Author: John Bellamy Foster

  • The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity

    The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity

    The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity,” vol. 74, no. 7 (December 2022), pp. 1-20 (revised version of Isaac and Tamarra Deutscher Lecture published in Historical Materialism in 2022).

    Frederick Engels. Drawing by N. Zhukov, 1930s, Museum of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Moscow.
    Frederick Engels. Drawing by N. Zhukov, 1930s, Museum of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Moscow.

    This article is the 2020 Deutscher Memorial Lecture, delivered each year by the recipient of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, and which was awarded in 2020 to John Bellamy Foster for The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2020). The lecture was first published in Historical Materialism 30, no. 2 (2022): 3–28. It has been revised for publication in Monthly Review, with the consent of Historical Materialism and their publisher, Brill.

    It is a fundamental premise of Marxism that as material conditions change, so do our ideas about the world in which we live. Today we are seeing a vast transformation in the relations of human society to the natural-physical world of which it is a part, evident in the emergence of what is now referred to as the Anthropocene Epoch in geological history, during which humanity has become the major force in Earth System change. An “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the earth, arising from the capitalist system, is now threatening to destroy the earth as a safe home for humanity and for innumerable species that live on it on a timeline not of centuries, but of decades.1 This necessarily demands a more dialectical conception of the relation of humanity to what Karl Marx called the “universal metabolism of nature.”2 The point today is not simply to understand the world, but to change it before it is too late.

    Given that Marxism has been, since its conception in the mid-nineteenth century, the primary basis of the critique of capitalist society, it naturally could be expected to lead the way in the ecological critique of capitalism. But while historical materialists and socialists more broadly can be said to have played the leading, formative role in the development of the ecological critique—particularly within the sciences—the key contributions of socialist ecology, principally in Britain, took place outside the main tendencies that were to define twentieth-century Marxism as a whole. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, a deep chasm emerged within Marxian theory, impeding the development of a coherent ecological view within the left. The dogmatism with which, on one side of this chasm, official Soviet thought by the mid-1930s approached the issue of the dialectics of nature and dialectical materialism more generally, had its counterpart, on the other side, in Western Marxism’s categorical rejection of the dialectics of nature and the materialist conception of nature. To speak of “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity” is thus to refer to the transcendence in our time, based on classical historical materialism and the dialectical naturalism that arose in Britain in the interwar period, of the principal contradictions hindering the development of a unified Marxian ecological critique.

    I. Post-Lukácsian Marxism and the Critique of the Dialectics of Nature

    A major shift occurred in Marxian thought nearly a century ago following the publication in 1923 of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, giving birth to what is now known as the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, but which could more accurately be referred to as “post-Lukácsian Marxism.”3 Lukács employed Hegelian dialectics to argue that the proletariat was the identical subject-object of history, giving a new philosophical coherence to Marxism and at the same time redefining dialectical thought in terms of totality and mediation.

    Yet, in what was to become a defining trait of Western Marxism, Lukács, in conformity with the neo-Kantian tradition, rejected Frederick Engels’s own notion of a dialectics of nature, on the alleged grounds that Engels had followed “Hegel’s mistaken lead” in seeing the dialectic as fully operative in external nature.4 Lukács applied Giambattista Vico’s principle that we can understand history (the transitive realm) because we have “made it,” and thus dialectical reflexivity can be said to apply in all such situations. Conversely, by the same logic, we cannot understand nature (the intransitive realm) dialectically, in the same sense, since it is devoid of a subject.5

    At the same time, Lukács, it should be noted, did not categorically reject the dialectics of nature in History and Class Consciousness, subscribing rather to the notion, as Engels himself did, that there exists a “merely objective dialectics” of nature, capable of being perceived by the “detached observer.”6 This could then be seen as underlying the higher historical subject-object dialectics of human social practice. In this way, Lukács, following Engels in this respect, conceived of a hierarchy of dialectics, extending from merely objective dialectics, all the way up to the dialectics of the identical subject-object of history. Moreover, in his later works, beginning with his Tailism manuscript written within just a few years of History and Class Consciousness, Lukács was to become a strong advocate of a dialectics of nature and societyrooted in Marx’s theory of social metabolism.7

    Yet post-Lukácsian Marxists took the categorical rejection of the dialectics of nature as a defining principle of Western Marxism and even of Marx’s own thought. Engels was in this way separated from Marx. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “In the historical and social world…there reallyis dialectical reason; by transferring it to the ‘natural’ world, and forcibly inscribing it there, Engels stripped it of rationality: there was no longer a dialectic which man produced by producing himself, and which, in turn produced man; there was only a contingent law, of which nothing could be said except it is so and not otherwise.”8 This criticism went hand-in-hand with a hostility toward materialism and scientific realism, in the sense of the rejection of the materialist conception of nature, and a distancing from the achievements of science.9 Serious ecological analysis was therefore missing from the Western Marxist philosophical tradition.

    Although there was the famous criticism of “the domination of nature” in the work of Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, it never got past the criticism of Enlightenment science—only to accede pessimistically in the end to its unavoidable necessity.10Herbert Marcuse’s treatment of “The Revolt of Nature” in Counter-Revolution and Revolt did not go beyond the notion of the domination (and pollution) of nature’s “sensuous aesthetic qualities” as a means for the domination of humanity and the need for an environmental rebellion in response.11 There could, in fact, be no meaningful analysis of nature-society where both the materialist conception of nature and the dialectics of nature were denied, leaving Marxist theory with no dialectical critical-realist analysis on which to base an ecological critique. At most, within Western Marxist philosophical discourse, the relation of human beings to nature was reduced to technology, which was then subject to critique as the positivistic fetishism of technique, divorced from the wider question of the natural world and the human-social relation within it.

    What was missing in such a one-dimensional approach was any notion of nature itself as an active power. As Roy Bhaskar wrote in criticism of these tendencies of Western Marxism: “Marxists [meaning Western Marxist philosophers] have…for the most part considered only one part of the nature-social relation, that is, technology, describing the way human beings appropriate nature, effectively ignoring the ways (putatively studied in ecology, social biology, and so on) in which, so to speak, nature reappropriates human beings.”12

    Yet, a powerful strain of ecological dialectics and critical, non-mechanistic materialism persisted in the natural sciences in the British Isles, evolving out of a tradition that drew on both Marx and Charles Darwin, and that later became the heir of the early revolutionary Soviet ecology of the 1920s and early 1930s. It was this “second foundation” of Marxist thought within the natural sciences which survived in the West, particularly in Britain, and that stretched back to Marx and Engels themselves, that was to play the formative role in the development of an ecological critique, and which was to constitute the main story told in The Return of Nature.13

    II. From Marx’s Ecology to The Return of Nature

    The Return of Nature has as its central area of inquiry the question of the organic interconnections between socialism and ecology that emerged in the century following the deaths of Darwin and Marx in 1882 and 1883, respectively, focusing in particular on developments in Britain and the United States. It follows a thread that was established in my book Marx’s Ecology twenty years earlier. That work is best known for its explanation of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. But the real intent of the book was to explain how Marx’s materialism had developed, going back to his confrontation in his doctoral thesis with Epicurus’s ancient materialist philosophy. Marx’s ecological perspective, it was argued, had developed as a counterpart to his understanding of the materialist conception of nature underlying the materialist conception of history.

    A full materialist outlook, such as that developed by Marx, has three aspects: (1) ontological materialism, focusing on the physical basis of reality independent of human thought and existence, and out of which the human species itself emerged; (2) epistemological materialism, which is best understood as dialectical critical-realist; and (3) practical materialism, focusing on human praxis and its basis in labor. Since Marx and Engels rejected mechanical or metaphysical materialism, their materialism was necessarily dialectical in all three aspects: ontology, epistemology, and practice.14 In Marx, materialism was closely related to mortality (“death the immortal”) applicable to all of existence, defining the material world.15 In this perspective derived from ancient Greek materialism, nothing comes from nothing, and nothing being destroyed is reduced to nothing. The human social world, in Marx’s conception, was, in the sense of Epicurean materialism, an emergent form or level of organization within the natural-material universe. Energy (matter and motion), change, contingency, the emergence of new assemblages or organizational forms, all characterize the natural-physical world, which could be explained in terms of itself, as a process of natural history.16 Marx’s analysis was from the outset rooted in the evolutionary theory of which Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the nineteenth-century culmination.

    Marx in his critique of political economy added to this overall materialist view the threefold ecological conception of: (1) the universal metabolism of nature; (2) the social metabolism (or the specifically human relation to nature through the labor and production process); and (3) the metabolic rift (representing the ecological destruction that ensues when the social metabolism comes into conflict with the universal metabolism of nature).17 The labor and production process was thus the key not only to the mode of production in a given historical form of society, but also represented the human relation to nature, and thus social-ecological relations. Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, which was first developed in the context of the rift in the soil nutrient cycle caused by the shipment of food and fiber to the new urban centers—where the essential nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, ended up as pollution rather than returning to the soil—constituted the most advanced attempt in his day to capture the human-ecological relation. All subsequent ecological thought, up to ecosystem theory and Earth System analysis, was to be rooted in this same essential approach, focusing on metabolism.

    Nevertheless, the argument of Marx’s Ecology left the story of the formative role played by socialist thinkers after Marx in the emergence of ecology largely unaddressed. Moreover, there remained the contentious issue of the dialectics of nature, associated with Engels in particular. These issues were to be taken up in The Return of Nature. Although Marx’s Ecology was a straightforward attempt to capture Marx’s materialist and ecological views, the story told in The Return of Nature was much more complex, not least of all because it had to transgress certain divisions within Marxism itself.

    Here we have to understand that the simultaneous rejection of both the materialist conception of nature and the dialectics of nature within Western Marxism was an inheritance of the neo-Kantian tradition, which had its origin within German philosophy with Friedrich Lange’s 1865 work, The History of Materialism. Lange attempted to use Kant’s notion of the noumenon, or the unknowable thing-in-itself, as the basis for demolishing materialism, a viewpoint that was carried forward in more sophisticated ways by later neo-Kantians. It was with the rise of neo-Kantianism that epistemology came to occupy its dominant place within philosophy, pushing aside ontology, and also displacing the dialectical logic associated with G. W. F. Hegel. Materialist ideas and natural science were seen as inherently positivistic. Room was made again for religion and idealist philosophy via the Kantian noumena or things-in-themselves.18 Closely related to this, as Marx and Engels noted, were the agnostic, dualistic views of British scientists such as Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall.19

    In opposition to the neo-Kantian dualism of Lange, which rejected both materialism and Hegelian dialectics, Marx responded by boldly stating: “Lange is naive enough to say that I ‘move with rare freedom’ in empirical matter. He hasn’t the least idea that this ‘free movement in matter’ is nothing but a paraphrase for the method of dealing with matter—that is the dialectic method.”20 Likewise, in Capital, Marx wrote: “My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it.… With me…the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into the forms of thought.”21

    In referring to the reflection of the “material world in the mind of man,” Marx had no simplistic notion of mirroring in mind, but rather a dialectical conception of reflection (and reflexivity) and a situated conception of knowledge, in which reason and both objective and subjective agency play central roles within an ever-changing historical reality. Marx’s position, while realist, was therefore a form of “dialectical critical realism.” As Bhaskar has explained, Marx’s dialectical “method, though naturalist and empirical is not positivist, but rather realist.… His epistemological dialectics [his critical realism] commits him to a specific [materialist] ontological dialectics and a conditional [historical] relational dialectics as well.”22

    From a classical historical-materialist standpoint, the dialectics of nature can be seen as part of a dialectical hierarchy. Thus, in terms of what Marx in Capital called “its foundations,” it stands for the material world characterized by motion, contingency, change, and evolution: the dialectic as material process. Central here is the notion that nature (apart from human beings) in the contingent, emergent effects of its manifold processes can be said to have a kind of agency, even if this is unconscious agency. At a social level, the dialectic can be seen in terms of human consciousness and practice, the realm of the identical subject-object of the human-historical realm, standing for human society as an emergent form of nature. In its alienated form under capitalism, the human-social realm often appears to be independent of the material world of nature, or even as completely dominant over nature—though this is a fallacy. In between these two abstract realms, of the merely objective and the merely subjective dialectics, lies the mediating realm of human labor and production, the dialectics of nature and society (what Lukács was to call the “ontology of social being”), arising from practice, which is, for Marx, the key to materialist dialectics.23

    Marx gives us two basic ways of looking at this mediation of nature and society through production (which, for him, in its broadest sense accounts for all human appropriation of nature and thus all material activity). In one of these pathways (most evident in his early writings but also apparent in his later works, such as his Notes on Adolph Wagner, written in 1879–80) the human relation to the universal metabolism of nature is seen in terms of human sensuous interaction with nature, which in classical German philosophy was closely tied to aesthetics, but which Marx linked to production as well. The second is in his theory of the labor and production process as the social metabolism between human beings and nature, representing the active relation of human beings to the earth. For Marx, we can know the world, including, to a considerable extent, the intransitive realm beyond the human subject, because we are part of it through our production and our sensuous existence, and we live in the context conditioned by nature’s laws, albeit in an emergent form in which historical laws, via specific modes of production, also condition human existence, mediating between nature and humanity.24 Engels later adds to this, in line with Marx, the role of mathematics and scientific experiments as ways in which humanity connects dialectically to the wider, “merely objective” realm, employing methods of scientific inference arising originally from the human material relation to nature.25

    In essence, while neo-Kantianism was rooted within a categorical division between the human subject and the objective natural world—between phenomena and noumena—that could not be transcended, Marxian materialist dialectics was grounded in human corporeal existence within the physical world, in a context of emergence, or integrated levels. Here the dualism between humanity and nature was not a fundamental assumption but rather was seen as a result of an alienated consciousness rooted in an alienated system. We can know nature, as Engels was to write in The Dialectics of Nature, because “we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst.”26

    III. The Dialectics of Nature and the Creation of Ecology

    The Return of Nature, moving on from where Marx’s Ecology left off, had a double burden. The historical narrative was concerned with explaining the various ways in which a tradition of socialist ecological analysis had arisen within art and science, in many ways dominating the ecological critique of contemporary capitalist society in the century from the deaths of Darwin and Marx up to the rise of the modern environmentalist movement. But at a deeper, more theoretical level, The Return of Nature was concerned as well with the ways in which a materialist dialectics of nature, often combined with other traditions, such as radical Romanticism and Darwinian evolutionary theory, guided the development of modern ecology, based on the insights of socialist thinkers. Here the conception of the dialectics of nature, in its various forms—despite its categorical rejection by post-Lukácsian Marxists—could be perceived as playing the crucial role in a process of ecological discovery and critique.

    A dialectical aesthetic as well as a dialectical conception of labor could be seen as underlying William Morris’s understanding of nature-society relations. Dialectical conceptions also informed E. Ray Lankester’s evolutionary and ecological materialism. But the thread of the dialectics of nature only fully enters the narrative of The Return of Nature once the work of Engels is considered. In many ways, Engels’s famous claim that “Nature is the proof of dialectics” is the key, provided we understand what he meant by this in more contemporary terms by saying, “Ecology is the proof of dialectics.”27

    Although Engels has been heavily criticized by numerous thinkers for adopting a crude “reflectionist” view of knowledge, a close inspection of his work shows such claims are clearly false when placed in the context of his actual arguments.28 Almost invariably, when Engels refers to “reflection,” he immediately turns around and indicates that what we perceive as objectively conditioned by the material world around us (of which we are part) is a result not simply of conditions external to ourselves, but also a product of our active role in changing the world around us, and our understanding of it through our self-conscious reason. Our rules of scientific interference, our logic, our mathematics, our scientific experiments, our modeling, all have their roots in principles derived from human labor and production; that is, our metabolic relation to the world at large. “Reflection,” as Marx and Engels use it—which invariably implies reflexivity, and which is employed by them in the Hegelian, dialectical sense—is anything but positivist in character.29

    Similarly, in attributing agency and thus dialectical relations of a “merely objective” kind to nature itself, Engels does this in a manner that emphasizes reciprocal relations, reflexivity, change, contingency, development, attraction-and-repulsion (contradiction), and emergence (or integrative levels) within nature itself, relying on Hegel’s complex notion of “reflection determinations” from the “Doctrine of Essence” in his Logic.30 The purpose is to capture the active, systemic, non-mechanistic relations that constitute the natural world, from which evolution (in the broadest sense) arises, and out of which humanity itself emerges. For Engels, as for Marx, it is our understanding of our own position within nature and our metabolism with the universal metabolism of nature that gives us the essential clues to those physical properties and principles that extend beyond ourselves. In this regard, Engels does not hesitate to attribute a kind of agency to nature, the material world itself, understood in its broadest terms as in motion and constituted by the “transformation of energy.”31

    Engels’s well-known three “laws” of the dialectics of nature, better understood today as underlying ontological principles, perfectly manifested this outlook.32 The first law, or the transformation of quantity into quality and vice-versa, is now known in natural science as “phase transition” (or as a “threshold effect”) and was explained in precisely that way by the Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy.33 It can be seen as referring to the general phenomenon of integrative levels or the emergence of new organizational forms and assemblages within the material world, a view directly opposed to reductionist approaches to nature, and leading to a hierarchy of natural laws, the product of evolution, transformation, and change. Such an analysis is essential to all science today.

    The notion of the unity/identity of opposites, or what Lukács, following Hegel, called “the identity of identity and non-identity,” which has played such a large role in Marxian dialectics, was aimed at overthrowing notions of fixity, dualism, reductionism, and mechanism, focusing on the contradictions and feedback loops that induce transformative change.34

    This then points to the third ontological principle, in which emergence now can be seen as the result of contradictions (“the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation”) arising from material-historical changes, and leading to the “negation of the negation,” an expression common to Hegel, Marx, and Engels. In the Marxian version, this phrase stands for the way in which the past mediates between the present and the future in material-historical development, producing a dialectic of continuity and change.35 Engels himself referred to the “spiral form of development,” which occurs when the residuals of the past and the active elements of the present coalesce to generate what Ernst Bloch was to call the “not-yet,” or an altogether new reality. For Bhaskar, this takes the form of the “absenting of absence,” or the transformative action directed at what has been inherited from the past in order to create a future existence.36

    In a sense, the negation of the negation is a historical, evolutionary conception of emergence. Although emergence of new levels of organization was articulated in Engels’s first “law,” in terms of the transformation of quantity to quality and vice-versa, now, following the generative principle of the unity of opposites (of contradiction), it takes on a developmental character: the emergence of a new form as a result of a historical process of reciprocal action or contradiction. This is what Bloch meant when he wrote that the “essential distinction between Hegel’s dialectic and all previous candidates” was that “it is not stilled in the unity of contraries or contradictions.”37 In Marxian terms, the past is never simply past but rather mediates between the present (the moment of praxis) and the future.

    In this way, Engels, in line with Marx, provided a dialectics of nature that was also a dialectics of emergence.38 His analysis recognized the unity and complexity of nature, as well as the “alienated mediation” of nature and society represented by capitalism’s irreversible rifts in nature’s own metabolism.39 This led to his powerful condemnation of capitalism’s conquest of nature, as if of a foreign people, undermining ecological conditions. What Engels referred to metaphorically as the “revenge” of nature was evident in deforestation, desertification, species extinctions, floods, destruction of the soil, pollution, and the spread of disease.40 Few other thinkers (outside of Marx and Justus von Liebig) in the nineteenth century captured so powerfully and succinctly the dialectic of ecological destruction under capitalism.

    Contrary to those who have argued (but without any substantive warrant) that Engels sought to subsume the dialectic of human society in the dialectic of nature, his work The Dialectics of Nature, although incomplete, was structured so as to move from the analysis of the “merely objective dialectics” of nature via natural science, to an anthropological basis in “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” Here the analysis was grounded in the dialectics of nature and society, evolving out of human labor and production and the human social metabolism with nature.41 This conformed to the structure adopted in Anti-Dühring in which the argument proceeded logically from natural philosophy to political economy and socialism, with political economy and the mode of production seen as relatively autonomous from the dialectics of nature as such, since conditioned by the dialectics of human history. What in fact mediated between the two, for Engels as for Marx, was human labor and production, that is, the social metabolism. Herein lay the actual material realm of human beings constituting the dialectic of nature and society, or what the later Lukács was to call the “ontology of social being.”

    Indeed, all critical-dialectical thought, encompassing both the “merely objective dialectics of nature,” and what could be called its polar opposite, the “merely subjective dialectics of society,” began for Engels, as for Marx, with the human social metabolism via labor and production, constituting the objective ground of all human existence: the dialectic of nature and society. Human self-consciousness required that the objective world become its own, but this could only be achieved on the basis of ontological principles expressing the specifically human relation to the universal metabolism of nature.

    All of our most fundamental scientific concepts regarding extra-human nature had their historical origins in human interactions with nature and the inferences that were drawn from them. To picture how this works, we can turn to the ancient Greeks. Empedocles in the middle of the fifth century BCE developed an experiment proving the corporeal nature of invisible and motionless air by demonstrating its resistance. This influenced Greek notions of flight. Thus, in Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, written shortly after, in which two eagles in flight (representing the two heads of the house of Atreus) are said to be rowing with “winged oars beating the waves of the wind,” like the ships below, what is being presented is something more than simply a loose poetic metaphor. Rather it was a direct application of the physical principle (the corporeal nature of air) derived from Empedocles’s experiment.42 In order to describe poetically the resistance that a bird’s wings would experience in flight, Aeschylus drew on experience derived from human labor, referring to the oars of ships and the resistance that propelled the ships forward as they rowed. While such an example may seem quaint, and although we have infinitely more sophisticated explanations of a bird’s flight today, what is significant is that basic scientific principles with regard to external nature arose from the earliest times through inferences from human interactions (primarily human production) with the natural world; inferences that then, in Epicurus’s famous phrase, had to “await confirmation.”43 Although the scope of our experiments, our instruments, and our interactions with the universe have expanded, the fact that the basic concepts with which we approach extra-human natural phenomena arise first and foremost from our own material experience in interacting with nature remains the same.

    Engels’s analysis of the dialectics of nature was developed mainly in his Anti-Dühring, which he read to Marx as it was written in draft form (and to which Marx contributed a chapter as well as notes on the Greek atomists), along with his unfinished Dialectics of Nature.44 It was all clearly provisional, a work in progress, and incomplete. The British socialist scientists who were to be strongly influenced by Engels’s materialist dialectics viewed it as a great, unfinished, and open-ended work of scientific inquiry; one far exceeding, as J. D. Bernal noted, the works in the philosophy of science in Engels’s own time, represented by Herbert Spencer and William Whewell in England and Lange in Germany.45

    For many of the leading British socialist thinkers of the early twentieth century—figures as varied as Lankester, Arthur G. Tansley, Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson, Bernal, Joseph Needham, Lancelot Hogben, and Christopher Caudwell—a key point of reference was Epicurean materialism, which was seen as offering not only a deep “materialist conception of nature,” but also, via the swerve (clinamen, declension), the concept of contingency, understood as a movement away from a purely mechanical worldview. The Epicurean swerve was a notion stressed by Marx in his doctoral dissertation, which became available in the 1920s.46 This was viewed by the British socialist scientists as connecting to a dialectical world view and to Engels’s dialectics of nature. Epicurus, as Needham emphasized, conceived nature as arising of itself, while swerving away from all rigid determinism.47

    The result of this historical-materialist Wissenschaft (a term often translated as science, but also referring to knowledge more generally when approached systematically on any topic) was a great renaissance of dialectical naturalism.48 This included, to point to just a few of the many pioneering developments:

    1. Lankester’s thesis that all major epidemics in animals and humans in the present age are the result of human production, and capitalism in particular;49
    2. Haldane’s theory (in parallel with that of the Soviet biologist A. I. Oparin) of the material origins of life—a discovery which was tied to a recognition of how life had created the earth’s atmosphere, linked to the Russian biochemist V. I. Vernadsky’s analysis of the biosphere;50
    3. Haldane’s role in the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis and his integration of this with the dialectics of nature based on Engels’s writings;51
    4. Bernal’s operationalization of the dialectics of nature and the negation of the negation in terms of a theory of the role of residuals in effecting the emergence of new forms of inorganic/organic organization;52
    5. Needham’s theory of integrative levels or emergence, encompassing both natural and social history;53
    6. Tansley’s introduction of the concept of ecosystem, in which he was influenced by Lankester’s earlier ecological analysis and Marxist mathematician Levy’s dialectical systems theory;54
    7. Hogben’s and Haldane’s devastating scientific refutation of the genetic basis of race;55
    8. Haldane’s early empirical analysis, based on his father’s research, of the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere;56
    9. Bernal’s leading role in the critique of the social relations of science;57
    10. Caudwell’s attempt to explore the interconnections in the dialectics of art and science;58
    11. Farrington’s and Thomson’s pioneering research into Epicurean materialism and its relation to the development of Marxist thought;
    12. Bernal’s critique of nuclear-weapons development and treatment of how this threatened the end of life in its present form.59

    And collectively, this manifested itself as the detailed critique of ecological degradation and destruction integrated into the work of all of these thinkers.

    Not only were the scientific and cultural achievements associated with these leading figures in materialist dialectics within realms of science and art of great importance in their time (though later effaced by the Cold War), they were also connected fairly directly with the battles that occurred beginning in the 1950s, with the advent of the Anthropocene, around the sustainability of the natural environment and the rise of the environmental movement. These developments helped inspire the work of leftist scientists like Barry Commoner, Rachel Carson, and, later on, figures such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, Hilary Rose, and Helena Sheehan, and still more recent analysts such as Howard Waitzkin, Nancy Krieger, and Rob Wallace. The reality is that there is a powerful tradition of historical-materialist analysis within and related to natural science that has often fallen outside the purview of Western Marxism.60

    The problem here is well-illustrated by a couple of statements by Perry Anderson, one of the premier Marxist cultural theorists and historians in Britain from the 1960s to the present day. Writing in the New Left Review in 1968, Anderson referred to the “false science…and the fantasies of Bernal.”61 The undeniable fact that Bernal was one of the leading scientific figures in Britain in the 1930s through the 1960s, famous for his major discoveries, and a Marxist, recognized as one of the great intellectual luminaries of his time—even if sometimes deviating into a kind of Soviet positivism—gets short shrift here. More significantly, Anderson felt compelled to declare in 1983 that “problems of the interaction of the human species with its terrestrial environment [were] essentially absent from classical Marxism,” thereby excluding Marx and Engels’s contributions in this respect, suggesting that the whole tradition of explorations of the dialectics of nature (and of nature and society) by Marxist theorists was outside the sphere of historical materialism properly speaking.62 Similar positions were adopted by a host of other thinkers, such as George Lichtheim, Leszek Kołakowski, Shlomo Avineri, David McLellan, and Terrell Carver, all of whom sought to separate Engels from Marx and the dialectics of nature from Marxism.63

    Insofar as this tendency of post-Lukácsian Marxism had a common basis, it had to do with postulations, inherited from neo-Kantianism and deeply embedded in the dominant traditions of philosophy, that rejected realism (critical or otherwise), and with it any possibility of a dialectics of nature. How is it, then, that a dialectics of nature has been so powerful in unlocking the secrets of the universe? The reason is that nature and society are not different realities, but are co-evolving existences, in which society is asymmetrically dependent upon the larger natural world of which it is a part. Our knowledge of nature, of ourselves, and of our place in the world, derives from this fact, spurred on in part by the very alienation of nature and the resulting self-consciousness that the capitalist system has generated. As Needham wrote:

    Marx and Engels were bold enough to assert that it [the dialectical process] happens actually in evolving nature itself, and that the undoubted fact that it happens in our thought about nature is because we and our thought are part of nature. We cannot consider nature otherwise than as a series of levels of organization, a series of dialectical syntheses. From the ultimate particle to atom, from atom to molecule, from molecule to colloidal aggregate, from aggregate to living cell, from cell to organ, from organ to body, from animal body to social association, the series of organizational levels is complete. Nothing but energy (as we now call matter and motion) and levels of organization (or the stabilised dialectical syntheses) at different levels have been required for the building of our world.64

    For Caudwell, “the external world does not impose dialectic on thought, nor does thought impose it on the external world. The relation between subject and object, ego and Universe, is itself dialectic. Man, when he attempts to think metaphysically, contradicts himself, and meanwhile continues to live and experience reality dialectically.”65

    The French Marxist Roger Garaudy put this in more straightforwardly epistemological terms:

    To say that there is a dialectic of nature, is to say that the structure and movement of reality are such that only a dialectical thought can make phenomena intelligible and allow us to handle them.

    That is no more than an inference: but it is an inference founded on the totality of human practice—an inference that is constantly subject to revision as a function of the progress of that practice.…

    At the current stage of the development of the sciences, the representation of the real which emerges from the sum total of confirmed knowledge, is that of an organic whole in a constant process not only of development but also of auto-creation. It is this structure that we call “dialectical.”66

    Kant argued in his Critique of Judgment that, in dealing with the intransitive world of nature beyond our perceptions, it is necessary to conceive of it teleologically in order to say anything about it at all.67 Science, however, has progressed far beyond this point, and while sometimes still presenting nature in teleological terms, it is more likely to resort to mechanical, systemic (systems theory), or dialectical terms.68 The last of these most fully captures the universal metabolism of nature, encompassing its different integrative levels—including the inorganic and organic, the extra-human and human—connected with the results of human praxis.

    IV. The Dialectic of the Anthropocene

    Why are these issues so important today, and why is there now a return to the dialectics of nature? This has to do with our own material conditions, which are increasingly dominated by the planetary emergency and the emergence of the Anthropocene, commencing around 1945 with the first nuclear detonation (followed by the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki), which represented a fundamental change in the human relation to the earth. As a result, the dialectic of nature in the twenty-first century is in many ways a dialectic of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Epoch is designated by science, though not yet officially, as a new epoch in the geological time scale, following the Holocene Epoch of the last 11,700 years. In the Anthropocene, humanity has arisen as the primary driver effecting changes in the Earth System. The dialectic of nature and society has thus evolved to the point that human production is generating an “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the planet, resulting in the crossing of various planetary boundaries and representing the transgressing of critical thresholds in the Earth System that define a livable climate for humanity.

    Climate change is one such threshold or planetary boundary. In essence, the quantitative build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has resulted in a qualitative change in the climate sufficient to threaten human existence, and even that of most life on Earth. Other planetary boundaries that have been crossed or are in the process of being crossed are represented by ocean acidification, loss of biological diversity (and species extinction), the disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, loss of ground cover (including forests), loss of fresh water sources (including desertification), and chemical and radioactive pollution of the environment.69

    The sources of these changes are not simply anthropogenic (something that will not be reversed so long as industrial civilization continues to exist), but are due more concretely to the worldwide expansion of capitalism as an accumulative system geared to its own internal growth ad infinitum and embodying in that respect the most destructive relation to the earth conceivable. This was captured by Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, now raised to the level of an anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.70

    Although we have a widely accepted name for the new geological epoch, characterized by the human economy’s current role as the primary geological force on the level of the Earth System itself, we still have no name for the new geological age, nested within the Anthropocene Epoch that underlies the current Anthropocene crisis. Officially, in terms of geological ages, we are still in the Meghalayan Age of the last 4,200 years, dating from a period of climate change that was thought to have brought down some of the early civilizations (though this is currently a matter of dispute among scientists). But how are we to conceive of the new geological ageassociated with the inception of the Anthropocene Epoch?

    My Monthly Review colleague Brett Clark and I, as professional environmental sociologists, have proposed the name Capitalinian (also referred to by geologist Carles Soriano as the Capitalian) for this first geological age of the Anthropocene, standing for the fact that it is the capitalist world-system that has created the present planetary emergency.71 The only solution—indeed, the only way of preventing the present mode of production from bringing about an Anthropocene extinction (or Quaternary Period extinction) event—is for human society to move beyond capitalism and the Capitalinian towards a future, more sustainable geological age within the Anthropocene, which we have labeled the Communian, after community, commune, and communal.

    What is called the practical, relational dialectic, the dialectic of history is now therefore caught up with the dialectic of nature and society reflected in Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. This has now been given a wider field of operation, only truly apparent in our time, in which the metabolism of the entire planet, or the dialectic of nature, is being affected by an anthropogenic rift in the Earth System and in ways that threaten our own existence, calling to mind Engels’s “revenge” of nature and Lankester’s “Nature’s revenges.”72

    It is important to understand that this Earth System crisis in the Capitalinian is tied to the long history of expropriation and exploitation that together constitute the foundation of capitalism’s relation to the earth and humanity. Expropriation, in Marx’s terms, meant appropriation without equivalent or reciprocity, that is, robbery. Marx thus spoke of the robbery of nature underlying the metabolic rift.73 But he also wrote about the expropriation of the land from the population, removing the workers from the most basic means of production and thus control over their own lives. The age that Marx critically referred to as “so-called original accumulation” (so-called, because it was defined not so much by accumulation as by robbery) was an age of expropriation.74 Expropriation went beyond the theft of land to the theft of human bodies themselves. This is associated with what Clark and I have designated as the “corporeal rift,” marked by genocide, enslavement, and colonization of much the world’s population, underlying the relations of class exploitation.75

    It is this wider logic of the expropriation of lands and bodies behind the capitalist system of exploitation that gave rise to the history of racial capitalism. This process of expropriation can also be seen in the robbing of women’s household labor (which led Marx in his day to refer critically to women in capitalism as the slaves in the household) and in the continuing agribusiness expropriation of the land of subsistence workers, primarily peasants. Even people’s leisure time away from work throughout the world is being expropriated in various ways in the accelerated accumulative society of digital capitalism. Today capitalism is thus involved in myriad ways in the expropriation of the entire earth and its population: a system of robbery so extensive that the human relation to the earth, the very basis of human existence, is now in danger of being severed. The alienation of nature and the alienation of labor that characterize capitalism point, in the end, only to destruction.

    Our practical dialectics today thus require a knowledge of the dialectics of nature and society. The merely objective dialectics of nature, excluding the human subject, and the merely subjective dialectics of society, excluding natural-physical existence, are not enough. A greater critical unity of thought and action is being forced upon us. Dialectics, as Lewontin and Levins explained, focuses on “wholeness and interpenetration, the structure of process more than things, integrated levels, historicity and contradiction.”76

    In ancient Greece, the Ionian philosophers, such as Heraclitus, focused on material processes as dialectical. For Heraclitus, describing the basic metabolic process underlying life:

    As things change to fire,
    and fire exhausted
    falls back into things,
    the crops are sold
    for money spent on food.77

    In contrast to the Ionians, the Eleatics, such as Parmenides (followed by Plato and much later, by Plotinus) conceived of a dialectic of the idea, or reason. Hegel can be seen as wedding these two vital streams together, building on all of modern philosophy and the Enlightenment in his idealist philosophy, but giving precedence to dialectics as idea or reason.78 Marx’s materialist dialectics returned to material processes as underlying all reality, leading to an objective dialectic of change and emergence, of the metabolism of nature and society, and ending in a dialectics of human history and practice.

    This materialist dialectical synthesis, the dialectic of nature and society, remains of great importance today. We live in a time, as Marx and Engels noted in The German Ideology, in which humanity must struggle in revolutionary ways not simply for the advancement of human freedom, but also in order to avoid destruction due to what can be called “capitalism’s deadly threat” to the world and life in general. For Epicurus, Marx wrote, “the world [the earth] is our friend.”79 Materialist dialectics tells us that our goal in the present moment must be one of creating a world of ecological sustainability and substantive equality, one which promotes sustainable human development. But this starts in our time with an ecological and social revolution that is forced upon us. Today, the struggle for freedom and the struggle for necessity coincide everywhere on the planet for the first time in human history, creating a prospect of ruin or revolution: either a fall into the depths to which the Capitalinian has brought us, or the creation of a new Communian Age.80

    Notes

    1. Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” Anthropocene Review, 2, no. 1 (2015): 59–72.
    2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), 54–66.
    3. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, (London: The Merlin Press, 1971); Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality (London: Routledge, 2011), 131.
    4. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 24; Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 115–18.
    5. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 493; John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 17.
    6. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 207; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 492.
    7. Georg Lukács, In Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2000), 102–7; Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: The Merlin Press, 1980).
    8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004), 32.
    9. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: Verso, 1975), Karl Jacoby, “Western Marxism” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 523–26; Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: Verso, 1973), 191–92.
    10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1998), 224, 254; Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: New Left, 1971), 156; Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 2004), 123–27.
    11. Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon, 1972), 59–78.
    12. Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 132.
    13. Foster, The Return of Nature, 7.
    14. Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 115.
    15. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, ed. Ronald Melville, Don Fowler and Peta Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93 (III: 869).
    16. Anthony Arthur Long, “Evolution vs. Intelligent Design in Classical Antiquity,” Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2006, available at berkeley.edu; Anthony Arthur Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 155–77.
    17. John Bellamy Foster, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” Monthly Review 65, no. 7 (December 2013): 1–19.
    18. On neo-Kantianism and its consequences for dialectical and materialist philosophy, see Evald Vassilievich Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, trans. H. Campbell Creighton (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2008), 289–319; Frederick C. Beiser, After Hegel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Foster, The Return of Nature, 264–69. In the words of Lukács, who started out as a neo-Kantian, “according to Kant’s theory the world given to us is only appearance, with a transcendental unknowable thing-in-itself behind it.” (Georg Lukács, Conversations with Lukács, ed. Theo Pinkus [London: The Merlin Press, 1974], 76.)
    19. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 45, 50, 462.
    20. Karl Marx, Letters to Kugelmann (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 112. Marx was replying to the second edition of Friedrich Albert Lange’s On the Workers’ Question (1870).
    21. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 102.
    22. Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, 120. Kai Heron, writing from a Lacano-Hegelian perspective, has recently stated that Marxian ecology based on Marx’s theory of metabolic rift is unable “to account for the contingent emergence of ourselves” as “subjects, from nature.” This, however, is exactly what the theory of contingent emergence developed in classical historical materialism, which is carried forward by today’s dialectical critical realism (including Marxian ecology) is, in the final analysis, all about. To call this “contemplative materialism” thus misses the point: today the issue is the formation of a revolutionary ecological subject, conceived in terms of the “transformative model of social activity,” viewed as a contemporary expression of historical materialism. Kai Heron, “Dialectical Materialisms, Metabolic Rifts and the Climate Crisis,” Science and Society 85, no. 4 (2021): 501–26; Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), 2, 152–73.
    23. Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach (London: The Merlin Press, 1978), 6–7, 103. Writing of “the hidden nature speculation in Marx” and Marx’s concept of metabolism, Alfred Schmidt observed: “Only in this way”—that is, through the mediation of human activity—”can we speak of a ‘dialectic of nature.’” Schmidt’s intention was to reduce the notion of the “merely objective dialectic of nature,” referred to by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, to the dialectics of nature and society. (Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes [London: New Left, 1971], 79.)
    24. See John Bellamy Foster, “The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology,” in Dialectics for the New Century, ed. Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 50–82; Andrew Feenberg, Lukács, Marx, and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981); John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 50–66.
    25. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 13–14, 503; Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xix.
    26. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.
    27. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 23; Foster, The Return of Nature, 254.
    28. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents in Marxism, trans. Paul Stephen Falla (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 324–25; Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 67, 86; Norman Levine, Dialogue with the Dialectic (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 10–12.
    29. On Hegel’s complex, dialectical concept of reflection (and its relation to reflexivity and refraction), see Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 247–50. For the distinction between the mechanistic and Marxian conceptions of reflection, see Roger Garaudy, Marxism in the Twentieth Century, trans. René Hague (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970) 53–54. Lukács was to relate the origins of dialectical reflection, in the Marxian sense, directly to praxis and production (the metabolism with nature), stating: “The most primitive kind of work, such as quarrying of stones by primeval man, implies a correct reflection of the reality he is concerned with. For no purposive activity can be carried out in the absence of an image, however crude, of the practical reality involved.” (Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxv.) This complex, dialectical view of the concept of “reflection” had roots that went back to Immanuel Kant, who wrote of the “Amphiboly of the Conceptions of Reflection.” See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: J. M. Dent, 1934), 191–208.
    30. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 43, 493–94; G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities, 1969), 399, 405–12, 490–91, 536; Foster, The Return of Nature, 244–51; George Lukács, The Young Hegel, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1975) 280; Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 1, trans. David Fernbach (London: The Merlin Press, 1978), 74–82.
    31. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 13.
    32. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 110–32, 356–61; Craig Dilworth, “Principles, Laws, Theories, and the Metaphysics of Science,” Synthese 101, no. 2 (1994): 223–47.
    33. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 115–19, 356–61; Hyman Levy, The Universe of Science (London: Watts and Co., 1932), 30–32, 117, 227–28.
    34. Lukács, Conversations with Lukács, 73–75.
    35. Bertel Ollman, The Dance of the Dialectic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 17; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 120–32; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 929. The notion of the negation of the negation arises out of Hegel’s attempts to explain determinate negations that express continuity and change. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University, 1977), 51.
    36. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 313; J. D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism, ed. Hyman Levy (London: Watts and Co., 1934), 103–4; Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, 150–52, 377–78; Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 9–18, 306–13; Jay, Marxism and Totality, 183–86. An account of the dialectic as a spiral form of development was developed by William Morris and E. Belfort Bax, probably in conjunction with Engels, in The Manifesto of the Socialist League. See William Morris and E. Belfort Bax, The Manifesto of the Socialist League (London: Socialist League Office, 1885), 11. The characterization of the dialectic as a spiral also appears in E. Belfort Bax, The Religion of Socialism (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1972), 2–5.
    37. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, 71.
    38. Kaan Kangal, “Engels’s Emergentist Dialectics,” Monthly Review 72, no. 6 (November 2020): 18–27, John Bellamy Foster, “Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 72, no. 6 (November 2020): 1–17.
    39. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1974), 260–61.
    40. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 459–64; Foster, The Return of Nature, 177–215, 273–87.
    41. For a standard criticism of Engels in this respect, see Levine, Dialogue with the Dialectic, 8–12. For a response, see John L. Stanley, Mainlining Marx (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002).
    42. Benjamin Farrington, Head and Hand in Ancient Greece (London: Watts and Co., 1947) 11–15; Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. George Thomson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
    43. Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader, trans. Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 42. Epicurus was known for his method of scientific inference as well as his epistemology. A few fragments of his writings have been preserved in the form of letters or collections of maxims. However, all of his 300 books are lost, except for parts of his On Nature, which have been recovered from the Herculaneum papyri. Nevertheless, we have a brief summary from Diogenes Laertius of his Canon, which was the first distinct epistemological work in the ancient Greek tradition. The most intact Epicurean treatment of the method of scientific inference (retrieved from the Herculaneum papyri) was Philodemus’s work on method and signs. See Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader, 41–42; Gisela Striker, “Epistemology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, ed. Philip Mitsis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 43–58; Philodemus, Philodemus: On Methods of Inference, ed. Philip Howard De Lacey and Estelle Allen De Lacey (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Association, 1941).
    44. Foster, The Return of Nature, 253.
    45. D. Bernal, World Without War (New York: Prometheus, 1936), 1–2.
    46. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, 34–107, 403–514. As the Epicurean scholar Cyril Bailey pointed out, Marx was the first figure in modern times to recognize the significance of Epicurus’s swerve. Cyril Bailey, “Karl Marx on Greek Atomism,” Classical Quarterly 22, no. 3–4 (1928): 205–6. Marx drew on a wide body of fragments in writing his dissertation (and his seven Epicurean Notebooks) at a time when these had not previously been collected, including one fragment recovered from the charred papyri in the Herculaneum library. Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 296. On the influence of Epicurus on the British Marxists of the 1930s and ’40s, see Foster, The Return of Nature, 369–70. Benjamin Farrington, in particular, played a major role in introducing the British Marxian scientists to Epicurus, not only through his own works, but also in facilitating the reading of Marx’s doctoral dissertation by thinkers in this tradition. See Lancelot Hogben, Lancelot Hogben, Scientific Humanist (London: The Merlin Press, 1998), 105; Benjamin Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1939); Benjamin Farrington, The Faith of Epicurus (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967); George Thomson, The First Philosophers (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955), 311–14.
    47. Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1948), 55, 124, 191.
    48. See Joseph Fracchia, “Dialectical Itineraries,” History and Theory 38, no. 2 (1991): 169–97.
    49. Ray E. Lankester, The Kingdom of Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 159–91; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease,” Monthly Review 73, no. 2 (June 2021): 1–23.
    50. B. S. Haldane, The Science of Life (London: Pemberton, 1968), 6–11; J. D. Bernal, The Origin of Life (New York: World Publishing, 1967), 24–35; Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 277; Vladimir I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere, trans. David B. Langmuir (New York: Springer Verlag, 1998).
    51. B. S. Haldane, The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (New York: Random House, 1939); Foster, The Return of Nature, 383–98.
    52. D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” 103–4; Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016) 301–2.
    53. Needham, Time: The Refreshing River, 233–72.
    54. G. Tansley, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16, no. 3 (1935): 284–307; Levy, The Universe of Science.
    55. Foster, The Return of Nature, 337–39.
    56. B. S. Haldane, “Carbon Dioxide Content of Atmospheric Air,” Nature 137 (1936): 575; Foster, The Return of Nature, 397, 612–13.
    57. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (New York: Macmillan, 1939).
    58. Christopher Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Foster, The Return of Nature, 417–56.
    59. Foster, The Return of Nature, 489–96; Bernal, World Without War; Bernal, The Origin of Life, xvi, 176–82.
    60. Foster, The Return of Nature, 502–26; Foster, Clark, and Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease”; Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1985).
    61. Perry Anderson, “Components of the National Culture,” New Left Review I, no. 50 (1968): 3–57. Compare Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times (London: Little, Brown, 2013), 169–83.
    62. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 83.
    63. McLellan’s Marxism After Marx reflected the tendency not only to condemn but also to exclude from the Marxist canon those who were seen as falling outside the narrowly defined Western Marxist tradition. Thus, of the British Marxists up through the 1930s considered in The Return of Nature, including Morris, Hogben, Haldane, Bernal, Levy, Needham, Farrington, Thomson, and Caudwell, only the last is mentioned in the chapter on “British Marxism” in McLellan’s work, and this was confined to a mere two sentences. We are told that “Christopher Caudwell was the only really original pre-war British Marxist”—and then only for his treatment of “literature,” not his theory of art in general or his analysis of science. See David McLellan, Marxism After Marx (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 30.
    64. Needham, Time: The Refreshing River, 14–15.
    65. Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, 227 (Further Studies).
    66. Garaudy, Marxism in the Twentieth Century, 61.
    67. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) 50–54, 67–74, 77–86.
    68. Systems theory often overlaps with dialectics. See Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 101–24.
    69. Johan Rockstrom et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009): 472–75; Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries,” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 736–46; Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Anchor, 1996).
    70. Hamilton and Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” 67.
    71. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 73, no. 4 (September 2021): 1–16; Carles Soriano, “On the Anthropocene Formalization and the Proposal by the Anthropocene Working Group,” Geologica Acta 18, no. 6 (2020): 1–10.
    72. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461; Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, 159–91.
    73. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637–38.
    74. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 871; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 43–61. Marx strongly preferred the concept of “original expropriation” to “original accumulation,” since what was at issue was expropriation, not accumulation. See Karl Marx, Value, Price, and Profit, in Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 38
    75. Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature, 78–103.
    76. Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 103.
    77. Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton (London: Penguin, 2001), 15.
    78. Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, 115–16; Thomson, The First Philosophers, 271–95.
    79. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 141. See also Walter Baier, Eric Canepa, and Haris Golemis, eds., Capitalism’s Deadly Threat (London: The Merlin Press, 2021).
    80. “The real ‘Golden Age’ of historical anthropology cannot be conceived of without the just as real ‘Golden Age’ of a new humanist cosmology.” (Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 138.)
  • Podolinsky Myth

    “Podolinsky Myth,” in Brent Haddad and Barry D. Solomon, ed., Dictionary of Ecological Economics (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2022), 341 words.

     

  • Ecological Civilization, Ecological Revolution

    Ecological Civilization, Ecological Revolution

    Ecological Civilization, Ecological Revolution,” Monthly Review, vol. 74, no. 5 (October 2022), pp. 1-11.

    This is an adapted version of a lecture delivered to the John Cobb Ecological Academy in Claremont, California, on June 24, 2022, on the topic of ecological civilization. It was intended to follow up on the Fifteenth International Conference on Ecological Civilization,” held in Claremont on May 26–27, 2022. The talk, which was delivered to a largely Chinese audience, was followed by an extensive interview conducted by Chinese ecological Marxist scholars, entitled “Why Is the Great Project of Ecological Civilization Specific to China?,” which is being published simultaneously as a Monthly Review Essay at MR Online. Both the lecture and the interview are being co-published by the Poyang Lake Journal in China.

    Aerial photo taken on Sept. 18, 2020 of Dihua, an ancient town in Danfeng County, Shangluo City of northwest China's Shaanxi Province. Dihua ancient town has attracted many tourists with its well protected ecological environment, rich history and unique folk customs. Source: "China to adhere to green development, advance ecological civilization: position paper," Xinhua, September 21, 2020.
    Aerial photo taken on Sept. 18, 2020 of Dihua, an ancient town in Danfeng County, Shangluo City of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province. Dihua ancient town has attracted many tourists with its well protected ecological environment, rich history and unique folk customs. Source: “China to adhere to green development, advance ecological civilization: position paper,” Xinhua, September 21, 2020.

    I would like to speak to you today about the connections between ecological civilization, ecological Marxism, and ecological revolution, and the ways in which these three concepts, when taken together dialectically, can be seen as pointing to a new revolutionary praxis for the twenty-first century. More concretely, I would like to ask: How are we to understand the origins and historic significance of the concept of ecological civilization? What is its relation to ecological Marxism? And how is all of this connected to the worldwide revolutionary struggle aimed at transcending our current planetary emergency and protecting what Karl Marx called “the chain of human generations,” together with life in general?1

    In 2018, cultural theorist Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning (2017), wrote an article for the online site Ecowatch, entitled “What Does China’s ‘Ecological Civilization’ Mean for Humanity’s Future?” This article exhibits a peculiarly Western view, which, while recognizing the distinctiveness of the notion of ecological civilization in China, nevertheless attempts to separate China’s core conception in this regard from ecological Marxism and the critique of capitalism. In opening his article, Lent writes:

    Imagine a newly elected president of the United States calling in his inaugural speech for an “ecological civilization” that ensures “harmony between humanity and nature.” Now imagine he goes on to declare that “we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it” and that his administration will “encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption.” Dream on, you might say. Even in the more progressive Western European nations, it’s hard to find a political leader who would make such a stand.

    And yet, the leader of the world’s second largest economy, Xi Jinping of China, made these statements and more in his address to the National Congress of the Communist Party in Beijing last October [2017]. He went on to specify in more detail his plans to “step up efforts to establish a legal and policy framework…that facilitates green, low-carbon, and circular development,” to “promote afforestation,” “strengthen wetland conservation and restoration” and “take tough steps to stop and punish all activities that damage the environment.” Closing his theme with a flourish, he proclaimed that “what we are doing today” is “to build an ecological civilization that will benefit generations to come.” Transcending parochial boundaries, he declared that his Party’s abiding mission was to “make new and greater contributions to mankind…for both the well-being of the Chinese people and human progress.”2

    Why is it that the category of ecological civilization, which is so central for China today, is largely inconceivable even as a talking point within the imperial core of the capitalist world, lying entirely outside its ideological sphere? Lent argues that such a principle is diametrically opposed to traditional Western culture, from Plato to the present day, with its alienated view of nature, in which the environment is viewed simply as something to be conquered. This stands in sharp contrast, he argues, to the more ecological culture embedded in China’s 5,000-year-old civilization—though China too has experienced thousands of years of ecological destruction.3 He quotes the early neo-Confucian philosopher Zhang Zai from a thousand years ago who wrote:

    Heaven is my father and earth is my mother, and I, a small child, find myself placed intimately between them.

    What fills the universe I regard as my body; what directs the universe I regard as my nature.

    All people are my brothers and sisters; all things are my companions.4

    For Lent, China’s view of ecological civilization—though laudable—has nothing really to do with the political economy of present-day China or Marxism.5 Rather, he associates it with the “regeneration” of traditional Chinese values. Here, the fact that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted the notion of ecological civilization, while such a forward-looking view is generally incomprehensible in the West, is simply interpreted in terms of the very different cultural heritages of China and Europe. In this way, the divergence between Asia and the Western world regarding ecological civilization is largely divorced from material foundations and from such issues as capitalism and socialism. Hence, in Lent’s perspective, China’s emphasis on ecological civilization has nothing whatsoever—except in a negative sense—to do with ecological Marxism. Rather, the People’s Republic of China is characterized as an authoritarian state that is the very symbol of unfreedom. He points to contemporary China’s “hyper-industrial” economy as somehow worse than what prevails in the West, leading it down the road toward the pollution of the entire earth, and opposed to its claim to be building an ecological civilization.6

    Lent’s argument seems to be that while Europe and North America have superior political and economic foundations, their environmental progress is hindered by their more destructive traditional ecological culture. China, in comparison, has a more harmonious ecological culture extending back millennia, but it is hindered by its “hyper-industrial,” authoritarian political-economic regime from bringing this to fruition, thus endangering the entire earth and all humanity—unless, of course, China’s traditional ecological culture triumphs over its present, Marxian-inspired political-economic goals.

    This attempt, in the name of traditional Chinese values, to sever the notion of ecological civilization from ecological Marxism and the question of revolutionary-scale ecological change is ultimately aimed at disconnecting the idea of ecological progress from a socialist praxis of sustainable human development. In contrast, I contend that the concept of ecological civilization is in fact a historical product of the development of ecological Marxism. Any attempt to separate the two, notwithstanding the importance of traditional Chinese values, is to deny the historical significance of the ecological civilization concept, and its importance in conceiving the necessary worldwide ecological revolution.

    Ecological Marxism and the Origins of the Ecological Civilization Concept

    The 1970s and ’80s saw a resurrection of Soviet ecological thought, which had in many ways led the world in development of ecological science in the 1920s and ’30s, only to degenerate in the decades that followed due to political and social factors.7 However, with its renewal in the 1970s and ’80s, Soviet ecology took on a new, distinctive character, seeing the ecological problem as related to the general question of civilization.8 This was especially evident in an important collection on Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, edited by A. D. Ursul and published in 1983.9 This volume included contributions by some of the USSR’s leading scientists and philosophers. This led directly to the concept of ecological civilization, with a number of other works on the topic appearing in 1983–84, and with the same notion entering almost immediately into Chinese Marxism, where it was to become a central category of analysis.10

    Ecological civilization in the Marxian sense points to the struggle to transcend the logic of all previous, class-based civilizations, particularly capitalism, with its two-fold domination/alienation of nature/humanity. Writing in Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, P. N. Fedoseev, vice president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, addressed the issue of “rejection of the gains of civilization” implicit in many Green attempts to confront the ecological problem, often generating historically disembodied utopias, either backward-looking or technocratic.11 Leading environmental philosopher Ivan Frolov, following Marx, emphasized that the human metabolism with nature was mediated by the labor and production process, and by science, and thus depended on the mode of production.12Philosopher V. A. Los explored how “culture is becoming an antagonist…to nature” and referred to the need to construct a new “ecological culture” or civilization, reconstituting on more sustainable grounds the role of science and technology in relation to the environment. As he explained: “It is in the course of shaping an ecological culture that we can expect not only a theoretical solution of the acute contradictions existing in the relations between man and his habitat under contemporary civilization, but also their practical tackling.”13

    From an ecological Marxist standpoint, the emerging global ecological crisis thus demanded an ecological transformation to create a new ecological civilization, in line with the long history of ecological analysis within Marxism, and a socialist path of development. Marx and Engels dealt extensively with the ecological contradictions of capitalism, going beyond simply their well-known discussions on the degradation of the soil and the division between town and country, to encompass such issues as industrial pollution, the depletion of coal and fossil fuels more generally (in terms of what Frederick Engels called the “squandering” of “past solar heat”), the clearing of forests, the adulteration of food, the spread of viruses due to human causes, etc.14Marx’s celebrated theory of metabolic rift, with which he addressed the ecological crises of his day, has been extended today to address capitalism’s destruction of ecosystems and the disruption of nearly every aspect of the planetary environment.15

    In twenty-first century China, ecological Marxism has contributed to the development not only of a powerful critique of contemporary environmental devastation, but also to the promotion of ecological civilization as an answer. Aware that ecology ultimately constitutes a deeper materialist grounding for society than mere economics, Xi has emphasized, in his conceptions of ecological civilization and of a “beautiful China,” that ecology is “the most inclusive form of public wellbeing.”16 He has stated: “Man and nature form a community of life; we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways and protect it. Only by observing the laws of nature can humanity avoid costly blunders in its exploitation. Any harm we inflict on nature will eventually return to haunt us. This is a reality we have to face.”17 These words are closely connected to the classical ecological analysis of Marx and Engels, who forcefully argued that human beings are part of nature, and need to follow nature’s laws in carrying out production, while referring to the “revenge” of nature on those who disregard its laws.18

    The concept of ecological civilization being implemented in China today is seen as representing a new, revolutionary, and transformative model of civilization. Prior civilizations are viewed, in accordance with Marxist analysis, as tied to class society, but historically giving rise to new stages of development. In this view, ecological civilization is a stage in the development of “a great modern socialist society” that, unlike capitalism, does not sacrifice people and the planet to profits.19 In contrast to the dominant capitalist notion of sustainable development, ecological civilization is understood as incorporating the domains of politics and culture, leading to a “five-in-one approach” that goes beyond the standard triad of environmental, economic, and social factors that has come to characterize liberal sustainable development. Ecological civilization conceived in this way is aimed at sustainable human development, giving more emphasis to the non-economic definition of well-being, and putting politics in charge.20

    As Chen Xueming noted in The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital, the basic principles underlying the socialist ecological modernization associated with ecological civilization are “prevention, innovation, efficiency, non-equivalence, dematerialization, greenification, ecologization, democratic participation, pollution fees and win-win scenarios between economy and environment.”21 The eight priorities for the establishment of ecological civilization are categorized as: (1) spatial planning and development; (2) technological innovation and structural adjustment; (3) sustainable use of land, water, and other natural resources; (4) ecological and environmental protection; (5) regulatory systems for ecological civilization; (6) monitoring and supervision; (7) public participation; and (8) organization and implementation of environmental policy/planning.22

    In the Chinese case, such revolutionary-scale ecological reforms are being attempted even in a context of rapid economic growth aimed at bringing China up to a level with the West. Integrated planning to protect the environment is being incorporated in all economic development plans. The seriousness with which ecological civilization is being pursued is reflected in the clear acknowledgment that, in the implementation of these ecological plans, economic growth will need to be slowed somewhat in relation to earlier decades.23 This environmental focus can be seen in the radical transformations that China has been introducing in such areas as pollution reduction; reforestation and afforestation; development of alternative energy sources; imposing restrictions in sensitive river areas; rural revitalization; food self-sufficiency through collective means; and in many other areas.24 China has made dramatic progress in reducing the degree of its reliance on coal, but due to the pandemic and world crises, it has partly regressed in this respect over the last few years.25 Nonetheless, it has set definite dates for the implementation of ecological civilization, including having the main components of its ecological civilization in place by 2035, establishing a beautiful China by 2050, and reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2060.26

    The struggle to create an ecological civilization in China would mean very little of course if it were simply a top-down program, which would almost certainly lose its impetus and succumb to economic and bureaucratic forces. The radical nature of the transformation is safeguarded by the fact that in China’s post-revolutionary society, the ecological metamorphoses are emanating from both above and below, drawing on struggles for rural reconstruction in response to the rural-urban divide. For example, Yin Yuzhen, a peasant woman living in the desert in Uxin Banner in Inner Mongolia, decided to reclaim the desert, entering into a thirty-seven-year struggle in which she and her family have planted 500,000 trees. She has become a respected expert on the greening of deserts. Peasants in the region joined in the afforestation effort, and nearly 6,700 square kilometers of barren sand were turned green. Yun Jianli, a former high school teacher, successfully organized against water pollution. In 2002, she founded Green Han River, an environmental protection organization to protect the Han River from pollution, producing countless environmental reports and opposing factory owners/managers. The organization has more than 30,000 volunteers. By 2018, they had organized over a thousand field trips to investigate pollution sources along the Han River, traveling over 100,000 kilometers altogether. The object is to mobilize the whole society for environmental protection. Wang Pinsong of Shangri-La by the Gold Sand River in southwest China—an area that is the home of fifteen ethnic groups—led in mobilizing her village in opposition to a dam-building project in Tiger Leap Grove, which would have displaced 100,000 villagers and engulfed 33,000 acres of fertile land by the riverbanks. Environmental organizing at the grassroots level, based on the self-mobilization of the population, is a powerful force in today’s China, pointing to the development of a new ecological communism.27

    A major indication of China’s approach to environmental issues and threats is its successful response to COVID-19, which has resulted in a mortality rate of four deaths per million people, as compared to the United States’ COVID mortality rate of 3,107 per million (as of June 22, 2022). China’s achievement in protecting its population, and, in a win-win situation, also protecting its economy, is widely misconceived in the West as simply the result of an authoritarian set of lockdowns imposed from the top of the society. Nevertheless, the secret to China’s achievement, especially in the early stages, was adopting the model of people’s revolutionary war: enlisting the self-mobilization of the entire population in the fight against COVID and the resurrection of the mass line, connecting the population to the state and party.28

    China and Ecological Revolution

    China faces enormous ecological contradictions internal to its society, as does world production as a whole. In terms of annual carbon emissions, China is the world’s largest polluter. However, much of this is devoted to producing manufactured products to be consumed in the West, while China’s historic carbon emissions are still far exceeded by the United States and Europe, with the United States responsible for seven times as much per capita of the carbon dioxide concentrated in the atmosphere as China. In terms of per capita carbon dioxide emissions, China today produces less than half the U.S. level.29 In Will China Save the Planet? (2018), Barbara Finamore, senior strategic director for Asia of the Natural Resources Defense Council in the United States, contends that while “China is still the largest GHG (greenhouse gas) emitter, it is arguably doing more than any other country to try to reduce global carbon emissions—though it continues to face enormous challenges.”30 There is no doubt that China’s struggles to create an ecological civilization are revolutionary when placed against the efforts of other countries. This is largely due to its role as a post-revolutionary, socialist-oriented social formation that retains a large element of economic planning capability, state direction, and collective values, invigorated by continual popular mobilization in both rural and urban areas.

    This brings us back to the question that Lent implicitly asked in the passage quoted at the beginning of this talk. Why is it so impossible that a U.S. or European head of state could have referred, as Xi did, to a present and future goal for society couched not in terms of mere economic growth, but stressing the importance of creating an ecological civilization? The answer to this is not simply, as Lent would have us believe, that China has regenerated its traditional ecological values, or that the West is wedded to a culture, going back thousands of years, geared to the “conquest of nature.” Rather, the fundamental division is between a post-revolutionary society that has adopted Marxism with Chinese characteristics—embracing the ecological critique emanating from classical historical materialism and treating it as central to the entire long revolution of socialism—and an unalloyed capitalist order in which the sole mantra is “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets.”31

    There is no possibility that the ruling-class interests in a core capitalist country like the United States, which has long cultivated an “imperial mode of living” and production, mainly benefiting the very top of society, will somehow turn around and advocate a low-carbon, “simple, moderate, green” way of life or oppose excessive consumption and inequality as advanced in the Chinese notion of ecological civilization.32 Rather, the main radical proposal in the West to deal with the global ecological threat is that of a state-sponsored Green New Deal, usually articulated in terms of market mechanisms, technological change, and climate jobs, which will allow production to continue, essentially unchanged. Yet the prospect of a Green New Deal, given the extent of opposition to fossil capital that it would require, has gone virtually nowhere in the United States or Europe, since even this is conceived as a dire threat to the ruling interests.33 The result is that saving the planet as a place for human habitation is, ironically, left in contemporary capitalism almost entirely up to the private sector, which is the historical source of global ecological destruction, while the environmental reform effort has been reduced to creating state-financed green markets for private corporations and new forms of the financialization of nature.34 Hence, the capitalist juggernaut continues in its forward motion, destroying in its path the very conditions of the human future.

    In terms of sheer capacity, the wealthy, developed, technologically advanced countries at the core of the world capitalist system could easily lead the way in addressing the ecological problem. Their political inability to do so is linked to the weakness of socialist, collective, and ecological principles in capitalist commodity society; the virtual absence of planning (outside the military); and the ruling class’s fears of the self-mobilization of populations, which is necessary if revolutionary-scale transformations in our economic relation to the environment are to be effected. What is needed in order to carry out an ecological revolution directed at human survival is not simply environmental reform, but a much broader ecological and social revolution aimed at transcending the logic of capitalism itself.

    Revolutionary Ecosocialism and the Future

    So far, I have emphasized the importance of revolutionary ecosocialism or ecological Marxism in the conception of ecological civilization. It is no accident that the notion of ecological civilization first appeared in the 1980s in the Soviet Union and that it is being implemented as a guiding principle and central project in China, while it is scarcely discussed elsewhere in the world. This cannot be attributed solely to China’s traditional culture, though it has played a part. Nor does it make sense to connect this to the notion of postmodern culture, which has had no real material relevance in this regard.35 Rather, the notion of ecological civilization is inconceivable in any meaningful sense outside of a society engaged in building socialism, and thus actively engaged in combating the primacy of capital accumulation as the supreme measure of human progress. It is exactly here that Marxian ecology has had a huge role to play.

    Ecological Marxism has developed in China in terms of its own “vernacular revolutionary tradition,” where new critical concepts are seen as directly problem-oriented and immediately put in operation.36 This is distinct from its conceptualization in the West, where ecosocialist researchers are more removed from praxis and have generally been engaged in wider, and often more abstract, theoretical developments. A principal concern of Marxian ecology in the West (as well in much of the rest of the world) has been the reconstruction of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, and how to enhance the continuing critique of capital in this respect. Bringing this renewed ecological critique emanating from classical historical materialism to bear on the problems of building ecological civilization in China therefore ought to be a priority—and, in fact, many scholars in China are currently engaged in this.

    In terms of what we have learned in the recent renewal and elaboration of Marxian ecology, a number of concepts are crucial. Chief amongst these is Marx’s triad of concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” “social metabolism,” and the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism”—or the metabolic rift brought on by capitalist development.37 The concept of the universal metabolism of nature recognizes that human beings and human societies are an emergent part of nature. Social metabolism expresses how humanity interacts with and transforms nature through production. And the metabolic rift reflects the fact that an alienated social metabolism, aimed at the expropriation of nature as a means of the exploitation of humanity and the accumulation of capital, necessarily produces an ecological crisis, driving a wedge between this alienated social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature of which we are a part.

    Marx himself provided a penetrating definition of what we now call sustainable human development. No one—not even all of the people or all of the countries in the world— he argued, owns the earth; rather, we are obligated to hold it in usufruct as good managers of the household, sustaining it for the chain of human generations.38 Genuine progress on this score, overcoming the alienation of nature and humanity associated with the processes of expropriation and exploitation, has to embrace the notion not simply of an economic proletariat (and economic peasantry) as the principal force for change, but, in a more inclusive materialism, of an environmental proletariat (and ecological peasantry). Indeed, the three categories that we started with—ecological civilization, ecological revolution, and ecological Marxism—hardly make sense without this fourth term of the environmental proletariat.

    Our relation to the earth is our most fundamental material relation out of which our production, history, and social relations emerge. Those who are most alienated, exploited, and degraded by the system in their relations to nature and the earth, constitute both the force and means for change in the twenty-first century.39 In what Marx called the “hierarchy of [human] needs,” our relation to the earth necessarily comes first, since it constitutes the basis of survival, and of the development of life itself.40

    Endnotes

    1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 754.
    2. Jeremy Lent, “What Does China’s ‘Ecological Civilization’ Mean for Humanity’s Future?”, Ecowatch, February 9, 2018, ecowatch.com; Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 54–56; Xi Jinping, “Full Text of Xi Jinping’s Report at the 19th CPC National Congress,” China Daily, November 4, 2017. An error in Lent’s quotes from Xi, where “human and nature” is used instead of “humanity and nature,” is corrected here.
    3. See Pat Kane, “A New History of Cultural Big Ideas Looks to the East for Solace,” New Scientist, May 24, 2017; Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Lent’s attempt to trace the divergence between humanity and nature, which characterizes the ecological contradiction of the West back to Plato, is not entirely convincing, since Plato himself commented on ecological destruction in his time in his Critias, while other ancient thinkers, particularly materialists, such as Epicurus and his Roman follower Lucretius, evidenced deep ecological values. On Epicurus, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 2–6, 33–39.
    4. Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct (New York: Prometheus, 2017), 264–65. See also Ira E. Kasoff, The Thought of Chang Tsai (1020–1077) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Similar views were, of course, to be found in Daoism. The ecological character of early Chinese thought was strongly emphasized by the great Marxist scientist, ecological thinker, and leading Sinologist Joseph Needham. See John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 498–501. The relation of Daoism to ecology is emphasized in P. J. Laska, The Original Wisdom of Dao De Jing: A New Translation and Commentary (Green Valley, AZ: ECCS, 2012).
    5. In seeking to demonstrate that Marx was anti-ecological and advanced a Promethean view of the conquest of nature equivalent to that of bourgeois thought, Lent takes Marx’s famous statement in Capital, volume 3 on the rational regulation of the metabolism between human beings and nature on behalf of the chain of human generations in accord with natural-material conditions and turns it into a flat statement meant to suggest the exact opposite. Thus, using the original English translation, removing the phrase “associated producers” (representing the subject of Marx statement) and replacing it with “socialism,” he writes, “Karl Marx wrote that the goal of socialism was ‘rationally regulating [humanity’s] material interchange with nature and bringing it under the common control’”—as if this implied a straightforward degradation of nature. In contrast, Marx’s statement, quoting from the Penguin translation: reads as follows: “Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control, instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.” The emphasis here is clearly one of sustainable human development. Lent, The Patterning Instinct, 280; Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 820; Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 959.
    6. Lent, “What Does China’s ‘Ecological Civilization’ Mean for Humanity’s Future?”; Kane, “A New History of Cultural Big Ideas Looks to the East for Solace.”
    7. The analysis in this section draws on John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 433–56.
    8. John Bellamy Foster, “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,” Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 1–20.
    9. , A.D. Ursul, Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983).
    10. Following the 1983 publication of Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilization, it appears that vice president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, P. N. Fedoseev (also Fedoseyev), who had written the introductory essay on ecology and the problem of civilization in the above-edited book, incorporated a treatment of “Ecological Civilization” into the second edition of his Scientific Communism. See P. N. Fedoseev (Fedoseyev), Scientific Communism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986); Jiahua Pan, China’s Environmental Governing and Ecological Civilization (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2014), 35; Arran Gare, “Barbarity, Civilization and Decadence: Meeting the Challenge of Creating an Ecological Civilization,” Chromatikon 5 (2015): 167–89; Qingzhi Huan, “Socialist Eco-Civilization and Social-Ecological Transformation,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 2 (2016): 2.
    11. N. Fedoseev (Fedoseyev), “The Social Significance of the Ecological Problem,” in Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, ed. Ursul, 31; Wang Hui, “Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory: Commemorating Lenin’s 150th Birthday,” Reading the China Dream (blog), April 21, 2020.
    12. Ivan T. Frolov, “The Marxist-Leninist Conception of the Ecological Problem,” in Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, ed. Ursul, 35–42.
    13. A. Los, “On the Road to an Ecological Culture,” in Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, ed. Ursul, 339.
    14. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 46, 411, italics in the original; Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 141–77.
    15. Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 73–74.
    16. Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 6, 20, 25, 417–24.
    17. Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 54.
    18. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 460–63; see also Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 150.
    19. Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 20.
    20. . Arthur Hanson, Ecological Civilization in the People’s Republic of China: Values, Action, and Future Needs (Manila: Asian Development Bank, 2019), 3–9. See also John B. Cobb in conversation with Andre Vltchek, China and Ecological Civilization (Jakarta: Badak Merah Semesta, 2019); Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” Monthly Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34–62.
    21. Chen Xueming, The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital (Boston: Brill, 2017), 573.
    22. Hanson, Ecological Civilization in the People’s Republic of China, 6.
    23. See Stephen S. Roach, “China’s Growth Sacrifice,” Project Syndicate, August 23, 2022.
    24. See Joe Scholten, “How China Strengthened Food Security and Fought Poverty with State-Funded Cooperatives,” Multipolarista, May 31, 2022.
    25. Xiaoying You, “What Does China’s Coal Push Mean for its Climate Goals?” Carbon Brief, March 29, 2022.
    26. Hanson, Ecological Civilization in the People’s Republic of China, 6.
    27. Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi, “Surviving through Community Building in Catastrophic Times,” Monthly Review 74, no. 3 (July–August 2022): 54–69.
    28. Coronavirus Updates by Country, Worldometer, as of June 22, 2022; Wang Hui, “Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory.”
    29. James Hansen et al., “Young People’s Burden: Requirements of Negative CO2 Emissions,” Earth System Dynamics 8 (2017): 578; James Hansen, “China and the Barbarians, Part 1,” Columbia University, November 24, 2010; “Each Country’s Share of CO2 Emissions,” Union of Concerned Scientists, August 12, 2020.
    30.  Barbara Finamore, Will China Save the Planet? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 119.
    31. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 742; Xi, The Governance of China, vol. 3, 55.
    32. Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (London: Verso 2021), 5–10.
    33. For how far the climate legislation in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act passed by the U.S. Congress with the backing of the Joe Biden administration falls short of a Green New Deal, see Jim Walsh and Peter Hart, “Will the Manchin Climate Bill Reduce Climate Pollution,” Food and Water Watch, August 10, 2022; Anthony Rogers-Wright, “Why the Inflation Reduction Act is Less a ‘Climate Bill’ and More a Poison Pill for Black and Indigenous Communities and Movements,” Black Agenda Report, August 24, 2022.
    34. John Bellamy Foster, “The Defense of Nature: Resisting the Financialization of the Earth,” Monthly Review 73, no. 11 (April 2022): 1–22.
    35. As a cultural determinist, based on what he calls “cognitive history” or the development of worldviews underpinning cultures, Lent seeks to weave together what he sees as non-essentialist cultural worldviews with postmodernism, and uses this to explain why some cultures are more ecologically destructive than others. What this obviates is any materialist worldview, leaving these architectonic worldviews hanging in air without foundations. See Jeremy Lent, “Beyond Modernist and Postmodernist History,” IAI News, January 28, 2022.
    36. Teodor Shanin, “Marxism and the Vernacular Revolutionary Traditions,” in Late Marx and the Russian Road, ed. Teodor Shanin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 243–79.
    37. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949; John Bellamy Foster, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” Monthly Review 65, no. 7 (December 2013): 1–19.
    38. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 911, 949.
    39. The above concepts from Marx’s ecology and Marxian ecology in general are all central to the analysis in John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene.
    40. Karl Marx, Texts on Method (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 195.
  • The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene

    The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review, vol. 73, no. 4 (September 2021), pp. 1-16.

    The geologic time scale, dividing the 4.6 billion years of Earth history into nested eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages, is one of the great scientific achievements of the last two centuries. Each division is directed at environmental change on an Earth System scale based on stratigraphic evidence, such as rocks or ice cores. At present, the earth is officially situated in the Phanerozoic Eon, Cenozoic Era, Quaternary Period, Holocene Epoch (beginning 11,700 years ago), and Meghalayan Age (the last of the Holocene ages beginning 4,200 years ago). The current argument that the planet has entered into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, is based on the recognition that Earth System change as represented in the stratigraphic record is now primarily due to anthropogenic forces. This understanding has now been widely accepted in science, but nevertheless has not yet been formally adopted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which would mean its official adoption throughout science.

    Under the assumption that the Anthropocene will soon be officially designated as the earth’s current epoch, there remains the question of the geological age with which the Anthropocene begins, following the last Holocene age, the Meghalayan. Adopting the standard nomenclature for the naming of geological ages, we propose, in our role as professional environmental sociologists, the term Capitalinian as the most appropriate name for the new geological age, based on the stratigraphic record, and conforming to the historical period that environmental historians see as commencing around 1950, in the wake of the Second World War, the rise of multinational corporations, and the unleashing of the process of decolonization and global development.1

    In the Anthropocene Epoch, it is clear that any designation of ages, while necessarily finding traces in the stratigraphic record, has to be seen, in part, in terms of human socioeconomic organization, not purely geologically. The most widely accepted social-scientific designation for the predominant world economic system over the last few centuries is capitalism. The capitalist system has passed through various stages or phases, the most recent of which, arising after the Second World War under U.S. hegemony, is often characterized as global monopoly capitalism.2 Beginning with the first nuclear detonation in 1945, humanity emerged as a force capable of massively affecting the entire Earth System on a geological scale of millions (or perhaps tens of millions) of years. The 1950s are known for having ushered in “the synthetic age,” not only because of the advent of the nuclear age itself, but also due to the massive proliferation of plastics and other petrochemicals associated with the global growth and consolidation of monopoly capitalism.3

    The designation of the first geological age of the Anthropocene as the Capitalinian is, we believe, crucial because it also raises the question of a possible second geological age of the Anthropocene Epoch. The Anthropocene stands for a period in which humanity, at a specific point in its history, namely the rise of advanced industrial capitalism following the Second World War, became the principal geological force affecting Earth System change (which is not to deny the importance of numerous other geological forces, which are not all affected by human action, such as plate tectonics, volcanism, erosion, and weathering of rocks, in shaping the Earth System’s future). If capitalism in the coming century were to create such a deep anthropogenic rift in the Earth System through the crossing of planetary boundaries that it led to the collapse of industrial civilization and a vast die-down of human species ensued—a distinct possibility under business as usual according to today’s science—then the Anthropocene Epoch and no doubt the entire Quaternary Period would come to an end, leading to a new epoch or period in geological history, with a drastically diminished human role.4 Barring such an end-Anthropocene and even end-Quaternary extinction event, the socioeconomic conditions defining the Capitalinian will have to give rise to a radically transformed set of socioeconomic relations, and indeed a new mode of sustainable human production, based on a more communal relation of human beings with each other and the earth.

    Such an environmental climacteric would mean pulling back from the current crossing of planetary boundaries, rooted in capital’s creative destruction of conditions of life on the planet. This reversal of direction, reflecting the necessity of maintaining the earth as a safe home for humanity and for innumerable other species that live on it, is impossible under a system geared to the exponential accumulation of capital. Such a climatic shift would require simply for human survival the creation of a radically new material-environmental relation with Earth. We propose that this necessary (but not inevitable) future geological age to succeed the Capitalinian by means of ecological and social revolution be named the Communian, derived from communal, community, commons.

    The Anthropocene versus Capitalocene Controversy

    The word Anthropocene first appeared in the English language in 1973 in an article by Soviet geologist E. V. Shantser on “The Anthropogenic System (Period)” in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Here, Shantser referred to the Russian geologist A. P. Pavlov’s introduction in the 1920s of the notion of the “‘Anthropogenic system (period),’ or ‘Anthropocene.’”5 During the first half of the twentieth century, Soviet science played a leading role in numerous fields, including climatology, geology, and ecology, forcing scientific circles in the West to pay close attention to its findings. As a result, the Shantser article would have been fairly well known to specialists, having appeared in such a prominent source.6

    Pavlov’s coining of Anthropocene was closely connected to Soviet geochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s 1926 book Biosphere, which provided an early proto-Earth System outlook, revolutionizing how the relationship between humans and the planet was understood.7 Pavlov used the concept of the Anthropocene (or Anthropogene) to refer to a new geological period in which humanity was emerging as the main driver of planetary ecological change. In this way, Pavlov and subsequent Soviet geologists provided an alternative geochronology, one that substituted the Anthropocene (Anthropogenic) Period for the entire Quaternary. Most importantly, Pavlov and Vernadsky strongly emphasized that anthropogenic factors had come to dominate the biosphere in the late Holocene. As Vernadsky observed in 1945, “Proceeding from the notion of the geological role of man, the geologist A. P. Pavlov [1854–1929] in the last years of his life used to speak of the anthropogenic era, in which we now live.… He rightfully emphasized that man, under our very eyes, is becoming a mighty and ever-growing geological force.… In the 20th Century, man for the first time in the history of the Earth knew and embraced the whole biosphere, completed the geological map of the planet Earth, and colonized its whole surface. Mankind became a single totality in the life of the earth.”8

    The current usage of Anthropocene, however, derives from atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen’s recoining of the term in February 2000, during a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he declared, “We’re not in the Holocene any more. We’re in the…Anthropocene!”9 Crutzen’s use of the term Anthropocene was not based on stratigraphic research but on a direct understanding of the changing Earth System rooted principally in perceptions of anthropogenic climate change and the anthropogenic thinning of the ozone layer (research for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995). Crutzen’s designation of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch thus reflected, from the beginning, a sense of crisis and transformation in the human relation to the earth.10 As Crutzen, geologist Will Steffen, and environmental historian John McNeill declared a few years later: “The term Anthropocene…suggests that the Earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state.”11Similar views on the effect of anthropogenic changes on the Earth System were presented by one of us in the early 1990s: “In the period after 1945 the world entered a new stage of planetary crisis in which human activities began to affect in entirely new ways the basic conditions of life on earth.… As the world economy continued to grow, the scale of human economic processes began to rival the ecological cycles of the planet, opening up as never before the possibility of planetary-wide ecological disaster. Today, few doubt that the [capitalist] system has crossed critical thresholds of sustainability.”12

    Perhaps the best way of understanding the changes brought about by the Anthropocene Epoch, as depicted by science, is in terms of an “anthropogenic rift” in the history of the planet, such that the socioeconomic effects of human production—today largely in the form of capitalism—have created a series of rifts in the biogeochemical processes of the Earth System, crossing critical ecological thresholds and planetary boundaries, with the result that all of the earth’s existing ecosystems and industrial civilization itself are now imperiled.13 By pointing to the Anthropocene Epoch, natural scientists have underscored a new climacteric in Earth history and a planetary crisis that needs to be addressed to preserve the earth as a safe home for humanity.

    It should be mentioned that the widespread notion that the Anthropocene Epoch stands for “the age of man,” frequently presented in the popular literature, is entirely opposed to the actual scientific analysis of the new geological epoch. Logically, to refer to anthropogenic causes of Earth System change does not thereby ignore social structures and inequality, nor does it imply that humanity has somehow triumphed over the earth. Rather, the Anthropocene Epoch, as conceptualized within science, not only incorporates social inequality as a crucial part of the problem, but also views the Anthropocene as standing, at present, for a planetary ecological crisis arising from the forces of production at a distinct phase of human historical development.14

    Yet, despite the crucial importance of the designation of the Anthropocene Epoch in promoting an understanding not only of the current phase of the Earth System but also of the present ecological emergency, the notion of the Anthropocene has come under heavy attack within the social sciences and humanities. Many of those outside the natural sciences are not invested in or informed about the natural-scientific aspects of Earth System change. They therefore react to the designation of the Anthropocene within geochronology in purely cultural and literary terms divorced from the major scientific issues, reflecting the famous problem of the “two cultures,” dividing the humanities (and frequently the social sciences) off from natural science.15 In this view, the prefix anthro is often interpreted as simply having a human-biological dimension while lacking a socioeconomic and cultural one. As one posthumanist critic has charged, not only the notion of the Anthropocene, but even “the phrase anthropogenic climate change is a special brand of blaming the victims of exploitation, violence, and poverty.”16

    Today, the most prominent alternative name offered for the Anthropocene is that of the Capitalocene, conceived as a substitute designation for the geochronological epoch of the Earth System following the Holocene. Leading environmental historian and historical-materialist ecological theorist Andreas Malm argues that the Anthropocene, as the name of a new epoch in the geologic time scale, is an “indefensible abstraction” since it does not directly address the social reality of fossil capital. Thus, he proposes substituting the Capitalocene for the Anthropocene, shifting the discussion from a geology of humankind to a geology of capital accumulation.17 In practical as well as scientific terms, however, this runs into several problems. The term Anthropocene is already deeply embedded in natural science, and it represents the recognition of a fundamental change in human and geological history that is critical to understanding our period of planetary ecological crisis.

    More importantly, although it is true that the Anthropocene was generated by capitalism at a certain phase of its development, the substitution of the name Capitalocene for the Anthropocene would abandon an essential critical view embodied in the latter. The notion of the Anthropocene as demarcated in natural science stands for an irreversible change in humanity’s relation to the earth. There can be no conceivable industrial civilization on Earth from this time forward where humanity, if it is to continue to exist at all, is no longer the primary geological force conditioning the Earth System. This is the critical meaning of the Anthropocene. To substitute the term Capitalocene for Anthropocene would be to obliterate this fundamental scientific understanding. That is, even if capitalism is surmounted, through a “Great Climacteric,” representing the transition to a more sustainable world order, this fundamental boundary will remain.18 Humanity will continue to operate on a level in which the scale of human production rivals the biogeochemical cycles of the planet, and hence the choice is between unsustainable human development and sustainable human development. There is no going back (except through a civilizational crash and a massive die-down) to a time in which human history had little or no effect on the Earth System.

    If a truly mass extinction and planetary civilizational collapse were to occur, this would be an end-Anthropocene or even end-Quaternary extinction event, not a continuation of the Anthropocene. As the great British zoologist E. Ray Lankester (Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley’s protégé and Karl Marx’s close friend) remarked in 1911 in The Kingdom of Man, given its massive and growing disruption of the ecological conditions of human existence, humanity’s “only hope is to control…the sources of these dangers and disasters.”19

    The enormous historical, geological, and environmental challenges now facing humanity demand, we believe, a shifting of the terrain of analysis to the question of ages rather than epochs in the geologic time scale. If the world entered the Anthropocene Epoch around 1950, we can also say that the Capitalinian Age began at the same time. The Capitalinian in this conception is not coterminous with historical capitalism, given that capitalism had its origins as a world system in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rather, the Capitalinian Age was a product of global monopoly capitalism in the wake of the Second World War. In order to understand the historical and environmental significance of the emergence of the Capitalinian and to put it in the context of the geologic time scale, it is first necessary to address the question of the changeover from one geological age to another, stretching from the late Holocene Epoch to the early Anthropocene Epoch.

    From the Meghalayan to the Capitalinian

    The Holocene Epoch (Holocene means entirely recent) was first proposed as a division of geologic time by the French paleontologist Paul Gervais in 1867 and formally adopted by the International Geographic Congress in 1885. It dates back to the end of the last ice age and thus refers to the warmer, relatively mild Earth-environmental conditions extending from roughly 11,700 years ago to the present, covering the time during which glaciers receded and human civilizations arose.20 It was not until around a century and a half after it was first proposed that the Holocene Epoch was formally divided into geological ages. This occurred with the modification of the geologic time scale by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in June 2018, dividing the Holocene into three ages: (1) the Greenlandian, beginning 11,700 years ago, with the end of the Pleistocene Epoch and the beginning of the Holocene; (2) The Northgrippian, beginning 8,300 years ago; and (3) the Meghalayan, extending from 4,200 years ago to the present.

    Dividing the Holocene into ages represented a more difficult problem than in other epochs of the Quaternary, given the relatively calm environmental-climatic character of the Holocene.21The first division of the Holocene, the Greenlandian, posed no problems because it corresponded to the criteria giving rise to the Holocene Epoch itself. The Northgrippian came to be designated in terms of an outburst of freshwater from naturally dammed glacial lakes that poured into the North Atlantic, altering the conveyor belt of ocean currents, leading to global cooling. The demarcation of the third division was not as straightforward. There were archaeological reports beginning in the 1970s of a megadrought 4,200 years ago (circa 2200 BCE) lasting several centuries, which was thought to have led to the demise of some early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere.

    In 2012, paleoclimatologists discovered a stalagmite in Mawmluh cave in the Meghalaya state in northeast India that pointed to a centuries-long drought. This was then taken as the geological exemplar or “golden spike” for the Meghalayan Age. In their original July 15, 2018, press release on the Meghalayan, entitled “Collapse of Civilizations Worldwide Defines Youngest Unit of the Geologic Time Scale,” the International Commission on Stratigraphy went so far as to declare that a civilizational collapse had occurred around 2200 BCE: “Agricultural-based societies that developed in several regions after the end of the last Ice Age were impacted severely by the 200-year climatic event that resulted in the collapse of civilizations and human migrations in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yangtze River Valley. Evidence of the 4.2 kiloyear climatic event has been found on all seven continents.”22

    This resulted in sharp rebuttals by archaeologists, who argued that the evidence for the sudden collapse of civilizations due to climate change around 2200 BCE does not in actuality exist. Although civilizations did decline, it was most likely over longer periods of time, and there were reasons to believe that an array of social factors played a more significant role than the megadrought.23 As archaeologist Guy D. Middleton wrote in Science magazine: “Current evidence…casts doubt on the utility of 2200 BCE as a meaningful beginning to a new age in human terms, whether there was a megadrought or not.… Climate change never inevitably results in societal collapse, though it can pose serious challenges, as it does today. From an archaeological perspective, the new Late Holocene Meghalayan Age seems to have started with a whimper rather than a bang.”24

    The Meghalayan controversy, whatever the final outcome, highlights a number of essential facts. First, as early as 4,200 years ago, geologic time became intertwined in complex ways with historical time. In the case of the Meghalayan, the geological demarcation drew much of its salience from a seeming correspondence to the historical-archaeological record. Second, although the International Stratigraphic Committee moved away from its original reference to the collapse of civilizations and sought instead to define the Meghalayan simply in terms of geologic-stratigraphic criteria, the question of social conditions associated with a geological age can no longer be avoided. Third, during the Holocene, from the earliest civilizations to the present, the issues of environmental change and civilizational collapse recur, on an evermore expanding global scale.

    If the Meghalayan Age did in fact come into being in the context of a megadrought, the end-event signaling the passing of the Meghalayan (and the Holocene) happened around 1950, leading to the start of what the Anthropocene Working Group posits as the Anthropocene Epoch and what we are proposing as the accompanying Capitalinian Age.25 This transition in geologic time, which is deeply intertwined with distinct sociohistorical relations, is associated with the Great Acceleration of global monopoly capitalism in the 1950s, resulting in an age of planetary ecological crisis. This has involved a move away from an environmentally “highly stable epoch” to one “in which a number of key planetary boundary conditions, notably associated with the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, are clearly outside the range of natural variability observed in the Holocene.”26 Here, megadroughts, megastorms, rising sea levels, out-of-control wildfires, deforestation, species extinction, and other planetary threats are emerging in fast order—not simply as external forces, but as the product of capitalism’s anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.

    The Capitalinian Age

    The “golden spike” in geologic time determining the end of the Holocene Epoch and the Meghalayan Age—as well as the corresponding emergence of the Anthropocene Epoch and what we are proposing as the Capitalinian Age—has not yet been determined, although a number of candidates are being pursued by the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. The two most prominent of these are radionuclides, the result of nuclear testing, and plastics, the creation of the petrochemical industry—both of which are products of the synthetic age and represent the emergence of a qualitative transformation in the human relation to the earth.27 While the “Anthropocene strata may be commonly thin,” they “reflect a major Earth System perturbation” in the mid–twentieth century, “are laterally extensive, and can include rich stratigraphic detail,” in which distinct “signatures” of a new epoch and age are evident.28

    Anthropogenically sourced radionuclides stem primarily from the fallout from numerous above-ground nuclear tests (and two atomic bombings in war) commencing with the U.S. Trinity detonation at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico.29 The first thermonuclear detonation was the Ivy Mike test on Enewetak Atoll on November 1, 1952. This was followed by the disastrous Castle Bravo test at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, the explosion of which was two and a half times what had been projected, raining down fallout on sailors in a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, and on residents of the Marshall Islands, who ended up with radiation sickness. The United States conducted over two hundred atmospheric and underwater tests (and others were carried out in the 1950s and ’60s by the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, France, and China), introducing radioactive fallout in the form of Iodine-131, Caesium-137, Carbon-14, and Strontium-90. This nuclear fallout, especially the gaseous and particulate forms, which entered the stratosphere, was dispersed throughout the biosphere, generating widespread global environmental concern, connecting the entire world’s population, to some extent, in a common environmental fate.30

    Radionuclides primarily from nuclear weapons tests are thus the most obvious basis for demarcating the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch and the Capitalinian Age. They have left a permanent record throughout the planet in sediments, soil, and glacial ice, serving as “robust independent stratigraphic markers” that will be detectable for millennia.31 The effects of nuclear weapons, beginning with the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War, stand for a qualitative change in the human relation to the earth, such that it is now possible to destroy life on such a scale that it would take perhaps as much as tens of millions years for it to recover.32 Indeed, the theory of nuclear winter developed by climatologists suggests that a massive global thermonuclear exchange, generating megafires in a hundred or more major cities, could lead to planetary climate change, more abruptly and in the opposite direction from global warming, through the injection of soot into the stratosphere, causing global or at least hemispheric temperatures to drop several degrees (or even “several tens of degrees”) Celsius in a matter of a month.33

    The advent of nuclear weapons technology thus stands for the enormous change in the human relation to the earth around the 1950s, marking the Anthropocene, leaving a distinct signature in the stratigraphic record; it also serves as a moment when specific radioactive elements were introduced into the body composition of all life.34 Nuclear weapons technology is of course not entirely separable from nuclear energy use, which also presents dangers of global radioactive contamination as in the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

    Plastics, which emerged as a major element of the economy in the 1950s, were the result of developments in organic chemistry, associated with the Scientific and Technical Revolution and the Second World War. They are a product of the petrochemical industry, thus standing for the further development of fossil capital, which dates back to the Industrial Revolution.35 As of 2017, over “8,300 million metric tons…of virgin plastics have been produced,” exceeding that of almost all other human-made materials.36 Plastic waste is so pervasive that it is found dispersed throughout the entire world. In fact, “molten plastics…have fused basalt clasts and coral fragments…to form an assortment of novel beach lithologies,” and deep ocean mud deposits include microplastics.37 The majority of plastic, made from hydrocarbon-derived monomers, is not biodegradable, resulting in an “uncontrolled experiment on a global scale, in which billions of metric tons of material will accumulate across all major terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on the planet.”38 Due to these conditions, plastic is seen as another potential stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene.39

    The production of plastics and petrochemicals in general, like nuclear weapons testing, represents a qualitative shift in the human relationship with the earth. It has resulted in the spread of a host of mutagenic, carcinogenic, and teratogenic (birth-defect causing) chemicals, particularly harmful to life because they are not the product of evolutionary development over millions of years. Like radionuclides, many of these harmful chemicals are characterized by bioaccumulation (concentration in individual organisms) and biomagnification (concentration at higher levels in the food chain/food web) representing increasingly pervasive threats to life. Microplastics actively absorb carcinogenic persistent organic pollutants within the larger environment, making them more potent and toxic.40 Plastics are durable and resistant to degradation, properties that “make these materials difficult or impossible for nature to assimilate.”41 The omnipresent character of plastics in the Capitalinian is evident in the massive plastic gyres in the ocean and by the existence of microplastic particles in nearly all organic life.

    Ecological scientists, such as Barry Commoner, Rachel Carson, Howard Odum, and others, singled out both radionuclides and plastics/petrochemicals/pesticides as embodying the synthetic age that emerged in the 1950s. They provided detailed accounts of the transformation in the relationship between humans and the earth, which today are reflected in contemporary charts on the Great Acceleration, presenting such Earth System trends as the dramatic increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, ocean acidification, marine fish capture, land use change, and loss of biodiversity. The epicenter for such global environmental disruption has been the United States as the hegemonic power of the capitalist world economy, dominating and characterizing this entire period. In our analysis, the economic and social system of the United States thus epitomizes the Capitalinian, as no other nation has played a bigger historical role in the promotion of the “poverty of power” represented by fossil capital.42

    At the start of what we are calling the Capitalinian, global monopoly capital, rooted within the United States, entered a period of massive expansion, fueled by the rebuilding of Europe and Japan, the petrochemical revolution, the growth of the automobile complex, suburbanization, the creation of new household commodities, militarization and military technologies, the sales effort, and the growth of international trade. With the endless quest for profit spurring the accumulation of capital, production and the material throughputs to support the economic system’s operations have greatly expanded, placing more demands on ecosystems and generating more pollution.43

    Since plastics and other synthetic materials associated with the expansion of the petrochemical industry were readily incorporated into industrial operations, agricultural production, and everyday commodities, new ecological problems inevitably emerged. As Commoner explained in The Closing Circle, “the artificial introduction of an organic compound that does not occur in nature, but is man-made and is nevertheless active in a living system, is very likely to be harmful.”44 Such materials do not readily decompose or break down in a meaningful human-historical time frame and thus end up accumulating, presenting an increasing threat to ecosystems and living beings. Pesticides and plastics that have these characteristics are therefore a violation of the informal laws of ecology.

    Given the operations of monopoly capitalism and its technological apparatus, the largely uncontrolled development of synthetic materials results in a particularly dangerous situation, often referred to as “the risk society.”45 In the words of Peter Haff, a professor of environmental engineering at Duke University, a capitalist technostructure “has emerged possessing no global mechanism of metabolic regulation. Regulation of metabolism introduces the possibility of a new timescale into system dynamics—a lifetime—the time over which the system exists in a stable metabolic state. But without an intrinsic lifetime, i.e., lacking enforced setpoint values for energy use,” this system “acts only in the moment, without regard to the more distant future, necessarily biased towards increasing consumption of energy and materials,” racing ahead “without much concern for its own longevity,” much less the continuance of what is external to it.46

    The uncontrollable, alienated social metabolism of global monopoly capitalism, coinciding with the introduction of radionuclides from nuclear testing, proliferation of plastics and petrochemicals, and carbon emissions from fossil capital—along with innumerable other ecological problems resulting from the crossing of critical thresholds—is manifested in the Capitalinian Age, associated with the present planetary crisis. Capitalism’s relentless drive to accumulate capital is its defining characteristic, ensuring anthropogenic rifts and ecological destruction as it systematically undermines the overall conditions of life.

    Today the moment of truth looms large. We currently reside within a “Great Climacteric”—first identified in the 1980s by geographers Ian Burton and Robert Kates—a long period of crisis and transition in which human society will either generate a stable relation to the Earth System or will experience a civilizational collapse, as part of a great die-down of life on earth, or sixth extinction.47

    The future of civilization, viewed in the widest sense, demands that humanity collectively engage in an ecological and social revolution, radically transforming productive relations, in order to forge a path toward sustainable human development. This entails regulating the social metabolism between humanity and the earth, ensuring that it operates within the planetary boundaries or the universal metabolism of nature. Viewed in these terms, there is an objective historical necessity for what we are calling the prospective second geological age of the Anthropocene: the Communian.

    The Dawn of Another Age: The Communian

    In a remarkable intellectual development in the closing decade of the Soviet Union, leading Soviet geologists, climatologists, geographers, philosophers, cultural theorists, and others came together to describe the global ecological crisis as a civilizational crisis requiring a whole new ecological civilization, rooted in historical-materialist principles.48 This viewpoint was immediately taken up by Chinese environmentalists and has been further developed and applied in China today.49 If historic humanity is to survive, today’s capitalist civilization devoted to the single-minded pursuit of profits as its own end, resulting in an anthropogenic rift in the Earth system, must necessarily give way to an ecological civilization rooted in communal use values. This is the real meaning of today’s widely referred to planetary “existential crisis.”50

    In this Great Climacteric, it is not only essential to bring to an end the destructive trends that are ruining the earth as a safe home for humanity, but also, beyond that, it is vital to engineer an actual “reversal” of these trends.51 For example, carbon concentration in the atmosphere is nearing 420 parts per million (ppm), peaking in May 2021 at 419 ppm, and is headed rapidly toward 450 ppm, which would break the planetary carbon budget. Science tells us that it will be necessary, if global climate catastrophe is to be avoided, to return to 350 ppm and stabilize the atmospheric carbon dioxide at that level.52 This in itself can be seen as standing for the necessity of a new ecological civilization and the anthropogenic generation of a new Communian Age within the Anthropocene. This ecorevolutionary transition obviously cannot occur through the unbridled pursuit of acquisitive ends, based on the naive belief that this will automatically lead to the greater good—sometimes called “Adam’s Fallacy,” after the classical economist Adam Smith.53 Rather, the necessary reversal of existing trends and the stabilization of the human relation to the earth in accord with a path of sustainable human development can only occur through social, economic, and ecological planning, grounded in a new system of social metabolic reproduction.54

    To create such an ecological civilization in the contemporary world would require a radical (in the sense of root) impetus emanating from the bottom of society—outside the realm of the vested interests.55 This overturning of the dominant social relations of production requires a long revolution emanating from the mass movement of humanity. Today’s realities are therefore giving rise to a nascent environmental proletariat, defined by its struggle against oppressive environmental as well as economic conditions, and leading to a revolutionary path of sustainable human development. Broad environmental-proletarian movements in this sense are already evident in our time—from the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, the international peasants’ movement La Vía Campesina, the Bolivarian communes in Venezuela, and the farmers’ movement in India, to the struggles for a People’s Green New Deal, environmental justice, and a just transition in the developed countries, to the Red Deal of the North American First Nations.56

    The advent of the Communian, or the geological age of the Anthropocene to succeed the Capitalinian, barring an end-Anthropocene extinction event, necessitates an ecological, social, and cultural revolution; one aimed at the creation of collective relations within humanity as a whole as a basis for a wider community with the earth. It thus requires a society geared to both substantive equality and ecological sustainability. The conditions for this new relation to the earth were eloquently expressed by Marx, writing in the nineteenth century, in what is perhaps the most radical conception of sustainability ever developed: “From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation [socialism], the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men [slavery]. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”57 In the view of the ancient Greek materialist Epicurus, “the world is my friend.”58

    The revolutionary reconstitution of the human relation to the earth envisioned here is not to be dismissed as a mere utopian conception, but rather is one of historical struggle arising out of objective (and subjective) necessity related to human survival. In the poetic words of Phil Ochs, the great radical protest singer and songwriter, in his song “Another Age”:

    The soldiers have their sorrow

    The wretched have their rage

    Pray for the aged

    It’s the dawn of another age.59

    In the twenty-first century, it will be essential for the great mass of humanity, the “wretched of the earth,” to reaffirm, at a higher level, its communal relations with the earth: the dawn of another age.60

    Notes

    1. John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: The Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 38–47; Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
    2. A classic work in this regard is Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
    3. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Bantam, 1972); John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 112–18; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994); Murray Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974); Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 100–21; Robert Rudd, Pesticides and the Living Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1964).
    4. Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 24 (2009): 472–75; Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries,” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 736–46; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010): 13–19; Giovanni Strona and Corey J. A. Bradshaw, “Co-extinctions Annihilate Planetary Life During Extreme Environmental Change,” Scientific Reports 8, no. 16274 (2018); James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), ix, 224–26.
    5. V. Shantser, “Anthropogenic System (Period),” in Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 140; Alec Brookes and Elena Fratto, “Toward a Russian Literature of the Anthropocene,” Russian Literature 114–115 (2020): 8. See also Anonymous (likely written by E. V. Shantser), “Anthropogenic Factors of the Environment,” in Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 2, 139.
    6. John Bellamy Foster, “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,” Monthly Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 1–20.
    7. Vladimir I. Vernadsky, The Biosphere (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998).
    8. Vladimir I. Vernadsky, “Some Words About the Noösphere,” in 150 Years of Vernadsky, vol. 2, The Noösphere, ed. John Ross (Washington DC: 21st Century Science Associates, 2014), 82. (Vernadsky clearly meant period here, in geochronology, rather than era.) See also Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, Colin P. Summerhayes, Martin J. Head, and Reinhold Leinfelder, “A General Introduction to the Anthropocene,” in The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit, ed. Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, and Colin P. Summerhayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 6.
    9. Will Steffen, “Commentary,” in The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, ed. Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 486; Paul J. Crutzen, “The Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002): 23; Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, 27–28. Marine biologist Eugene Stoermer used the word Anthropocene a number of times in the 1980s to refer to the growing human impact on the earth in published articles. But unlike Pavlov in the early twentieth century (who impacted Vernadsky), as well as Crutzen in the early twenty-first century, who launched the current investigations into the Anthropocene, Stoermer’s use of the term at the time had no discernible impact on geological and Earth System discussions. See Andrew C. Revkin, “Confronting the Anthropocene,” New York Times, May 11, 2011; Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, 27.
    10. Will Steffen et al., “Stratigraphic and Earth System Approaches to Defining the Anthropocene,” Earth’s Future 4 (2016): 324–45.
    11. Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614; Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, 28–29.
    12. Foster, The Vulnerable Planet, 108.
    13. Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated,” Anthropocene Review (2015): 6–7. The notion of an anthropogenic rift is closely related to the conception of a carbon rift, developed within environmental sociology, expanding on Karl Marx’s early conception of a metabolic rift in the human relation to the environment through production. See Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 121–50.
    14. Ian Angus, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 70–71. As Angus explains, “Anthropocene names a planetary epoch that would not have begun in the absence of human activity, not one caused by every person on Earth.”
    15. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
    16. Jason W. Moore, “Who Is Responsible for the Climate Crisis?,” Maize, November 4, 2019. For a critique of such views, see Angus, A Redder Shade of Green, 67–85.
    17. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming(London: Verso, 2016), 391. Malm himself coined the term Capitalocene in 2009. See Jason W. Moore, “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?,” introduction to Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM, 2016), 5.
    18. Ian Burton and Robert W. Kates, “The Great Climacteric, 1798–2048: The Transition to a Just and Sustainable Human Environment,” in Geography, Resources and Environment, vol. 2, ed. Robert W. Kates and Ian Burton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 393; John Bellamy Foster, “The Great Capitalist Climacteric,” Monthly Review 67, no. 6 (November 2015): 1–18.
    19. Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 31–32.
    20. Mike Walker et al., “Formal Ratification of the Subdivision of the Holocene Series/Epoch (Quaternary System/Period): Two New Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSPS) and Three New Stages/Subseries,” Episodes 41, no. 4 (2018): 213.
    21. Walker et al., “Formal Ratification,” 214.
    22. Collapse of Civilizations Worldwide Defines Youngest Unit of the Geologic Time Scale,” International Commission on Stratigraphy, July 15, 2018.
    23. Paul Voosen, “Massive Drought or Myth? Scientists Spar Over an Ancient Climate Event Behind Our New Geological Age,” Science, August 8, 2018.
    24. Guy D. Middleton, “Bang or Whimper?: The Evidence for Collapse of Human Civilizations at the Start of the Recently Defined Meghalayan Age Is Equivocal,” Science 361, no. 6408 (2018): 1204–5.
    25. Michael Walker, who chaired the geological working group that introduced the division of the Holocene into ages, insists that the designation of the Meghalayan Age in no way compromises the notion of an Anthropocene Epoch beginning in 1950. It would simply lop off seventy years from the end of the Meghalayan. “You’re Living in a New Geologic Age, the Meghalayan,” CBC News, July 23, 2018.
    26. Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Making the Case for a Formal Anthropocene Epoch,” Newsletters on Stratigraphy 50, no. 2 (2017): 210.
    27. Colin N. Waters et al., “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene,” Science 351, no. 6269 (2016): 137–47; Colin N. Waters, Irka Hajdas, Catherine Jeandel, and Jan Zalasiewicz, “Artificial Radionuclide Fallout Signals,” in The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit, 192–99; Reinhold Leinfelder and Juliana Assunção Ivar do Sul, “The Stratigraphy of Plastics and Their Preservation in Geological Records,” in The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit, 147–55. The most important thinker developing the analysis of the synthetic age was Barry Commoner. See Commoner, The Closing Circle; Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: New Press, 1972); Foster, The Vulnerable Planet, 108–24.
    28. Zalasiewicz et al., “Making the Case for a Formal Anthropocene Epoch,” 212–13.
    29. On the significance of 1945 as a shift in the human relation to the earth, see Commoner, The Closing Circle, 49–50; Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “Capitalism and the Environment,” Monthly Review 41, no. 2 (June 1989): 3.
    30. John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 502–3; Richard Hudson and Ben Shahn, Kuboyama and the Saga of the Lucky Dragon (New York: Yoseloff, 1965); Ralph E. Lapp, The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (London: Penguin, 1957).
    31. Zalasiewicz et al., “Making the Case for a Formal Anthropocene Epoch,” 211; Waters et al. “Artificial Radionuclide Fallout,” 192–99; Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin?,” Quaternary International 383 (2014): 196–203; “A New Geological Epoch, the Anthropocene, Has Begun, Scientists Say,” CBC News, January 7, 2016.
    32. Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 71; John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992), 70–72.
    33. Stephen Schneider, “Whatever Happened to Nuclear Winter?,” Climatic Change 12 (1988): 215; Richard P. Turco and Carl Sagan, A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race (New York: Random House, 1990), 24–27; R. P. Turco and G. S. Golitsyn, “Global Effects of Nuclear War,” Environment 30, no. 5 (1988): 8–16. The nuclear winter concept led to wide discussions of the actual indirect effects of a global thermonuclear exchange, the scientific consensus that emerged, as Schneider indicated, was “that the environmental and societal ‘indirect’ effects of a nuclear war are…probably more threatening for the earth as a whole than the direct blasts or radioactivity in the target zones.” Schneider, “Whatever Happened to Nuclear Winter?,” 217.
    34. Commoner, The Closing Circle, 45–53.
    35. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 107–15; Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, 167–69; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 247–58.
    36. Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law, “Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made,” Science Advances 3, no. 7 (2017).
    37. Zalasiewicz et al., “Making the Case for a Formal Anthropocene Epoch,” 212–13.
    38. Geyer, Jambeck, and Law, “Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made,” 1, 3.
    39. Zalasiewicz, et al., “The Geological Cycle of Plastics and Their Use as a Stratigraphic Indicator of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 13 (2016): 4–17; Waters et al., “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene”; Leinfelder and Ivar do Sul, “The Stratigraphy of Plastics and Their Preservation in Geological Records”; Juliana Assunção Ivar do Sul and Monica F. Costa, “The Present and Future of Microplastic Pollution in the Marine Environment,” Environmental Pollution 185 (2014): 352–64.
    40. Tamara S. Galloway, Matthew Cole, and Ceri Lewis, “Interactions of Microplastic Debris throughout the Marine Ecosystem,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 1 (2017); Susan Casey, “Plastic Ocean,” in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007, ed. Mary Roach (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 9–20.
    41. Geyer, Jambeck, and Law, “Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made,” 3.
    42. Carson, Silent Spring; Commoner, The Closing Circle; Commoner, The Poverty of Power; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique,” Monthly Review 59, no. 9 (2008): 1–17.
    43. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital; Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift.
    44. Commoner, The Closing Circle, 40.
    45. Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992).
    46. Peter Haff, “The Technosphere and Its Relation to the Anthropocene,” in The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit, 143.
    47. Burton and Kates, “The Great Climacteric, 1798–2048,” in Geography, Resources and Environment, vol. 2, 393; Foster, “The Great Capitalist Climacteric”; Richard E. Leaky and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind (New York: Anchor, 1996).
    48. See A. D. Ursul, ed., Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983). Following the 1983 publication of Philosophy and the Ecological Problems of Civilisation, the vice president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, P. N. Fedoseev (also Fedoseyev), who had written the introductory essay on ecology and the problem of civilization in the above edited book, incorporated a treatment of “Ecological Civilization” into the second edition of his Scientific Communism. Chinese agriculturalist Ye Qianji used the term in an article he wrote for The Journal of Moscow University in 1984, which was translated in Chinese in 1985. See P. N. Fedoseyev (Fedoseev), Soviet Communism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986); Qingzhi Huan, “Socialist Eco-Civilization and Social-Ecological Transformation,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27 no. 2 (2016): 52; Jiahua Pan, China’s Environmental Governing and Ecological Civilization (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2014), 35; Aran Gare, “Barbarity, Civilization, and Decadence: Meeting the Challenge of Creating an Ecological Civilization,” Chromatikon 5 (2009): 167.
    49. On China and ecological civilization, see Pan, China’s Environmental Governing and Ecological Civilization; John B. Cobb Jr. (in conversation with Andre Vitchek), China and Ecological Civilization (Jakarta: Badak Merah, 2019); Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 6, 20, 25, 417–24.
    50. “Interview—Greta Thunberg Demands ‘Crisis’ Response to Climate Change,” Reuters, July 18, 2020.
    51. Sweezy, “Capitalism and the Environment,” 6.
    52. “Carbon Dioxide Peaks Near 40 Parts Per million at Mauna Loa Observatory,” NOAA Research News, July 7, 2021; James Hansen et al., “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?,” Open Atmospheric Science Journal 2 (2008): 217–31.
    53. Duncan Foley, Adam’s Fallacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
    54. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (London: Merlin, 1995); John Bellamy Foster, “The Earth-System Crisis and Ecological Civilization,” International Critical Thought 7, no. 4 (2017): 439–58; Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 401–22; Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature, 269–87; Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,” Monthly Review 62, no. 8 (2011): 1–25.
    55. Mere technological change is insufficient to effect the necessary ecological and social transformation since technology is itself constrained by the underlying social relations. In his essay “Technological Determinism Revisited,” economist Robert Heilbroner indicated that modern economics ideology tends to focus on “the triadic connection of technological determinism, economic determinism, and capitalism.” However, this triadic connection insofar as it exists in reality, it can be argued, limits technological or productive rationality, while often pushing it in irrational directions, since capitalism as a system promotes accumulation “by ignoring all effects of the changed environment [and indeed all effects on the changing of the natural environment] except those that affect our maximizing possibilities” for profit. Robert Heilbroner, “Do Machines Make History?,” in Does Technology Drive History?, ed. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 72–73.
    56. Science for the People Statement on the People’s Green New Deal,” Science for the People, accessed July 23, 2021; Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future (London: Verso, 2019); Red Nation, The Red Deal (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2021); Max Ajl, A People’s Green New Deal(London: Pluto, 2021).
    57. Karl Max, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 911.
    58. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 141; Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994), 3–4.
    59. Phil Ochs, “Another Age,” Rehearsals for Retirement, 1969.
    60. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963).
  • The Ecology of Socialism

    “The Ecology of Socialism,” Rosa Luxemburg Conference, Berlin, January 9, 2021, provided a video keynote, January 9, 2021.

  • “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature” (video lecture)

    “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature” (video lecture), Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize, Historical Materialism Coference, London, November 12, 2021, 70 minutes.

    This is a prerecording of the 2020 Deutscher Prize Lecture by John Bellamy Foster. The title of the lecture is: “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: Marxian Ecology and the Struggle for Freedom as Necessity.” In addition to this lecture a remote panel discussion was held on November 12, 2021. You can watch the panel discussion here.

     

     

  • COVID-19 and Imperial Value: Commodity Chains, Global Monopolies, and Catastrophe Capitalism

    “COVID-19 and Imperial Value: Commodity Chains, Global Monopolies, and Catastrophe Capitalism,” International Critical Thought (forthcoming vol. 12, no. 3 [September 2022], 16 pp. 

  • The Return of the Dialectics of Nature

    The Return of the Dialectics of Nature,” Historical Materialism (forthcoming 2022, Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Lecture), 10,000 words.

     

  • “Foreword” to Cheng Enfu, “China’s Economic Dialectics”

    “Foreword” to Cheng Enfu, “China’s Economic Dialectics”

    “Foreword” to Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectics (New York: International Publishers, 2021), vii-xiii.

    China’s Economic DialecticFor Western Marxists, what is likely to be most astonishing is the many-sided approach to Marxism displayed throughout this work. This reflects a strong emphasis on cultivating an open Marxism, drawing on different views and debates, and various movement ver­naculars, in the continuing world struggle for socialism.

  • “Introduction” to István Mézáros, “Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State”

    “Introduction” to István Mézáros, “Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State”

    “Introduction” to István Mézáros, Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 20 pp.

    Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the StateIstván Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the thinkers discussed in depth.

    The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-fledged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an-all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of “the withering away of the state.” In his definitive, final work, Mészáros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy.

    In his scholarly and personal introduction, John Bellamy Foster traces the gestation of this masterwork and its place in the history of political theory.

    The pathfinder of socialism.

    Hugo Chávez, former Venezuelan President and a leader of the Bolivarian revolution