Por qué el ecosocialismo necesita a Marx

Monthlyreview.org / 2016/11/01 / why-ecosocialism-needs-marx /

Por Kohei 1 de noviembre de

Saito 2016

Kohei Saito es investigador invitado en UC-

Santa Barbara y miembro postdoctoral de la
Sociedad Japonesa para la Promoción de la
Ciencia.
John Bellamy Foster y Paul Burkett, Marx
and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (Chicago:
Haymarket, de próxima publicación en enero
de 2017), 316 páginas, $ 28, tapa blanda;
tapa dura — Boston: Brill, 2016, $ 149.
En su reciente prólogo a la segunda edición
de Marx y la naturaleza de Paul Burkett ,
John Bellamy Foster reflexionó sobre un
cambio significativo en las actitudes de la
izquierda hacia la ecología de Marx: “Hoy en
día, la comprensión de Marx del problema
ecológico se está estudiando en
universidades de todo el mundo y está inspirando acciones ecológicas en torno a la
ecología. el mundo." 1 Este reconocimiento mundial de la crítica ecológica de Marx al
capitalismo, sin duda, debe mucho a Marx y la naturaleza de Burkett (1999) y Ecología de
Marx de Foster (2000). Sin embargo, el nuevo interés por el marxismo ecológico no se
originó únicamente en estos libros. Más bien, como su nuevo libro en coautoría Marx and
the Earthdocumentos, durante los últimos quince años Burkett y Foster han refutado
meticulosamente las muchas críticas a Marx de los llamados “ecosocialistas de primera
etapa”, como John Clark, Joel Kovel y Danuel Tanuro. Sus críticas son diversas, y cada una
de ellas es analizada de cerca en los capítulos del libro de Foster y Burkett, que discuten “El
rechazo de Marx del valor intrínseco de la naturaleza” (Introducción);
“Instrumentalización de la naturaleza como cuerpo inorgánico del hombre” (capítulo uno);
“El desconocimiento de Marx y Engels sobre la termodinámica” (capítulos dos, tres y
cuatro); y “restar importancia a las condiciones naturales en los esquemas de
reproducción” (capítulo cinco).

Cabe señalar que, cualesquiera que sean sus desacuerdos con Marx, los ecosocialistas de la
primera etapa también fueron profundamente críticos con el capitalismo. Entonces, ¿por
qué Foster y Burkett discuten con sus posibles camaradas? Además, algunos de los temas
tratados en Marx y la Tierrapuede parecer abstruso a primera vista, ¿por qué molestarse
en debatirlos tan extensamente? Sin embargo, un lector paciente pronto reconocerá la
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importancia del libro y la importancia de los temas en juego. Como señalan los autores, los
"ecosocialistas de la primera etapa", a pesar de su reconocimiento declarado del legado
más amplio de Marx, tienden a enfatizar las deficiencias teóricas de la ecología de Marx en
los términos más enérgicos, como "un defecto ecológico importante", "un grave error, ”“ Un
defecto ”y“ un fallo ”(16). Prefieren abandonar las teorías de Marx sobre el valor, la
cosificación y la clase por completo, descartándolas como obsoletas e irrelevantes, y no ven
ningún sentido en revivir las ideas de Marx como parte de una crítica radical de la
destrucción ambiental del capitalismo. Al mismo tiempo, frente a la creciente influencia
hegemónica de un enfoque más "clásico" de Marx y Engels, los ecosocialistas de la primera
etapa buscan resueltamente cualquier “defecto” en la comprensión de las ciencias
naturales de Marx y Engels, por trivial que sea, para socavar la ecología de Marx. Foster y
Burkett se propusieron elaborar una rigurosa “anti-crítica” contra esas críticas, para
finalmente zanjar estos debates y defender una parte vital del legado intelectual de Marx.

Marx y Engels, por supuesto, difícilmente podrían predecir todo lo que le ha sucedido a la
humanidad y al medio ambiente desde su época. Sin embargo, para muchos críticos de la
izquierda, este hecho obvio por sí solo invalida sus escritos sobre ecología. En cambio,
basándose en la rica tradición socialista y ecológica de Paul Sweezy, Shigeto Tsuru, István
Mészáros y Barry Commoner, quienes ya habían defendido la relevancia teórica de la
crítica ecológica de Marx en los años sesenta y setenta, Foster y Burkett demuestran de
manera convincente que el enfoque de Marx La ecología puede permitirnos derivar un
"enfoque metodológico aplicable a los problemas ambientales bastante diferentes (pero no
sin relación) de hoy", porque su crítica de la economía política, más de un siglo después,
todavía ofrece una visión única de la lógica fundamental y la estructura de capitalismo
(24).

In making their case for the “compatibility” of Marx’s view with contemporary ecological
economics, Foster and Burkett undertake historical investigations of the scientific
discourses and debates of the nineteenth century (135). For example, they provide
translations of the Italian and German versions of Sergei Podolinsky’s seminal article on
“Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces,” from the early 1880s, in the appendix,
making it clear that Marx and Engels did not reject Podolinsky because they were ignorant
of the latter’s thermodynamic contribution to ecological economics, but rather because
they were fully aware of Podolinsky’s problematic presuppositions. Podolinsky’s crude
materialism, based on “energy reductionism,” is of little use in understanding the social
category of “value.” In other words, a thermodynamic perspective alone is not able to reveal
the historical specificity of capitalist social relations. Even within thermodynamics,
Podolinsky’s calculations, according to Burkett and Foster, are deeply flawed, ignoring the
energy inputs associated with fertilizers and coal, and effectively omitting humanity’s role
as a “squanderer” of accumulated solar power in the production process. Marx and Engels,
by contrast, gave far more attention to such waste, opening up the possibility of an
ecological critique of value (127).
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Furthermore, Foster and Burkett show that Marx and Engels eagerly and carefully studied
the newest developments in the natural sciences, and first-stage ecosocialists’ critiques of
Marx’s ignorance of thermodynamics, among other areas, are based on arbitrary or
superficial reading of the texts. Though Engels is better known for his writings on natural
science, the book offers a valuable reminder that Marx was an equally keen student of
many of the same subjects. The intellectual division of labor between Marx and Engels
suggested by Western Marxism, one inherited by first-stage ecosocialists, therefore does
not hold. Western Marxists, most influentially those associated with the Frankfurt School,
limited the application of dialectics to society, excluding what they viewed as Engels’s
misguided project of a “dialectics of nature,” in an effort to save Marx from the rigidly
positivistic and mechanistic worldview of Soviet Marxism. The price they paid for this
intellectual foreclosure was significant. By excluding natural science from Marx’s project,
Western Marxists were left unable to analyze modern ecological crises as manifestations of
the basic contradictions of capitalism. So Alain Badiou, a contemporary representative of
the Western Marxist legacy, ironically declared that ecology is “a contemporary form of the
opium of the people.”2 Against this tendency, Foster and Burkett’s Marx and the Earth
overcomes the binary of society and nature within Marxism, successfully demonstrating
that Marx was able to elaborate his conceptions of “labor power” and “value” without
contradicting or distorting the natural scientific discoveries of his time.

The key concept in this transcendence of the society-nature binary is “metabolism”

(Stoffwechsel). According to Marx, labor is a mediation of the metabolic interaction
between human beings and nature. Humans actively work upon nature in a conscious and
teleological manner, dramatically altering and disrupting nature. At the same time,
humans, as a part of nature, are not in a position arbitrarily to manipulate the external,
sensuous world. Rather, they depend deeply on their environment. This reliance on nature
is apparent in the limited availability of natural resources and energies, and in the myriad
ways in which the development of human societies has been conditioned by geological,
climatic, and biological factors—what the authors call the “reality of coevolution” through
the incessant process of the metabolic interaction between humans and nature (116). In
this sense, Marx’s concept of “metabolism” starts with the recognition of this
transhistorical “unity” of humans and nature as a fundamental material condition.

On its own, the concept of metabolism is hardly revelatory. But Marx goes further, aiming
to understand the historical specificity of the metabolic relationship between humanity and
nature under capitalism. This is why Foster and Burkett stress that capitalist production is
characterized by the “separation” of humans from their objective condition of production,
i.e., by alienation from nature (85). Instead of falling into a neo-Malthusian vision of
overpopulation, Marx asked how capitalism’s historically unique organization of the
metabolism between humanity and nature causes “rifts” in material conditions of life. Of
course, capitalist production is not possible without support from nature, and even its
rapacious growth is constrained by the material limits of available resources. However,
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capital’s endless drive for self-valorization means that it cannot fully consider the
sustainability of historically accumulated energy and resources such as soil fertility and
fossil fuel. Consequently, the “rift” noted above takes the form of the environmental crises
that accompany the expansion of capital’s logic around the world.

In this way, Marx and the Earth already prepares a cogent reply to Jason W. Moore, who
has recently argued that “the metabolic rift” presupposes a crude “Cartesian divide”
between society and nature.3 Such dualism is actually alien to the concept of metabolism,
however, while the opposite approach, a one-sided emphasis on the unity of society and
nature, elides Marx’s vital insight that capitalist production is characterized by the
alienation of labor from nature. The social form of labor is of central importance to Marx’s
critical investigation, and to treat labor, as Moore does, as merely one of what he calls the
“Four Cheaps” enabling capitalist expansion, is to miss this fundamental point of Marx’s
theory of metabolism.

Marx and the Earth is a thorough examination and defense of Marx’s ecological critique of
capitalism, and its ideas have been further bolstered by the publication of the new edition
of Marx and Engels’s collected works, the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). A
number of Marx’s notebooks, unpublished until the new edition, record his careful
examination of the newest advances in natural science. Two specific examples show the
MEGA’s relevance to Marx and the Earth.

First, Foster and Burkett reply to Joel Kovel’s critique that Marx did not recognize the
intrinsic value of nature, but rather treated nature merely as humanity’s instrument. Not
only, the authors argue, is Kovel’s retreat to the aesthetic intuition of nature’s value, as
suggested by Jakob Böhme, a retreat into idealism (47), but also his criticisms of Marx in
this respect are decisively refuted by remarks recorded in Marx’s notebooks. During his
decades-long exile in London, Marx witnessed a rapid development in the productivity of
English stock farming. He read books in French and German that argued for the
superiority of English agriculture. However, his comments on these readings are far more
critical of human activity and sympathetic to animals. Responding to Léonce de Lavergne‘s
enthused reports of the “system of selection” developed by English breeder Robert
Bakewell, Marx commented: “Characterized by precocity, in entirety sickliness, want of
bones, a lot of development of fat and flesh etc. All these are artificial products.
Disgusting!”4 Marx also read the work of Wilhelm Hamm, Lavergne’s German translator,
who had the same praise for English farming. Marx’s comments are again sympathetic to
the well-being of animals. Marx condemns “feeding in the stable” as a “system of cell
prison,” and asks himself:

In these prisons animals are born and remain there until they are killed off. The question is
whether or not this system connected to the breeding system that grows animals in an
abnormal way by aborting bones in order to transform them to mere meat and a bulk of fat—
whereas earlier (before 1848) animals remained active by staying under free air as much as
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 possible—will ultimately result in serious deterioration of life force?5

These remarks will come as a surprise to those who wish to denounce Marx as a naïve,
anthropocentric apologist for technological development. His notebooks instead document
his real reaction against the capitalist form of “robbery” development, a critique that hardly
excluded non-humans from consideration.

Foster and Burkett also refer to Joseph Beete Jukes’s 1878 Student’s Manual of Geology.
Looking at Marx’s extensive excerpts from Jukes’s book, one is surprised to learn that his
interest in ecological issues continued to expand through the last years of his life.
Investigating the impact of climate change on species, he paid attention to great
transformations of nature caused by humanity: “The extinction of species is still going on
(man himself [is] the most active exterminator).”6 These are only two examples, and Marx
filled about two hundred notebooks during his life time, many of which no doubt contain
still more textual support for “Marx’s ecology.”

En cualquier caso, Foster y Burkett son los mejores representantes de los “ecosocialistas de
segunda etapa” que han revivido la tradición marxista de la crítica ecológica del
capitalismo. No es de extrañar que sus cuidadosos análisis en Marx y la Tierra y en
trabajos anteriores hayan inspirado a muchos académicos y activistas, y que un
movimiento de "ecosocialistas de tercera etapa", como Naomi Klein, Stefano Longo, Brett
Clark, Del Weston, y Richard York, está emergiendo (11). Más que una mera "anti-crítica",
Marx y la Tierra muestra positivamente que el enfoque clásico de Marx proporciona una
base metodológica para comprender la actual crisis ecológica global del capitalismo.

Notas

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