Home › 2015 › Volume
67, Number 7 (December) › Marxism and Ecology
To link Marxism and
ecological transition may seem at first like trying to bridge two entirely
different movements and discourses, each with its own history and logic: one
having mainly to do with class relations, the other with the relation between
humans and the environment. However, historically socialism has influenced the
development of ecological thought and practice, while ecology has informed
socialist thought and practice. Since the nineteenth century, the relationship
between the two has been complex, interdependent, and dialectical.
Marxian approaches to
the planetary ecological crisis and the socio-ecological transformation
necessary for its resolution have evolved rapidly in recent decades, creating
the basis for a much more powerful, collective struggle for a Great Transition,
in which “consumerism, individualism, and domination of nature” are replaced
with “a new triad: quality of life, human solidarity, and ecological
sensibility.”1 The demands for a
society dedicated to need rather than profit and to human equality and
solidarity have long been associated with socialism. More recently, socialist
thinkers have given equal importance to ecological sustainability, building on
Karl Marx’s environmental critique of capitalism and his pioneering vision of
sustainable human development.2
This essay unearths
the deep ecological roots of Marx’s thought, showing how he brought an
environmental perspective to bear on the overarching question of social
transformation. From there it traces the evolution of Marxian ecology,
illuminating its profound, formative link to modern ecological economics and
systems ecology. It concludes with the wider project of building the broad and
deep social movement required to halt and reverse ecological and social
destruction.
For the first time in
human history, our species faces a dire existential choice. We can continue on
the path of business as usual and risk catastrophic Earth-system change (what
Frederick Engels metaphorically referred to as “the revenge of nature”), or we
can take the transformative route of social-system change aimed at egalitarian
human development in coevolution with the vital parameters of the earth.3 This constitutes the
epochal challenge of our time: to advance radical reform measures that oppose
the logic of capital in the historical present while coalescing with a long
revolution to construct a new social and ecological formation aimed at
sustainable human development.
Socialism
and the Origins of Systems Ecology
Ecology as understood
today came into its own only with the rise of systems ecology and the concept
of the ecosystem. Although Ernst Haeckel, who promoted and popularized Charles
Darwin’s work in Germany, coined the word “ecology” in 1866, originally the
term was used merely as an equivalent for Darwin’s loose concept of the
“economy of nature.”4 The view of ecology as a
way of addressing complex plant communities later gained currency in botanical
studies in the early twentieth century.
Yet ecology had other
roots, closer to our current conception, in early work on nutrient cycling and
the extension of the concept of metabolism to ecological-system processes. A
key figure in this respect, the great German chemist Justus von Liebig,
launched a major ecological critique of British industrial agriculture in the
late 1850s and early 1860s.5 Liebig accused the
British of developing a robbery culture, systematically leaching the soil of
nutrients, thereby requiring that bones be imported from the Napoleonic
battlefields and catacombs of Europe, and guano from Peru, to replenish English
fields. Liebig’s analysis itself was a product of revolutions then taking place
in nineteenth-century physics and chemistry. In 1845, Julius Robert von Mayer,
one of the co-discoverers of the conservation of energy, had described the
metabolism of organisms in thermodynamic terms. The new physiochemical thinking
stressed the interrelationship between the inorganic and organic (abiotic and
biotic), providing the initial basis for what was eventually to become a wider
ecological systems theory.6
Drawing on the work of
Liebig and that of the socialist physician Roland Daniels, Karl Marx introduced
the concept of “social metabolism,” which from the late 1850s on occupied a
central place in all his economic works.7 Marx defined the labor
process itself as a way in which “man, through his own actions, mediates,
regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” Human
production operated within what he called “the universal metabolism of nature.”
On this basis, he developed his theory of ecological crisis proper, now known
as the theory of metabolic rift, pointing to the “irreparable rift in the
interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the
natural laws of life itself.”8 As economist Ravi
Bhandari has recently written, Marxism was “the first systems theory.”9 This is true not simply
in political-economic terms, but also in incorporating thermodynamics and the
wider metabolic relationship between nature and society into its analysis.
These two strands of
ecological analysis—Haeckel’s notion of “ecology” and Liebig and Marx’s concept
of a metabolic relationship between society and nature—evolved during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning in the 1880s, the leading
British zoologist E. Ray Lankester (Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley’s protégé
and Marx’s close friend) put forward a strong ecological critique of capitalism
and of the Victorian concept of progress.10Lankester’s student, the
botanist Arthur George Tansley (like Lankester a socialist of the Fabian type)
founded the British Ecological Society. Tansley introduced the ecosystem
concept in 1935, in a theoretical polemic against the racist ecological
“holism” of General Jan Smuts and his followers in South Africa. In the
process, he developed a broad, materialist approach to ecology that
incorporated both inorganic and organic processes.11
Related developments
occurred in the Soviet Union. In his 1926 work The
Biosphere, V. I. Vernadsky argued that life existed on the thin
surface of a self-contained planetary sphere, was itself a geological force affecting
the earth as a whole, and had an impact on the planet that grew more extensive
over time.12 These insights induced
Nikolai Bukharin, a leading figure in the Russian Revolution and Marxian
theory, to reframe historical materialism as the problem of “man in the
biosphere.”13 Despite the purging of
Bukharin and other ecologically oriented thinkers, Vernadsky’s work remained
central to Soviet ecology, and later helped inspire the development of modern
Earth system analysis.
Ecology as we know it
today thus represented the triumph of a materialist systems theory. Tansley’s
ecosystem concept focused on natural complexes in a state of dynamic
equilibrium. Ecosystems were seen as relatively stable and resilient complexes
that were nonetheless vulnerable and subject to change. In developing this
analysis, he drew on the systems perspective of the British Marxist
mathematician and physicist Hyman Levy. In Tansley’s framework, humanity was
viewed as an “exceptionally powerful biotic factor” that disrupted and
transformed natural ecosystems.14 Correspondingly,
ecology today focuses on the human disruption of ecosystems from the local to
the global.
Marx’s concepts of the
“universal metabolism of nature,” the “social metabolism,” and the metabolic
rift have proven invaluable for modeling the complex relation between
social-productive systems, particularly capitalism, and the larger ecological
systems in which they are embedded. This approach to the human-social relation
to nature, deeply interwoven with Marx’s critique of capitalist class society,
gives historical materialism a unique perspective on the contemporary
ecological crisis and the challenge of transition.
Marx wrote of a rift
in the soil metabolism caused by industrialized agriculture. Essential soil
nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium contained in food or
fiber were shipped for hundreds, even thousands, of miles to densely populated
cities, where they ended up as waste, exacerbating urban pollution while being
lost to the soil. He went on to emphasize the need for rational regulation of
the metabolism between human beings and nature as fundamental to creating a
sustainable society beyond capitalism. Socialism was defined in ecological
terms, requiring that “socialized man, the associated producers, govern the
human metabolism with nature in a rational way…accomplishing it with the least
expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their
human nature.” The earth or land constituted “the inalienable condition for the
existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.” As he declared
in Capital, “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 boni
patres familias [good heads of the household].”15
Marxism’s
Great Divide and the Ecological Problem
Yet if classical
historical materialism embodied a powerful ecological critique, why was this
forgotten for so long within the main body of Marxist thought? One partial
answer can be found in the observation of the early twentieth century
revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg that many aspects of Marx’s vast
theoretical framework extending beyond the immediate needs of the working-class
movement would be discovered and incorporated much later, as the socialist
movement matured and new historical challenges arose.16 A more direct
explanation, however, is the fact that Marx’s ecological ideas fell victim to
the great split that opened in the 1930s between Western Marxism and Soviet
Marxism.
Intellectually, the
schism within Marxism centered on the applicability of dialectics to the
natural realm, and on the question of where Marx and Engels themselves stood on
this issue. The concept of the “dialectics of nature” was more closely
identified with Engels than Marx. Engels argued that dialectical
reasoning—focusing on the contingent character of reality, contradictory (or
incompatible) developments within the same relation, the interpenetration of
opposites, quantitative change giving rise to qualitative transformation, and
processes of historical transcendence—was essential to our understanding of the
complexity and dynamism of the physical world. This, however, raised deep
philosophical problems (both ontological and epistemological) within Marxian
discourse.
Soviet thinkers
continued to see complex, historical, interconnected views of development,
associated with dialectical reasoning, as essential to the understanding of
nature and science. Yet, while Marxism in the Soviet Union continued to embrace
natural science, its analysis often assumed a dogmatic character, combined with
an exaggerated technological optimism. This rigidity was reinforced by
Lysenkoism, which criticized Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian
genetics, and took on a politically repressive role during the purges of
scientists in the late 1930s.17
In contrast, the
philosophical tradition known as Western Marxism dissociated Marxism and the
dialectic from questions of nature and science, claiming that dialectical
reasoning, given its reflexive character, applied to human consciousness (and
human society) only, and could not be applied to the external-natural world.18 Hence, Western Marxists,
as represented most notably in this respect by the Frankfurt School, developed
ecological critiques that were largely philosophical and abstract, closely
related to ethical concerns that were later to dominate environmental
philosophy, but distant from ecological science and issues of materialism.
Neglect of natural-scientific developments and a strong anti-technology bent
placed sharp limits on the contributions of most Western Marxists to an
ecological dialogue.
From the 1950s to
1970s, when the modern environmental movement first developed, some pioneering
environmental thinkers, such as radical ecological economist K. William Kapp
and socialist biologist Barry Commoner, reached back to Marx’s idea of
metabolic rift in referring to ecological contradictions.19 However, in the 1980s a
distinct tradition of ecosocialism arose in the work of major New Left figures,
including British sociologist Ted Benton and French social philosopher André
Gorz. These important early ecosocialist thinkers employed the new ecologism of
Green theory to criticize Marx for allegedly failing to address questions of
sustainability. In Benton’s view, Marx, in his critique of Malthus, had thrown
the baby out with the bathwater, downplaying and even denying natural limits.20 The answer these
thinkers offered was to graft the general assumptions of mainstream Green
thought (including Malthusian notions) onto Marxian class analysis. The journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, founded by Marxian
economist James O’Connor in the late 1980s, generally denied any meaningful
relation to ecology in Marx’s work itself, insisting that prevailing ecological
concepts should simply be joined, in a centaur-like fashion, with Marxian
class-based perspectives—a position known today as “first-stage ecosocialism.”21
The hybrid approach
was challenged in the late 1990s when others, most notably Paul Burkett,
demonstrated the deep ecological context in which Marx’s original critique had
been constructed. The new analysis included the systematic reconstruction of
Marx’s argument on social metabolism. The result was the development of
important Marxian ecological concepts, together with a reunification of Marxian
theory. Hence, “second-stage ecosocialists” or ecological Marxists like Burkett
have reincorporated Engels’s major contributions to ecological thought,
associated with his explorations of the dialectics of nature, into the core of
Marxian theory, seeing Marx and Engels’s work once more as complementary.22
More recently, the
importance of late Soviet ecology has come to light. Despite its tortuous
history, Soviet science, particularly in the post-Stalin period, continued to
give rise to a dialectical understanding of interdependent natural and
historical processes. A key innovation was the concept of biogeocoenosis
(equivalent to ecosystem but emerging from the Vernadsky tradition of the
impact of life on the earth) developed in the early 1940s by the botanist and
silviculturist Vladimir Sukachev. Another critical systemic insight was Soviet
climatologist Mikhail Budyko’s discovery in the early 1960s of the albedo-ice
feedback, which made climate change a pressing issue for the first time. By the
1970s, recognition of “global ecology” as a distinct problem related to the
Earth system grew in the Soviet Union—in some respects, ahead of the West. It
is not by chance that the word “Anthropocene” had its first appearance in
English in the early 1970s in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia.23
Marxism
and Ecological Economics
By the dawn of the
twenty-first century, awareness of Marx’s ecological analysis inspired a
radical reconstruction of Marxism in line with the classical foundations of
historical materialism and its underlying environmental framework. For a long
time Marxian thinkers, particularly in the West, lamented that Marx had wasted
so much time and energy on what then seemed to be esoteric topics, related to
natural science and unrelated to the presumed narrow social-scientific bases of
his own thought. Marx attended with great interest some of the lectures on
solar energy by British physicist John Tyndall, over the course of which
Tyndall reported on his experiments demonstrating for the first time that
carbon dioxide emissions contributed to the greenhouse effect. Marx also took
detailed notes on how the shifting isotherms on the earth’s surface due to
climate change led to species extinction over the course of earth history. He
noted how anthropogenic regional climate change in the form of desertification
contributed to the fall of ancient civilizations, and considered the way this
would likely play out within capitalism.24 Today, the rise of
socialist ecology in response to changing conditions has led to a growing
appreciation—as Luxemburg anticipated—of such wider aspects of Marx’s science
and their essential role in his system of thought.
Marx’s (and Engels’s)
approach to ecological economics took shape from a critique of production, and
particularly capitalist commodity production. All commodities were conceived as
having the dual forms of use value and exchange value, related respectively to
natural-material conditions and monetary-exchange valuations. Marx saw the
antagonistic tension between use value and exchange value as key to both the
internal contradictions of capitalism and to its conflict with its external natural
environment. He insisted that nature and labor together constituted the dual
sources of all wealth. By incorporating only labor (or human services) into
economic value calculations, capitalism ensured that the ecological and social
costs of production would be excluded from the bottom line. Indeed, classical
liberal political economy, Marx argued, treated the natural conditions of
production (raw materials, energy, the fertility of the soil, etc.) as “free
gifts of nature” to capital. He based his critique on an open-system
thermodynamics, in which production is constrained by a solar budget and by
limited supplies of fossil fuels—referred to by Engels as “past solar heat,”
which was being systematically “squandered.”25
In Marx’s critique,
the social metabolism, i.e., the labor-and-production process, necessarily drew
its energy and resources from the larger universal metabolism of nature.
However, the antagonistic form of capitalist production—treating natural
boundaries as mere barriers to be surmounted—led inexorably to a metabolic
rift, systematically undermining the ecological foundations of human existence.
“By destroying the circumstances of this metabolism” related to “the eternal
natural condition” governing human production, this same process, Marx wrote,
“compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production,
and in a form adequate to the human race”—albeit in a future society
transcending capitalist commodity production.
Central to the whole
destructive dynamic was capital’s inherent drive to accumulate on an ever
greater scale. Capital as a system was intrinsically geared to the maximum
possible accumulation and throughput of matter and energy, regardless of human
needs or natural limits.26 In Marx’s understanding
of the capitalist economy, the correlation of material flows (related to use
value) and labor-value flows (related to exchange value) leads to an intensifying
contradiction between the imperatives of environmental resilience and economic
growth.
Burkett delineates two
different sources of such imbalance underpinning ecological crisis theory in
Marx. One of these takes the form of economic crises associated with resource
scarcities and the concomitant increases in costs on the supply-side, squeezing
profit margins. Ecological crises of this kind have a negative effect on
accumulation, and naturally lead to responses on the part of capital, e.g.,
energy conservation as an economizing measure.
The other type of
ecological crisis, or ecological crisis proper, is quite different, and is most
fully developed in Marx’s conception of the metabolic rift. It concerns the
interplay between the degradation of the environment and human development in
ways not accounted for in standard economic metrics like GDP. For example, the
extinction of species or the destruction of whole ecosystems is logically
compatible with the expansion of capitalist production and economic growth.
Such negative ecological impacts are designated by the system as
“externalities,” since nature is treated as a free gift to capital. As a
result, no direct feedback mechanism intrinsic to the capitalist system
prevents environmental degradation on a planetary scale.
A distinctive
characteristic of Marxian ecological theory has been an emphasis on unequal
ecological exchange or ecological imperialism, in which it is understood that
one country can ecologically exploit another—as in Marx’s famous reference to
how, for more than a century, England had “indirectly exported the soil of
Ireland,” undermining the long-term fertility of Irish agriculture. In recent
years, Marxian theorists have extended this analysis of ecological imperialism,
coming to see it as integral to all attempts to address the ecological problem.27
Marxian
Rift Analysis and Planetary Boundaries
As described above,
Marx’s theory of metabolic rift grew out of a response to the
nineteenth-century crisis of soil fertility. The problems of accelerated tempo,
increasing scale, and spatial disjuncture (the separation of town and country)
in capitalist production were already systematically stressed by Marx in the
mid-nineteenth century. In recent years, Marxian theorists have built on this
perspective to explore the global rift in the carbon metabolism and a host of
other sustainability issues.28 For several decades,
socialist ecologists have argued that capitalism has generated an acceleration
of the human transformation of the Earth system, occurring in two major phases:
the Industrial Revolution beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and
the rise of monopoly capitalism, particularly in its mature stage following the
Second World War—including the postwar scientific-technical revolution marked
by the development of nuclear power and widespread commercial use of synthetic
chemicals.29
Thus, socialist
ecological theorists were quick to embrace the explanatory power of the
Anthropocene, which highlighted the epoch-making emergence of modern human
society asthe major planetary geological force governing
changes in the Earth system. Closely related to this rich insight, leading
Earth System scientists introduced the planetary boundaries framework in 2009
to delineate a safe space for humanity defined by nine planetary boundaries,
most of which are currently in the process of being crossed. In our 2010 bookThe Ecological Rift, Brett Clark, Richard York, and I
integrated the Marxian metabolic rift analysis with the planetary-boundaries
framework, describing it as a series of rifts in the Earth system. In this
view, today’s planetary emergency related to crossing these boundaries could be
called “the global ecological rift,” referring to the disruption and
destabilization of the human relationship to nature on a planetary scale,
arising from the process of capital accumulation without end.30
The
Great Convergence
The integrative
concept of “the global ecological rift” represents a growing convergence of
Marxian ecological analysis with Earth System theory and the Great Transition
perspective, which share a complex, interconnected evolution. Marxian
ecologists today start with the critique of economic growth (in
its more abstract characterization) or capital accumulation(viewed
more concretely). Continued exponential economic growth cannot occur without
expanding rifts in the Earth System. Therefore, society, particularly in rich
countries, must move towards a stationary state or steady-state economy, which
requires a shift to an economy without net capital formation, one that stays
within the solar budget. Development, particularly in the rich economies, must
assume a new form: qualitative, collective, and cultural; one that emphasizes
sustainable human development in harmony with Marx’s original view of
socialism. As Lewis Mumford argued, a stationary state, promoting ecological
ends, requires for its fulfillment the egalitarian conditions of “basic
communism,” with distribution determined “according to need, not according to
ability or productive contribution.”31 Such a shift away from
capital accumulation and towards a system of meeting collective needs based on
the principle of enough is obviously impossible
in any meaningful sense under the regime of capital accumulation. What is
required, then, is an ecological and social revolution that will facilitate a
society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality.
If the objective
necessity of such an ecological revolution is now clear, the more difficult
question of how to carry out the necessary social transformations remains. The
ecosocialist movement has adopted the slogan System Change Not Climate Change,
but the global capitalist system is so deeply entrenched as to be omnipresent
in our current reality. The dominance of the capitalist mode of production
means that revolutionary change on the scale needed to confront the planetary
environmental emergency remains beyond the immediate social horizon.
However, we need to
take seriously the non-linear, contingent relation of everything connected to
human development. The conservative nineteenth-century cultural theorist Jacob
Burckhardt used the term “historical crisis” to refer to situations in which “a
crisis in the whole state of things is produced, involving whole epochs and all
or many peoples of the same civilization.” He explained, “The historical
process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which
otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and
are fulfilled.”32 That revolutionary
accelerations of the historical process have occurred in the past around the
organization of human society itself is not to be doubted. We can point not
only to the great political revolutions, but also beyond, to such fundamental
transformations in production as the original Agricultural Revolution and the
Industrial Revolution. Today, we need an Ecological Revolution equivalent in
depth and scope to those earlier transformations.
The obvious difficulty
is the speed—and, in some respects, irreversibility—of encroaching
environmental havoc. Hence, the concomitant acceleration of the historical
process to address the crisis must start now. Underestimating the scale of the
problem will prove fatal. In order to avoid hitting the trillionth cumulative
tonne of combusted carbon, equivalent to a 2° C increase in global temperature,
carbon emissions must fall by a rate of at least 3 percent per annum globally,
which realistically requires that the rich nations cut their emissions by more
than twice that rate—a truly daunting challenge.33 As always, we must act
with the tools we have. Moreover, no mere technical fix can solve a problem
based in the systematic maximization of exponential economic growth ad infinitum. Hence, “a revolutionary reconstitution of
society at large,” altering the system of social-metabolic reproduction,
provides the only alternative to the impending “common ruin of the contending
classes.”34
For Marxist ecological
thinkers, this dire state of affairs has led to the development of a two-stage
strategy for ecological and social revolution. The first stage focuses on “What
Can Be Done Now?”—that is, on what is realistic in the short term under present
conditions, while necessarily going against the logic of capital accumulation.
This could be considered theecodemocratic phase in
the worldwide ecological revolution. Under prevailing conditions, a wide array
of drastic changes needs to be fought for within a broad-based radical
movement.35 Such measures would
need to include ones like the following: a carbon-fee-and-dividend system, with
100 percent of the revenue being redistributed back to the population on a
per-capita basis; a ban on coal-fired plants and unconventional fossil fuels
(such as tar sands oil); a vast shift to solar and wind power and other
sustainable energy alternatives, financed by cutbacks in military spending; a
moratorium on economic growth in the rich economies in order to reduce carbon
emissions, coupled with radical redistribution (and measures to protect the
less well-off); and a new international climate negotiation process modeled on
the egalitarian and ecocentric principles of the Peoples’ Agreement of the
World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia in 2010.36
The above emergency
measures all run against the prevailing logic of capital accumulation, but
nevertheless can conceivably be advanced and fought for under present
conditions. Along with a wide array of similar initiatives, such measures
constitute the rational and realistic starting point for an ecological and
social revolution, and a means with which to mobilize the general public. We
cannot replace the whole system in all of its aspects overnight. The battle
must start in the present and extend into the future, accelerating in the
mid-term, and ending with a new social metabolism geared to sustainable human
development.
The long-term goal of
systemic transformation raises the issue of a second stage of ecological
revolution, or the ecosocialist phase.
The primary question, of course, is the historical conditions under which this
change can come about. Marx referred to the environmental pressures of his day
as an “unconscious socialist tendency,” which would require the associated
producers to regulate the social metabolism with nature in a rational way.37 This tendency, however,
can only be realized as the result of a great revolution carried out by the
greater part of humanity, establishing more egalitarian conditions and
processes for governing global society, including the requisite ecological,
social, and economic planning.
In the not-too-distant
future, an “environmental proletariat”—of which signs are already present—will
almost inevitably emerge from the combination of ecological degradation and
economic hardship, particularly at the bottom of society. In these
circumstances the material crises affecting people’s lives will become
increasingly indistinguishable in their manifold ecological and economic effects
(e.g., food crises). Such conditions will compel much of the working population
of the earth to revolt against the system. What we often misleadingly call the
“middle class”—those above the working poor but with little vested interest in
the system—will doubtless be drawn into this struggle too. As in all
revolutionary situations, some of the more enlightened elements of the ruling
class will surely abandon their class for humanity and the earth. Since the
challenge of maintaining a resilient earth will face the younger generations
the most, we can expect that youth will become disenchanted and radicalized as
the material conditions of existence deteriorate. Historically, women have been
especially concerned with issues of natural and social reproduction, and will
undoubtedly be at the forefront of the struggle for a more ecologically
oriented global society.
In this Great
Transition, I believe socialists will play the leading role, even as the
meaning of socialism evolves, taking on a wider connotation in the course of
the struggle. As the great artist, writer, and socialist William Morris
famously declared, “Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought
for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be
what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another
name.”38 Today, the age-old
struggle for human freedom and meaning has reached an endgame. In the new epoch
before us, our task is clear: to fight for equitable and sustainable human
development in lasting accord with the earth.39
Notes
1.
Paul D. Raskin, The Great Transition Today: A Report from the Future (Boston:
Tellus Institute, 2006), http://greattransition.org.
2.
See Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human
Development,” Monthly Review 57, no. 5
(October 2005): 34–62.
3.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International
Publishers, 1975), vol. 25, 460–61.
4.
Frank Benjamin Golley, A History of the Ecosystem
Concept in Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2,
207.
5.
On Liebig’s ecological critique, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2000), 149–54.
6.
Julius Robert Mayer, “The Motions of Organisms and Their
Relation to Metabolism,” in Julius Robert Mayer: Prophet of
Energy, ed. Robert B. Lindsey (New York: Pergamon, 1973), 75–145.
7.
Roland Daniels, Mikrokosmos (New
York: Peter Lang, 1988), 49.
8.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3
(London: Penguin, 1981), 949; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International
Publishers, 1975), vol. 30, 54–66.
9.
Ravi Bhandari, “Marxian Economics: The Oldest Systems Theory is New Again (or Always)?”
Institute for New Economics, April 9, 2015, http://ineteconomics.org.
10.
E. Ray Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair (New
York: Henry Holt, 1913), 365–79; Joseph Lester,E. Ray Lankester and the Making
of Modern British Biology (Oxford: British Society for the
History of Science, 1995).
11.
Arthur G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational
Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, no.
3 (July 1935): 284–307; Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
12.
Lynn Margulis et al., “Foreword,” in Vladimir I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere (New York: Springer, 1998), 15.
13.
Nikolai Bukharin, “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint
of Dialectical Materialism,” in Bukharin et al., Science at the Crossroads (London: Frank Cass,
1971), 17.
14.
Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and
Terms,” 303-04; Hyman Levy, The Universe of Science (London:
Watts, 1932), 303–04.
15.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1,
637, vol. 3, 754, 911, 949, 959.
16.
Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New
York: Pathfinder, 1970), 111.
17.
For an informed and balanced discussion of Lysenkoism, see
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin,The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 163–96.
18.
See Russell Jacoby, “Western Marxism,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 523–26.
19.
K. William Kapp, The Social Costs of Private
Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950),
35–36; Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New
York: Knopf, 1971), 280.
20.
Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits,” New Left Review 178 (1989): 51–86; André Gorz,Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (London: Verso,
1994).
21.
See John Bellamy Foster, “Foreword,” in Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014),
vii–xiii.
22.
Burkett, Marx and Nature.
23.
John Bellamy Foster, “Late Soviet Ecology,” Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 20; M.I.
Budyko,Global Ecology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980
[Russian edition 1977]); E.V. Shantser, “The Anthropogenic System (Period),” Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan,
1973): 140.
24.
On these aspects of Marx’s thought, see John Bellamy Foster,
“Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1–17.
25.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works,
vol. 46, 411; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York,The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2010), 61–64.
26.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1,
637–38, 742; Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London:
Penguin, 1973), 334–35; Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 207–11.
27.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1,
860; Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift,
345–72; John Bellamy Foster and Hannah Holleman, “The Theory of Unequal
Ecological Exchange: A Marx-Odum Dialectic,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 41,
no. 1-2 (March 2014): 199–233.
28.
See, for example, Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen and
Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans,
Fisheries, and Aquaculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2015). See also Ryan Wishart, Jamil Jonna, and Jordan Besek,
“The Metabolic Rift: A Select Bibliography,”http://monthlyreview.org.
29.
See Ian Angus, “When Did the Anthropocene Begin…and Why Does
It Matter?” Monthly Review 67, no. 4
(September 2015): 1–11; John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 108.
30.
Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift,
14–15, 18; Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 24 (September 2009): 472–75.
31.
Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 411. Mumford, interestingly, was
drawing here both on Mill’s Principles of Political Economy and
Marx’sCritique of the Gotha Program.
32.
Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History (Indianapolis:
Liberty Press, 1979), 214.
33.
Kevin Anderson, “Why Carbon Prices Can’t Deliver 2°C
Target,” August 13, 2013,http://kevinanderson.info/blog/why-carbon-prices-cant-deliver-the-2c-target/;
trillionthtonne.org, accessed September 21, 2015.
34.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1964), 2. On the concept of socio-metabolic reproduction see István
Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1995), 170–87.
35.
These and other proposals are developed in Fred Magdoff and
John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist
Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2011), 124–33.
36.
These and numerous other measures can be fought for now in
the context of the present system, as a way of addressing the present planetary
emergency, but are also consistent with a longer ecological and social
revolution.
37.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42, 558–59.
38.
William Morris, Three Works (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), 53.
39.
See Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human
Development,” 34–62.
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