Friday, April 17, 2020

“Capitalism and ecology: from the decline of capital to the decline of the world”: Paul Mattick

The historical character of nature follows from the Second Law of thermodynamics, discovered more than a hundred years ago by Carnot and Clausius, spelling an increase in entropy ending in heat death. Our earthly life depends on the continuous supply of energy from solar radiation, which decreases with increasing entropy, however slowly. The period of time involved is indefinite from the human point of view, too gigantic to be taken into practical consideration. Nevertheless, the entropy law has a continuous, direct influence on the earth and therefore on the fate of humankind. Apart from the sun, the mineral wealth of the earth provides for the satisfaction of human energy needs. Its exploitation, however, hastens the transformation of “free” into “bound” energy, that is, energy no longer available for human use and degrading towards heat death. In other words, the available energy sources can only be utilized once. With their exhaustion human life would come to an end, and indeed very long before the cooling of the sun, as all the natural riches of the earth contain no more energy than two days’ sunlight.
For humanity, therefore, the Second Law of thermodynamics comes down to the limitation of natural wealth. The more slowly it is extracted, the longer humanity can live; the faster it is utilized, the sooner we will reach our end. Since consumption varies with the size of the population, the moment at which the world will collapse is connected with the population problem. In order to delay this collapse, population growth must be limited and the consumption of natural resources be decreased. To this problem, raised with regard to the capitalist world by the Club of Rome, Wolfgang Harich has turned with regard to communism, which has up to now similarly been engaged in endless economic growth.1
The old saying fits Harich: “The cat won’t leave the mouse alone.” His many years in Walter Ulbricht’s prisons have not been able to break his spirit of opposition. As after June 17, 1953 he turned against the Stalinist course in the DDR, in the interest of the DDR itself, so today he turns against the growth ideology reigning in that country, to save the world by means of communism. After 1953 the DDR should have come closer to the West in order to master its inner contradictions; today the ecological problems raised in the West should be tackled by the East, in order to prevent the destruction of the world. The abolition of capitalism is thus for Harich not only the goal of communist politics but the only adequate means to move to a world without growth, on which depends the long-term survival of the human race. He expressed his views in interviews with Freimut Duve, with the hope that they would not again be misunderstood in the DDR.   Neither Marx nor classical economics related their theories to the entropy law. Malthus, however, opened up the population problem for debate and Ricardo saw the tendency to declining returns from the land as a limit to capitalist development. In this way they apologetically portrayed specifically capitalist contradictions as natural and unalterable processes. These theories were developed at a time when agriculture still dominated the economy and industrial development was making its initial take-off. Although production is determined by nature and human beings, Marx’s and Engels’s chief attention was directed not to natural limitations but to those due to the capitalist mode of production, since the world—seen as nature—was still quite under-populated, and the “overpopulation” of which Malthus wrote was a direct result of capitalism. Of course, an increasing population presupposes the increasing productivity of labor, and this, in turn, presupposes changes in social structure. “The more I go into the stuff,” Marx wrote Engels, “the more I become convinced that the reform of agriculture, and hence the question of property based on it, is the alpha and omega of the coming upheaval. Without that, Father Malthus will turn out to be right.”2
In the light of the dominance in the DDR of the ideology of growth, which is supposed to take the development of the productive forces beyond any reached so far, Harich seeks to legitimate his interest in ecology with references to Marx and Engels and to dialectical materialism. Citing the French Communist G. Biolat, he maintains that “the development of ecology expressed a new​ deeply dialectical approach to the study of nature,” so that his own concern “is as orthodox as one could wish.” Ecology concerns itself with the “reciprocal action between nature and society,” which can only be fully comprehended by the adepts of “the dialectics of nature” and the “Marxist theory of knowledge refined by Lenin.”
Now, the metabolism between humans and nature, which can also be understood as a mutual interaction, has in itself nothing to do with the question of the dialectics of nature, and will not be disputed by those for whom the dialectic has no validity. Therefore Lenin’s epistemology is also not required in order to discuss ecology and the threats to it, just as his possession of this epistemology, as Harich must to his sorrow recognize, has until now contributed little to the knowledge of ecological problems. In any case, the Club of Rome is unconcerned with dialectical materialism. As in the last analysis it hardly matters even for Harich whether the dialectics of nature already included the ecological problem, it is not necessary to discuss his party-line Leninist orthodoxy. His argument rests not on the dialectics of nature but on the calculations of the Club of Rome, which start from the too rapid consumption of natural resources and the population explosion to predict a decline of humanity in the not too distant future.
There are aspects of nature which can be grasped with formal logic and others which require the use of dialectical logic. Discoveries in microphysics enforce a logic adequate to this object, which is not identical with either formal or dialectical logic. But the means for the understanding of nature and the relevance of its regularities on the human beings who investigate them give no information about the “totality” of nature and its laws of motion, which are closed to us up to now, and no doubt permanently. Even if dialectical logic would be required for the study of nature, we could draw no conclusions from this about the dialectics of nature; in contrast, the dialectic of society is visible in its economic development and class struggles. One can, of course, describe the entropy law as “dialectical,” just because it implies lasting qualitative changes, especially if one traces all economic and biological processes to their physical basis. But the Second Law of thermodynamics was discovered by physical chemistry, not by the dialectical method, and is quite sufficient to illuminate ecology from both a biological and a social point of view.
Marxism is not a natural science, and in fact not a science in the bourgeois sense, but uses scientific methods in order to discover the presuppositions and necessities of social transformation in general and of the abolition of capitalism in particular, in order to intervene practically in social processes. Laws of nature cannot be changed; they have to be accepted, although increasing understanding of them becomes a human force of production, determining the possibilities of social development. If nature as it affects human beings can thus only develop in one direction, namely its end, so long as the world exists the problems of humanity are determined by this world and must be decided within it. Even if it were true that thermodynamics is only a characteristic of an expanding universe and that in a contracting universe the opposite process would occur, leading to a new production of matter out of radiation, this has no significance for the world which would have disappeared in the mean time, together with its inhabitants.
It is also obvious without reference to the entropy principle that the metabolism between humanity and nature depends on the fruitfulness of the earth and the productiveness of its raw materials. With the exhaustion of the latter the sources of energy decline and with them the possibility of human interventions in natural processes. The world in which Marx and Engels lived knew, however, none of the nature-determined limits to production. Neither physical nor biological processes explained the unpleasant social conditions. The exhaustion of the earth’s wealth and relative overpopulation were the direct result of production for profit and could be undone by the elimination of the capitalist relations of production. One could not yet speak of an ecological crisis, in particular not from a Marxist standpoint.
Are things different today? According to the Club of Rome and Harich, we are in the midst of an ecological crisis, which obliges Marxism also to go more deeply than before into the natural basis of society and into the population question raised by Malthus. Harich believes that communist scientists, if not yet in the DDR then in the USSR, “are beginning to focus with growing insight on the ecological crisis.” To repeat: the problem can be summed up in three ideas—environmental overload, consumption of raw materials, overpopulation. The solution, according to Harich, lies in reversing these processes. This, however, implies the destruction of capitalist society and therefore revolutionary transformations on the global level.
According to Harich, however, we can today no longer speak of the communist revolution as it was once imagined, freeing the social forces of production from the fetters of the capitalist relations of production in order to meet growing needs, but must take up Babeuf’s idea of turning back the productive forces and human needs in the direction of the pre-industrial ascetic collectivity. Marx had already emphasized that in capitalism the productive forces had become forces of destruction, “and exactly this,” says Harich, “ we are experiencing today.” But this is a misunderstanding on Harich’s part. Even considering the destructive side of capitalist development, Marx saw in communism the only possible way to a further progressive development of the productive forces, on which the overcoming of human poverty as determined by capitalism, as in general, depends. Certainly this growth of the social forces of production includes the requirement that it should no longer serve the blind drive for valorization of capital, but rational human needs, which are themselves determined by the technologico-scientific character of the additional productive forces.
Now this may turn out to be utopian, not only because of the long-lived character of capitalism but also because of limits to economic growth set by nature and not considered by Marx. The relative overpopulation Marx wrote about has, according to Harich, become absolute overpopulation, which cannot be overcome by means of a change from capitalism to communism, but only through its systematic reduction by means of population planning—and not only in the “Third World” but on the global scale. Thus even communism allows for no further development on the basis of modern industry, but requires economic planning without growth and possibly the liquidation of forms of production already in use.
The ecological crisis discovered by the Club of Rome and others can be seen as a new attempt—similar to the efforts of Malthus and Ricardo—to explain social difficulties as the result of natural conditions, since to them the form of society appears to be natural and unchangeable. The novel element is that today there is agreement from the “Marxist” side, with either a good or a bad conscience. Of course, Harich’s position differs from that of the Club of Rome in that he remains aware that even with a full understanding of the crisis situation the capitalist world is in no position to take measures to preserve human life for the distant future, even if on a more modest basis. The Club of Rome, Harich notes, indeed speaks of an expectable impoverishment and destruction of the world, but “it does ​not​ say that the rich must disappear from the picture.” People are indeed ready today “to ration gasoline,” but not prepared “to ration ​everything.” But why shouldn’t everything be rationed, and indeed on a socialist basis, asks Harich; “Wouldn’t that already be communism?” Would it not be, “as a result of a ​rational​ distribution, Babeuf’s communism, to which the workers’ movement must now, having reached a higher level, turn back with a dialectical spiral movement—the negation of the negation—after the ‘springs’ of capitalist wealth have flowed for nearly 200 years?”
But why stop with Babeuf? Why not return to the perfect ecology of Paradise before Original Sin? The one is as much an impossibility as the other, on which Babeuf must come to grief. History cannot be made to go backwards, not even through the “negation of the negation.” A rationed distribution itself presupposes productive forces which are a match for the needs of four billion people, and with this continued productive development, in order to counter the law of increasing entropy, i.e. to support the negative entropy of the living world with the least expenditure of “free” energy.
But apart from this, the rationing of which Harich speaks is not at all foreign to the capitalist world, where it is to be found, applied more or less thoroughly, in wartime (and also in “war-communism”). Besides, capitalism is based, in the form of the law of surplus value, on a form of “rationing” of proletarian living conditions, something that also characterizes the relations of production in the putatively “socialist” countries, although there surplus value can appear directly as surplus product. In fact, the existence of capital, as Harich himself explains, hangs on the continuing “rationing” of the producers, in order to satisfy the growing surplus-value requirements of accumulation. When and to whatever extent it is necessary, capital will also seek political ways to push the living conditions of the workers down to a more modest level. The expanding poverty on the global level is a product of surplus value production, the result of capitalism’s “rationing” of the conditions of life of ever greater masses of people, and can therefore not be recommended as a solution to the ecological crisis. If it were a solution, capital would be in the best position to carry it through.
When Harich speaks of the necessity to reduce production and consumption, the question arises: of whom is he speaking, actually? The workers, from whom always more surplus value is being extracted? The unemployed, who can hardly keep their heads above water? The hundreds of millions in the underdeveloped countries, who suffer from malnourishment and slow (or often fast) starvation? And if absolute overpopulation and the too rapid consumption of raw materials are the causes of these sufferings, then a more just distribution cannot change much essentially. Thus, according to Harich, we must call an end to accumulation, so that social production on the basis of simple reproduction, and with zero population growth, can finally match consumption.
The capitalist relations of production and property exclude the possibility of simple reproduction. Interruption of the industrial development demanded by the pressure to accumulate brings economic crisis and the misery of a depression. From the point of view that sees the ecological crisis as already underway, this would of course be a welcome situation. But as a crisis situation without a revolutionary contestation of the capitalist system can lead only to a new phase of accumulation, a realization of simple reproduction is reserved for communism. Indeed, in Harich’s conception communism also not a reality, but its preconditions have already been established with the existence of “socialist countries.” It depends on them, and on the workers’ movements in the capitalist countries, whether society can preserve its natural basis. “The overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the realization of communism are,” according to Harich, “the presuppositions for the social realization of the demands of the Club of Rome.”
Apart from a handful of scientists, however, neither the authorities of the “socialist countries” nor the workers of the capitalist world are conscious of this important task. As Freimut Duve emphasizes, “the economic policies of all nations—without exception—are the same as if the studies of the Club of Rome had never been made.” This holds also for the “socialist countries,” which does not stop Harich from ascribing to them he possibility of a faster and better adaptation to the ecological crisis, as they are not subject to the pressure for expanded reproduction. Since in any case the destruction of the environment is a problem for industrial society generally, the possibility of coming to grips with this problem is in no way system-neutral. Certainly, unfortunately, the raw-materials resources of the “socialist” countries make a prior communist revolution unnecessary. But they will nevertheless finally deal with the ecological crisis, as communists “will never resign themselves to the idea that humanity is doomed to destruction.”
In the meantime, it is a matter of once more swimming “against the current” and holding an image of the future to the eyes of the world, so as to indicate the pathway to escape. That the Club of Rome can only warn and make proposals, according to Harich, changes nothing in the “revolutionary explosive force” of the ecological understanding it has achieved. The implications of this understanding can only be drawn by the workers’ movement and the workers’ states, but they demand the revision of traditional communist ideas. “The advantages of the socialist system must be utilized, in order to regulate by planning the production of all material goods, to do optimal justice to the criteria of ecology…” To this end, says Harich, “the left-wing parties must now immediately begin to explain to the working class the reasons why which it will halt economic growth as soon as it has come to power, and impose material restrictions on the whole population, including the workers.” This will thus be a revolution not for improving but for lowering of the workers’ standard of living.
It will be difficult to arouse much revolutionary enthusiasm for this project. This is Harich’s greatest worry. As a truth-loving person he wishes to awaken no illusions and make clear to the workers the necessity of new privations, “as popular as possible and as unpopular as is necessary ​given the judgment of science.​” In any case we must put as much of an end as we can to prosperity thinking and the fetishism of growth, “by means of re-education, though also, when necessary, by rigorous repression, perhaps by the shutdown of whole branches of production, accompanied by legally imposed cold-turkey cures.” It is clear, at least for Harich, “that for this the social ownership of the means of production, administered by the proletarian state, is the necessary precondition.” But this is not enough. The proletarian state must also have the power to control individual consumption according to criteria imposed by ecology. “In the finite system of the biosphere,” Harich continues, “in which communism must make its way, it must transform human society into a homeostatic stationary state which, just as it limits the continuation of the dynamic of capitalism or of socialism, also has no place for the limitless freedom of the individual. Any idea of a future withering away of the state is therefore illusory.”
This “revision” of “classical Marxism-Leninism” is directed of course only against the ideology and not against the reality of the “socialist” countries, which have never, and do not now, intend to renounce “state authority and codified law” in order to realize communism in the original Marxian sense. But just as the authoritarian state, according to Harich, was necessary in order to create the “heavy industrial foundation of national self-determination” with “unexampled harshness and brutality,” it is even more necessary today in order to dismantle this foundation. As Stalin “governed the country” with the goal of industrial development, so must the proletarian state, taking into its calculations the forecasts of science, utilize all necessary means to force people into a life in accordance with ecology. Babeuf’s communism itself cannot be left to the workers, but can only be achieved through the unavoidable state power exercised by Marxist-Leninist parties.
To this Duve objects that one cannot speak of communism in relation to Harich’s authoritarian ideas, since “the administration of want in any case will give the administrators the real power.” The perpetuation of the state is naturally the perpetuation of class society and so of exploitative relations of production, which are at the same time relations of property. As ​state property​ the means of production appear in future as means of production separated from the workers. How and what is produced is subordinated not to their control but to that of state institutions, which supposedly represent the interest of society. But this society remains divided into one group of people organized through the state, who control the means of production and so the distribution of the product, and the mass of the population, who must follow their orders. This new type of society characterized by state control of the means of production appears to the bourgeoisie as state socialism, or simply socialism, but is capitalist in its relation to the workers, something which is conveniently expressed in the concept of state capitalism, although it seeks to present itself as socialism.
Once this situation is established, the social reproduction process takes place as the reproduction of state domination and social wealth grows as the increase of state power. Apart from the international competitive struggle among nationally-organized capitals, which will be even sharper thanks to the differences between the capitalist systems, the privileged class building itself up within the social relations of state capitalism has its own direct interest in the increase of the surplus product at its disposal and so for the development of the productive forces on a state-capitalist foundation. It cannot be expected freely to set limits on the productive forces, and to the extent to which it is forced in this direction it will not apply the resulting privations it to itself, but impose them on the powerless mass of the population. The ecological argument, of course, offers a good alibi.
It is already of use to Harich for the defense of the continuing backwardness of the “socialist” countries in comparison to the capitalist industrial nations. “We must transform the West-East gradient of living standards,” he says, “which up to the present has limited the progress of the proletarian revolution in the industrial capitalist countries, into an East-West gradient of exemplary care for the environment, of rational, moderate, economical handling of raw materials and a quality of socialist life in accordance with it.” Workers in the West, even if only after a successful revolution, are to take the lower standard of living of the East as a model and perceive their revolutionary duty in the renunciation of the few comforts which capitalism occasionally offers them. What the workers of the DDR experience should thus make clear to those in the West “that the characteristics of the DDR, as of the socialist camp in general, which we usually see as disadvantages, are advantages as soon as we measure them against the new standards of the ecological crisis.”
This inversion of hitherto existing values can, however, in Harich’s conception not be achieved overnight. Babeuf’s communism of equals presupposes a “first socialist phase,” as Marx already stressed and as exists in the DDR: i.e. a distribution not according to need but according to work performed. As it is the “proletarian state” that judges performance, this state becomes the instrument of inequality and has no other content than this inequality, or itself. But just as little as the ruling class in private capitalism is willing freely to give up its privileges, so little will the new class ruling through the “proletarian state” give up the privileges associated with it. The “socialist state” is no more able to respond to the warnings of the Club of Rome à la Babeuf than capital; it acts instead at the expense of the workers, as always, with or without the ecological crisis. And as little as the working class will be ready, under the conditions of exploitation and inequality that obtain in the capitalist countries, to set aside its needs to preserve the environment, so little will the workers of the “socialist” countries renounce an improvement of their living standard in the interest of “future generations.” The class struggle, always latent, will decide the further course of economic development. If economic growth is to be halted the class struggle must also be abolished, or, to use Harich’s terminology, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” under the leadership of the communist parties must be created on a global scale in order to meet the demands of the ecological crisis even in the “first phase” of communism.
The class struggle cannot of course be abolished by means of state power but only carried on in a one-sided way for a longer or shorter period, that is, through the fascist or democratic dictatorship of capital or through the “dictatorship of the working class” in the sense of “Marxism-Leninism.” Just as the economic crisis arising from the capitalist relations of production sharpens class antagonisms, so must the measures for overcoming the ecological crisis, which are the same as those responding to an economic crisis, be expected to sharpen class conflicts. The continuing threat to the ruling classes will, on the one hand, push the latter to keep their power by dictatorial means; on the other, they will also seek to meet the demands of the workers halfway, in so far as this is possible. For private capital this can only be a matter of measures that lead to the resumption of capital accumulation and with it the expansion of production. To keep their power, the ruling classes of the “socialist” countries must increase the productivity of labor and expand production, committing themselves without a backward glance to the ecological consequences of further growth.
Thus the warnings of the Club of Rome fall on deaf ears everywhere, and particularly in the “socialist” countries, where a new “bourgeoisie” has come into existence on the foundation of the state. Harich conjures up a lack in understanding on the part of the “communist” authorities, which could be remedied by “scientific” insight, but the real problem is the class consciousness of a new ruling class, as strong as that of the old ruling class. It is the falsification of socialism in state socialism, the only kind of “socialism” that Harich can imagine, which allows him to make his ecological hopes depend on state dictatorship and its perpetuation.
If the salvation of the world depends on the already existing “socialist” countries and future ones like them, we can abandon all hope. What Harich reproaches capitalism for, its inability to call a halt to economic growth, is as true for the state-capitalist systems posing as “socialism.” His illusionary demand for “a stationary state of humanity within the system of nature” requires the simultaneous overcoming of the capitalist and state-capitalist systems and would require revolutionary movements which would not subordinate themselves unconditionally to the “judgment of science” or the state but would, without obedience to authority, make themselves at home in the world in a way corresponding to their own necessities and needs.
As such movements do not exist, we are stuck with the ecological crisis. “Science” is not responsible for the practical application or failure to apply the knowledge won by it; these are left to the governments and so to the ruling classes. It is peculiar that Harich criticizes the fetishism of growth in the name of science, since the latter is itself only an aspect of the fetishism of growth. Science is represented by people, who are not only scientists but also members of society, and it is particular social interests that determine the fields of application of science. The development of the capitalist forces of production or–what comes to the same thing–the generation of the “ecological crisis” was a process made possible by science, to an increasing extent a direct result of science and its influence on technology. It is from this environment-destroying science that Harich now expects the necessary instructions for the reconstruction of an ecological equilibrium, whose practical realization would set definite limits not only to the growth of the economy but to that of science. He speaks of course of science under the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but since this is only another name for the still existing capital-worker relation, in the form of state property, here also the development of science depends on the further growth of the productive forces, as the socially-determined interests of the scientists remain tied to the progress of state-capitalism.
This is apparently contradicted by the recognition given to the Club of Rome by Russian scientists, as well as by the attention given generally to the Club’s discoveries, credited with “revolutionary explosive force.” It seems astonishing that these researches have been financed by capitalist institutions and business concerns, such as the Volkswagen Foundation, to say nothing of the unexpected liberalism with which totalitarian states have allowed their academics the right to pessimistic futurology. Do we here see science as such, independent of its social environment, opening up a free path, or are its present-day concerns also those of the ruling classes? Is this development perhaps a part of called-for long-term planning, or only a spontaneous reaction to a shortage of necessary raw materials and fuels, politically engineered in the framework of the price mechanism? Or are we here dealing with no more than a free rein given to science, which can ultimately lead only to extensive projects to give the scientists jobs and incomes? Although the ecological problem actually exists, the researches into it have almost no practical meaning. In so far as one could ascribe practical significance to them, it is a contradictory one: while they are able to explain the dreadful situation to the workers in the East and West and halt their struggle for better living conditions, an increase in surplus value or surplus product still requires progressive ecological destruction.
The absolute maintenance of an ecological balance is impossible. But today the prolongation of human existence by respecting the limits set by nature is a possibility, but one whose realization would require the end of the capitalist overexploitation of natural resources. The limits set by nature are in any case not yet the most important. What is necessary, today and tomorrow, is to end the human misery due to the capitalist relations of production, as the starting-point for a rationally planned mode of society in accordance with natural conditions—one based not on further privations but on a higher standard of living for everyone, on which the diminution of population growth depends, and which would make possible the further development of society’s productive forces.
The progressive destruction of the environment is not so much the result of growing productive forces as of the development of these forces under capitalist conditions. Were capitalist production really what it is claimed to be, production for the satisfaction of human needs, the development of the productive forces would have had a character different from the actual one, with a different technology and different ecological consequences. With respect to this, enlarged reproduction with a growing population and increasing needs makes no difference in principle. But the development of the productive forces takes place on the basis of capitalist production relations and is thus bound to the production of capital; it can serve human needs only insofar as they coincide with the requirements of capitalist accumulation. This rules out any direct reference to true social needs and to the natural limits of social production. Under the conditions of capitalist competition, which are not abolished by monopoly capital, and to which the state-capitalist systems are subordinated as parts of a global system, the development of the productive forces advances blindly, especially as attempts are made to bring production under conscious central control on the national level. This process requires an enormous wastage of human labor power and natural resources, which would not occur (at least to the same degree) in another social system.
Although there is not much sense in it, one could calculate to what extent the expansion of capitalist production is determined by the requirements of human existence and to what extent by the specific character of the capitalist mode of production. In other words: what would production look like without all the productive and unproductive activities required by capitalism? Surely such a calculation would show that at least half of capitalist production could be dispensed with without affecting people’s living conditions. The larger portion of labor performed today is unproductive, making “sense” only within the capitalist market and property relations. It could be transformed into productive labor—“productive” not in the sense of profitable but in the sense of creative of use-value–while shortening labor time. Such production, with the disappearance of the profit principle, competition, and the unnecessary “moral depreciation” of the means of production, would bring a meaningful savings of raw materials without diminishing production to meet human needs.
Such a transformation requires a social order different from the existing ones. If we follow the calculations of the Club of Rome, it may be that–given overpopulation, the limited carrying capacity of the earth, and the drying up of sources of energy–the opportunity to make it may already have been lost. A glance at today’s world production shows clearly that we cannot yet speak of an actual lack of material resources. To the contrary, and despite the short, artificially produced “energy crisis,” the world is suffering from “overproduction,” from an insufficient effective demand, even on the basis of a low rate of accumulation, which by itself sets limits to the expansion of production. The crisis situation we are experiencing has as yet no natural causes, but has its basis in the valorization requirements of capital. Even according to the Club of Rome, the effects of the ecological crisis will be fully visible, and take on catastrophic forms, only in “two or three generations,” and then only if no steps are taken to counter it.
In the two reports produced for the Club of Rome that Harich cites3 a reprieve for the world seems possible by the midst of the next century. In the meantime a way must be found to move from today’s “undifferentiated” growth to an “organic” growth of economy and society. This way is to be discovered thanks to a computer model that extrapolates the trend of present-day development into the future. Admittedly, the results are only a matter of probability, not of certainty. While the first report on the “limits to growth” concerned the world as a whole, dealing with the increase of the total population and the average per capita income, etc., the second report emphasizes that this sort of analysis cannot lead to a solution of the problem. The world consists of various, very different parts, which must be dealt with in particular ways, with regard for regional necessities. If the first report warned that the world system will break down in the middle of the next century, the second report predicts not the breakdown of the world but that of one or another of its regions (which would, of course, ​ipso facto​ mean the destruction of the world as a totality).
Whether fragment by fragment or all at once, the breakdown is inevitable, according to the computer’s logic; it follows that it is up to “statesmen” to pull the carts out of the muck. Here we encounter the mentality of the Club of Rome’s scientific experts, for example, M. Mesarovic and E. Pestel, responsible for the second report. They refer throughout not to capitalist society, but to “society” (or simply to “humanity”), threatened by nature. From their point of view the ecological crisis has its roots in activities that “arise from people’s best intentions.” That these intentions involve the exploitation of the workers does not occur to them; to the contrary, they are convinced “that the decrease of human labor through the exploitation of non-human sources of energy is a project with which every person must agree.” They are unable to grasp that it is exactly the increase in the exploitation of human labor that makes necessary the over-exploitation of natural resources. They have either no understanding of the society in which they live or they feign a lack of understanding in order not to be offensive. But looking at their proposed solutions, it is the first of these that seems correct.
These proposals amount to a series of noncommittal forms of talk, such as emphasizing the necessity of a global solution of the ecological problem; a more balanced world economy through the simultaneous abolition of under- and over-development in the respective regions; an appropriate worldwide allocation of non-renewable raw materials and fuels; an effective population policy; a turn towards solar energy instead of more nuclear reactors; increased support for the poor countries by the rich ones; and similar praiseworthy measures. Not a word is wasted on how this program is to be put into practice. The experts are certain only that the solution of the problématique humaine requires the closest cooperative work on the world scale, since there can only be a future “when history no longer, as earlier, is determined by individuals or social classes, but through the devotion of material resources to the security of human existence.” The recognition of capitalist reality is on the same level as Harich’s understanding of the “socialist” world. In both cases we have to do only with conjurations spoken into the wind.
Somehow the authors of the second report do not themselves feel quite right. As “rational” as the computer is, people are irrational. Although the computer indicates that people can be helped not through conflict but through cooperation, the computer analysis necessarily deals only with the material limits of growth. But the world is threatened by people themselves on the basis of social, political, and organizational problems, which in the last analysis spring from “human nature.” Since the Club of Rome is non-partisan with respect to politics, the problems can’t be discussed politically. The report notes that the quickest road to the annihilation of humankind would certainly be an atomic war; but this eventuality, like the enormous wastage of expensive resources through armaments and militarism, is not included in the framework of the problems discussed by the Club of Rome, since the world is exposed to the danger of complete destruction even without an atomic war.
A dialectician like Harich can not be satisfied with this. The distinction made by the Club of Rome between natural and social problems contradicts the “interaction” between humanity and nature. For Harich the threatened atomic war and the ecological crisis stand in a close connection. Indeed, he does not deny that there are social contradictions that drive towards war, but “in a time in which economic growth comes up against unbreachable natural limits, we must also readjust our views a little. Under the conditions of the ecological crisis natural and social factors are intertwined in previously unknown ways … The influence of society on nature can create a situation which then in turn drives society to seek refuge in a catastrophe.” It is therefore not enough to strive directly to prevent war; we must treat the ecological crisis as a possible cause of war, in order to avoid war itself.
Indeed, we had two world wars and many smaller skirmishes behind us before the threat to the ecology entered our consciousness. These wars happened not because nations fought like dogs with a bone over declining supplies of raw materials but because the capitalist competitive struggle over the surplus value extracted from the laboring population played out on a worldwide field. The competitive struggle exists under all circumstances, with or without shortages of raw materials, and thus has nothing to do with the latter but arises from the capitalist mode of production. Even when a shortage of raw materials and consumption goods leads to war instead of some other solution, this results from the form of society and not from the shortage as such. On this question, however, Harich again comes close to the Club of Rome’s one-sided conception of the problem as purely ecological, with no reference to the actual capitalist world. This world is for him too, despite the “intertwining of natural and social factors,” only a subordinate factor: it is the ecological crisis which can lead to war, so that avoiding war presupposes solving the ecological crisis. But war can break out tomorrow, while the ecological crisis is not expected till the middle of the next century. It can even be forestalled by an atomic war, which would provide a ghastly demonstration of humanity’s destruction not by nature but by capitalism.
But is there actually an ecological crisis? The numbers produced by the computer model to which Harich and the Club of Rome refer are open to doubt from many different points of view. As the amount of raw materials and energy consumed by the industrial countries over the last 50 years can only be determined very inexactly, we are even less sure what is still available. Here we are dealing with unknown quantities, as can already be seen in the fact that estimates are continuously revised, not only because of the discovery of new reserves, but also because of improvements in methods of estimation. To give only one example: The untouched coal supplies in the United States were estimated in 1969 at 3,000 billion tons; in 1975 this quantity was increased by 23 percent on the basis of better methods of estimation. Since such mistakes of estimation, whether too high or too low, do not alter the fact that the raw materials and fuels will in the end be utilized, it does not make much sense to counterpose optimistic expectations to the pessimistic ones. But as things are, it is to be expected that for the foreseeable future economic policy and therefore politics will not be determined by ecological considerations, but—as earlier—by capital’s immanent requirement of profit production.
The historical limit of capital is, according to Marx, capital itself. The development of the social forces of production by way of capital accumulation not only requires nonrenewable raw materials and brings with it relative overpopulation, but also leads to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in relation to the growing mass of capital. With this the limits to capitalist expansion come into view. Even without the limits set by nature capital must come to an end. It is therefore not oriented directly to nature but to the profit rate, dependent on surplus value, which, as capital accumulates, determines the relation between nature and society. Thus the “ecological” apprehensions of the Club of Rome often have a prosaic background, as was prominent, for example, in the so-called oil crisis of 1973. Here there was not a sudden lack of oil but politically motivated price increases, following the inflation general in the world, which shifted the supply-demand relation to the benefit of the oil producers. If it were left to the market, only a considerable decline in demand could affect the monopoly price, and only with difficulty (and over time). But the increase in oil production together with increasing prices will, according to the second report of the Club of Rome, lead not only to a more rapid exhaustion of energy supplies but to a transfer of wealth and economic power from the industrial countries to the oil-producing states. Iran has already achieved minority control of the German Krupp works. Within ten years the oil states, with an accumulated capital of 500 billion dollars, could take a large part of Western capital into their hands, thus shaking the world economy, inclusive of the underdeveloped countries, to the deepest level. Without going into these ungrounded and more than dubious speculations, it can be noted that the wishes of the Club of Rome for a “global solution of the energy problem” appears to derive more from an economic than from an ecological point of view. In any case, it is at the moment not an actual lack of natural resources that menaces the world but the competitive war for global profit carried on by every possible means.
As the movement of the world is determined by profit, the capitalists concern themselves with the ecological problem only insofar as it affects profit. The capitalists have no interest in the destruction of the world; if it turns out that saving the world can be profitable, then the protection of the world will become another business–all the more because environmental destruction is itself an instrument of competition for shares of the total profit. This problem appears in the economic literature under the heading of “externality,” the distinction between private effects and the social concomitant symptoms of capitalist production. Social phenomena are also ecological phenomena, as when the emission of pollutants of all sorts, which enter into natural cycles, finally destroys the necessary global balance of oxygen. In this way the destruction of the environment, which is often taken to be faster and more dangerous than the rapid use of material resources, is bound up with the exhaustion of resources. Such widely known phenomena, which can both be ascribed to profit production and also curtail profit production, affect different capitals differently and thus themselves provoke attempts to limit the destruction within capitalism. It depends on the mass of surplus value whether these attempts can be successful, i.e. on the increasing exploitation of the workers or on their “modest standard of living.” On this point Harich’s proposals are at one with the measures recommended by capital, as expressed by the Club of Rome.
It is not impossible that—with sufficient surplus value production—capital itself could be able to avoid the destruction of the environment, in its own interest, as long as the cost is paid by the working population. And as accumulation sets limits to surplus value, the ongoing destruction of the environment can be traced back to the limits of the capitalist mode of production. We are, that is, faced here with a social, not an ecological problem. But what about overpopulation? This is a problem in itself, which will not simply vanish even with an imaginable rational management of raw materials and the end of environmental destruction. The production of means of subsistence is declining in relation to the increasing population. Is the earth becoming less fertile? Or is it simply inadequate to support the growing population?
Among other studies, one undertaken three years ago for the Club of Rome, under the leadership of H. Linnemann, showed that the global capacity for food production has grown sufficiently to support a doubling of the population.4 The decrease in agricultural production relative to the growing population has at present nothing to do with any limits set by nature, but originates in social relations that stand in the way of an extension of production. Moreover, the hunger existing in the world has nothing to do with the productivity of agriculture. Even a doubling of production could not eliminate it; indeed it would mostly likely increase it even more. The existence of sufficient foodstuffs is not enough to guarantee the satisfaction of human consumption needs. Commodities exist only for effective demand, and for those who need it without the capacity to pay overproduction can be even more dangerous than a crop failure caused by nature. That crop failures can also lead to hunger has, of course, nothing to do with incalculable nature, but with the social neglect of measures which, with the increase in agricultural production and the improvement of agricultural productivity, could accumulate sufficient reserves to be able to offset natural catastrophes.
In the underdeveloped, largely agrarian world, as for example in South Asia, the problem is not so much the miserliness of nature as a social class system of institutions and power relationships that stands in the way of increasing production and productivity. Besides the increasingly unsustainable subsistence economy, it is landed property, the tenant-farming system, usurious loan capital, the plantation economy, and the parasitical state bureaucracy that hinder any progressive development by maintaining the existing social structure. In the African states the specialization in the production of industrial raw materials created by the colonial system has led to a situation whose further development is today also subordinated to the capitalist crisis cycle and the impoverishment bound up with it. Not only there, but also in the South American nations, increasing industrialization comes at the cost of agricultural production. Former exporting countries are becoming importers of foodstuffs. Russia’s development into a competitive world power too has required the relative neglect of agriculture, making the importation of food necessary whenever there is a bad harvest. The increasing discrepancy between industrial and agricultural production has less to do with population growth and decreasing fertility of the soil that with the one-sided over-emphasis on industrial expansion, or capital’s expansion, demanded by capitalist competition.
Of course, the population has grown enormously. Since medicine has lowered mortality figures considerably, the number of births, remaining the same, appears as a “population explosion.” It is obvious, however, that the population can not continue to grow and sooner or later will have to stabilize in relation to ecological givens. But from this it does not follow that the current size of the population is responsible for the poverty existing in the world. A level of production adequate to the needs of the increasing population would very likely show that it is too soon to speak of an absolute overpopulation. The percentage growth in production and productivity of agriculture in countries like the United States and Australia exceeds by far the percentage of population increase. Although the same results cannot be achieved everywhere, even with the same methods, it is certainly still possible to increase the world’s production of food meaningfully.
And with a general improvement of living conditions can we expect to see a conscious decrease in population growth. Of course, this can also be achieved through the use of state violence, the method prized by Harich. Thus in India at the moment bills have been proposed mandating forced sterilization, to be imposed on all families after their second child. From this it is only a small step to the direct extermination of excessive people. But there is also another thing: While it is so far the privilege of a minority of the world’s population, the level of birth control already achieved in the developed countries demonstrates the possibility of population planning, which in the course of time could not only stabilize the population but even diminish it.
The warnings of Harich and the Club of Rome would be completely senseless if they were not accompanied by the conviction that the threatening ecological catastrophe can be prevented. The idea that this is a real possibility in itself means that whether humanity still has an indefinite future depends on society and not on nature. For Harich the destruction of capitalist production is the unavoidable presupposition for this future. Only in this way can the ecological problem find a general solution. But what he has in mind is not a revolution that might lead to a communist society, the only kind of society that would be in a position to solve the ecological problem. The Club of Rome cannot even imagine Harich’s pseudo-revolution but relies on the good will and readiness of enlightened statesmen to take the measures necessary to solve the ecological problem. But we cannot expect from this quarter measures that would do away with the social structure and so with its statesmen themselves.
What, then, is to be done in this apparently hopeless situation? In general, nothing, so long as the problem is looked at from the standpoint of ecology. It is, first of all, not the thing that is most obvious that threatens the continuing existence of humankind. The “ecological crisis” is to a great extent itself a product of a situation of social crisis, and the approaching catastrophe arising from the latter is coming sooner than the ecological catastrophe. As things stand today, the great likelihood of conflicts involving atomic warfare makes concern with the ecological crisis superfluous. We need to concentrate on social processes to stop the atomic criminals of East and West. If the world’s workers do not succeed in this they will also not be in a position to counter the ecological threat or to create the communist society that would make possible the further existence of humanity.
Notes:
1. Wolfgang Harich, ​Kommunismus ohne Wachtum? Babeuf und der “Club of Rome.” Sechs Interviews mit Freimut Duve und Briefe an ihn. (Hamburg: Reinbek, 1975).
2. MECW, vol. 38, p. 425.
3. Donella Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth​ (1972) and Mihailo Mersarovic and Eduard Pestel, ​Mankind at the Turning Point​ (1975).
4. Hans Linnemann, ​MOIRA: model of international relations in agriculture: report of the project group ‘Food for a Doubling World Population’ (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980).
‘Kapitalismus und Okologie’ (1976) by Paul Mattick, translated by Paul Mattick Jr. This article looks at ecological crisis, the Club of Rome’s ‘The Limits to Growth’, and the work of East German philosopher Wolfgang Harich.

Was Marx eco-socialist ?: An answer to Kohei Saito": Daniel Tanuro

Kohei Saito's book “Marx's ecosocialism” is an essential contribution to the ongoing debates on Marxism and the environmental issue 1 / .
What makes Kohei Saito's work particularly interesting is that it traces the evolution of Marx's thinking from a "productivist" view to an "antiproductivist" view of human development, incorporating in particular the natural limits to the perspectives of agriculture. This historical approach allows the author to transcend disputes between Marxists who see Marx's ecology as an empty glass, half empty, half full or full.
Thanks to a careful reading of Notebooks (Notebooks) Marx, Saito brilliantly shows how Marx abandoned the idea that agricultural productivity could increase indefinitely under socialism to arrive, in 1865-1868, to the opposite conclusion that only socialism it could stop the absurd and destructive capitalist tendency to unlimited growth.

John Bellamy Foster, in his book "Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature", highlighted the impact of Liebig's work on Marx's understanding of the problem of soil depletion 2 / . A the like Foster, Kohei Saito found that perturbation of the exchange of matter between humanity and nature ( metabolic rift ), caused by the combined processes of enclosures ( enclosures ), capitalist industrialization, urbanization and breaking the cycle of nutrients resulting from the above, it is a fundamental concept of the "ecology of Marx".
But Saito goes further: it shows that Marx, because he still believed in the unlimited potential of agricultural production, was initially interested in Liebig because the German chemist offered arguments against Ricardo's "law of diminishing returns" and against the "theory of absolute overpopulation ”of Malthus. However, Liebig himself, in the seventh edition of his "Agricultural Chemistry", distanced himself from his overly optimistic positions, "recognized that there are natural limits to agricultural improvements" and concluded that fertilizers could not compensate "predatory agriculture ”( Robbery agriculture ).
"Liebig did not highlight his change of position," says Saito. But Marx was so focused on the debate about the (non) proportionality between agricultural productivity and capital investment "that this hidden modification did not escape him." On the contrary, he commented that "the [Liebig's] new formulation implied a critical point of view on agriculture subject to gains from capitalist relations, incapable of improving the soil in a lasting and long-term way."
For Saito, the turning point of the German chemist was "decisive" for Marx's break with productivism. Hence the fact that this break occurred "relatively late", beginning in 1865. "In the London Notebooks , writes Saito, Marx's Promise is still discernible, but, by integrating Liebig's turn, he corrected, during the 1860s, his own optimistic vision of the possibilities of agriculture ”.
Of course, Marx did much more than correct his vision on the basis of Liebig's work. The chemist was a great scientist, but also an industrialist who produced fertilizers for profit. He had no historical or social understanding of soil depletion. Marx, on the contrary, immediately perceived the parallelism between the exploitation of labor and the destruction of nature by capital. From that moment, he saw the two phenomena as a common result of mediating by the abstract value of relationships between people, as well as between people and their environment.
Kohei Saito rightly insists on the general importance, in Capital , of the concept of "breakdown of metabolism" humanity / nature. Although Marx concentrated on agriculture and other sectors that directly exploit natural resources (forestry, for example), it is obvious that, for him, the concept transcends the problem of soil depletion to include all exchanges of materials (Stoffwechsel) between humanity and its environment. Agriculture is a starting point, because Marx gave a greater theoretical interest to the question of income and saw enclosures (enclosures) as "the great rupture" of the relations between humanity and nature.
We can only approve of Saito when he emphasizes that Marx saw the "breakdown of metabolism" as a global phenomenon, compounded in particular by the imperialist plunder of colonized countries, such as India and Ireland, for example. Therefore, Marx was aware that the nutrients included in Indian cotton made in British factories would never return to the soils where cotton had grown. This is another example showing that "Marx did not integrate Liebig's theory passively but very actively, applying it to his own political analysis."
Saito's historical approach to the evolution of Marx's thinking regarding the subject of natural limits is similar to that used by Kevin Anderson in his book “Marx in the Antipodes”, dedicated to non-western societies, another area in the that the opinions of the author of Capital changed significantly 3 / . For Saito there is a link between these two fields of research because Marx, in his Promethean period, "attributed the depletion of soils to the technological and moral backwardness of the so-called primitive agricultural techniques." In this regard, it is undoubtedly probable that "the Marxist critique of modernity deepens as he investigates the natural sciences in 1865", as Saito says.
Based on his careful study of Marx's Notebooks , Kohei Saito argues that Marx tempered his enthusiasm for Liebig after 1868. The reasons could be two-fold: on the one hand, Marx could not but oppose the development of Malthusian tendencies in the Liebig's thought; on the other hand, he discovered the work of other scientists, particularly those of Fraas, who defended the idea that nature, under certain climatic and alluvial conditions, could compensate for the loss in the soil of the nutrients absorbed by plants.
For Fraas, Liebig "increased the risk of soil depletion, in order to popularize his theory on the mineral amendment." In addition, Fraas also supported the idea that agriculture, because it involves deforestation, causes local climatic changes that, in the long term, will cause the decline of civilization. It is clear that such a theory must have stimulated Marx's reflection on the conditions for a "rational management" of people / nature metabolism.
Saito's concept of an "unfinished critique of political economy", particularly in the field of ecology, creates a suitable framework for debates among Marxists, not only on the evaluation of Marx's works but also on the fields of Research that must be opened to continue the elaboration of an ecosocialist alternative.
I leave aside Saito's criticism of my own work on the subject “Marx and ecology”. According to Saito, "Daniel Tanuro argues that the Marx era is now so distant in terms of technology and natural science that his theory is not appropriate for a systematic analysis of current environmental problems, in particular because Marx did not pay enough attention to the specificities of fossil energy compared to other forms of renewable energy. " Criticism is so inconsistent with my writings for more than 20 years that a response is superfluous .. 4 / .
In my opinion, there is something like an "ecology of Marx", but it is incomplete and sometimes contradictory. If I really appreciate "Marx's ecosocialism", it is precisely because Saito offers a dynamic, historical and, consequently, non-apologetic explanation of this incomplete and contradictory character. Furthermore, he gives this explanation without falling into the Althusserian theory (false, in my opinion) of the so-called "epistemological break" in the development of Marx's thought.
It is true that eco-socialists have different opinions about the degree of incompleteness and contradictions in Marx's ecology. At the end of his chapter "Capital as a theory of metabolism", Saito dedicates some pages to the "contradiction of capital in nature". I generally agree with the content of this text, but it essentially consists of a (re) construction of Marx's ecology by Saito himself. I admit that Marx could have eventually written something like that at the end of his life. But it did not, most likely because it was not confronted with the global ecological crisis.
Saito says that Marx "did not elaborate on the waste of natural resources in as much detail as on the cruel exploitation of the labor force." It is the least that can be said, indeed. Therefore, in my opinion, it is exaggerated and counterproductive to affirm that Marx would have analyzed "the problem of the ecological crisis as the central contradiction of the capitalist mode of production".
It seems to me preferable to consider the "ecology of Marx" as an unfinished field of work. The practical question, therefore, is: "What must we, as ecosocialists, do to continue the work?" Obviously, the priority is to apply the genius concept of capitalist breakdown of metabolism to ecological imbalances other than soil depletion, which Marx focused on. As far as I know, the possibility of a global energy imbalance in the Earth system, due to the burning of fossil fuels, did not attract his attention. It would have been otherwise - John Tyndall discovered radiative forcing of the CO ²and other atmospheric gases in 1859. But Marx's interest in science focused primarily on other areas of research. (Let's add that Fraas was talking about local climate changes caused by deforestation, not global warming.)
But the most important ecosocialist task is clearly to identify new fields of research, feeding new programmatic elaborations. In my opinion, three areas are particularly fertile from an ecosocialist point of view.
The first is the deep connection between the exploitation of nature, the exploitation of work, and the oppression of women by patriarchy. Marx's formula (in Capital ) on "the only two sources of wealth, nature and the worker", does not take into account either the reproductive work carried out mainly by women, or the specific exploitation of salaried women. Now, this specific exploitation and oppression constitute a pillar of capitalism, as important as the exploitation of nature and of labor in general.
The second area is the necessary break with scientism. This is an important question because scientism had an influence on Marx (and even more so on the Marxists of the 20th century). As an example of this influence, I have already mentioned the fact that Marx considered the idea that certain plants could fix nitrogen from the air in soils as a fable. Saito replies that "it is expedient to criticize Marx on this point": what Marx rejected as a fable, according to him, was not the possibility of this mechanism, but Lavergne's idea that it could favor crop growth in the short term. However, I maintain my interpretation. In my opinion, there is little doubt that Marx, in this quote, expresses disdain for what he considers superstitions of the peasants (and of the indigenous peoples). 5 / ), but the peasant knowledge did not attract the attention of Marx (who, on the other hand, was very aware of the knowledge of the artisans).
The third area is the place and role of peasants in contemporary capitalism. Marx thought that the peasants were condemned to disappear by the evolution of capital, but the reality has been different. Due to the gap (identified by Marx) between production time and labor time in agriculture, capital has chosen rather not to invest directly in agriculture in the strict sense, but to control it indirectly, upstream (machines, seeds, etc.) and downstream (processing, distribution, etc.). The result of this process is that a large fraction of the peasantry (and even more the "landless peasants") does not act as an intermediate class that oscillates between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but rather as a layer opposed to the multinationals. and to financial capital. This is how peasants often play a leading role in eco-socialist struggles, as we see in the action of Via Campesina. The strategic consequences of this situation should be carefully discussed by the ecosocialist movement.
In German Ideology , Marx and Engels defined communism as "the real movement that abolishes the present state of affairs." They added that "the conditions for this movement are the result of the premises that currently exist." Because they define "Marx's" ecosocialism "as an" unfinished critique of political economy "and underline the general direction of its development, the works of Kahei Saito constitute a powerful invitation for ecosocialists to unite to debate and collaborate in the elaboration of a new eco-communist program.
01/07/2020
Translation: Faustino Eguberri for south wind
Notes:
1 / Kohei Saito, «Karl Marx's Ecosocialism. Capital, Nature and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy », Monthly Review Press, 2017.
2 / John Bellamy Foster, "The Ecology of Marx: Materialism and Nature", The Old Mole 2004.
3 / Kevin Anderson, “Marx aux antipodes”, (Marx in the antipodes) ed. Syllepse, 2015
4 / See, for example, DANIEL TANURO, “Marx, Mandel et les limites naturelles” in Contretemps, No. 20, September 2007.; DANIEL TANURO, “Pour une reconstruction écologique du marxisme”, IIRE, 2012. Available on the Web: < http://www.4edu.info/images/6/61/8-FR-Cover_merged.pdf >. (Different texts by Daniel Tanuro is peden consult Spanish in https://vientosur.info/spip.php?page=busqueda-avanzada&lang=es&formulaire_action=buscar_autor&formulaire_action_args=OQenuEpztkBzxDTvQHUjCGjO99MLiaF3Fx601TB9rB0KSG4WuHjvY64HOJoHkMoFQqQMdigVfmvS8w%3D%3D&lang=es&autor=tanuro ndt)
5 / Charles Darwin, "La Formation de la terre végétale par l'action des vers de terre" Available on the Web: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:Darwin_-_R%C3%B4le_des_vers_de_terre_dans_la_formation_de_la_terre_v%C3% A9g% C3% A9tale.djvu (“The formation of the upper layer of the soil by the action of earthworms”)

"Marx and Ecosocialism": Michael Löwy

07/15/2019
[Book review  Karl Marx's Ecosocialism - Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy,  Kohei Saito, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017, 308 pages].
Mainstream ecologists often dismiss Karl Marx as being  productivist  and blind to ecological problems. A growing body of ecomarxist writing has recently developed in the United States that clearly contradicts this commonplace.
The pioneers of this new line of research were John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, followed by Ian Angus, Fred Magdoff and others. They contributed to turning the  Monthly Review  into an ecomarxista magazine. His main argument is that Marx was well aware of the destructive consequences of capitalist accumulation for the environment, a process that he described with the concept of metabolic gap. Some of his interpretations of Marx's writings may be in disagreement, but his research was decisive for a new understanding of his contribution to the ecological critique of capitalism.
Kohei Saito is a young Japanese Marxist academic who is part of this important eco-Marxist school. His book, published by Monthly Review Press, is a valuable contribution to the reevaluation of the Marxist legacy from an ecosocialist perspective. 
Reset unit
One of the great qualities of Saito's work is that, unlike many other scholars, he does not treat Marx's writings as a systematic whole, defined from start to finish by his strong ecological commitment (according to some) or a marked tendency non-ecological (according to others). As Saito very convincingly points out, there are elements of continuity in Marx's reflection on nature, but also some very significant changes and reorientations. Furthermore, as the book's subtitle suggests, his critical reflections on the relationship between political economy and the natural environment are  unfinished .
Among the continuities, one of the most important is the question of the   capitalist separation of humans from earth, that is, from nature. Marx understood that in precapitalist societies there had been a form of unity between producers and land. It saw the restoration of the original unity between humanity and nature, destroyed by capitalism, but on a higher level (negation of negation), as one of the main tasks of socialism. This explains Marx's interest in precapitalist communities, both in his ecological debate (for example, on Carl Fraas) and in his anthropological research (Franz Maurer): both authors were perceived as "unconscious socialists".
In his last important document, the letter to Vera Zasúlich (1881), Marx affirms that, thanks to the suppression of capitalism, modern societies could return to a superior form of the archaic type   of collective property and production. I think this is part of a romantic anti-capitalist moment   in Marx's reflections. In any case, this interesting approach of Saito is very relevant today, when the indigenous communities of America, from Canada to Patagonia, form the first line of resistance to the capitalist destruction of the environment.
Evolution of thought
However, Saito's main contribution is in showing the movement, the evolution of Marx's reflections on nature, in a process of learning, rethinking and reformulating his ideas. Before  Capital (1867) we can find in Marx's writings a rather uncritical assessment of   capitalist progress , an attitude often described by the vague mythological term of  Prometheanism . This is evident in the passage of  the Communist Manifesto  that celebrates the "submission of natural forces by the hand of man" and the "breaking of entire continents" thanks to capital; but it is also applicable to  London Notebooks (1851), to the economic manuscripts of 1861-1863 and to other writings of those years.
Interestingly, from my point of view, Saito seems to exempt the  Grundrisse  (1857-1858) from his criticism. This exception is not justified, taking into account the extent to which Marx admires in this manuscript "the great civilizing mission of capitalism" in relation to nature and to pre-capitalist communities, prisoners of its localism and its "idolatry of nature" (! ).
The change occurred in 1865-1866, when Marx discovered, reading the writings of the agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, the problems of soil depletion and the metabolic gap between human societies and their natural environment. This will give rise, in volume I of  Capital  (1867), as well as in the other two unfinished volumes, to a much more critical assessment of the destructive nature of   capitalist progress , particularly in agriculture. After 1868, by reading another German scientist, Carl Fraas, Marx will also discover other important ecological issues, such as deforestation and local climate change.
According to Saito, if Marx had been able to complete Volumes II and III of  Capital , he would have insisted more on the ecological crisis. This also implies, at least, that in the unfinished state in which Marx left these volumes he does not insist enough on these questions. This brings me to my main disagreement with Saito. In several passages of the book he affirms that for Marx "the environmental unsustainability of capitalism is the contradiction of the system" (p. 142); or that in his last years of life he considered that the metabolic gap is "the most serious problem of capitalism"; or that the conflict with natural limits is, for Marx, "the main contradiction of the capitalist mode of production".
I wonder where Saito found, among all of Marx's writings, published books, manuscripts, or notebooks, such claims. It is impossible to find them, and for good reason. In the 19th century, the unsustainability of the capitalist system was not the decisive issue that it has become today, or to be more precise, since 1945. Ian Angus rightly points out that it was then that human activity began to constitute the dominant factor in the configuration of the planetary environment. Consider that it was then that the planet entered a new geological era, the  anthropocene .
Furthermore, I believe that the metabolic gap, or the conflict with natural limits, is not correctly classified as a "problem of capitalism" or "contradiction of the system". Is much more! It is a contradiction between the system and the "eternal natural conditions" (Marx), and therefore a conflict with the natural conditions of human life on the planet.
In fact, as Paul Burkett (quoted by Saito) puts it, capital can continue to accumulate in any state of nature, however degraded it may be, as long as human life has not been totally extinguished. Indeed, human civilization can disappear before capital accumulation becomes impossible.
Saito concludes his book with a sober assessment that seems to me a very accurate summary of the question:  Capital  (the book) is an unfinished project. Marx did not answer all questions nor did he predict today's world. But his critique of capitalism constitutes an extremely useful theoretical basis for understanding the current ecological crisis. That is why, I would add, elecosocialism can be inspired by Marx's ideas, but it must develop a new ecomarxist vision when facing the challenges of the anthropocene in the 21st century.
Source: South Wind
Valuing race? Stretched Marxism and the logic of imperialism
Robert Knox*
This article attempts to demonstrate the intimate interconnection between
value and race in international law. It begins with an exploration of Marxist
understandings of imperialism, arguing that they falsely counterpose race and
value. It then attempts to reconstruct an account in which the two are understood as mutually constitutive.
https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/2356018/Knox,-Valuing-Race-Stretched-Marxism-and-the-logic-of-imperialism.pdf

THE HAITIAN INTERVENTION—VALUE, LAW AND RACE?
In his 2008 article ‘Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and
Imperialism’,1 China Mie´ville dissects the 2004 UN intervention in Haiti. In
February 2004, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, leader of the leftwing Fanmi
Lavalas movement, was overthrown. Boniface Alexandre, Supreme Court Chief
Justice, was appointed interim-President, and requested international support.
In response, the Security Council passed Resolution 1529, which expressed deep
concern for ‘the deterioration of the political, security and humanitarian situation’. Acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council
authorised a multinational ‘peacekeeping force’ which could ‘take all necessary
measures’ to ‘support the constitutional process under way in Haiti’ and
‘maintain public safety and law and order and to protect human rights’.
Pursuant to the Resolution, the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti
(MINUSTAH) was created.

* Lecturer, School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool. Email: r.knox@liv.ac.uk. I would like to thank Tor Krever and Anne Neylon for their incisive comments on drafts of this article, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their very extensive feedback. More generally, this article is the product of a number of long conversations about law, race and capitalism, so I extend sincere thanks
to Brenna Bhandar, Susan Marks, China Mie´ville and Alberto Toscano for all of their insights. As ever, all errors of style and substance remain mine alone.

1 C Mie´ville, ‘Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and Imperialism’ 19 Finnish
Yearbook of International Law (2008) 63.

London Review of International Law, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2016, 81–126
doi:10.1093/lril/lrw004 Advanced Access publication 24 February 2016
 The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All r
Hilferding over Marx: A Political Economy Viewpoint of the Struggles in the
Left 1900-1933 and the Modern Revival.
Nikos Stravelakis
Department of Economics
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/50064/1/MPRA_paper_50064.pdf
Abstract: 
Recent heterodox economic literature makes reference to Hilferding’s “Finance
Capital” and Lenin’s “Imperialism” as early insights on the phenomenon of Financialization
of capital. In this regard ideas which became dominant in the left during the first decades of
the previous century are applied in the explanation of the current crisis, as well as the
understanding of contemporary capitalism from a methodological, analytical and political
standpoint. This paper traces the underlying argument of the Monopoly model and its main
political applications in the first three decades of the 20th century, in an effort to draw rough
historical analogies with its revival in contemporary literature. It is argued that the
Hilferding model, from which Lenin’s ”Imperialism” is derived, has very little or nothing to
do with Marx’s economics but much to do with the neoclassical theory of Monopoly and
Oligopoly. This theoretical association abolishes labor value theory from the analytical
framework and with it any possibility of inherent breakdown (depression) in capitalist
accumulation. Consequently political economy was pushed to the background and the
confrontations between Lenin and Kautsky and subsequently Trotsky, Bukharin and Stalin
were fought around political and geopolitical considerations a factor which played important
part in the outcome. But the most astonishing historical fact is that the revolutionary flood
which shook Europe until 1930 gave place to the dominance of the extreme right when
circumstances were most favorable for the left in the years of the “great depression”.
Drawing from this it is argued further that the main analogy between the 1930s’ and the
present is that both back then and now the left is attempting to intervene in a depression
environment without a depression theory. Disproportional growth between sectors was the
cause of crisis in Hilferding, a contradiction which under the dominance of “Finance
Capital” would be resolved and capitalism would move to an “organized stage”. In the same
fashion disproportional growth of the financial sector relative to the corporate sector, which
emerged following the “great stagflation”, is the cause of the present crisis for contemporary
heterodox literature. Crisis can be resolved through state regulation in this line of thought,
since Financialization of capital is understood independently from the inherent contradictions
of profit motivated growth. In the absence of a depression theory this part of heterodox
economics has drifted in a “witch hunt” on whether capital will resolve the crisis introducing
a new era of “regulated capitalism” or power shifts in favor of financial capital will preserve
the present state of affairs. In the meantime, economic policy suggestions and the political
agenda is surrendered in the hands of mainstream economics and right wing politics
ROSA LUXEMBURG AND FINANCE
Jan Toporowski
https://debt-issues.blog.rosalux.de/files/2012/10/LUXEMBURGFINANCE.pdf
Rosa Luxemburg is best known for her attempt in her book The Accumulation of
Capital to show that capitalist accumulation requires external markets in order to
overcome a tendency to stagnation. These external markets formed the basis of her
theory of imperialism, which was taken over by Lenin and subsequent Marxists.
However, in chapter xxx of that book, on ‘International Loans’, Rosa Luxemburg
examined the role of finance in capital accumulation. This analysis was perhaps
peripheral to her argument. But it has sufficient critical elements to warrant a place
for Luxemburg among the pioneers of critical finance, while the fate of that analysis
among Marxists reveals how the most important school of radical political economy
in the twentieth century came to an attenuated view of finance as a factor in capitalist
crisis. In this paper, it is argued that Luxemburg put forward an analysis of
international finance that not only allows for a disturbing character of finance, but
also looks forward to important aspects of Minsky’s analysis in the second half of the
twentieth century
The
Accumulation
of Capital
in Southern
Africa
Rosa Luxemburg’s Contemporary Relevance
Proceedings of the Rosa Luxemburg Seminar 2006 and the
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Centre for Civil Society’s Colloquium on Economy, Society
and Nature
Edited by
Patrick Bond, Horman Chitonge and Arndt Hopfmann
Fifty years of struggle over Marxism 1883‐1932
Henryk Grossman

Translated from German by Rick Kuhn and Einde O’Callaghan

https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/11086/2/Grossman_FiftyYearsMarxism2013.pdf
Appendix to Rick Kuhn ‘Marxist crisis theory to 1932 and to the present: reflections on Henryk Grossman’s Fifty years of struggle over Marxism’ presented at the Society of Heterodox Economists Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2-3 December 2013
Henryk Grossmann, Fünfzig Jahre Kampf um den Marxismus 1883‐1932, Fischer, Jena, 1932,
and as Part 7, ‘The further development of Marxism to the present’, of the essay
Sozialistische Ideen und Lehren I in Ludwig Elster (ed.), Wörterbuch der Volkswirtschaft. Band
3, 4th edition, Fischer, Jena 1933, pp. 272‐341.

Introduction to Henryk Grossman


 ‘The value-price transformation in Marx and the problem of crisis’ Rick Kuhn, 
Historical Materialism, Volume 24, Issue 1, 2016 

The transformation of values into prices of production, in volume 3 of Capital, was a vital step in Marx’s exposure of the anatomy of capitalism and the laws of capital accumulation. In ‘The value-price transformation in Marx and the problem of crisis’, Henryk Grossman dealt with the fundamental context and significance of the transformation and its implications for theories of economic crisis. While the issue at stake has been the coherence of Marx’s entire analysis of capitalism, almost all of the controversy over the transformation has been preoccupied with the narrower questio of the theoretical adequacy of his mathematics. This was the case both before Grossman’s essay, as he pointed out, and over the subsequent eighty years.1 The starting point in Grossman’s discussion was the method that underpinned the structure of Capital and the procedure of successive approximation [Annäherungsverfahren]. After dealing with capitalism’s most basic features at a very abstract level, achieved by means of a series of simplifying assumptions, Marx progressively lifted them to explain further aspects of concrete reality. Grossman had dealt with this procedure in a series of earlier works, paying particular attention to its implications for Marx’s account of how crises, arising from the growing organic composition of capital were intrinsic to capitalism production, and the division of surplus value into its phenomenal forms.2 In this essay, he focussed on the place of the reproduction schemas in Capital volume 2 and the discussion of the general (or ‘average’) rate of profit and prices of production, that is the value-price transformation, in volume 3. 

Introduction to Henryk Grossman, 
‘The Value-Price Transformation in Marx and the Problem of Crisis’
Rick Kuhn
School of Sociology, Australian National University
http://pinguet.free.fr/kuhngross.pdf

Abstract
Whereas most previous and later discussions of Marx’s transformation of values
into prices of production have focused on his mathematical procedure, Henryk
Grossman addressed the logic of its place in the structure of Capital. On this basis
he criticised underconsumptionist and disproportionality theorists of economic crises
for inappropriately basing their accounts on the level of analysis of the value schemas
in the second volume of Capital. Such a criticism cannot be made of Grossman’s and
Marx’s explanation of systemic crises in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to
fall. Grossman’s article still provides insights into Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his
theory of economic crises, unsurpassed in the subsequent literature.
Keywords
Capitalism – transformation problem – economic crisis – Henryk Grossman – Henryk
Grossmann – Karl Marx – Marxism – method
THE OLD AND NEW ECONOMICS OF IMPERIALISM
GREGORY ALBO
SOCIALIST REGISTER 

Writing forty years ago in the first volume of the Socialist Register, Hamza
Alavi argued that it was necessary to turn to an analysis of a ‘new impe-
rialism’, because the ‘end of direct colonial rule … [had] not yet precipitated that
final crisis which was to see the end of monopoly capitalism and to herald the
age of socialism.’ Insisting that the key dynamic in the world economy could no
longer be captured by the classic theories of imperialism of territorial expan-
sionism in the search for economic outlets, he concluded that
the principal aim of … the new imperialism is not the export of capital as
a means of exploiting cheap labour overseas. It is rather that of concen-
trating investment at home to expand production in the metropolitan
country and of seeking to dominate world markets on which it establishes
its grasp by a variety of means …1
This insight, at once theoretical and political, remains central to the analysis
of the new imperialism today in terms of the systemic reproduction of uneven
development and the hierarchical organizational arrangement of the world
market through formally equal economic exchanges and political relations
between states.2 By locating imperialism in terms of the law of value and the rule
of law, ‘consent’ can be seen as important as ‘coercion’ in understanding modern
imperialism.
The internationalisation of capital during the long period of neoliberalism
since the 1980s has given rise to new patterns and contradictions in the world
market and has had profound effects on the institutionalization of state power,
the organization of state apparatuses and the relations between states. This has
raised three sets of issues with respect to the theory of imperialism: (1) the
patterns of competition and the distribution of power in the centres of capital
accumulation, i.e., inter-imperial relations; (2) the mechanisms and patterns of
uneven development that reproduce hierarchical relations between dominant and
dominated social formations; and (3) the political and cultural relations between,
and oppression of, different peoples; or to put it another way, the question of
political sovereignty vis-à-vis the development of supra-national institutions of
governance. While all three issues remain fundamental to the political economy
of the world market today, it is the first that is of chief concern here.
A characteristic of this period of neoliberalism is that political alternatives
outside the advanced capitalist bloc have been marginalized. The new imperi-
alism has intensified the relations of domination, in terms of both economic
marginalization and geo-political subordination, within the imperialist chain. The
emergence of three political-economic zones – albeit zones with great variation
of organizational arrangements, from the deep integration of the European
Union (EU) to the preferential trading arrangements of North America and the
trade linkages formed by subcontracting networks in East Asia – is a key devel-
opment. But how does the internationalisation of capital affect the organizational
forms, competitive rivalries and interdependencies of these three blocs, and, in
particular, what are the effects of this on the place of the US as the dominant
imperialist pole?
https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5812/2708/