The invention of tradition on Marxist ecology

Submitted by AWL on 11 January, 2022 - 2:59 Author: Paul Vernadsky
Marx and ecology

In his influential book The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm explained the process by which historians seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, attempting to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.

Marxism is not exempt from the manufacture of tradition. In fact the battle of ideas is often fought around the legitimacy of decisions made by individuals and parties at crucial times in the past. Thus we openly proclaim our affinity with the methods, theories and practices of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci, the foremost representatives of classical Marxism. Similarly, we uphold Trotskyism against the abomination of Stalinism, and later heterodox, third camp Trotskyism against the “orthodox” variant that has dominated since Trotsky’s murder in 1940.

Marxist ecology

Over the last two decades, Marxists have sought to forge an authentic tradition of Marxist ecology, in the face of significant environmental threats and to intervene within burgeoning climate campaigns. It has also taken place against the backdrop of widespread scepticism about whether Marxism has anything at all to offer environmental politics.

These efforts centre on applying Marxist economic and political analysis to today’s ecological questions. But to develop ecological Marxism, it has been necessary to search within the variegated Marxist tradition for attempts to address ecological questions in the past. The results have been fruitful: to uncover serious engagement with environmental questions from a wide range of classical Marxists, which bring some insight to our efforts to tackle current problems.

John Bellamy Foster has played a prominent role excavating ecological thinking within the Marxist tradition. His book, Marx’s Ecology (2000), alongside Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature (1999), represented an enormous advance by locating an ecological approach within the core of Marx’s mature political economy, in Capital and other writings. The shorthand for this approach is Marx’s term “metabolism”, used to encapsulate humanity’s relationship with nature mediated by labour, his conception of environmental crises (“rifts”) and of communism as a sustainable alternative society.

Foster is a prolific writer, publishing numerous books on Marxist ecology, articles in Monthly Review magazine and sponsoring other scholars who share his approach. For example Kohei Saito’s book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (2017) extends our understanding of Marx’s ideas, through an exhaustive engagement with his published and unpublished works from the MEGA project.

Foster has recently published a sequel to his turn of the century book, entitled The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020). While Marx’s Ecology was concerned only with Marx and his engagement with the best scientists of his day, including Darwin and Liebig, the sequel takes the story onwards to Friedrich Engels, William Morris, Nikolai Bukharin and a host of high-profile scientists.

The book is well written, informative, readable and advances our understanding in many respects. However it is flawed in a crucial sense: its purports to invent a tradition of ecological Marxism that ignores the damaging effects of Stalinism and further, the break in continuity between classical Marxist ecology and the incarnations that came later in the twentieth century. Stalinism was responsible for that break. Foster has produced an adroit justification to circumvent this break, but his attempt is not convincing.

Morris

Three of the four chapters in Part 1 are devoted to William Morris (1834-96). Morris is of course most famous for his art and design. However he devoted the last decade and a half of his life to Marxism, agitating at meetings across the UK and making propaganda for socialism. Morris brought a heightened consideration with nature into his socialism and the fusion made a definite contribution to developing Marxist ecology. Although he lamented conditions in industrial towns, he did not advocate a romantic “back to nature” approach.

Morris spoke at many meetings with coal miners, where he expressed solidarity with their struggles. He also made plain his concerns about the human and environmental damage from coal mining. He wrote to Bruce Glasier: “For myself, I should be glad if we could do without coal… We could get plenty of timber for our domestic fires if we cultivated and cared for our forests as we might do; and with water and wind power we now allow to go to waste, so to say, and with or without electricity, we could perhaps obtain the bulk of the motive power which might be required for the essential mechanical industries.” Perhaps Morris’ most significant contribution was to identify working class action as the essential social agents in protecting the environment.

He made the point explicitly in public at his lecture Art: a Serious Thing at the annual distribution of prizes of the Leek School of Art on 12 December 1882. He said: “I have taken note of many strikes, and I must needs say without circumlocution that with many of these I have heartily sympathised: but when the day comes that there is a serious strike of workmen against the poisoning of the air with smoke or the waters with filth, I shall think that art is getting on indeed.”

Engels

Part 2 of Foster’s book assesses Friedrich Engels’ distinctive contribution to Marxist ecology. Engels pioneered social geography with his early analysis of Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Engels also wrote interesting material on housing in later life, although Foster does not discuss his contentious comments on the desirability of small towns under socialism.

Foster makes a good case that Engels’ major unpublished work, Dialectics of Nature, written between 1873 and 1882 but not published in his lifetime, deserves to be considered a significant ecological work. One particular passage stands out for the variety of themes it raised:

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.

“When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula.

“Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”

Foster also makes a stout defence of Engels’ materialism and his three laws of dialectics. Since Foster takes a “critical realist” philosophical position, following Roy Bhaskar and others, this defence of Engels seems obtuse. Although Engels was well versed in the science of his time, he was less secure on philosophy and did not grasp the subtleties of Hegel’s contribution. Critical realism is a far better philosophical foundation for Marxists to engage with modern science, including climate change.

Other Marxists

Foster’sThe Return of Nature goes seriously awry in Part 3, when he discusses developments after Engels and Morris. The most surprising element is the absence of dialogue with the Second International Marxists, those who build the German SPD and other mass workers’ parties based on this model.

The book contains next to nothing on Bebel, Kautsky, Plekhanov and other Marxists writing in the half century before the First World War, despite their ecological credentials. This is unconscionable. Despite the collapse of socialist internationalism in 1914, these parties and thinkers educated a whole generation, including those who opposed the war and led the revolutionary working class struggles in the post-war period, notably the Russian revolutionaries. Foster’s failure to engage with this body of work is an enormous hiatus.

The only exception is the work of the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin. Foster touches on Bukharin’s book, Historical Materialism (1921), which discussed the relationship of humanity to nature, although the treatment is somewhat mechanical. However Foster chooses to focus on Bukharin’s speech to the Second International Congress in the History of Science and Technology, 29 June to 4 July 1931 at the Science Museum in London.

Bukharin’s contribution was certainly insightful, as are many of his writings. Similarly, the Russian scientists who spoke at the congress wowed their audience with their expositions. Foster does at least register that virtually all of them, including Bukharin, soon met their deaths at the hands of Stalin’s purges.

However Foster says little on the damage Stalin wrought, starting with the destruction of workers’ democracy in Russia, continuing with his forced industrialisation and collectivisation, the running down of Russia’s nature reserves and the ecological damage Stalinist society imposed for decades.

Indeed there is little on the role Bukharin played in destroying the Left Opposition, which was the precursor to Stalin’s triumph.

This period is vital because Stalin effectively terminated Marxist engagement with ecology, both in terms of scientific thinking and with his economic policies. The close interdependence of Marxism and ecology was severed by Stalinism. It would take another two generations for the links to be re-established, and longer to recover the authentic Marxist ecological tradition.

Scientists

Foster compounds this mistake by attempting to argue that continuity was preserved in the works of prominent scientists who engaged with the left. These included E Ray Lankester (1847-1929), Arthur Tansley (1871-1955), Hyman Levy (1889-1975), J B S Haldane (1892-1964), J D Bernal (1901-71), Joseph Needham (1900-95), Christopher Caudwell (1907-37) and others.

Although there is little doubt that all these writers made significant contributions to their fields of study and to ecological thinking in particular, some were marred by flawed political views on race and gender. The older scientists such as Lankester and Tansley evolved into Fabian or social democratic reformists, with very little connection to Marxism.

However the rest had in common an association with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), either as members or fellow travellers. They were close to the CPGB at the time of high Stalinism, which meant that they lent their scientific reputations to the cause of Stalin’s Russia.

Given the role of Stalinism in destroying authentic Marxism, as well as its ecologically disastrous policies in the USSR (replicated by the Stalinists in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere), there is no continuity between them and the ecology begun by Marx and Engels.

Foster therefore indulges in the invention of tradition in the worst sense: attempting to create continuity where there was a break. He glosses over those who broke from Marx’s original approach, even when they swore allegiance to it. Foster ignores some of the possible threads that did endeavour to extend Marx and Engels, and instead substitutes public intellectuals whose “Marxism” was far from the real tradition.

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