays on the topics in a revised, sharply formulated argument. Moreover, inclusion of two previously translated Podolinsky essays as appendices puts at hand related material central to the Marx and ecology debate. Foster and Burkett mention Marx’s historically specific, open system, antidualistic naturalism at key junctures and weave it into their broader argument. Developed more comprehensively and comparatively, this vital theme would round out the foundation for the third stage ecosocialism the authors hope to achieve. Foster and Burkett develop the issue substantially enough that the volume should be of interest to thinkers who believe that such naturalism illuminates the interdependence between the social sciences and natural sciences and encourages the interdisciplinary cooperation needed to cope with global ecological problems.
Foster and Burkett employ the concept “dialectical” often in this text. Marx’s dialectical method calls for serious engagement with contradictory situations, forces, and ideas to transcend existent conditions. Perhaps an outcome of this volume’s “anti-critical” focus, Foster and Burkett do not analyze contradictory features or tensions within Marx and Engels’s thought that provide potential blockages to achieving third-stage ecosocialism. Such problematic facets can exist alongside an approach’s strong points and do not necessarily compromise the latter.
For example, seen in broader context than Foster and Burkett describe, Marx’s references to peasant “isolation” are part of hiswider argument about the powers of “complex cooperation” and how highly concentrated, centralized capitalism and its productivist facets constitute precursory conditions for socialism. Critics of socialism and social democracy have contended that this thread of Marx’s thought is an ultimate root of actually existent communist pathologies. Foster and Burkett’s ideal of “associated producers” instituting metabolic restoration and regulating metabolic processes democratically and sustainably is no easy task. Engaging problematic facets of Marx’s thought and his critics’ claims about them is necessary to generate agreement about the strengths identified by the authors and secure support for the massive transformation of thought, practice, and society they call for in a historical moment deadly opposed to it.
Foster and Burkett’s volume and corpus have contributed very substantially to Marx scholarship and ecological discourse. Aimed to accelerate accumulation, neoliberal globalization has greatly increased material throughput and production of waste and has driven global overshoot. Even natural scientists have begun to suggest that the neoliberal policy regime is the undiscussed “elephant in the room” in debates about drivers of climate change and blockages to adaptation and mitigation. The teams of leading natural scientists cited by Foster and Burkett (p. 222) for their work on “safe operating spaces” and “planetary boundaries” raise this point. Foster and Burkett’s vision of Marx’s ecology has affinity for this recent wave of scientific work. Most importantly, they point to the profoundly important formative role of capitalist accumulation in generating “ecological alienation” and hold that the consequent planetary ecological crisis is not resolvable within capitalism per se. Given the rapidly mounting, portentous ecological risks reported regularly in the pages of Science and Nature and the Trump regime’s effort to accelerate accumulation by eviscerating already inadequate ecological regulation makes Foster and Burkett’s core argument worthy of serious debate in much wider public and policy circles as well as within specialized science and academe. Comprehensive planning suggested by the authors’ idea of ecosocialism has been anathema in mainstream circles for decades, but some version of it will be required if climate change is as serious and fast moving as natural scientists contend.