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".
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
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.
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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
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