Bellamy Foster's "Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature" (Book Note)

 

 

Bellamy Foster argues that understanding Marx's materialist conception of nature is essential for grasping his social thought. He highlights the historical influences on Marx's materialism, tracing it back to ancient philosophers like Epicurus and Lucretius, as well as English materialists. Foster contends that Marx's historical materialism is deeply rooted in his understanding of nature, which he sees as crucial for human self-consciousness, freedom, and progress.

 

The Western Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s shared a bias against naturalistic perspectives, which had dominated social and cultural studies since the early 20th century. Foster aims to resurrect a different Marxist tradition, tracing back to mid-19th-century social and scientific thought. He suggests that Marx could have been a pioneer of the ecological movement if not for two misinterpretations. One misinterpretation arose from Western intellectuals like Lukács, Korsch, Adorno, Horkheimer, or Gramsci, who viewed Marx through an idealistic lens, opposing positivism and scientism. The other misinterpretation stemmed from a mechanistic reading of Marx prevalent in communist Eastern Europe. These interpretations obscured the "real" Marx, leaving him absent from the early environmentalist discourse.

 

Foster argues that Marx was rooted in the tradition of materialistic metaphysics, going back to Epicurus and Lucretius, but this is widely accepted and doesn't need special emphasis. Traditional Marxist thought emphasized the opposition between "idealism" and "materialism," with materialism prioritizing matter in motion and rejecting supernatural agents. However, this does not necessarily align with "progressive" or "rational" tendencies. Materialism faced challenges in explaining the emergence of life from non-living matter, as spontaneous generation lost credibility with scientific advancements. Materialist thinkers in the 18th century struggled to explain life without resorting to vital forces or supernatural design. It wasn't until Darwinian natural selection that materialism regained credibility by offering a mechanism for self-organization.

 

Marx's adoption of a materialistic ontological position was not particularly helpful heuristically, given the challenges materialism faced at the time. Additionally, there was an epistemological obstacle to Marx's understanding of society's relationship with nature. Classical political economists, like Thomas R. Malthus, viewed land as a limiting factor in economic growth. They argued that the finite availability of land contrasted with the potential for exponential population growth, leading to a stationary state where further economic progress would be hindered. Malthus suggested that social reforms redistributing land would be counterproductive, as growing populations would eventually deplete resources, advocating for social stratification to maintain balance.

 

 

According to Foster, Marx's belief in the eventual convergence of natural and human sciences stems from this materialist perspective. He sees humanism and naturalism as interconnected aspects of the same material reality. For Marx, communism represents the positive abolishment of private property through collective association. Foster suggests that communism, as fully developed naturalism and humanism, resolves conflicts between humans and nature, and among humans themselves.

 

 

With Malthus, nature became a powerful tool for conservative, anti-utopian arguments in political thought. The idea of nature, previously invoked to support social reform in the 18th century, now aligned with the status quo, demonstrating a harsh natural equilibrium resistant to change.

 

Malthus, along with Ricardo and other early 19th-century political economists, posed significant challenges for social reformers and socialists. Marx's work on political economy can be seen as a rebuttal of Malthus's theories. However, Marx couldn't simply adopt a blindly optimistic view like Friedrich Engels, who believed in limitless productivity through capital, labor, and science. Marx recognized the absurdity of this notion, realizing that there must be limits to population growth.

 

As a materialist, Marx acknowledged the validity of Malthus's argument about natural limits to economic growth. Malthus focused on agricultural production, based on the law of diminishing returns, which Marx understood in a changing context. Marx incorporated insights from emerging sciences like soil chemistry, particularly from Justus Liebig, to show that soil productivity was not fixed but influenced by human activity. This shifted the perception of land and soil from natural elements to products of human labor.

 

This shift had profound implications. Classical political economy primarily studied agricultural production within traditional energy constraints. Marx, however, witnessed the transition to a new regime, where agriculture became dynamic and detached from natural cycles. Soil was now seen as a resource that could be depleted and replenished through human intervention, such as using guano or mineral fertilizers processed with fossil fuels.

 

Foster argues that Marxist materialism aligns with Darwin's evolutionary thought. Both offer secular-scientific accounts of human development, emphasizing the importance of historical and natural processes in shaping society and humanity.

 

Bellamy Foster emphasizes the importance of the concept of metabolism in Marx's later work, seeing it as central to understanding the relationship between humans and nature. He argues that the alienation and exploitation of nature in capitalist society are intimately linked to the alienation and exploitation of people. Foster suggests that the metabolic interaction between humans and nature, represented by the economic and ecological circular flows, underlies Marx's analysis of these issues.

 

Foster also highlights Marx's ecological concerns, which were influenced by his criticism of Malthus and Malthusian economics. Marx saw Malthusian ideas, which justified poverty and inequality as natural, as a key ideological component of bourgeois liberalism. Marx objected to Malthusianism for its unscientific basis, its defense of aristocratic interests, and its disregard for the poor. Foster argues that Marx sought to replace Malthusianism with a more scientifically informed understanding of human-environment relations, drawing support from Darwin's evolutionary theory.

 

Much of the evidence for Marx's ecological perspective comes from his ongoing critique of Malthusian thought throughout his life. Foster demonstrates how Marx's rejection of Malthusianism influenced his views on human-environment relations and shaped his historical materialism.

 

Foster's analysis of Marx's ecological perspective has some notable shortcomings. While he argues that a materialist-evolutionary view can support ecological concerns, he acknowledges that Marx himself didn't place much emphasis on ecological sustainability within capitalist society. Foster suggests that Marx's focus on issues like capitalist agriculture and enclosures overshadowed his ecological considerations.

 

Foster also points out that later Marxists, such as William Morris, were more explicitly eco-socialist, indicating that Marx himself may not have been as focused on ecological issues. Additionally, Foster mentions other Marxists like Bukharin and Lenin who touched on ecological themes, but he admits that these ideas were not central to classical Marxism.

 

Another issue raised by Foster is Marx's Prometheanism, which suggests that a post-capitalist society would rely on exploiting nature more rationally and intensively to achieve superabundance. This perspective has been criticized as anti-ecological, but Foster argues that such criticism doesn't necessarily align with anti-modernist beliefs. However, Foster's discussion overlooks other critiques of Marx's Prometheanism within eco-Marxist circles, which seek to reconcile Marx's ideas with ecological concerns.

 

Foster acknowledges that Marx and Engels didn't prioritize environmental concerns in their revolutionary movement against capitalism. They didn't see ecological issues as central to the transition to socialism, believing instead that sustainability would be addressed after the revolution. However, Foster weakly counters the criticism of Marx's Prometheanism by claiming that Marx showed concern for ecological limits and sustainability in his texts, without providing enough evidence to support this claim.

 

One aspect Foster overlooks is Marx's strong faith in technological progress and solutions to societal problems, including ecological issues. This optimism needs to be discussed, as it forms the basis for ecological critiques of Marxism. Although Foster notes that Marx and Engels didn't view animals as mere machines and rejected human exceptionalism, he fails to address their ethical stance on non-human animals and the natural world. This omission weakens their critical stance against anthropocentrism.