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  • The Contagion of Capital: Financialized Capitalism, COVID-19, and the Great Divide

    The Contagion of Capital: Financialized Capitalism, COVID-19, and the Great Divide

    The Contagion of Capital: Financialized Capitalism, COVID-19, and the Great Divide” (coathored with R. Jamil Jonna and Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 72 no. 8 (January 2021), pp. 1-19.

    John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. R. Jamil Jonna is associate editor for communications and production at Monthly Review. Brett Clark is associate editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah. The authors thank John Mage, Craig Medlen, and Fred Magdoff for their assistance.
    John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. R. Jamil Jonna is associate editor for communications and production at Monthly Review. Brett Clark is associate editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah.
    The authors thank John Mage, Craig Medlen, and Fred Magdoff for their assistance.

    The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline. The result is two national economies as perceived, respectively, by the top and the bottom of society: one of prosperity, the other of precariousness. At the level of production, economic stagnation is diminishing the life expectations of the vast majority. At the same time, financialization is accelerating the consolidation of wealth by a very few. Although the current crisis of production associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened these disparities, the overall problem is much longer and more deep-seated, a manifestation of the inner contradictions of monopoly-finance capital. Comprehending the basic parameters of today’s financialized capitalist system is the key to understanding the contemporary contagion of capital, a corrupting and corrosive cash nexus that is spreading to all corners of the U.S. economy, the globe, and every aspect of human existence.

    Free Cash and the Financialization of Capital

    “Capitalism,” as left economist Robert Heilbroner wrote in The Nature and Logic of Capitalism in 1985, is “a social formation in which the accumulation of capital becomes the organizing basis for socioeconomic life.”1 Economic crises in capitalism, whether short term or long term, are primarily crises of accumulation, that is, of the savings-and-investment (or surplus-and-investment) dynamics. Investment in new productive capacity in new or existing businesses is what determines growth. Such investment decisions are governed by expected profits on new investments.

    Viewed in these terms, the decline in the long-term growth rate experienced by the mature, monopolistic economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan over the last half century can be seen as related principally to the atrophy of net investment.2 Existing excess capacity in plant and equipment, a product of the monopolistic structure of accumulation, tends to decrease expected profits on new investment.3 The U.S. economy has seen a long-term decline in capacity utilization in manufacturing, which has averaged 78 percent from 1972 to 2019—well below levels that stimulate net investment.4 As a result, the capital accumulation process within production has stagnated, with existing idle capacity tending to shut off the creation of new capacity. From 1960 to 1980, it was common for private net investment to constitute around 40 percent of private gross investment. Since 2000, this has dropped to around 20 percent, even as gross investment has weakened relative to national income.5

    The significance of the atrophy of net investment in the core capitalist countries cannot be exaggerated. As the foremost emerging economy in the world today, China has what economist Zhun Xu calls a “high Baran ratio,” standing for investment as a share of economic surplus. Conceptually, economic surplus—the difference between national output and wage income or essential consumption—is gross property income (profit, rent, interest). Zhun uses the income of the top 10 percent as a proxy for economic surplus. On this basis, he explains, China has invested around 80 percent of its economic surplus, leading to high growth rates of 7 percent or higher. In contrast, mature, monopolistic economies such as the Group of 7 (the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada) typically have relatively low Baran ratios, investing less than 50 percent of economic surplus, resulting in what for decades have been weak and declining average annual growth rates.6

    Given these conditions, it is important to ask: What happens to that part of the economic surplus held by corporations and individual capitalists that is not invested in new capacity?7Some of it is used for capitalist consumption, but this has inherent limits. The vast economic surplus (actual and potential) generated by the system of economic exploitation far exceeds what can be spent in the luxury consumption of the wealthy, however ostentatious. More importantly, capitalists do not desire to consume the larger part of the economic surplus at their disposal, since, above all else, they seek to amass wealth.

    Government spending absorbs some of the economic surplus, as does waste in the business process. However, government deficit spending also increases corporate profits after taxes above the level determined by capitalist spending on consumption and investment.8 Hence, with both the growth of the federal deficit and the stagnation of investment, the amount of free cash in corporate coffers has dramatically expanded. This free cash plays a central role in the financialization of capital and the resulting extreme polarization of society.9

    As stipulated by Craig Medlen in Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, free cash equals corporate profits after taxes plus depreciation minus investment. (In national income accounting, corporate profits after taxes plus depreciation is known as corporate cash flow. The funds associated with depreciation [or capital consumption] are part of the gross surplus available to corporations.)10

    A wider conception of free cash, utilized in this article, also includes net interest. Hence, in the wide version, Free Cash = Corporate Profits After Taxes + Depreciation + Net Interest – Investment.11 This free cash is held by corporations or is distributed to stockholders through dividend payouts and/or stock buybacks.12

    Building on the research of Michał Kalecki, Medlen demonstrates that the amount of free cash is identical to the federal government deficit minus the excess of savings over investment of the noncorporate sector (now usually negative) plus the current account balance. The three factors of (1) the federal deficit, (2) the country’s current account balance (or the trade deficit), and (3) the deficit spending of the noncorporate sector (encompassing noncorporate business, housing, and personal finance) can therefore be seen as underpinning free cash.13

    Chart 1 shows the growth of corporate free cash in the U.S. economy from the period immediately after the Second World War to the present. Free cash, as non-invested surplus, became a much bigger and bigger factor in the U.S. economy beginning in the 1980s due mainly to the combined effects of a long-term decline in corporate taxation, the increasing federal deficit, and the atrophy of net investment.14 Free cash falls in recessions (due to lower business activity and income), but then rockets up soon afterward due to investment not keeping up with increasing economic activity, freeing up more cash after investment. This sudden rebound in cash is also a product of the fact that the Federal Reserve Board now steps in during every recession, at precisely such “Minsky Moments” when the prospects for investment are at their worst, with lavish provision of low-interest credit.

    Chart 1. Free Cash, U.S. Corporations, 1957-2019 (5-year Moving Average)

    Chart 1. Free Cash, U.S. Corporations, 1957-2019 (5-year Moving Average)

    Notes: Free Cash is calculated as the sum of Corporate Profits after tax (W273RC1Q027SBEA), Depreciation (CCFC), and Net Interest (A453RC1Q027SBEA) minus Corporate Fixed Investment, which includes investment in nonresidential structures (FBGFEEQ027S and BOGZ1FA105013005Q), residential structures (BOGZ1FA105012005Q), and inventories (NCBIAVQ027S). The ratio divides by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Quarterly data reported as 5-year moving averages.

    Sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 1.14. Gross Value Added of Domestic Corporate Business and Federal Reserve (Financial Accounts); Table F.2 Distribution of Gross Domestic Product. Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, November 16, 2020, fred.stlouisfed.org. Series IDs corresponding to FRED variables are included above in parentheses.

    Another way of looking at this phenomenon is to chart the total cash or liquid funds that corporations actually have ready at hand, if they were to choose to invest (or otherwise productively use) the surplus at their disposal. Of course, corporate investment is not dependent on the prior availability of savings/surplus, since capitalism, as Joseph Schumpeter long ago explained, is a system that creates “credit ad hoc”; while John Maynard Keynes and Kalecki taught that investment determines savings, not the other way around.15 Nevertheless, it is significant that the cash funds of corporations in the current phase of monopoly-finance capital far exceed profitable investment outlets. At the beginning of 2020, nonfinancial corporations were sitting on over $4 trillion dollars in cash; before the end of 2020 this had risen to over $5 trillion.16 According to the Federal Reserve Flow of Funds data, shown in Chart 2, total cash held by U.S. nonfinancial corporations as a share of gross domestic product (GDP)—much of it parked abroad in tax havens—has almost tripled between the early 1990s and the present.17

    Chart 2. Cash On-Hand, U.S. Nonfinancial Corporations, 1980-2020 (5-year Moving Average)

    Chart 2. Cash On-Hand, U.S. Nonfinancial Corporations, 1980-2020 (5-year Moving Average)

    Notes: Corporate Cash is the sum of lines 1-7 of Table L.102 Nonfinancial Business from Financial Accounts of the United States. Data points are reported as 5-year moving averages.

    Source: Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, November 16, 2020, https://fred.stlouisfed.org. Series IDs: FDABSNNCB, BOGZ1FL143020005Q, BOGZ1FL143030005Q,BOGZ1FL143034005Q, SRPSABSNNCB, BOGZ1FL144022005Q, and GDP.

    The total cash holdings of nonfinancial corporations on hand at any given time are not to be confused with free cash, which is that part of the corporate cash flow left over after investment in a given year—much of which is not held as cash deposits but instead spent on mergers and acquisitions, stock buybacks, and other financial instruments. Rather, total cash on hand, as defined by the Federal Reserve Flow of Funds, simply measures the actual cash deposits sitting in the accounts of nonfinancial corporations presented as annual averages based on quarterly data. Still, the rapid growth of total cash currently held by nonfinancial corporations in the form of ready monies, both absolutely and as a proportion of GDP (as shown in Chart 2), is a further indication of an economy that has shifted from capital formation to speculation.

    As we have seen, when corporations do not invest their economic surplus in new capital formation—primarily due to vanishing investment opportunities in an economy characterized by excess capacity—they are left with abundant free cash that is partly returned to the shareholders through share buybacks and, to a lesser degree, dividends. It is also used for speculation, including mergers, acquisitions, and the panoply of corporate “cash management” techniques that amount to the leveraging of free cash to enhance returns.18 This gives rise to a whole alphabet soup of financial instruments, in which corporations use the cash at their disposal partly as collateral for debt leverage, with nonfinancial corporate debt rising rapidly as a share of national income. Predictably recurring internal corporate funds in the form of free cash constitute a “flow collateral” allowing for further leverage, feeding speculation. A speculative economy relies on borrowed funds for leverage, backed up in part by cash. Expanding cash reserves are also needed as hedges in case of financial defaults. The whole system is a house of cards.

    The progressive financialization of the capitalist economy, whereby the financial superstructure continues to expand as a share of the underlying productive economy, has led to ever-greater asset price bubbles and growing threats of world economic meltdown. So far, a complete meltdown has been headed off by central banks, as in the 2000 and 2008 financial crashes. At every major recurring disturbance, and with serious economic repercussions, the monetary authorities pump massive amounts of cash into the financial superstructure of the economy only to give rise to greater bubbles in the future.

    Theoretically, stock values represent future expected streams of earnings arising primarily from production.19 Nowadays, however, finance has become increasingly autonomous from production (or the “real economy”), relying on its own speculative “self-financing,” leading to financial bubbles, contagions, and crashes, with the monetary authorities intervening to keep the whole house of cards from collapsing. This serves to reduce the risk to speculators, thereby keeping the value of stocks and other financial assets rising on a long-term basis, along with the overall wealth/income ratio. In these circumstances, so-called asset accumulation by speculative means has replaced actual accumulation or productive investment as a route to the increase of wealth, generating a condition of “profits without production.”20

    In order to grasp the full significance of the financialization of the economy, it is useful to look at the two conceptions of capital (relative to national income) depicted in Chart 3.21 One of these, the numerator of the lower line, is the traditional conception of capital as fixed investment stock (physical structures and equipment) at historical cost minus depreciation. This is called the fixed capital stock of the nation and is tied directly to economic growth.22 It represents what economic theorists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Keynes have referred to as the accumulation of capital. Capital formation and national income are closely related, generally rising and falling together, producing the relatively flat line, representing the ratio of fixed capital stock to national income, shown in Chart 3.

    Chart 3. Capital and Wealth to Income Ratios, U.S., 1947-2019

    Chart 3. Capital and Wealth Income Ratios, U.S., 1947-2019

    Note: Grey bars indicate economic recession periods (USREC).

    Sources: Fixed Capital Stock: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 4.3. Historical-Cost Net Stock of Private Nonresidential Fixed Assets by Industry Group and Legal Form of Organization. Stock Value: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 16, 2020, https://fred.stlouisfed.org. Series IDs: BOGZ1FL893064105Q (All Sectors; Corporate Equities; Asset, Level) and GDP.

    Yet, capital, as Marx noted very early in the process, has more and more taken on the “duplicate” form of “fictitious capital,” that is, the structure of financial claims (in monetary values) produced by the formal title to this real capital. Insofar as economic activity is directed to the appreciation of such financial claims to wealth relatively independently of the accumulation of capital at the level of production, it has metamorphosed into a largely speculative form.23

    This can be seen by looking again at Chart 3. In contrast to the lower line, the upper line depicts what is traditionally seen as the wealth/income ratio (which some economic theorists, such as Thomas Piketty, conflate with the capital/income ratio, treating wealth as capital).24 The numerator here is the value of corporate stocks. Since the mid–1980s, the ratio of stock value to national income has increased more than 300 percent. This marks an enormous growth of financial wealth, with speculation-induced asset growth sidelining the role of productive investment or capital accumulation as such in the amassing of wealth. This is associated with a massive redistribution of wealth to the top of society. The top 10 percent of the U.S. population owns 88 percent of the value of stocks, while the top 1 percent owns 56 percent.25Rising stock values relative to national income thus mean, all other things being equal, rapidly rising wealth (and income) inequality.26

    The existence of the two conceptions of capital (and of capital/income ratios) presented here—one representing historical investment cost minus depreciation, and conforming to the notion of accumulated capital stock, the other the monetary value of stock equities (in economics traditionally treated as wealth rather than capital)—is often downplayed within establishment economics under the assumption that in the long run they will simply fall in line with each other, and with national income. As leading mainstream economic growth theorist Robert Solow writes: “Stock market values, the financial counterpart of corporate productive capital, can fluctuate violently, more violently than national income. In a recession the wealth-income ratio may fall noticeably, although the stock of productive capital, and even its expected future earning power, may have changed very little or not at all. But as long as we stick to longer-run trends…this difficulty can safely be disregarded.”27

    But can the divergence of stock values from income (and from fixed capital stock) in reality be so easily disregarded? Chart 3 depicts a sharp increase in stock values relative to national income, which has now continued for over a third of a century, with decreases in total stock values as a ratio of national income (output) occurring during recessions, then rebounding during recoveries.28 The overall movement is clearly in the direction of compounded financial hyperextension. This conforms to the general pattern of the financialization of the capitalist economy, constituting a structural change in the system associated with the growth of monopoly-finance capital. This has gone hand in hand with a bubblier economy, with financial bubbles bursting in 1987, 1991, 2001, and 2008, but ultimately shored up by the Federal Reserve and other central banks.

    Today, vast amounts of free cash are spilling over into waves of mergers and acquisitions, typically aimed at acquiring megamonopoly positions in the economy. A major focus is the tech sector, much of which is directed at commodifying all information in society, in the form of a ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.29 All financial bubbles derive their animus from some common rationale, which claims that this time is different, discounting the reality of a bubble. In the present case, the rationale is that the advance of the FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google), which now comprise almost a quarter of the value of Standard and Poor 500’s total capitalization, is unstoppable, reflecting the dominance of technology. Apple alone has reached a stock market valuation of $2 trillion. All of this is feeding a massive increase in income and wealth inequality in the United States, as the gains from financial assets rise relative to income. Yet, like all previous bubbles, this one too will burst.30

    Kalecki determined that the export surplus on the U.S. current account increased free cash, as did the federal deficit.31 However, the current account deficit cannot be seen, in today’s overall structural context, as simply reducing free cash, because of the changed role of multinational corporations in late imperialism, which alters other parts of the equation. Due to globalization and the rise of the global labor arbitrage, U.S. multinational corporations in their intrafirm relations have in effect substituted production overseas by their affiliates for parent company exports, thereby decreasing their investment in fixed capital in the United States.32 The sales abroad of goods by majority-owned affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations in 2018 were 14.5 times the exports of goods to majority-owned affiliates.33 Foreign profits of U.S. corporations as a proportion of U.S. domestic corporate profits rose from 4 percent in 1950 to 9 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 2019. This mainly reflects the shift in production to low unit labor cost countries in the Global South. Samir Amin described the vast expropriation of surplus from the Global South, based on the global labor arbitrage, as a form of “imperialist rent.”34

    This expansion of global labor-value chains is also associated with an epochal increase in what is called the non-equity mode of production, or arm’s length production. Companies like Apple and Nike rely not on foreign direct investment abroad, but instead draw on subcontractors overseas to produce their goods at extremely low unit labor costs, often generating gross profit margins on shipping prices on the order of 50 to 60 percent.35

    The loss of investment in the United States, as U.S. multinational corporations have substituted production overseas, coupled with the growth of foreign profits of U.S. megafirms, has further increased the free cash at the disposal of corporations (even with a growing deficit in the current account), thereby intensifying the all-around contradictions of overaccumulation, stagnation, and financialization in the U.S. economy. Much of this free cash is parked in tax havens overseas to escape U.S. taxes.36

    Washington uses its printing press, through the federal deficit, to compensate for the U.S. current account deficit. Foreign governments cooperate, providing the “giant gift” of accepting dollars in lieu of goods, thereby acquiring massive dollar reserves.37 At some point, however, these contradictions are bound to undermine the hegemony of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, with dire ramifications for the U.S.-based world empire.

    The COVID-19 Crisis and the Great Divide

    Received economic ideology, with its compartmentalized view, treats the COVID-19 pandemic as simply an external shock to the economy emanating from the natural environment and thus unrelated to capitalism. However, as Rob Wallace and his colleagues have shown, contagions like COVID-19 arise from the worldwide circuits of capital associated with the global labor arbitrage and the accelerated extraction of the planet’s resources.38 This is tied especially to global agribusiness, which displaces, often forcibly, subsistence farmers while advancing into wilderness areas, destroying ecosystems, and disrupting wildlife. The result is a growing spillover of zoonoses (or diseases from other animals that are capable of being transmitted to human populations). From the standpoint of the Structural One Health tradition in epidemiology, the COVID-19 pandemic can therefore be seen as part of the larger planetary ecological crisis or metabolic rift engendered by twenty-first-century capitalism.39

    In March 2020, the U.S. stock market saw a sharp dip as COVID-19 spread in the United States. The Federal Reserve immediately brought out its firehose to flood the market with liquidity, purchasing, from March to June 2020, $1.6 trillion in U.S. Treasuries and $700 billion in mortgage-backed securities, and letting markets know that there was virtually no limit to the trillions that they were ready to pour into markets.40 The result was that—just as social distancing and lockdowns were being instituted and unemployment was soaring to the highest levels since the Great Depression, reaching almost seventeen million—the U.S. stock market experienced its biggest increase since 1974 in the week of April 6 to 10.41 Wall Street profits rose in the first half of 2020 by 82 percent over the year before.42 The total wealth of U.S. billionaires skyrocketed by $700 billion between March and July 2020, even as the number of those dying from COVID-19 in the United States continued to mount and as millions of U.S. workers found themselves hit hard by the crisis.43 Amazon centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos experienced an increase in his total wealth by more than $74 billion in 2020, while Tesla megacapitalist Elon Musk saw his wealth increase in 2020 by $76 billion, making him too a centi-billionaire. (For comparison, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits provided by the federal government in Fiscal Year 2019, aiding tens of millions of low-income families, seniors on fixed incomes, and disabled people, amounted to $62.3 billion.)44 All of this points to the continuing operation of what Marx termed “the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation,” polarizing wealth and poverty, or what Solow, commenting on the work of Piketty, calls “the rich-get-richer dynamic.”45

    The wreckage inflicted on the U.S. population as a whole has been enormous. In mid–October 2020, more than 25 million workers in the United States were hurt in the pandemic crisis. According to official unemployment figures, 11.1 million workers in the United States were officially unemployed; another 3.1 million had lost their jobs but were misclassified as a result of the lockdowns; 4.5 million had dropped out of the labor force since the pandemic; and 7 million were still employed but experiencing cuts in pay and hours due to the coronavirus crisis. The number claiming unemployment compensation in all programs in October equaled 21.5 million people.46 Millions are behind in payments for rent, home mortgages, and student loans while food insecurity has grown from 35 million to over 50 million as a result of insufficient government help during the pandemic.47

    According to the 2020 U.S. Financial Health Pulse Report, published by the U.S. Financial Network, more than two-thirds of the U.S. population at present are in a financially unhealthy condition. Of these, more than 20 percent are concerned about not having enough food, while more than a quarter are worried about their ability to pay their next month’s rent or mortgage. Ironically, the financial health of the bottom two-thirds of the population at the time the survey was completed (August 2020) was slightly improved compared to 2019 (prior to the present economic and epidemiological crisis), due to the temporary relief mainly in the form of unemployment compensation provided by the federal government in response to the pandemic.48 In the third quarter of 2020, the U.S. economy was still 3.5 percent smaller than in the fourth quarter of 2019, with tens of millions of people suffering as a result of the crisis.49

    Exploiting these conditions, the richest 1 percent saw their financial assets skyrocketing as a share of national income. FAANG stocks led the way as corporations and the wealthy turned increasingly from investment to speculative outlets, focusing on the big tech monopolies. By October 2020, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google had seen the value of their shares rise year-to-date by 29, 61, 77, 64, and 61 percent respectively.50

    Such frenetic speculation naturally carries with it the growing danger of a financial meltdown. At present, the U.S. economy is faced with a stock market bubble that is threatening to burst. Two of the more influential ways of ascertaining whether a financial crisis centered on the stock market is imminent are: (1) the stock price to company earnings ratios (P/E) of stocks, and (2) Warren Buffett’s Expensive Market Rule. The historical average P/E ratio, according to the Shiller Index, is 16. In August 2020, the U.S. stock market was priced at more than twice that, at 35. On Black Tuesday during the 1929 stock market crash, which led to the Great Depression, the P/E ratio had reached 30. The 2000 stock market crash that ended the tech boom of the 1990s occurred when the P/E ratio reached 43.51

    According to Buffett’s Expensive Market Rule, the mean average of stock values (measured by Wilshire 5000 market-value capitalization index) as a ratio of GDP is 80 percent. The 2000 tech crash occurred when the stock to income ratio, measured in this way, reached 130 percent, while the 2007 Great Financial Crisis occurred when it reached 110 percent. In August 2020, the ratio was at 180 percent.52

    Another key indicator of growing financial instability is the ratio of nonfinancial corporate debt to GDP, depicted in Chart 4. Corporations flush with free cash have taken on debt, available at very low interest rates, in order to further pursue nonproductive ventures such as mergers, acquisitions, and various forms of speculation, using the free cash as flow collateral. In each of the three previous economic crises of 1991, 2000, and 2008, nonfinancial corporate debt reached cyclical peaks in the range of 43 to 45 percent of national income. In 2020, nonfinancial corporate debt in relation to national income reached a record 56 percent. This is a sure sign of a financial bubble stretched beyond its limits.

    Chart 4: Debt as a Percent of GDP, U.S. Nonfinancial Corporations, 1949-2020

    Note: See Chart 3. Based on quarterly data.

    Source: Retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, November 16, 2020, https://fred.stlouisfed.org. Series IDs: BCNSDODNS (Nonfinancial Corporate Business; Debt Securities and Loans; Liability, Level) and GDP.

    The entire world economy, apart from China, is now in crisis, with over a million and a half lives lost worldwide to COVID-19 as of the beginning of December, disrupting normal production relations. The International Monetary Fund has projected a -5.8 percent rate of growth in the advanced economies in 2020 and a -4.4 percent rate of growth in the world.53 In these circumstances, there will be no fast recovery from the current capitalist crisis. Heavy storm winds will continue. The U.S. ability to print dollars to stave off financial crises as well as its capacity to devalue its currency so as to increase its exports (thereby reducing the value of dollar reserves held by countries around the world) may both come up against mounting resistance to the dollar system, further hastening the decline of U.S. hegemony. As in other areas, the contagion of capital, which spreads like a virus, ultimately undermining its own basis, is operative here.54 Washington’s attempt to create trade pacts that will ensure the continued dominance of U.S.-centered global commodity chains is running into increasing competition from Beijing. The 2020 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the largest trade bloc in the world, accounting for around 30 percent of the global economy, has China as its center of gravity.

    Faced with economic stagnation, periodic financial crises, and declining economic hegemony, and confronted with rapid Chinese growth, the United States is heading toward a New Cold War with China. This was made clear in the November 2020 U.S. State Department report, The Elements of the China Challenge, accusing the “People’s Republic of China of authoritarian goals and hegemonic ambitions.” The State Department report proceeded to outline a strategy for the defeat of China by targeting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), exploiting the CCP’s economic and other “vulnerabilities.”55

    Here, the chief economic weapon of the United States is its dominance over world finance. Former Chinese Finance Minister, Lou Jiwei, recently indicated that the United States is preparing to launch a “financial war” against China. U.S. attempts at “the suppression of China” by financial means under a Joe Biden administration, he says, “will be inevitable.” Under these circumstances, Lou insists, China’s earlier goals of internationalizing its currency and initiating full capital account convertibility, which would lead to the loss of its control of state finance, are “no longer safe options.” If Washington were to use its power over the world financial system to smother Chinese growth, Beijing, according to Chen Yuan, a former Chinese central bank deputy governor, could be forced to weaponize its holdings of U.S. sovereign debt (totaling $1.2 trillion) in response. This is viewed as the financial equivalent of nuclear war. A financial (not to mention military) war between the United States and China, driven by U.S. attempts to shore up its declining economic hegemony by attempting to derail its emerging rival, could well spell utter disaster for the global capitalist economy and humanity as a whole.56

    The Boundary Line and the Contagion of Capital

    The crisis of the U.S. system and of late capitalism as a whole is one of overaccumulation. Economic surplus is generated beyond what can profitably be absorbed in a mature, monopolistic system. This dynamic is associated with high levels of idle capacity, the atrophy of net investment, continuing slow growth (secular stagnation), enhanced military spending, and financial hyperexpansion. The inability of private investment (and capitalist consumption) to absorb all of the surplus actually and potentially available, coupled with government deficit spending, leads to growing amounts of free cash in the hands of corporations. The result is the rise of a system of asset speculation that partially stimulates the economy due to the wealth effect (increases in capitalist consumption fed by a part of the increased returns on wealth), but which is unable to overcome the underlying tendency toward stagnation.57

    Hence, monopoly-finance capital of today is a deeply irrational system, in which money is seen as begetting more money without the mediation of production, or what Marx characterized as M-M’ (Money-Money + Δm or surplus value).58 “The viability of today’s money manager capitalism,” as the heterodox economist Hyman Minsky called it,

    depends upon not having a serious depression: the continued absence of a serious depression fosters experimentation with portfolio managing techniques that increases the likelihood of system threatening crises, that is, increases the likelihood of depressions. There is a basic contradiction in money manager capitalism which makes continued success ever more dependent upon an apt structure of supportive government interventions. Money manager capitalism rests upon the power of government to prevent a sharp decline in aggregate business profits.… We can expect future crises to be met with some form of ad hoc intervention which will in part reflect an unwillingness by policy makers to appreciate that once again capitalism has changed.59

    A rational strategy with which to escape this trap—if only partially—would be to increase the direct U.S. governmental role in investment and consumption in order to address the multiple crises of society, including public spending in response to: (1) the climate emergency; (2) the public health crisis; (3) the shortage of adequate housing for much of the population; (4) the deterioration of the public education system under neoliberalism; (5) the absence of a national mass transit system, and so on. Yet, for the government to enter directly into such areas would involve crossing the private sector-government boundary line, which ensures the present near-complete dominance of the economy by the private sector, a phenomenon first critically diagnosed by Marxist economists Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy in Monopoly Capital in 1966.60 As Medlen writes, “the institutional arrangements for profit-seeking investment are simply taken for granted as a boundary line that is not to be violated.”61

    So strict is the boundary line in the U.S. economy that outside of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as well as various municipal utilities and land leases, government-owned productive facilities cannot be said to produce internal revenues sufficient to compensate for costs of production. “This is primarily because the government, outside a considerable land mass, the public school system, the U.S. Postal Service and toll-free roads, owns essentially nothing.”62The bulk of federal government discretionary spending goes to the military, which constitutes a huge subsidy to private capital while avoiding any intrusions on the private sector. Meanwhile, the privatization of public health infrastructure and public education is further pushing the boundary line in the direction of the complete dominance of a private sector already prone to overaccumulation and the contagion of capital.

    A little more than forty years ago in “Whither U.S. Capitalism?,” Sweezy, writing in Monthly Review, questioned the then common view that the United States, caught in economic stagnation, was headed inevitably to “an American version of the corporate state, authoritarian and repressive internally, increasingly militaristic and aggressive externally.”63 His reasoning is worth recalling today:

    There are at least two problems with this “solution” to the crisis of U.S. capitalism. First, it assumes that because the working class has never yet organized itself for effective independent political action it never will in the future either. In my view this reflects a simplistic view of the history of class struggles in the United States and quite unjustifiably rules out the emergence of new patterns of behavior and forms of struggle. Second, it assumes that the capitalists will be united behind a fascist-type policy of repression, and this seems to me doubtful too. Not only is a strategy of this kind costly to large elements of the middle and upper classes, as the whole history of fascism shows, but even more important, it is no solution at all to the real problems of U.S. capitalism. The basic disease of monopoly capitalism is an increasingly powerful tendency to overaccumulate. At anything approaching full employment, the surplus accruing to the propertied classes is far more than they can profitably invest. An attempt to remedy this by further curtailing the standard of living of the lower-income groups can only make things worse. What is needed, in fact, is the exact opposite, a substantial and increasing standard of living of the lower-income groups, not necessarily in the form of more individual consumption: more important at this stage of capitalist development is a greater improvement in collective consumption and the quality of life.64

    Sweezy followed this up with the notion of building a “cross-class alliance” between those suffering most from monopoly capitalism and the more far-seeing elements of the ruling class, a kind of new New Deal, but with the working class as the organizing and hegemonic force. This was consistent with a political praxis emphasizing protecting the population in the immediate present while working toward the long-run revolutionary reconstitution of society at large.

    More than four decades later, in 2021, the basic conditions are similar, if more serious and threatening. The current struggle for a People’s Green New Deal, based on a just transition, is a call for a cross-class movement to protect humanity as a whole, one which, however, can only be successful by going against the logic of capital and establishing the basis for a new society geared to substantive equality and environmental sustainability: the historical struggle for socialism. If the danger of “a fascist-type policy of repression” of the kind that Sweezy pointed to has reemerged in the twenty-first century in the context of the contagion of capital, so has a new socialist movement from below aimed at ensuring a world of sustainable human development. Predictions as to the future are meaningless in this context. The point is to struggle.

    Notes

    1. Robert Heilbroner, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 143.
    2. Harold G. Vatter and John F. Walker, The Inevitability of Government Growth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 6–22; John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 18–19.
    3. Excess capacity is both a cause of the atrophy of net investment, given monopolistic pricing and output strategies, and a manifestation of overaccumulation and stagnation. The issue of excess capacity was extensively examined in Josef Steindl, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 127–37.
    4. Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization in Manufacturing-G17,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, November 17, 2020; Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 20.
    5. Timothy Taylor, “Declining U.S. Investment, Gross and Net,” Conversable Economist (blog), February 17, 2017. Productive capacity can of course expand even with no net investment since used up plant and equipment is replaced with more efficient plant and equipment paid out of depreciation funds. Luke A. Stewart and Robert D. Atkinson, “The Greater Stagnation: The Decline in Capital Investment Is the Real Threat to the U.S. Economy,” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, October 2013.
    6. Although recognizing that economic surplus can be conceived of as the gross property income from production, in his study, Zhun uses the income of the top 10 percent of the population as a rough proxy for economic surplus, allowing for comparisons between a wide number of countries. He does a reliability check and shows that there is no significant distortion between this method and the two other measures of economic surplus: based on (1) surplus as the residual after essential consumption, and (2) the property share method (used by Thomas Piketty). The top 10 percent method has the advantage of allowing comparisons between a wide variety of countries and historical situations where the data to utilize the other two methods is not available. Zhun Xu, “Economic Surplus, the Baran Ratio, and Capital Accumulation,” Monthly Review 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 25–39; Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 4; “S. GDP Growth Rate 1961–2020,” Macrotrends. For another article employing the Baran ratio, see Thomas E. Lambert, “Paul Baran’s Economic Surplus Concept, the Baran Ratio, and the Decline of Feudalism,” Monthly Review 72, no. 7 (December 2020): 34–49.
    7. In macroeconomic terms, economic surplus that is not invested or consumed (either by private or public entities) represents a loss to society. But the losses do not necessarily fall on corporations and the wealthy—instead, they manifest in the form of “forced dissavings” of the population. Corporations are thus able to use the money capital available to them in other (nonproductive) ways, which have the effect of slowing the rate of growth while also in many cases increasing corporate assets and the earnings on these assets. Economic stagnation under monopoly capital thus leads to a redistribution of wealth and income toward the top.
    8. As Michał Kalecki wrote: “A budget deficit has an effect similar to that of an export surplus. It also permits profits to increase above that level determined by private investment and capitalists’ consumption.” Michał Kalecki, Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 85; Craig Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality (London: Routledge, 2010), 13. The term free cash was first introduced in Michael Jensen, “Agency Costs of Free Cash Flow, Corporate Finance, and Takeovers,” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 76, no. 2 (1986): 322–29.
    9. Craig Medlen, “Free Cash, Corporate Taxes, and the Federal Deficit,” Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 38, no. 1 (2015): 21.
    10. Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 6.
    11. Medlen, “Free Cash, Corporate Taxes, and the Federal Deficit,” 21, 26. As Medlen writes in connection to the wide definition of free cash, including net interest, “It might be objected that ‘net interest’ ought not to be included in any ‘free cash’ measure as ‘interest’ is a committed obligation. For the portion of the corporate sector whose cash is inadequate to sponsor investment, such ‘interest’ does, indeed, reflect the debt necessary to carry out the given investment expenditure. But since the corporate sector—taken as a consolidated whole—had enough profit and depreciation charges after taxes to fund internal investment, the net interest portion represents free cash on a consolidated basis.” Craig Medlen, “Two Sets of Twins? An Exploration of Domestic Saving-Investment Imbalances,” Journal of Economic Issues39, no. 3 (September 2005): 564.
    12. Besides speculation, free cash can also be used for foreign direct investment. On the role of corporate cash flow in the economy, see Thomas B. King, “Corporate Cash Flow and Its Uses,” Federal Reserve Board of Chicago, Chicago Fed Letter 368 (2016).
    13. Kalecki, Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy, 85–86. “Kalecki’s conviction that aggregate demand drove economic activity underpinned his interpretation of accounting identities as ‘models.’ Under the assumption that only capitalists save, an absence of government deficits and export surpluses would mean that ‘capitalists earn what they spend.’ But by providing additional aggregate demand, government deficits act as an artificial ‘export surplus’ that generates additional profits above capitalist’s spending.… Noncorporate deficit spending by consumers and noncorporate businesses has an analogous effect to that of government deficits and adds to the generation of corporate gross profits in excess of corporate investment (free cash).” Medlen, “Free Cash, Corporate Taxes, and the Federal Deficit,” 20, 23. When noncorporate savings minus investment is negative, as it was prior to the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007–08, it contributes to free cash.

      In calculating noncorporate S-I , in this formulation, Medlen makes adjustments to avoid double counting. Thus, he subtracts from the free cash the savings from dividends (and savings from net interest in the wide version of free cash), and adds to investment the amount spent on capitalist consumption out of dividends. Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 88.

    14. The increased reliance on federal government deficits was connected to reductions in taxes on corporations and the wealthy. See Craig Medlen, “Corporate Taxes and the Federal Deficit,” Monthly Review 36, no. 6 (November 1984): 10–26. The process Medlen identified in the early 1980s was, as is now clear, only in its earliest stages.
    15. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (New York: Oxford University Press. 1961), 107, 126; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Essays (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1951), 170; Joan Robinson, Introduction to the Theory of Employment (London: Macmillan, 1937), 11.
    16. Kristine W. Hankins and Mitchell Petersen, “Why Are Companies Sitting on So Much Cash?,” Harvard Business Review, January 17, 2020.
    17. Chart 2 is derived from Michael W. Faulkender, Kristine W. Hankins, and Mitchell A. Petersen, “Understanding the Rise in Corporate Cash,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 23799, August 2018., Figure 1, 49.
    18. If the rate paid on credits secured in part by dependable internal cash flow is lower than that on financial instruments purchased with that credit, “cash management” requires that the latter be pursued.
    19. Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 51. Stock values represent discounted profit expectations due to the time value of money. The discount is normally calculated by how many current dollars at the compounded current long-term rate of interest will produce the expected profit at some specific future time. The higher the rate of interest, the larger the discount. And as the interest rates approach zero, the discount—also irrationally—approaches zero. “Minsky moments” when the Fed steps in to reinforce capital to suppress the crisis now occur in every recession, at precisely the moment that the prospects for new investment are at their worst. This has therefore become a regular part of the financialization process with major structural effects. With the lavish provision of central bank credit in spring 2020 at a near-zero rate of interest, the rate of discount went into an asymptotic movement that raised stock values ceteris paribus, but that wildly privileged certain high-growth (monopoly) sectors (communications tech and pharmaceutical) and their stock values. Thus, the value of stocks now became a combination of expected streams of profit from production and evermore extreme discount rates tied to the provision and distribution of central bank credit, that is, stock values now reflect a structure of finance that is relatively autonomous from the real economy.
    20. Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Production: How Finance Exploits Us All (London: Verso, 2013); James Tobin, Asset Accumulation and Economic Activity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
    21. Chart 3 is derived from Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, Figure 8.3 , 141.
    22. The flat line of capital stock to income is a product of the mutual conditioning of investment and national income.
    23. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 607–10, 707; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 396–402; Jan Toporowski, Theories of Financial Disturbance (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005), 54; Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 197. For a detailed description of Marx’s theory of “fictitious capital,” see Michael Perelman, Marx’s Crises Theory (New York: Praeger, 1987), 170–217. See also Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 55–57.
    24. On Piketty’s conflation of capital as the accumulation of fixed stock and “capital” as wealth, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 47; Robert M. Solow, “The Rich-Get-Richer Dynamic,” New Republic, May 12, 2014, 51–52; Craig Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 139–40: John Bellamy Foster and Michael D. Yates, “Thomas Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics,” Monthly Review 66, no. 6 (November 2014): 11–12.
    25. Robin Wigglesworth, “How America’s 1% Came to Dominate Stock Ownership,” Financial Times, February 10, 2020. The logic of this process of wealth concentration under monopoly-finance capital is vicious. As Medlen writes: “In lowering rates of equity returns and interest rates, higher stock valuations drive an ongoing feedback loop that tilts the capital/income ratio upwards. The rate of equity returns and the capital/income ratio are therefore codependent with the interest (discount) rate having a supporting role. Moreover, there is an amplification effect: An expectation of lower and lower rates of return on equity and bonds is compensated by a larger offsetting gain in capital values thereby driving a higher and higher share of income towards the wealthy.” Craig Medlen, “Piketty’s Paradox, Capital Spillage, and Inequality,” Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 40, no. 4 (2017): 630.
    26. “If you multiply the rate of return on capital [wealth] by the capital-income ratio, you get the share of capital in the national income.… It is always the case that wealth is more highly concentrated among the rich than income from labor…and this being so, the larger the share of income from wealth, the more unequal the distribution of income among persons is likely to be.” Solow, “The Rich-Get-Richer Dynamic,” 53.
    27. Robert M. Solow, “The Rich-Get-Richer Dynamic,” 52.
    28. This is often called the capital output ratio, though it is more properly referred to as the wealth/income (output) ratio.
    29. John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Surveillance Capitalism,” Monthly Review66, no. 3 (July–August 2014): 1–31; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
    30. Ronald Surz, “If COVID-19 Won’t Pop the Stock Market, What Will?,” Nasdaq, August 20, 2020. Jacob A. Robbins, “Capital Gains and the Distribution of Income in the United States,” National Bureau of Economic Research (2018). It is the nature of asymptotes to signal a contradiction in the system under study that presages a qualitative change—here, the divergence between hypertrophied finance, asset prices, and the value of labor.
    31. Kalecki, Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy, 85.
    32. Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 112–13; Intan Suwandi, R. Jamil Jonna, and John Bellamy Foster, “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism,” Monthly Review 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 1–24.
    33. For the basic data on affiliates abroad and exports, see Bureau of Economic Analysis, “International Data, Direct Investment and MNE, Data on Activities of Multinational Enterprises, U.S. Direct Investment Abroad, All Majority-Owned Foreign Affiliates (Data for 2009 and Forward), Goods Supplied,” and “International Data, Direct Investment and MNE, Data on Activities of Multinational Enterprises, U.S. Direct Investment Abroad, All Majority-Owned Foreign Affiliates (Data for 2009 and Forward), S. Exports of Goods,” accessed December 8, 2020; Craig Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 121.
    34. “National Data, National Income and Product Accounts, Tables 6.16A, 6.16B, 6.16C, 6.16D Corporate Profits by Industry,” Bureau of Economic Analysis, accessed December 11, 2020, lines 2 (Domestic Industries) and 5 (Rest of the World); Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 126. See also Joe Weisenthal, “Chart of the Day: What Percent of Corporate Profits Come from Overseas?,” Business Insider, May 17, 2011; “The share of national corporate profits accounted for by foreign profits (receipts from the rest of the world) has trended upwards for the last 60 years, peaking at 45.3 percent in 2008.” Andrew W. Hodge, “Comparing NIPA Profits with S&P 500 Profits,” Survey of Current Business (March 2011): 23.

      On “imperialist rent” see Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value, 110–11; Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 140, 173; Kenneth L. Kramer, Greg Linden, and Jason Dedrick, “Capturing Value in Global Networks,” Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, July 2011, 5, 11; John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

    35. Intan Suwandi, Value Chains (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019); Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis, 140, 171–73.
    36. Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
    37. Martin Feldstein, “Resolving the Global Imbalance: The Dollar and the U.S. Saving Rate,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 3 (2008): 115.
    38. Rob Wallace, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 42–57; John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi, “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism,” Monthly Review 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 1–20.
    39. Robert G. Wallace et al., “The Dawn of Structural One Health: A New Science Tracking Disease Emergence Along Circuits of Capital,” Social Science and Medicine 129 (2015): 68–77.
    40. Lorie K. Logan, “Treasury Market Liquidity and Early Lessons from the Pandemic Shock” (speech, Brookings-Chicago Booth Task Force on Financial Stability Meeting, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, October 23, 2020).
    41. Fred Imbert and Pippa Stevens, “S&P Index Jumps More than 1%, Capping Off Its Best Week Since 1974,” CNBC, April 9, 2020.
    42. Mark DeCambre, “Wall Street Profits Soared in First Half of 2020 Amid the Worst Pandemic in a Century, Report Says,” Market Watch, October 20, 2020.
    43. Billionaires Pandemic Wealth Gains Burst through $700B,” Americans for Tax Fairness, July 16, 2020.
    44. Billionaires’ Net Worth Grows to $10.2 Trillion During Pandemic,” teleSUR, October 7, 2020. Congressional Research Service, “USDA Domestic Food Assistance Programs: FY2019 Appropriations,” May 24, 2019, 3, Table I.
    45. “If you multiply the rate of return on capital [wealth] by the capital-income ratio, you get the share of capital [as a flow] in the national income. For example, if the rate of return is 5 percent a year and the stock of capital is six years’ worth of national income, income from capital will be 30 percent of national income, and so income from work will be the remaining 70 percent.… As long as the rate of return exceeds the rate of growth, the income and wealth of the rich will grow faster than the typical income from work. (There seems to be no offsetting tendency for the aggregate share of capital to shrink.)” Solow, “The Rich-Get-Richer Dynamic,” 53.
    46. Heidi Shierholz, “More than 25 Million Workers Are Being Hurt by the Coronavirus Downturn,” Economic Policy Institute, November 6, 2020.
    47. Bridget Balch, “54 Million People in America Face Food Insecurity During the Pandemic. It Could Have Dire Consequences for Their Health,” Association of American Medical Colleges, October 15, 2020.
    48. Financial Health Network, S. Financial Health Pulse: 2020 Trends Report (Chicago: Financial Health Network, 2020).
    49. The Conference Board Economic Forecast for the U.S. Economy,” Conference Board, November 13, 2020.
    50. Robert Francis, “FAANG Stocks and COVID-19,” Global Banking and Finance Review, October 11, 2020.
    51. Surz, “If COVID-19 Won’t Pop the Stock Market, What Will?”
    52. Surz, “If COVID-19 Won’t Pop the Stock Market, What Will?”
    53. Real GDP Growth, Annual Percent Change, 2020,” International Monetary Fund, accessed November 21, 2020.
    54. See Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
    55. Policy Planning Staff, Office of the Secretary of State, Elements of the China Challenge(Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of State, 2020).
    56. “Former China Finmin Says Trade Frictions with U.S. Could Remain Under Biden,” Nasdaq, November 11, 2020; “China-U.S. Rivalry on Brink of Becoming a ‘Financial War,’ Former Minister Says,” South China Morning Post, November 9, 2019; Julian Gewirtz, “Look Out: Some Chinese Thinkers Are Girding for a ‘Financial War,’” Politico, December 17, 2019.
    57. On the wealth effect, see Dean Baker, The End of Loser Liberalism(Washington DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2009), 18; Christopher D. Carroll and Xia Zhou, “Measuring Wealth Effects Using U.S. State Data,” Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco, October 26, 2010.
    58. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 515.
    59. Hyman Minsky, “Financial Crises and the Evolution of Capitalism,” in Capitalist Development and Crisis Theory, ed. Mark Gottdiener and Nicos Komninos (London: Macmillan, 1989), 398, 402. See also Riccardo Bellofiore, “Hyman Minsky at 100: Was Minsky a Communist?Monthly Review 71, no 10 (March 2020): 6–10.
    60. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 161–75.
    61. Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 5.
    62. Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality, 149.
    63. Paul M. Sweezy, “Whither U.S. Capitalism?Monthly Review 31, no. 7 (December 1979): 11.
    64. Sweezy, “Whither U.S. Capitalism?” 12.
  • Return of Nature and Marx’s Ecology

    Return of Nature and Marx’s Ecology

    Return of Nature and Marx’s Ecology” (Foster interviewed by Alejandro Pedregal), Monthly Review, “The vol. 72, no. 7 (December 2020): 1-16.

    [Finnish language version in Viento Sur, no. 172 (2020), pp. 101-115.

    John Bellamy Foster, "The Ecological Break, or What Happens When Nature Becomes a Commodity?" Luxemburg Lecture, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Berlin, Germany, June 6, 2013. See here for video.
    John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecological Break, or What Happens When Nature Becomes a Commodity?” Luxemburg Lecture, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Berlin, Germany, June 6, 2013. See here for video.

    John Bellamy Foster writes me before leaving Eugene, Oregon: “We had to evacuate. And we have to travel a long ways. But I will try to send the interview by the morning.” The massive fires on the West Coast of the United States had triggered the air quality index up to values of 450, and in some cases over the maximum of 500—an extremely dangerous health situation. Forty thousand people in Oregon had left their homes and another half a million were waiting to flee if the threat grew. “Such is the world of climate change,” Foster states. Professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review, twenty years ago Foster revolutionized Marxist ecosocialism with Marx’s Ecology. This book, together with Marx and Nature by Paul Burkett, opened Marxism to a second wave of ecosocialist critique that confronted all kinds of entrenched assumptions about Karl Marx himself in order to elaborate an ecosocialist method and program for our time. The great development of Marxist ecological thought in recent years—which has shown how, despite writing in the nineteenth century, Marx is essential for reflecting on our contemporary ecological degradation—is in part the product of a turn carried out by Foster and others linked to Monthly Review.His current, which came to be known as the school of the metabolic rift due to the central notion Foster rescued from volume 3 of Marx’s Capital, has developed numerous ecomaterialist lines of research in the social and natural sciences—from imperialism and the study of the exploitation of the oceans, to social segregation and epidemiology. On the occasion of the release of his latest book, The Return of Nature, a monumental genealogy of great ecosocialist thinkers that has taken him twenty years to complete, Foster tells us about the path these key figures traveled, from the death of Marx to the emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s and ’70s, as well as about the relationship of his new book to Marx’s Ecology and the most prominent debates of current Marxist ecological thought. His reflections thus serve to help us rethink the significance of this legacy, in view of the urgent need for a project that transcends the conditions that threaten the existence of our planet today.

    Alejandro Pedregal: In Marx’s Ecology, you refuted some very established assumptions about the relationship between Marx and ecology, both within and outside of Marxism—namely, that the ecological thought in Marx’s oeuvre was marginal; that his few ecological insights were mostly (if not solely) found in his early work; that he held Promethean views on progress; that he saw in technology and the development of the productive forces the solution to the contradictions of society with nature; and that he did not show a genuine scientific interest in the anthropogenic effects on the environment. Your work, along with that of others, disputed these assumptions and shifted many paradigms associated with them. Do you think that these ideas persist in current debates?

    John Bellamy Foster: Within socialist and ecological circles in English-speaking countries, and indeed I think in most of the world, these early criticisms of Marx on ecology are all now recognized as disproven. They not only have no basis in fact, but are entirely contradicted by Marx’s very powerful ecological treatment, which has been fundamental to the development of ecosocialism and increasingly to all social-scientific treatments of the ecological ruptures generated by capitalism. This is particularly evident in the widespread and growing influence of Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift, the understanding of which keeps expanding and which has been applied now to nearly all of our current ecological problems. Outside the English-speaking world, one still occasionally encounters some of the earlier misconceptions, no doubt because the most important works so far have been in English, and much of this has not yet been translated. Nevertheless, I think we can treat those earlier criticisms as now almost universally understood as invalid, not simply due to my work, but also that of Paul Burkett in Marx and Nature, Kohei Saito in Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, and many others. Hardly anyone on the left is so simplistic today as to see Marx as a Promethean thinker in the sense of promoting industrialization over all else. There is now a widespread understanding of how science and the materialist conception of nature entered his thought, a perception reinforced by the publication of some of his scientific/ecological extract notebooks in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe project. Thus, I don’t think the view that Marx’s ecological analysis is somehow marginal in his thought is given much credence among socialists in the English-speaking world today, and it is rapidly receding everywhere else. Ecological Marxism is a very big topic in Europe, Latin America, China, South Africa, the Middle East—in fact, nearly everywhere. The only way in which Marx’s ecological analysis can be seen as marginal is if one were to adopt an extremely narrow and self-defeating definition of what constitutes ecology. Moreover, in science, it is often the most “marginal” insights of a thinker that prove most revolutionary and cutting edge.

    Why were so many convinced earlier on that Marx had neglected ecology? I think the most straightforward answer is that most socialists simply overlooked the ecological analysis present in Marx. Everyone read the same things in Marx in the prescribed manner, skipping over what was then designated as secondary and of little importance. I remember talking to someone years ago who said there were no ecological discussions in Marx. I asked if he had ever read the chapters on agriculture and rent in volume 3 of Capital. It turned out that he hadn’t. I asked: “If you haven’t read the parts of Capital where Marx examines agriculture and the soil, how can you be so sure that Marx did not deal with ecological questions?” He had no answer. Other problems were due to translation. In the original English translation of Capital, Marx’s early usage of Stoffwechsel, or metabolism, was translated as material exchange or interchange, which hindered rather than helped understanding. But there were also deeper reasons, such as the tendency to overlook what Marx meant by materialism itself, which encompassed not just the materialist conception of history, but also, more deeply, the materialist conception of nature.

    The important thing about Marx’s ecological critique is that it is unified with his political-economic critique of capitalism. Indeed, it can be argued that neither makes any sense without the other. Marx’s critique of exchange value under capitalism has no significance outside of his critique of use value, which related to natural-material conditions. The materialist conception of history has no meaning unless it is seen in relation to the materialist conception of nature. The alienation of labor cannot be seen apart from the alienation of nature. The exploitation of nature is based on capital’s expropriation of the “free gifts of nature.” Marx’s very definition of human beings as the self-mediating beings of nature, as István Mészáros explained in Marx’s Theory of Alienation, is based on a conception of the labor process as the metabolism of human beings and nature. Science as a means of enhancing the exploitation of labor can’t be separated from science conceived as the domination of nature. Marx’s notion of social metabolism cannot be divided off from the question of the metabolic rift. And so on. These things were not actually separated in Marx, but were removed from each other by later left thinkers, who generally ignored ecological questions, or who employed idealist, mechanist, or dualist perspectives and thus robbed the critique of political economy of its real material basis.

    AP: In regard to Prometheanism, you have shown in your work how Marx’s reflections on Prometheus are to be read in relation to his own scholarly research on Epicurus (as well as to the Roman poet Lucretius), and thus need to be interpreted as linked to the secular knowledge of the Enlightenment, rather than as a blind advocacy for progress. However, the dominant use of the term Prometheanism remains quite common, also in Marxist literature, which gives room to certain accelerationist and techno-fetishist trends that reclaim Marx for their aims. Should this notion be challenged more effectively, at least in relation to Marx and his materialist thought?

    JBF: This is a very complicated issue. Everyone knows that Marx praised Prometheus. He was a devotee, of course, of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, which he reread frequently. In his dissertation he compared Epicurus to Prometheus. And Marx himself was even caricatured as Prometheus in the context of the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung in a famous image that appears in volume 1 of Marx and Fredrick Engels’s Collected Works. It thus became common for various critics within and without Marxism to characterize Marx’s views as Promethean, particularly in such a way as to suggest that he saw extreme productivism as the chief aim of society. Not having any proof that Marx put industrialization before human social (and ecological) relations, his critics simply employed the term Promethean as a way of making their point without evidence, merely taking advantage of this common association with Marx.

    Yet, this was a distortion in quite a number of ways. In the Greek myth, Prometheus, a Titan, defied Zeus by giving fire to humanity. Fire of course has two manifest qualities. One is light, the other is energy or power. In the interpretation of the Greek myth in Lucretius, Epicurus was treated as the bringer of light or knowledge in the sense of Prometheus, and it was from this that Voltaire took the notion of Enlightenment. It was in this same sense that Marx himself praised Epicurus as Prometheus, the giver of light, celebrating him as the Enlightenment figure of antiquity. Moreover, Marx’s references to Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound always emphasized Prometheus’ role as a revolutionary protagonist in defiance of the Olympian gods.

    In the age of the Enlightenment itself, the Prometheus myth was seen, not surprisingly, as all about Enlightenment, not about energy or production. Walt Sheasby, a great ecosocialist with whom I worked in the early days of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and while I was also editor of Organization and Environment, wrote an extraordinary piece for the latter journal in March 1999, establishing conclusively that the notion of Prometheanism and the Promethean myth was used until the nineteenth century primarily in this sense of Enlightenment. I am not sure when the usage changed. But, certainly, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheusand Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty represented a shift where Prometheanism came to mean industrialism and machinery, symbolizing the Industrial Revolution. Here, Prometheus was seen as standing for mechanical power. It is interesting that Marx took on Proudhon’s mechanistic Prometheanism directly, attacking all such notions in The Poverty of Philosophy. Yet, the Promethean myth became reified as a story of industrialization, something the ancient Greeks themselves could never possibly have imagined, and the common identification of Marx with Prometheus in people’s minds became a way therefore of faulting him on ecological grounds. Interestingly, the charge that Marx was Promethean, which you find in such figures such as Leszek Kolakowski, Anthony Giddens, Ted Benton, and Joel Kovel, was directed against Marx exclusively and at no other thinker, which points to its ideological character.

    The closest anyone could come to finding evidence that Marx was Promethean in the sense of glorifying industrialization as its own end was in his panegyric to the bourgeoisie in the first part of The Communist Manifesto, but this was simply a prelude to his critique of the same bourgeoisie. Thus, he turned around a few pages later, ushering in all the contradictions of the bourgeois order, referring to the sorcerer’s apprentice, ecological conditions (town and country), the business cycles, and of course the proletariat as the grave digger of capitalism. In fact, there is nowhere that Marx promotes industrialization as an objective in itself as opposed to free, sustainable human development.

    Explaining all of this, though, takes time and, while I have brought up all of these points at various occasions in my work, it is usually sufficient simply to show that Marx was not at all a Promethean thinker, if what is meant by this is the worship of industry, technology, and productivism as ends in themselves, or a belief in an extreme mechanistic approach to the environment. In these concrete terms, setting aside the confusions borne of myth, there can be no doubt.

    AP: Twenty years after Marx’s Ecology, the extensive work of the metabolic rift school has transformed today’s debates about Marxism and ecology. What are the continuities and changes between that context and the current one?

    JBF: There are several different strands of discussion and debate. One, the most important, as I indicated, is a vast amount of research into the metabolic rift as a way of understanding the current planetary ecological crisis and how to build a revolutionary ecosocialist movement in response. Basically, what has changed things is the spectacular rise of Marxian ecology itself, throwing light on so many different areas, not only in the social sciences, but in the natural sciences as well. For example, Mauricio Betancourt has recently written a marvelous study for Global Environmental Change on “The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift.” Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark have applied Marx’s method to the analysis of the oceanic rift in The Tragedy of the Commodity. Hannah Holleman has used it to explore dust bowls past and present in Dust Bowls of Empire. A considerable number of works have utilized the metabolic rift conception to understand the problem of climate change, including Brett Clark, Richard York, and myself in our book The Ecological Rift and Ian Angus in Facing the Anthropocene. These works, as well as contributions by others, such as Andreas Malm, Eamonn Slater, Del Weston, Michael Friedman, Brian Napoletano, and a growing number of scholars and activists too numerous to name, can all be seen basically in this light. An important organization is the Global Ecosocialist Network in which John Molyneux has played a leading role, along with System Change Not Climate Change in the United States. Naomi Klein’s work has drawn on the metabolic rift concept. It has played a role in the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil and in discussions around the question of ecological civilization in China.

    Another issue concerns the relations between Marxian ecology and both Marxist feminist social reproduction theory and the new analyses of racial capitalism. All three of these perspectives have drawn in recent years on Marx’s concept of expropriation as integral to his overall critique, extending beyond exploitation. It is these connections that motivated Brett Clark and myself to write our recent book The Robbery of Nature on the relation between robbery and the rift, that is, the expropriation of land, use values, and human bodies, and how this is related to the metabolic rift. An important area is the whole realm of ecological imperialism and unequal ecological exchange on which I have worked with Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman.

    Today, there are some new criticisms of Marx on ecology aimed at the metabolic rift theory itself, saying it is dualistic rather than dialectical. But this of course is a misconception, since for Marx the social metabolism between humanity and (extra-human) nature through the labor and production process is by definition the mediation of nature and society. In the case of capitalism, this manifests itself as an alienated mediation in the form of the metabolic rift. Such an approach, focusing on labor/metabolism as the dialectical mediation of totality, could not be more opposed to dualism.

    Others have said that if classical Marxism addressed ecological questions, they would have appeared in subsequent socialist analyses after Marx, but did not. That position too is wrong. In fact, that is the question taken up in The Return of Nature, which was expressly intended to explore the dialectic of continuity and change in socialist and materialist ecology in the century after the deaths of Charles Darwin and Marx, in 1882 and 1883 respectively.

    AP: Indeed, in Marx’s Ecology you focused on the emergence and formation of Marx’s materialism in correlation to that of Darwin’s and Alfred Russell Wallace’s theory of evolution, ending precisely with the deaths of the first two. Now, in your new book, you start from this point to trace an intellectual genealogy of key ecosocialist thinkers until the appearance of the ecological movement in the 1960s and ’70s. For a long time, some of these stories did not receive enough attention. Why did it take so long to recover them? And how does the rediscovery of these links help us understand the emergence of the ecologist movement differently?

    JBF: The Return of Nature continues the method of Marx’s Ecology. This can be seen by comparing the epilogue of the earlier book to the argument of the later one. Marx’s Ecology(apart from its epilogue) ends with the deaths of Darwin and Marx; The Return of Nature begins with their funerals and with the one person who was known to be present at both funerals, E. Ray Lankester, the great British zoologist who was Darwin’s and Thomas Huxley’s protege and Marx’s close friend. The Return of Nature is not directed simply at the development of Marxist ideas, but at the socialists and materialists who developed what we today call ecology as a critical form of analysis. Moreover, we can see how these ideas were passed on in a genealogical-historical fashion.

    Like all Marxian historiography, this, then, is a story of origins and of the dialectic of continuity and change. It presents a largely unbroken genealogy that extends, though in complex ways, from Darwin and Marx to the explosion of ecology in the 1960s. Part of my argument is that the socialist tradition in Britain from the late nineteenth to the mid–twentieth century was crucial in this. Not only was this the main period of the development of British socialism, but in the sciences the most creative work was the product of a kind of synthesis of Darwin and Marx along evolutionary ecological lines. The British Marxist scientists were closely connected to those revolutionary Marxist thinkers involved in the early and most dynamic phase of Soviet ecology (nearly all of whom were later purged under Joseph Stalin), but unlike their Soviet counterparts, the British left scientists were able to survive and develop their ideas, ushering in fundamentally new socioecological and scientific perspectives.

    A common criticism of Marx’s Ecology from the beginning, raised, for example, in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism right after the book was published, was that, even if Marx had developed a powerful ecological critique, this had not been carried forward in subsequent socialist thought. There were two answers to this. The first was Rosa Luxemburg’s statement that Marx’s science had reached far beyond the immediate movement and the issues of the time, and that, as new contradictions and challenges arose, new answers would be found in Marx’s scientific legacy. In fact, it is true that Marx’s perception of the ecological crisis of capitalism, based in tendencies of his time, was far ahead of the historical development and movement, which in some ways makes his analysis more valuable, not less. But the other answer is that the presumption that there was no socialist ecological analysis was false. Indeed, ecology as a critical field was largely the creation of socialists. I had already tried to explain this in the epilogue to Marx’s Ecology, but much more was needed. The challenge was to uncover the history of socialist and materialist ecology in the century after Marx. But doing this was a huge undertaking since there was no secondary literature to speak of, except in some respect Helena Sheehan’s marvelous Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.

    I commenced the archival research for The Return of Nature in 2000, around the time that Marx’s Ecology was published. The idea was always to explore further the issues brought up in the epilogue, focusing on the British context. But at the same time, as I began this work, I also took on the position of coeditor (and eventually sole editor) of Monthly Review, and that naturally pulled me back to political economy, which governed my work for years. Moreover, when I wrote on ecology in these years, I had to deal first and foremost with the immediate crisis. So, I could only work on an intensive project like The Return of Nature at times when the pressure was off, during short vacations from teaching. As a result, the work proceeded slowly over the years with innumerable interruptions. I might never have finished the book except for constant encouragement by a few friends (particularly John Mage, to whom the book is dedicated), and the fact that the ecological problem came to loom so large that, for Monthly Review itself, the ecological critique became as important as the critique of political economy, making the development of systematic historical approach more necessary than ever.

    However, the bigger reason the book took so long was that these stories were not known and it required an enormous amount of archival research and pursuit of obscure sources, including works that no one had read for more than half a century. Great works were cast aside and grew moldy in obscure corners. Other writings were not published or had appeared only in hard-to-find places. The role of thinkers such as J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, J. D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, and Lancelot Hogben in the development of ecological thought was, despite their earlier prominence, then unknown or forgotten, in part a casualty of the internecine struggles within Marxism itself. Also forgotten were the great left classicists such as Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson, and Jack Lindsay. With all of this to deal with, grasping the vast scope of the analyses, placed in their proper historical context, took time.

    But the historical linkages, as you say, were definitely there. The story leads in the end to figures like Barry Commoner and Rachel Carson, and also to Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Steven and Hilary Rose, Lindsay, and E. P. Thompson (who became Britain’s leading antinuclear activist)—all of whom were immensely impacted, although in different ways, by this intellectual and political inheritance. In answer to your question on how this history can help us in today’s struggles, perhaps the most succinct response is the statement of Quentin Skinner, who I quote in the introduction of The Return of Nature, who says that the only purpose of such histories is to demonstrate “how our society places limitations on our imaginations.” He adds that “we are all Marxists to this extent.”

    AP: Marx’s Ecology mentions how your own internalization of the legacy of Georg Lukács (and Antonio Gramsci) prevented you from using the dialectical method for the realm of nature. You point out how, due to this common weakness, Western Marxism had partly abandoned the field of nature and the philosophy of science to the dominion of mechanist and positivist variants of thought. However, The Return of Nature begins precisely by questioning some assumptions about Lukács central to the departure of Western Marxism from the dialectics of nature. What conditions delayed so many findings of this importance? What were the main effects that these assumptions had on Marxism, particularly in relation to ecology?

    JBF: Maybe I can explain this somewhat through my own intellectual development. When I was an undergraduate, I studied the works of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Marx, Engels, V. I. Lenin, and Max Weber fairly extensively, as well as thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Mészáros, Ernst Cassirer, H. Stuart Hughes, and Arnold Hauser. So, when I got to graduate school, I had a pretty good general idea of the boundaries between Kantianism/neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism/Marxism. I was therefore surprised, in participating in courses on critical theory, to find that the very first proposition taught was that the dialectic did not apply to nature, based primarily on the authority of a footnote in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, where he had criticized Engels on the dialectics of nature. Only by rejecting the dialectic of nature, it was argued, could the dialectic be defined in terms of the identical subject-object of the historical process.

    Of course, Lukács himself, as he later pointed out, had never totally abandoned the notion of “merely objective dialectics” or the dialectics of nature, which he referred to elsewhere in History and Class Consciousness. Indeed, in his famous 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, Lukács, following Marx, insisted on a dialectical mediation between nature and society via labor as metabolism, and in that sense on a dialectics of nature conception. The same argument was made in his Conversations with Lukács, which I read in the early 1980s.

    It was in this context that I internalized, to some extent, at a practical level, without ever fully embracing, the Western Marxist philosophical notion that the dialectic was applicable only to the human historical realm and not to nature (or natural science), which was given over to mechanism or positivism. I came to see the historical dialectic in terms of the Vician principle that we can understand history because we have made it, as advanced by Marxist historian E. P. Thompson—even though I recognized that, at a deeper level, this was not entirely satisfactory because human beings do not make history alone, but do so in conjunction with the universal metabolism of nature of which human society is an emergent part. But my interests in the 1980s were mainly geared toward political economy and history, where such issues seldom arose. As far as the human historical realm was concerned, it was easy enough to bracket the question of the dialectics of nature.

    It was when I turned more directly to the question of ecology in the late 1980s and ’90s that this problem became unavoidable. The dialectics of nature could only consistently be set aside on idealist or mechanical materialist grounds. Still, in writing Marx’s Ecology, I consciously avoided, for the most part, any explicit, detailed consideration of the dialectics of nature in relation to Marx, given the complexity of the issues, which I was not then prepared to address, though clearly Marx’s concept of social metabolism took him in that direction. Thus, in the epilogue to Marx’s Ecology, I simply referred to Marx’s reference to the “dialectical method” as the way of dealing with the “free movement of matter,” and how this was part of the inheritance he had taken from Epicurus and other earlier materialists, mediated by his studies of Hegel. As an epistemological approach, I indicated, this could be defended as heuristically equivalent to the role that teleology played for human cognition in Kant. But the wider ontological question of “so-called objective dialectics,” as this appeared in Engels (and in Lukács), and its relation to Marx, was mostly avoided (left implicit) in my book.

    I did not address the dialectics of nature explicitly in any detail until 2008, in a chapter that I wrote for a book on dialectics edited by Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (later included in The Ecological Rift). Here, I was still caught in what I called “the Lukács problem,” even if I understood that, for the later Lukács, Marx’s metabolism argument offered a broad pathway out of the whole epistemological-ontological dilemma. (While another pathway, I argued, was to be found in what Marx had called the “dialectic of sensuous certitude” represented by the materialism of Epicurus, Francis Bacon, and Ludwig Feuerbach, and incorporated into Marx’s early work). Yet, my approach there, even if arguably a step forward, was in various ways inadequate. Part of the difficulty, as I came to understand it, lay in the philosophical limitations (and at the same time much greater scientific scope) of a materialist dialectic, which could never be a closed, circular system as in Hegel’s idealist philosophy—or a totalizing system consisting exclusively of internal relations and windowless monads. The dialectic for Marx was open, not closed, as was the case for the physical world itself.

    The question of the dialectics of nature was to be central to The Return of Nature. One element was the study of the later Lukács, particularly The Young Hegel and the Ontology of Social Being. A key factor here was Lukács’s treatment of Hegel’s reflection determinations, which helped me understand the way in which Engels’s dialectical naturalism had been inspired to a considerable extent by the Doctrine of Essence in Hegel’s Logic. Another element affecting my views, going back to Marx’s Ecology, was the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar, especially his Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. But at the heart of my project in The Return of Nature was the close scrutiny of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature itself (as well as Lenin’s philosophical writings), which had untold depth. This allowed me to chart the influence that Engels exerted on subsequent thinkers—most notably, in terms of the dialectics of nature problem itself, on Needham, Christopher Caudwell, and Lindsay. In addition, William Morris in the arts and Haldane, Bernal, Hogben, and Levy in the sciences offered a variety of powerful insights into dialectical and materialist ecology.

    AP: Lukács also noted how the division of alienated labor served to increase the disciplinary divisions of knowledge according to the needs of functional specialization of capital. As a philosophy of praxis, Marxism is proposed as a totalizing project, among other things, to recompose the many varied rifts that capitalism had expanded or imposed: nature and society, but also science and art. A central theme of your new book is the existence of parallel approaches to ecology and socialism in science and art. How did these links contribute to materialist ecosocialist thought? And how can they help us rethink this interaction in relation to ecology and the ecosocial crisis we face?

    JBF: In writing The Return of Nature, Morris’s statement in News from Nowhere that there were two insurmountable forms of knowledge, the sciences and the arts, was constantly on my mind. All of the Marxist thinkers concerned with ecology crossed these boundaries in various ways, so the parallel developments had to be examined in any genealogical-historical account. Clearly, the analytical development of ecology as a science and its relation to the dialectics of nature evolved mainly through the scientific stream. But it was hardly possible to isolate this from socialist aesthetics.

    Thus, Lankester was friends with Morris and the pre-Raphaelites. Hogben took the main inspiration for his socialism from Morris. In Morris, we find an analysis rooted in the conception that all unalienated work contains art, a notion he drew from John Ruskin, but to which he added depth via Marx. Morris also reproduced independently of Marx the notion of the social character of all art. Caudwell brilliantly captured both the aesthetic and scientific strands of the overall ecological critique. His aesthetics drew on the concept of mimesis based in Aristotle and in the radical British classical tradition of the Cambridge ritualists represented by Jane Harrison, which Caudwell then merged with materialist dialectics. Caudwell’s powerful approach led to George Thomson’s extraordinary analyses of the origins of poetry and drama.

    This whole aesthetic-ecological development on the left culminated with the Australian Marxist Jack Lindsay, who due to his enormous range of classical, literary, philosophical, and scientific studies was to bring together notions on the dialectics of nature, drawing on both aesthetics and science. It is no accident that thinkers like Lukács, Mészáros, and Thompson thought so highly of Lindsay, whose work is not sufficiently valued, perhaps because navigating his corpus of 170 volumes, extending from the ancient classics to literature, poetry, history, and the philosophy of science is simply too daunting.

    AP: Engels is a key character in your new book. For a long time, within certain Marxisms, Engels was accused of having vulgarized Marx’s thought, but you point out the relevance and complexity of Engels’s dialectical materialism for a social and ecological critique of capitalism. Although increasingly recognized, you can still find a certain disdain for Engels and for his work’s ties to Marx. How did this happen? How do we contest these positions from the standpoint of Marxist ecological thought?

    JBF: I remember hearing David McClellan speak in December 1974, not long after he had written his biography on Marx. I was completely taken aback by an extraordinary tirade against Engels, which was the core of his talk. This was my first real introduction to the attacks on Engels that in so many ways came to define the Western Marxist tradition in the days of the Cold War, and which have carried over into the post-Cold War era. All of this was clearly less about Engels as a thinker than it was about the “two Marxisms,” as Alvin Gouldner called it. Western Marxism and, to a considerable extent, the academic world claimed Marx as their own, as an urbane thinker, but for the most part rejected Engels as supposedly too “crude,” casting him in the role of spoiler, as the person who had created a “Marxism” that had nothing to do with Marx, and who was thus responsible for the economism, determinism, scientism, and vulgar philosophical and political perspectives of the Second International and beyond, all the way to Stalin.

    It should not perhaps surprise us, therefore, that while we can find hundreds, even thousands, of books and articles that mention Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, there is hardly anything to be learned from them because they either treat his views in a doctrinaire way, as in much of the old official Marxism, or, in the case of the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, simply quote a few lines from Dialectics of Nature, or sometimes Anti-Dühring, so as to establish his vulgarization of Marxism. Others, like Terrell Carver, who has written extensively on Engels, devote themselves not to furthering an understanding of Engels’s work, but to the systematic severing of Engels’s work from that of Marx.

    I remember looking at Karl Padover’s Letters of Karl Marx and wondering why it felt like such an arid empty work, despite the fact that it was filled entirely with Marx’s own words. I realized it was because almost all the letters were to Engels and Engels was left out of the book, so it is a one-sided conversation, as if only Marx counted and was simply talking to himself. The Marx-Engels correspondence is definitely a two-sided conversation, and takes on much of its brilliance as a continual dialogue between these two magisterial thinkers, who together founded historical materialism.

    In terms of Marxian ecology, Engels is essential. Because as brilliant as Marx’s analysis was in this regard, we cannot afford to ignore the vast contributions of Engels to class-based epidemiology (the main subject of his Condition of the Working Class in England), to the dialectics of nature and emergence, to the critique of the conquest of nature, or to the understanding of human evolutionary development. Engel’s critical appropriation of Darwin in Anti-Dühring was fundamental to the development of evolutionary ecology. The emergentist materialism developed in Dialectics of Nature is central to a critical scientific world view.

    AP: Monthly Review has always shown great sensibility to the revolutionary struggles of the third world. Lenin’s theory of imperialism, together with that of monopoly capital by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, dependency theory (in Ruy Mauro Marini and Samir Amin, among others) and its dialogue with world-systems analysis, or the contributions of Mészáros, among many other influences, have been essential for the elaboration of your specific ecosocialist critique. Unfortunately, and to some extent in connection to the limitations of Western Marxism, the link between ecology and imperialism has been often underestimated in other Marxist and ecological currents. Some have even considered imperialism an outdated category to deal with global capitalism. Why is it that this separation between geopolitics and ecology remains so strong in certain sectors of the left? Is a different approach to these matters possible?

    JBF: In my generation in the United States, impacted by the Vietnam War and the coup in Chile, most of those drawn to Marxism came to it by way of opposing imperialism. It was partly for this reason that I was attracted early on to Monthly Review, which, practically from its birth in 1949, has been a major source of the critique of imperialism, including dependency theory and world-system analysis. Harry Magdoff’s writings on imperialism, in The Age of Imperialismand Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present are central to us, as well as work on imperialism by Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Che Guevara, Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, and a host of others. The fact that the most revolutionary perspective in the United States has historically come from the Black movement, which has always been more internationalist and anti-imperialist in its perspective, has been crucial in defining the radical U.S. left. Yet, with all of this, there have always been major social democratic figures in the United States, such as Michael Harrington, who have made their peace with U.S. imperialism. Today, some of the representatives of the new movement for “democratic socialism” regularly turn a blind eye to Washington’s ruthless interventions abroad.

    Of course, none of this is new. Variants of the conflict over imperialism within the left can be seen as far back as the early socialist movement in England. H. M. Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, and George Bernard Shaw, one of the leading Fabians, both supported the British Empire and “social imperialism.” On the other side were figures associated with the Socialist League, such as Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Engels, all of whom were anti-imperialists. It was the issue of imperialism that was most decisively to split the European socialist movement at the time of the First World War, as recounted in Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

    Within the New Left in Britain from the 1960s, imperialism was a major source of contention. Those who identified with the First New Left, such as Thompson, Ralph Miliband, and Raymond Williams, were strongly anti-imperialist, while the Second New Left, associated in particular with the New Left Review, either saw imperialism as a progressive force in history, as in the case of Bill Warren, or tended to downplay its significance altogether. The result, particularly with the rise of globalization ideology in this century, was a dramatic decline in studies of imperialism (though accompanied by growing cultural studies of colonialism and postcolonialism) in both Britain and the United States. The logical outcome of this is that a figure as influential today in the left academy as David Harvey has recently pronounced that imperialism has been “reversed,” with the West now on the losing end.

    All of this takes us to the question of the very weak performance on the left generally in developing a theory of ecological imperialism, or unequal ecological exchange. This is a product of the systematic failure to explore capitalism’s ruthless expropriation of the resources and ecology of most of the world. This is about use value, not just exchange value. Thus, the famines introduced in India under British colonial rule had to do with how the British forcibly altered the food regime in India, shifting the use values, metabolic relations, and the hydrological infrastructure essential to human survival, while also draining away India’s surplus. Although this process of ecological expropriation has long been understood by the left in India, and in much of the rest of the Global South, it is still not fully grasped by Marxists in the Global North. An exception is Mike Davis’s excellent Late Victorian Holocausts.

    Similarly, the massive expropriation of guano from Peru to fertilize European soil, which had been robbed of its nutrients (a manifestation of the metabolic rift), was to have all sorts of long-term negative developmental effects on Peru, and included the importation of Chinese laborers under conditions that were often characterized as “worse than slavery” to dig the guano. All of this was tied to what Eduardo Galeano called The Open Veins of Latin America.

    What this tells us is that the issues of ecology and imperialism have always been intimately related and are becoming more closely intertwined all the time. The Ecological Threat Register 2020 report from the Institute of Economics and Peace indicates that as many as 1.2 billion people may be displaced from their homes, becoming climate refugees, by 2050. Under such historical conditions, imperialism can no more be analyzed independently from the planetary ecological destruction that it has brought into being than the planetary ecological crisis can be addressed independently from the imperialism in which it is being played out today. This was the message that Brett Clark and I sought to convey in The Robbery of Nature, and that the two of us, together with Hannah Holleman, endeavored to explain in our article “Imperialism in the Anthropocene,” published in the July–August 2019 issue of Monthly Review. In that article, we concluded: “There can be no ecological revolution in the face of the current existential crisis unless it is an anti-imperialist one, drawing its power from the great mass of suffering humanity.… The poor shall inherit the earth or there will be no earth left to inherit.”

    AP: As we have seen, interest in Marx’s ecosocialism has grown greatly in recent decades. But, of course, this goes beyond Marx’s historical context. Why is it important for current ecological thought to return to the ideas of Marx? And what are the challenges for Marxist ecological thought today?

    JBF: Marx’s ecology is a starting point and a set of foundations, not an end point. It is in Marx’s thought above all that we find the foundations of the critique of political economy that was also a critique of capitalism’s ecological depredations. This was no accident, since Marx dialectically presented the labor process as the social metabolism (the mediation) of nature and society. In Marx, capitalism, in alienating the labor process, also alienated the metabolism between humanity and nature, thereby generating a metabolic rift. Marx took this to its logical conclusions, arguing that no one owns the earth, not even all the people in all the countries of the world own the earth, that they simply have the responsibility to care for it and, if possible, improve it for the chain of future generations as good heads of the household. He defined socialism as the rational regulation of the metabolism of humanity and nature, so as to conserve as much as possible on energy and promote full human development. There is nothing in conventional or even left green theory—however much capitalism may be questioned in part—that has this unity between ecological and economic critique, or as comprehensive a historical synthesis. Consequently, in our planetary emergency, ecosocialism has come to rest inevitably on Marx’s foundational conception. The environmental movement, if it is to matter at all, has to be ecosocialist.

    But, of course, I would not have written The Return of Nature, which focuses on the century following Marx and Darwin’s deaths, if socialist ecology simply began and ended with Marx. It is crucial to understand how socialist dialectical, materialist, and ecological perspectives developed from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century in order to grasp the historical theory and practice that feeds into today’s struggles. Our task now is not simply to linger on the past, but to pull all of this together to engage with the challenges and burdens of our historical time. Marx serves to demonstrate the essential one-ness of our political-economic-ecological contradictions and their basis in the present alienated social and ecological order. This helps us unmask the contradictions of the present. But to carry out the necessary change, we need to do so with an eye to how the past informs the present and allows us to envision necessary revolutionary action.

    The purpose of Marxian ecological thought is not merely to understand our present social and ecological contradictions, but to transcend them. Given that humanity is facing greater dangers than ever before and is on a runaway capitalist train headed over the cliff, this has to be our chief concern. Facing up to the planetary ecological emergency means we must be more revolutionary than ever before, and not be afraid to raise the question of altering society, as Marx said, “from top to bottom,” starting from where we are. The piecemeal and reformist approach of most environmentalism, which puts faith in the market and technology, while making its peace in large part with the prevailing system, with its unceasing, totalizing ecological destruction, will not work, even in the short run. There is now more than a century of socialist critique of the ecological contradictions of capitalism, which has enormous theoretical power and points to a different philosophy of praxis. In our current growing recognition that there is no choice but to leave capitalism’s burning house, we need the deeper theoretical understanding of human, social, and ecological possibility, of freedom as necessity, offered by ecological Marxism. As Doris Lessing, who appears briefly in The Return of Nature, stated in her introduction to The Golden Notebook: “Marxism looks at things as a whole and in relation to each other.” This is the revolutionary capacity we most need today.

  • Antinomies of Space and Nature or an Open Totality?: Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on Nature and Society

    Antinomies of Space and Nature or an Open Totality?: Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on Nature and Society” (coauthored with Brian M. Napoletano and Brett Clark, Foster listed second), Human Geography (published Online First, November 2022), 14 pp.

    The work of Henri Lefebvre has played a pivotal role in human geography in recent decades. At the same time, it has frequently been subject to partial and fragmented appropriations that isolate his insights on the production of space from his broader corpus, leading to confusion and misunderstanding regarding his handling of the dialectical relationships between space, time, society, and nature. In particular, Neil Smith’s claim that Lefebvre’s conceptualization of nature was both deficient and inconsistent with his dynamic conceptualization of space has tended to dominate geographical engagements with Lefebvre in this area. Following Smith, researchers generally reconstruct the production of space as an epiphenomenon of the production of nature. We critically assess and respond to Smith’s criticisms of Lefebvre. Specifically, we contrast Lefebvre’s material–dialectical approach to Smith’s production-of-nature thesis. While Smith’s thesis is helpful in understanding how capital attempts to subsume all of nature under commodity production, Lefebvre’s dialectical conceptualization of nature–society as an oppositional unity points both to the impossibility of capital subsuming all of nature and the dangers that its attempts to do so pose to human civilization (even survival). Lefebvre’s observations, regarding the growing rupture between natural processes and spatial dynamics, which he incorporates into his own elaboration of Karl Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, make his work indispensable to the development of an ecospatial critique within geography and the social sciences more generally.

  • Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene

    Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene

    Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review  vol.72, no. 6 (November 2020), pp. 1-17.

    [Spanish translation in Izquierda Diario.es, Contrapunt, November 29, 2020; Italian transltion in Di Antiper, December 3, 2020]

    A famous early photograph of Frederick Engels. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, Link.
    A famous early photograph of Frederick Engels. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, Link.

    In “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” from his Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels declared: “Everything affects and is affected by every other thing.”1 Today, two hundred years after his birth, Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times. If Karl Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift is at the heart of historical-materialist ecology today, it nonetheless remains true that Engels’s contributions to our understanding of the overall ecological problem remain indispensable, rooted in his own deep inquiries into nature’s universal metabolism, which reinforced and extended Marx’s analysis. As Paul Blackledge has stated in a recent study of Engels’s thought, “Engels’s conception of a dialectics of nature opens a place through which ecological crises” can be understood as rooted in “the alienated nature of capitalist social relations.”2It is because of the very comprehensiveness of his approach to the dialectic of nature and society that Engels’s work can help clarify the momentous challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch and the current age of planetary ecological crisis.

    Racing to Ruin

    Some intimation of the contemporary significance of Engels’s ecological critique can be gained by commencing with Walter Benjamin’s celebrated 1940 aside, often quoted by ecosocialists, from the “Paralipomena” (or side notes) to his “On the Concept of History.” There, Benjamin stated: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.” In Michael Löwy’s well-known interpretation of Benjamin’s statement: “The image suggests implicitly that if humanity were to allow the train to follow its course—already mapped out by the steel structure of the rails—and if nothing halted its headlong dash, we would be heading straight for disaster, for a crash or a plunge into the abyss.”3

    Benjamin’s dramatic image of a runaway locomotive and, hence, the necessity of conceiving of revolution as a pulling of the emergency brake, recalled a similar passage in Engels’s Anti-Dühring, written in the late 1870s, a work with which Benjamin, like all socialists in his day, was familiar. Here, Engels had indicated that the capitalist class was “a class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is too weak to open.” It was precisely capital’s inability to control “the productive forces, which have grown beyond its power,” including the destructive effects imposed on its natural and social “environs,” that was “driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution.” Hence, “if the whole of modern society is not to perish,” Engels argued, “a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place.”4

    Engels’s earlier metaphor differed slightly from Benjamin’s later one, in that the object was to open the safety valve in order to prevent a boiler explosion and crash—a fairly common cause of train wrecks in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.5 If the system can be seen as “racing to ruin,” revolution here is less about simply stopping the forward momentum than exerting control over the out-of-control forces of production. Indeed, Engels’s ecological and economic argument was not predicated, as would be the case today, on the notion that there was too much production in relation to the overall carrying capacity of the earth, a perspective that was scarcely present at the time he was writing. Instead, his chief ecological concern had to do with the wanton destruction wrought by capitalism on local and regional environments—even if on an increasingly global basis. The visible effects of this were evident in industrial pollution, deforestation, the degradation of the soil, and the general deterioration of the environmental conditions (including periodic epidemics) of the working class. Engels also pointed to the devastation of whole environments (and their climates), as in the ecological destruction that played such a big role in the fall of ancient civilizations, due mainly to desertification, and the environmental damage imposed by colonialism on traditional cultures and modes of production.6 Like Marx, Engels was deeply concerned with British colonialism’s “Victorian Holocausts,” including the generation of famine in India through the destruction of its ecology and hydrological infrastructure, and the ruinous expropriation and extermination inflicted on Ireland’s ecology and people.7

    It is true that we can also find in these same pages, in which the question “ruin or revolution” is raised, the most productivist (and, in this sense, seemingly Promethean) passage to be found anywhere in Marx and Engels’s works.8 Thus, Engels declared in Anti-Dühring that the advent of socialism would make possible the “constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and…a practically unlimited increase of production itself.”9 However, in the context in which Engels was writing, this presents no particular contradiction. The view that a future society, released from the irrationality of capitalist production would allow for what, by nineteenth-century standards, would have seemed like an almost unlimited development of production was of course practically universal among radical thinkers at the time. This was a natural reflection of the still low level of material development in most of the world at the time of the Industrial Revolution, when set against the still immeasurably vast scale of the earth itself. World manufacturing production was to increase by “about 1,730 times” in the hundred and fifty years between 1820, when Engels was born, at the time of the early nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, and 1970, when the modern ecological movement was born, at the time of the first Earth Day.10 Moreover, in Engels’s analysis (as in Marx’s), production was never viewed as an end in itself, but rather as a mere means to the creation of a freer and more equal society, dedicated to a process of sustainable human development.11

    Two centuries after his birth, the depth of Engels’s understanding of the systematic nature of capitalism’s destruction of the natural and social environment, together with his development of a dialectical naturalist perspective, makes it, along with Marx’s work, a starting point for a revolutionary ecosocialist critique today. As Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock noted, Engels, in the Dialectics of Nature, sought to develop the conceptual basis for understanding “the complete interdependence of human social relations and human relations to nature.”12

    The Revenge of Nature

    Ecological problems are the product of the interrelation of system and scale. In Engels’s analysis, it is system that is emphasized above all. In his great work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, written while he was still in his early twenties, he focused on the destructive environmental and epidemiological conditions of the Industrial Revolution in the large manufacturing towns, particularly Manchester. He highlighted the horrendous ecological conditions imposed on workers by the new industrial factory system, evident in pollution, toxic contamination, physical deterioration, periodic epidemics, poor nutrition, and high working-class mortality, all associated with extreme economic exploitation. The Condition of the Working Class in England remains unique in its powerful indictment of the “social murder” inflicted by capitalism on the underlying population at the time of the Industrial Revolution.13 Marx, for whom Engels’s book was the starting point for his own epidemiological studies in Capital, was on this basis to designate “periodical epidemics,” along with the destruction of the soil, as evidence of capitalism’s metabolic rift. In Germany, Engels’s treatment of the etiology of disease in The Condition of the Working Class in England exercised an influence that extended well beyond socialist circles. Rudolf Virchow, the German doctor and pathologist, famous as the author of Cellular Pathology, referred favorably to Engels’s book in his own pioneering work in social epidemiology.14

    This understanding of the material conditions of capitalist class society as environmental, as well as economic, was evident in all of Engels’s work. Moreover, in constantly seeking to merge materialist and dialectical perspectives of nature and society, Engels eventually arrived at the thesis that “nature,” of which human beings were an emergent part, was the “proof of dialectics”—a statement that today is better understood if we say that ecology is the proof of dialectics.15

    In Engels’s developed evolutionary-ecological perspective, evident in his mature works such as The Dialectics of Nature and Anti-Dühring, what distinguished human beings from nonhuman animals was the role of labor in transforming and mastering the environment, making it possible for “man” to become the “real, conscious, lord of nature, because he now [in a future society] becomes master of his own social organisation.”16 Nevertheless, along with this tendency toward greater mastery of nature in some respects, already exhibited under capitalism, was concealed a systematic tendency toward expanding ecological crises, since all attempts at the conquest of nature in defiance of natural laws of limits could only lead, in the end, to ecological catastrophes. This could be seen first and foremost in the mid–nineteenth century in the ecological devastation unleashed by colonialism. As he exclaimed:

    What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very profitable coffee trees—what cared they that the heavy tropical rain afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only with the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the often remote effects of actions to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.17

    For Engels, the starting point for a rational approach to the environment was to be found in Francis Bacon’s famous maxim that “nature is only overcome by obeying her”—that is, by discovering and conforming to her laws.18 Yet, in Marx and Engels’s view, the Baconian principle, to the extent that it was applied in bourgeois society, was primarily treated as a “ruse” for conquering nature so as to bring it under capital’s laws of accumulation and competition.19 Science was made into a mere appendage of profit making, viewing nature’s boundaries as mere barriers to be surmounted. Instead, the rational application of science in society as a whole was only possible in a system in which the associated producers regulated the human metabolic relation to nature on an unalienated basis, in accordance with genuine human needs and potentials and the requirements of long-term reproduction. This pointed to the contradiction between, on the one hand, science’s own dialectic, which more and more recognized our “oneness with nature” and the associated need for social control, and, on the other hand, capitalism’s myopic drive to accumulation ad infinitum, with its innate uncontrollability and neglect of environmental consequences.20

    It was this deep, critical-materialist perspective that led Engels to stress the senselessness of the prevailing notion of the conquest of nature—as if nature were a foreign territory to be subjected at will, and as if humanity did not exist in the midst of the earth’s metabolism. Such an attempt to conquer the earth could only lead to what he referred to, metaphorically, as the “revenge” of nature, as various critical thresholds (or tipping points) were crossed:

    Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.… Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.21

    Through conscious action in accord with rational science, human beings were capable of rising to a considerable extent above “the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces,” perceiving “the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature.” Yet, even with respect to “the most developed peoples of the present day,” there could be seen to be “a colossal disproportion between the proposed aims and the results arrived at,” such “that unforeseen effects predominate and…the uncontrolled forces are more powerful than those set in motion according to plan.” Class-based commodity economies achieved “the desired end only by way of exception,” more often producing “the exact opposite.” Hence, a rational, scientific, and sustainable approach to the human relation to nature and society under capitalism was impossible.22

    It is significant that this same general standpoint on capitalism and ecology articulated by Engels was to be echoed a few decades later by Ray Lankester, who was Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley’s protégé, Marx’s close friend (and Engel’s acquaintance), and the leading British biologist in the generation after Darwin. Lankester was a Fabian-style socialist who had read and been influenced by Marx’s Capital. In his 1911 book, The Kingdom of Man—which brought together his 1905 Romanes lecture at Oxford, “Nature’s Insurgent Son,” his 1906 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and his article “Nature’s Revenges” focusing on the African sleeping sickness—Lankester insisted that the growing human dominion over the earth was giving rise, in contradictory fashion, to an increased potential for planetary-scale ecological disasters. Thus, in his chapter on “Nature’s Revenges,” he referred to humanity as the “disturber of Nature” and thus as the creator of periodic epidemic diseases threatening humanity along with other species. “It seems to be a legitimate view,” Lankester wrote, “that every disease to which animals [including the human animal] (and probably plants also), are liable, excepting as a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to Man’s interference.”23 Moreover, this could be traced to a system dominated by “markets” and “cosmopolitan dealers in finance” who undermined any rational and scientific approach to reconcile nature and human production.24 Lankester was later to develop this argument further, writing systematically on “The Effacement of Nature by Man.”25

    Like the later Marx and Engels, Lankester saw the “Kingdom of Man” as ushering in a permanent ecological knife-edge state for humanity, engendered by capitalism, that would, if natural conditions were trampled over by rapacious capital accumulation, lead to catastrophic human environmental decline. If it were not to destroy the very bases of its existence, humanity therefore had no choice but to control its production, superseding the narrow dictates of capital accumulation and adopting the dictates of a rational science in line with coevolutionary development.

    The Dialectics of Nature and History

    Engels’s ecological insights are inseparable from his inquiries into the dialectics of nature from which they arose. Yet, the very first principle of what came to be known as the philosophical tradition of Western Marxism was that the dialectic could not be said to apply to external nature, that is, there was no such thing as what Engels referred to as “so-called objectivedialectics” beyond the active realm of the human subject.26 Dialectical relations, and even the objects of dialectical reasoning, were thus confined to the human-historical sphere, where the identical subject-object could be said to apply, since all nonreflexive (transfactual) reality outside of human consciousness and human action was excluded from the analysis.27 But with the complete rejection of the dialectics of nature within the Western Marxist tradition, the extraordinary power of Engels’s explorations in this area and the enormous influence they exerted on evolutionary and ecological thought within the natural sciences and on Marxism were lost, except to a relatively small number of left scientists and dialectical materialists. Unable to see dialectics as related to material nature, the Western Marxist philosophical tradition tended to relegate both natural science and external nature itself to the realm of mechanism and positivism. The result was to create a deep chasm between the dominant post-Second World War conception of Marxian philosophy in the West and natural science (and between Western Marxism and the materialist conception of nature) at the very moment, ironically, that the ecological movement was emerging as a major political force.28

    Restoring the insights of classical historical materialism in this area thus requires the recovery, at some level, of Engels’s conception of the dialectics of nature.29 This requires, in turn, rejecting superficial and often poorly conceived summary dismissals of Engels’s approach to the dialectics of nature, usually polemicizing against his three broad dialectical “laws” that he derived from G. W. F. Hegel and to which he gave new materialist significance: (1) the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, (2) the identity or unity of opposites, and (3) the negation of the negation.30 In writing on “Engels’s Philosophy of Science,” Peter T. Manicas, for example, has complained of the “very nearly vacuous” nature of these laws.31 Yet, in Engels’s analysis, these were not meant as narrow, fixed laws in the positivistic sense, but, rather, in today’s terminology, as broad, dialectically conceived “ontological principles,” equivalent to such basic propositions as the principle of the uniformity of nature, the principle of the perpetuity of substance, and the principle of causality. In fact, Engels’s approach to dialectics challenged in various ways the understanding of these very same principles as they were advanced by the science of his day.32

    Perhaps the most succinct and penetrating assessment of Engels’s contributions to the dialectics of nature provided by a natural scientist can be found in a 1936 pamphlet entitled Engels as a Scientist by the celebrated Marxist scientist J. D. Bernal, professor of physics and x-ray crystallography at Birkbeck College, University of London. Bernal depicted Engels as a philosopher and historian of science, one who could not “be said to have been an amateur” given the range of the scientific contacts he had developed in Manchester, and who had reached a level of analysis that far exceeded that of the professional philosophers of science of his day, such as Herbert Spencer and William Whewell in England and Friedrich Lange in Germany.33 Behind Engels’s deep understanding of the historical development of science in his time, according to Bernal, was a dialectical perception in which the “concept of nature was always as a whole and as a process.”34 In this, Engels had borrowed critically from Hegel, recognizing that behind the latter’s idealist presentation of dialectical change in his Logic were processes that could be said to inhere objectively in nature, as captured in human cognition.

    In addressing the first of the three dialectical “laws” or ontological principles that Engels had drawn from Hegel—how changes in quantity can lead to qualitative transformations and its opposite—Bernal emphasized its essential character for natural scientific thought. “With remarkable insight, Engels says:—‘The so-called constants of physics are for the most part nothing but designations of nodal points where quantitative addition or withdrawal of motion calls forth a qualitative change in the state of the body in question’.… We are only now beginning to appreciate the essential justice of these remarks and the significance of such nodal points.” In this regard, Bernal stressed Engels’s reference to Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table as exemplary of qualitative transformations arising from continuous quantitative changes, as well as the relation of Engels’s basic notions to discoveries associated with the rise of quantum theory.35 Engels’s approach, as the British Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy indicated, pointed to the concept of “phase change” as employed in modern physics.36

    Today, we know that this dialectical principle holds for biology as well. For example, increasing population density of microorganisms (a quantitative increase) can cause a change in genetic expression, leading to the formation of something new (a qualitative change). As bacterial populations increase, the signals (chemicals) emitted by each organism accumulate to a level that activates genes, leading to the production of a mucilaginous biofilm phase in which the organisms become embedded. Biofilms may be composed of a number of organisms and attach organisms to almost any surface, from water pipes to rocks in streams to teeth to soil roots.37

    Engels’s second law, the interpenetration of opposites, was more difficult to define in an operational sense, but still of supreme importance for scientific inquiry. In Bernal’s explanation, this stood for two related principles: (1) “everything implies its opposite” and (2) there were “no hard and fast lines in nature.” Engels illustrated the latter point by referring to Lankester’s famous discovery that the horseshoe crab (Limulus) was an arachnid, part of the spider and scorpion family, a revelation that had startled the scientific world and threw previous biological classifications askew.38 In his application of this dialectical principle to physics and to the question of matter and movement (or energy), Bernal contended, “Engels approached very close to the modern ideas of relativity.”39 Engels’s notion of the unity of opposites is often seen in today’s Marxian dialectics in terms of the role of internal relations, in which at least one of the relata is dependent on the other.40 As Engels himself observed, the recognition that mechanical relations with “their imagined rigidity and absolute validity have been introduced into nature only by our reflective minds…is the kernel of the dialectical conception of nature.”41

    The negation of the negation, Engel’s third informal dialectical law, which, as Bernal noted, seemed so paradoxical in mere words, was meant to convey that, in the course of its historical development or evolution over time, anything within the objective world is bound to generate something different, a new emergent reality, representing new material relations and emergent levels, often through the action of recessive factors or residual elements, previously overcome, that still inhere in the present. Material existence as a whole could be seen as leading to a hierarchy of organizational levels, while transformative change often meant the shift from one organizational level to another, as in the seed to the plant.42

    The development of what are called “emergent properties” is now considered a basic biological and ecological concept. In an ecological context, it occurs when communities of species interact in ways that produce new characteristics, mostly unpredicted, arising from the behavior of the individual species in the community.43 A four-acre farm field with a mixture of four different species (a polyculture) may lead to higher total yield than four acres devoted to only growing each of the individual species separately. This can occur for a variety of reasons: for example, better use of sunlight and water, and decreased insect damage in the polyculture field.

    Coevolution of organisms also produces new properties. For example, over evolutionary time, insects feeding on plant leaves lead to the development of numerous defense mechanisms in plants. These include producing chemicals that inhibit the insect’s feeding and emitting chemicals that recruit organisms (frequently small wasps) that lay their eggs in the insect, which is then killed as the eggs develop. But the back and forth continues. In at least one instance, that of the tomato hornworm caterpillar, the wasp has also to inject a virus that deactivates the caterpillar’s immune system to enable the wasp’s eggs to develop. Evolution is constantly creating something different, sometimes dramatically, as organisms interact. In some cases, this leads to fundamental changes in whole ecosystems and the rise of new dominant species in particular environments. As Engels wrote, emergence, in the sense of “the negation of the negation, really does take place in both [plant and animal] kingdoms of the natural world.”44

    As a historian of science, Engels, according to Bernal, was remarkable in his insights into the three great scientific revolutions of the nineteenth century: (1) thermodynamics—the laws of the conservation and interchangeability of forms of energy, and of entropy; (2) the analysis of the organic cell and the development of physiology; and (3) Darwin’s theory of evolution based on natural selection by innate variation.45 As Ilya Prigogine, winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was later to observe, Engels’s great insight was to recognize that these three revolutions in physical science “rejected the mechanistic worldview” and drew “closer to the idea of an historical development of nature.”46

    In Bernal’s account, among Engels’s concerns was the pursuit of “the synthesis of all the processes affecting life, animal ecology, and [biological] distribution.”47 What made this synthesis possible was his conception of dialectical movement and change, emphasizing the complexity of material interactions and the introduction of new emergent powers, in a process of origin, development, and decline. “The central idea in Dialectical Materialism,” Bernal declared, “is that of transformation.… The essential task of the materialist dialectic is the explanation of the qualitatively new,” uncovering the conditions governing the emergence of a new “organizational hierarchy.”48

    In this respect, Engels’s pioneering achievement was to utilize his dialectical conception of nature to throw light on all four materialist problems of “origin” that remained after Darwin: (1) the origin of the universe (which Engels insisted was a self-origin as envisioned in the nebular hypothesis of Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace); (2) the origin of life (in which Engels refuted Justus von Liebig’s and Hermann Helmholtz’s notion of the eternity of life and pointed instead to a chemical origin focusing on the complex of chemicals underlying the protoplasm, particularly proteins); (3) the origin of human society (in which Engels went further than any other thinker of his time in explaining the evolution of the hand and tools through labor, and with them the brain and language, anticipating later discoveries in paleoanthropology); and (4) the origin of the family (in which he explained the original matrilineal basis of the family and the rise of the patriarchal family with private property).49

    In this way, Engels, Bernal insisted, had anticipated or prefigured many of the developments in materialist science. “Engels, who welcomed the principle of the conversion of one form of energy into another, would equally have welcomed the transformation of matter into energy. Motion as the mode of existence of matter [Engels’s great postulate] would here acquire its final truth.”50 As Bernal noted elsewhere, Engels “saw more clearly than most distinguished physicists of his time the importance of energy and its inseparability from matter. No change in matter, he declared, could occur without a change in energy, and vice versa.… [The] substitution of motion for force which Engels battles for throughout was the starting-point of Einstein’s own criticism of mechanics.”51

    Yet, it was the broad perspective on ecology emanating from Engels’s dialectics that constituted the most critical insight of the Dialectics of Nature and is the reason why a return to Engels’s way of reasoning remains so important. As Bernal argued, one of Engels’s crucial contributions was his critique of notions of the absolute human conquest of nature. Engels had powerfully diagnosed the failure of human society, and particularly of the capitalist mode of production, to foresee the ecological consequences of its actions, tracing “the effects of undesired physical consequences of human interference with nature such as cutting down forests and the spreading of deserts.”52

    Other leading British socialist scientists of the 1930s and ’40s were equally impressed by Engels’s ecological warnings. For the great biochemist and science historian Joseph Needham, Engels could be described as someone for “whom nothing escaped.” Engels thus pointed out that, in Needham’s words, “a time may some day come when the struggle of mankind against the adverse conditions of life on our planet will have become so severe that further social evolution will become impossible,” referring to the eventual extinction of the human species.53For Needham, such a critical standpoint, which rejected the crude hypothesis of linear progress, also served to illuminate the extraordinary waste and ecological destruction of capitalist society—where coffee was grown to feed locomotive fireboxes. This raised the question of a “thermodynamic interpretation of justice” since the alienation of nature (including the alienation of energy), as Engels had intimated, was “squandering” real human possibilities in the present and future.54

    Biologist J. B. S. Haldane—one of the two leading British figures (along with R. A. Fisher) in the neo-Darwinian synthesis, reconciling Darwinian biology with the revolution in genetics—saw Engels as “the chief source” of materialist dialectics. Comparing Engels to Charles Dickens in relation to the Industrial Revolution, Haldane emphasized that Engels saw deeper and further. “Dickens had a first-hand knowledge of these conditions [of poverty and pollution]. He described them with burning indignation and in great detail. But his attitude was one of pity rather than hope. Engels saw the misery and the degradation of the workers, but he saw through it. Dickens never suggested that if they were to be saved they must save themselves. Engels saw that this was not only desirable but inevitable.”55

    The recognition of the importance of Engels’s dialectics of nature has extended into our own times. Harvard biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin were to dedicate their now classic work The Dialectical Biologist to Engels, drawing heavily, if somewhat critically at points, on his analysis.56 Levins and Lewontin’s Harvard colleague, paleontologist and evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, was to observe that Engels provided the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture coevolution—that is, the best explanation of human evolution in Darwin’s own lifetime, given that gene-culture coevolution is the form that all coherent theories of human evolution must take.57

    It was Engels’s development of a dialectics of emergence that was ultimately to prove most revolutionary. The significance of this perspective—ontologically, epistemologically, methodologically—was captured by Needham in his own pathbreaking analysis of “integrative levels” (or emergence) in Time, the Refreshing River (a title that referred back to the great ancient materialist, Heraclitus):

    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 organisation, 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 organisational levels is complete. Nothing but energy (as we now call matter and motion) and the levels of organisation (or the stabilised dialectical syntheses) at different levels have been required for the building of our world.58

    Engels in the Anthropocene

    It is widely recognized in contemporary science (though not yet official) that the Holocene epoch in geological time, extending back almost twelve thousand years, has come to an end, beginning in the 1950s, displaced by the current Anthropocene epoch. The onset of the Anthropocene was brought about by a Great Acceleration in the anthropogenic impacts on the environment, such that the scale of the human economy has now come to rival the major biogeochemical cycles of the planet itself, resulting in rifts in the planetary boundaries that define the Earth System as a safe home for humanity.59 The Anthropocene thus stands for what Lankester had earlier called the “Kingdom of Man,” in the critical sense in which this was meant: that is, humanity was increasingly the “disturber” of the natural environment on a planetary scale. Hence, society had no choice but to seek the rational application of science, and thus the overturning of a social order in which science has been relegated to a mere means by which “treasure and luxury are opened to capitalists.”60 What this meant, in Engels’s (and Marx’s) more forceful terms, was that the condition for the rational regulation of the metabolism between humanity and nature, and hence the rational application of science, was the transformation of the mode of production and distribution. Any other course invited the accumulation of catastrophe.61

    It is in the Anthropocene that Engels’s dialectic of ecology can be seen as finally coming into its own. It is here that his emphasis on the interdependence of everything in existence, the unity of opposites, internal relations, discontinuous change, emergent evolution, the reality of ecosystem and climate destruction, and the critique of linear notions of progress can all be seen as essential to the very future of humanity and the earth as we know it. Engels was acutely aware that in modern scientific conceptions “the whole of nature also is now merged in history, and history is only differentiated from natural history as the evolutionary process of self-conscious organisms.”62 Insofar as humanity was alienated from its own labor and production process, and therefore from its metabolism with nature, this could only mean the destruction of nature as well as society. The quantitative growth of capital led to a qualitative transformation of the human relation to the earth itself, which only a society of associated producers could rationally address. This was related to the fact that a particular qualitative mode of production (such as capitalism) was associated with a specific matrix of quantitative demands, while a qualitatively transformed mode of production (as in socialism) could lead to a very different quantitative matrix.

    Engels argued that capitalism was “squandering” the world’s natural resources, including fossil fuels.63 He indicated that urban pollution, desertification, deforestation, exhaustion of the soil, and (regional) climate change were all the result of unplanned, uncontrolled, destructive forms of production, most evident in the capitalist commodity economy. In line with Marx, and Liebig, he pointed to London’s enormous sewage problem as a manifestation of the metabolic rift, which removed the nutrients from the soil and shipped them one-way to the overcrowded cities where they became a source of pollution.64 He underscored the class basis of the spread of the periodic epidemics of smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and other contagious diseases that were affecting the environmental conditions of the working class, along with poor nutrition, overwork, exposure to toxics at work, and workplace injuries of all kinds. He highlighted, based on the new science of thermodynamics, that historical ecological change was irreversible and that humanity’s own survival was ultimately in question.65 In terms of the current relations of production and the environment, he wrote of a society faced with ruin or revolution. The social murder of workers in urban environments and the famines in colonial Ireland and India were seen as indications of the extreme exploitation, ecological degradation, and even wholesale extermination of populations just below the surface of capitalist society.66

    On all these bases, Engels, like Marx, argued that the human metabolism with nature should be regulated by associated producers in conformity to (or in coevolution with) nature’s laws as understood by science, while fulfilling individual and collective needs. Such a rational application of science, however, was impossible under capitalism. Nor was development itself controllable under capitalism, since it was based on immediate, individual gain. To implement a comprehensive, rational scientific approach in line with human needs and sustainable environmental conditions required a society in which a system of long-term planning in the interest of the chain of human generations could be put into operation.67

    Implicit in Engels’s analysis from the very beginning was a notion of what we can call the environmental proletariat. Thus, while capitalism was concerned with the “political economy of capital,” the working class in its most oppressed and also in its most radical phases was concerned with the entirety of existence, always starting from elemental needs. To call the objectives of workers a “political economy of the working class,” as Marx once did, may not be wrong, but it would be more correct in today’s terminology to say that workers, in their more revolutionary struggles, are primarily striving to create a new political ecology of the working class, concerned with their whole environment and basic living conditions, which can only be achieved on a communal basis.68 It was this that was captured so well in Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, where he systematically exposed the pollution of air and water, the contaminated sewers, the adulterated food, the lack of nutrition, the toxics at work, the frequent injuries, and the high morbidity and mortality of the working class—and saw the struggle for socialism as the only genuine way forward.

    Indeed, The Condition of the Working Class in England raised issues that are now once again coming to the fore in the Anthropocene. For Marx, Engels’s youthful work was to exert an enduring influence leading him to designate “periodical epidemics” as a manifestation of the metabolic rift alongside the destruction of the soil. Many pages of Capital were devoted simply to attempting to update Engels’s epidemiological analysis decades later.69 Today, in the context of the pandemic represented by COVID-19, these insights take on a renewed importance as a place from which to begin in the long revolution for an ecosocialist world.70 Yet, to bring such analyses forward, it is necessary to explore a dialectical science (and art) rooted in a conception of the complex “oneness” of humanity and nature.

    All Things Are Sold

    Engels admired the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom he considered a “genius.” He wrote in his youth of “a tenderness and originality in the depiction of nature such as only Shelley can achieve.”71 In the opening stanzas of Shelley’s Mont Blanc, we find a materialist dialectics of nature and mind not unlike Engels’s own:

    The everlasting universe of things
    Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
    Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
    Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
    The source of human thought its tribute brings
    Of waters—with a sound but half its own72

    Like Shelley, who in Queen Mab wrote of bourgeois society’s alienation of nature along with love—“All things are sold: the very light of Heaven / Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love”—Engels saw the deep need for the reconciliation of humanity with nature, which only a revolution could bring.73

    Notes

    1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 459.
    2. Paul Blackledge, Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 16.
    3. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402; Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (London: Verso, 2001), 66–67.
    4. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 145–46, 153, 270; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 142.
    5. Locomotive boiler explosions due to defective and maladjusted safety valves were common in the mid–nineteenth century. Locomotive engineers under time pressures often wedged or fastened down the safety valves, thereby jamming the safety valves on the train, which did not open, or which they were unable physically to open in time. See Christian H. Hewison, Locomotive Boiler Explosions (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1983), 11, 18–19, 36, 49, 54–56, 82, 85, 110.
    6. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 459; John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 5–7; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) IV/31 (Amsterdam: Akadamie Verlag, 1999), 512–15.
    7. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 167; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) IV/18 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), 670–74, 731 (excerpts by Marx); Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001); Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question.
    8. On the notion of extreme productivism and, in this sense, Prometheanism, as well as its almost complete absence in Marx and Engels’s thought, see John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 226–29.
    9. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 269. For Marx and Engels, it should be noted, productive forces refer to more than simply technology. Thus, Marx insisted that the most important instrument or force of production was human beings themselves. Hence, expansion of the forces of production meant the expansion of human productive skills and powers. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 211; Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 59.
    10. Walt Rostow, The World Economy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 47-48, 659–62.
    11. On sustainable human development as a framework governing both Marx’s and Engels’s thought, see Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” Monthly Review57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34–62.
    12. Eleanor Leacock, introduction to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 245.
    13. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4, 394, 407; Ian Angus, “Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder,” Monthly Review 70, no. 3 (July–August 2018): 38; John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 182–95.
    14. Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness (New York: Free Press, 1983), 71–72.
    15. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 23; Foster, The Return of Nature, 254.
    16. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 270.
    17. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 463–64.
    18. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 29, 43.
    19. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461; Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 409–10.
    20. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.
    21. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 460–61.
    22. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 330–31, 461.
    23. Ray Lankester, The Kingdom of Man (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1911), 1–4, 26, 31–33; Foster, The Return of Nature, 61–64.
    24. Lankester, The Kingdom of Man, 31; Joseph Lester, Ray Lankester and the Making of Modern British Biology (Oxford: British Society for the History of Science, 1995), 163–64.
    25. Ray Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1913), 365–69.
    26. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 492. The criticism of Engels on the dialectics of nature had its origins in footnote 6 of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, though Lukács, as he later explained, never fully abandoned the notion of a “merely objective dialectics” and was to promote such a naturalistic dialectic, based on Marx more than Engels, in his later thought. Nevertheless, the rejection of the dialectics of nature became axiomatic for Western Marxism beginning in the 1920s, taking a stronger hold in the post-Second World War period. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 24, 207. See also Russell Jacoby, “Western Marxism,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 523–26; Foster, The Return of Nature, 11–22. On the general conflict regarding Engels within contemporary Marxism, see Blackledge, Frederick Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory, 1–20.
    27. As Roy Bhaskar has argued, the necessity to consider the intransitive or the realm of transfactuality establishes the distinction between the epistemological and the ontological, against the tendency within much of contemporary philosophy, including the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, to promote the epistemological fallacy, characteristic of idealism, in which ontology is subsumed within epistemology. Adherence to the epistemological fallacy would make any consistent materialism or natural science impossible. Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), 397, 399–400, 405.
    28. This can be seen in Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx, published in 1962, the same year as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Schmidt’s work, a product of the Frankfurt School (influenced particularly by his mentors Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno) for the most part denied the dialectics of nature and any reconciliation of humanity with nature on the very cusp of the emergence of the modern environmental movement. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: Verso, 1970).
    29. This and the following six paragraphs are adapted from Foster, The Return of Nature, 379–81.
    30. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 356.
    31. Peter T. Manicas, “Engels’s Philosophy of Science,” in Engels After Marx, ed. Manfred B. Steger and Terrell Carver (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), 77.
    32. Craig Dilworth, “Principles, Laws, Theories, and the Metaphysics of Science,” Synthese 101, no. 2 (1994): 223–47. The principle of uniformity (or uniformitarianism), most closely associated with Charles Lyell, was challenged by Darwin’s concept of evolution, though Darwin’s gradualism downplayed the conflict. Stephen Jay Gould and paleontologist Niles Eldredge were to challenge uniformitarianism much more radically in their theory of punctuated equilibrium in the 1980s. See Richard York and Brett Clark, The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 28, 40–42. The traditional notion of the perpetuation of substance was challenged in Engels’s day by the development of the concept of energy in physics. In relation to both of these ontological principles and the principle of causality, where he addressed the complex interchange of cause and effect, Engels’s dialectical “laws” or ontological principles not only captured the revolutionary changes taking place in the science of his day, but in various ways prefigured later discoveries. On Engels’s views of causality, see Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 510.
    33. D. Bernal, Engels and Science (London: Labour Monthly Pamphlets, 1936), 1–2.
    34. Bernal, Engels and Science, 5.
    35. Bernal, Engels and Science, 5–7; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 359 (translation follows Bernal).
    36. Hyman Levy, A Philosophy for a Modern Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), 30–32, 117, 227–28.
    37. This paragraph was written by Fred Magdoff. See also Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 215.
    38. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 326, 507; E. Ray Lankester, “Limulus an Arachnid,” Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science 2 (1881): 504–48, 609–49; Foster, The Return of Nature, 56, 249.
    39. Bernal, Engels and Science, 7–8, J. D. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism, by Hyman Levy et al. (London: Watts and Co., 1934), 107–8.
    40. Bernal, Engels and Science, 7; Foster, The Return of Nature, 242.
    41. Bernal, Engels and Science, 7; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 14.
    42. All three of Engels’s informal laws of dialectics can be seen as related to emergence, particularly the first and the third. Engels’s third informal law, negation of the negation, as Roy Bhaskar argued in Dialectics: Pulse of Freedom, “raises the issue of absenting absences and the reassertion of lost or negated elements of reality. Bernal developed an analysis of the negation of the negation in terms of the role of residuals that reemerge and transform relations through complex evolutionary processes.” Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), 150–52, 377–78; Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” 103–4.
    43. This and the following paragraph were drafted nearly in their entirety by Fred Magdoff.
    44. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 126.
    45. Bernal, Engels and Science, 8–10; Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), 65–69.
    46. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984), 252–53.
    47. Bernal, Engels and Science, 4.
    48. Bernal, “Dialectical Materialism,” 90, 102, 107, 112–17.
    49. Bernal, Engels and Science, 10–12. With respect to Engels on the origins of life, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin wrote that “dialectical materialism has focused [necessarily] mostly on some selected aspects of realty. At times we have emphasized the materiality of life against vitalism, as when Engels said that life was the motion of ‘albuminous bodies’ (i.e. proteins; now we might say macro-molecules). This seems to be in contradiction to our rejection of molecular reductionism, but simply reflects different moments in an ongoing debate where the main adversaries were first the vitalist emphasis on the discontinuity between the inorganic and living realms, and then the reductionist erasure of the real leaps of levels.” Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 103.
    50. Bernal, Engels and Science, 13–14.
    51. D. Bernal, The Freedom of Necessity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 362.
    52. Bernal, The Freedom of Necessity, 364–65.
    53. Joseph Needham, Time, the Refreshing River (London: George Allen, and Unwin, 1943), 214–15; Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, 12.
    54. Needham, Time, the Refreshing River, 214–15; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46, 411.
    55. B. S. Haldane, The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (New York: Random House, 1939), 199–200; Foster, The Return of Nature, 391.
    56. Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
    57. Stephen Jay Gould, An Urchin in the Storm (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 111–12.
    58. Needham, Time, the Refreshing River, 14–15. Engels wrote: “It is precisely the alteration of nature by men, not solely nature as such, which is the most essential and immediate basis of human thought.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 511.
    59. See John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 13–18; Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Clive Hamilton,Defiant Earth (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
    60. Lester, Ray Lankester, 164.
    61. John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” 1–2, 15–16. Foster, The Return of Nature, 64, 286–87.
    62. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 516.
    63. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46, 411.
    64. Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1975), 92.
    65. On Engels’s approach to thermodynamics, see John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 137–203.
    66. On Marx and Engels on ecological degradation and extermination in colonial Ireland, see John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 64–77.
    67. Engels made it clear that the rational regulation of the human relation to nature, and thus a rational application of science, was only possible with “a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 462. On the alienation of science under capitalism, see István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1975), 101–2. The role of science under capitalism is further clarified in Richard Levins’s notion of the “dual nature of science.” Richard Levins, “Ten Propositions on Science and Antiscience,” Social Text 46–47 (1996): 103–4. The uncontrollability of capital is theorized in István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 713.
    68. Karl Marx, On the First International, ed. Saul Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 10.
    69. See Foster, The Return of Nature, 197–204.
    70. John Bellamy Foster and Istvan Suwandi, “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism,” Monthly Review 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 3–4.
    71. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 2, 95–101, 497; vol. 4, 528. Engels’s admiration for Shelley led him to attempt to translate Queen Mab, along with The Sensitive Plant, into German. See John Green, Engels: A Revolutionary Life (London: Artery, 2008) 28–29, 59. For a fascinating treatment of Shelley’s revolutionary poetry and politics, see Annette Rubinstein, The Great Tradition in English Literature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953), 516–64.
    72. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), 528.
    73. Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, 773. Marx depicted Shelley as “essentially a revolutionist,” a view that Engels shared. Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling, Shelley’s Socialism(London: The Journeyman, 1975), 4.
  • China 2020: An Introduction

    China 2020: An Introduction,” Monthly Review  vol. 72, no. 5. (October 2020), pp. 1-5.

    The history of capitalism has been punctuated by periodic struggles for hegemony over the world economy, leading to a centuries-long series of world wars.1 In the twenty-first century, all signs are pointing to another such period of hegemonic struggle, this time between the United States and China, although complicated in this case by the unique, indeterminate aspects of the post-revolutionary Chinese social formation, which is neither entirely capitalist nor entirely socialist. In the words of the influential president of the Council of Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, a key architect of the “Imperial America” strategy of the George W. Bush administration, writing in August 2020, the “chances of a second cold war [with China] are far higher than they were just months ago. Even worse, the chances of an actual war…are also greater.” Nor is there any real doubt in Haass’s mind about the cause, which he refers to as the inevitable “friction between established and rising powers.”2The current U.S. trade war against China is explicitly designed to compel the multinational corporations in the triad of the United States/Canada, Europe, and Japan to remove the key production links in their global commodity chains from China and relocate them in low-wage countries subject to the dominant imperial sphere, such as India and Mexico, in an attempt to weaken China and reestablish unrivaled U.S. hegemony over the world economy.3

    U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, voicing the current sentiments of the U.S. ruling class, referred in July 2020 to “the Chinese Communist Party’s [CCP] designs for hegemony” over the world economy, replacing the American Century with a “Chinese Century.” In the face of China’s rapid rise and what Pompeo calls “the China threat,” Washington and its allies are promoting what in foreign policy circles is called a hybrid war strategy of political, ideological, technological, and financial interventions, as well as stepped up military pressures, designed to slow down or even altogether halt China’s advance and to subordinate it once again to hegemonic U.S. power.4 U.S. criticisms of China have accelerated since the advent of COVID-19, with Donald Trump referring repeatedly to the “China virus,” with the general support of the media, a propaganda move that has succeeded in generating unfavorable views toward China among almost three quarters of the U.S. population.5

    Rather than relying merely on one wing of the U.S. ruling class, this belligerent anti-China stance has now been adopted by both parties within the political duopoly. It is supported by numerous U.S. multinational corporations and wealthy interests that fear the consequences for their own global economic positions of waning U.S. imperial dominance associated with China’s rise. Many firms, confronted by high tariffs and growing economic uncertainty, are now seeking to relocate their production away from China.6 Naturally, some major multinational corporations, particularly in the high-tech sector, are concerned about the loss of access to the massive, lucrative Chinese market. Still, if there is any substantial sector of U.S. capital that opposes the current New Cold War against China, they have so far remained silent.

    This general strategic shift away from China, designed to weaken it in order to restore U.S. unipolar dominance in the world economy, is coupled with one of the biggest U.S. military buildups in history, with the Trump administration requesting a $705 billion “defense” budget for the fiscal year 2021, directed explicitly against China and Russia.7 Washington’s focus on China is ideologically justified by the latter’s attempts to dominate the South China Sea (within its regional sphere of interest). But it has its deeper roots in what figures like Peter Navarro, in charge of U.S. trade policy in the Trump administration, openly refers to as coming hegemonic wars with China.8 In this context, attempts are being made by Washington to bring India firmly into a new Indo-Pacific alliance as a way of militarily constraining China.9

    This shift in imperial grand strategy on the part of the U.S. hegemon is due to China’s spectacular economic leap forward—an economy growing at 6 percent annually doubles in size about every twelve years, while an economy growing at 2 percent doubles in size approximately every thirty-five years. Additionally, there are recent indications (see the lead article in this issue by Zhiming Long, Zhixuan Feng, Bangxi Li, and Rémy Herrera, “The U.S.-China Trade War”) that China has succeeded in diminishing the level of imperial rent that the West has continually exacted from it as the price of its growth, while simultaneously breaking through the technological monopoly of Western corporations. China has therefore emerged as a seemingly unstoppable economic superpower, now the second largest economy in the world, even if in many ways it is still a relatively poor country measured in income per capita.

    How vulnerable is Beijing to the actions of the triad led by Washington? A strategy of so-called “containment,” or isolation of China, as in the Cold War years of the twentieth century, is no longer possible as Chinese production is integral to the entire global economy. As Pompeo says, “this isn’t about containment.… Communist China is already within our [economic] borders.” Rather, he indicates, the U.S. strategy is to defeat China in the New Cold War by breaking the hold of the CCP, which has been critical to China’s advance. Hence, Washington’s attacks on the Chinese economy are couched primarily as attacks on the CCP. The goal is to damage the Party’s credibility, exploiting its external and internal contradictions and weakening the Chinese state. This would allow the United States and global monopoly-finance capital to move in with the support of internal Chinese interests and restructure China’s state and economy in such a way as to ensure continuing U.S. (and Western) dominance—in a variation of the dismantling of the Soviet Union.10

    Nevertheless, China presents enormous external and internal barriers standing in the way of this new imperial strategy. It is connected in a weblike fashion to the entire capitalist world economy. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative is expanding China’s global geopolitical position in ways that appear irreversible. Much, however, still depends on whether China in the future pursues a horizontal or a hierarchical-imperialist mode in relating to the countries of the Global South.

    Even more important than external geopolitical relations in determining China’s future is the internal legacy of the Chinese revolution. The CCP retains strong support from the Chinese population. Moreover, despite the development of the various integuments of capital in China, a number of key strategic-economic variables, related to socialism, free it in part from the “antagonistic centrifugality” that accounts for capitalism’s “uncontrollability” as a system of social metabolic reproduction.11 The noncapitalist sector of the Chinese economy includes not just a large sector of state ownership, but also both state control of finance through state-owned banks and the continuing absence of the private ownership of land.

    Substantial state ownership of basic infrastructure and finance has allowed for the continuation of economic planning in key areas, associated with a much higher rate of investment. At the same time, state ownership of banks has been the basis of China’s control of its currency and its ability to defend itself against the financial hegemony of the dollar (see Sit Tsui, Erebus Wong, Lau Kin Chi, and Wen Tiejun, “Toward Delinking,” in this issue).12 As Samir Amin argued shortly before his death, for China to remove state control of bank finance would be for it to disarm economically, simply handing over to the imperial center of world capital the very weapon with which the Chinese development model would be destroyed.13

    Social ownership of land in China, which in the countryside is still partly managed collectively by village communities—though the current situation, following the introduction of the household responsibility system beginning in 1979, is a far cry from the earlier communal production—has contributed to the success of Chinese peasant agriculture, allowing it today to produce the food for 22 percent of the world’s populationon on 6 percent of the world’s arable land. Socialist land tenure is also the crucial context in which a renewed grassroots rural reconstruction movement is developing. The rural reconstruction movement (see the following papers on Chinese rural society in this issue, Lau Kin Chi, “Revisiting Collectivism and Rural Governance in China” and Sit Tsui and Yan Xiaohui, “Negotiating Debt”) is made possible by the noncapitalist foundations of much of rural Chinese society, leading to continuing popular struggle to secure collective needs. This has been strengthened since 2017 with the government’s rural revitalization strategy. Whatever claim China has to moving forward on its goal to forge an “ecological civilization” starts with such rural revitalization.

    What then is the strategy of the Chinese leadership itself in this overall historical context today? Definite conclusions are not possible at this point. In the past, both collective land ownership and state ownership of the means of production, particularly major banks, have come under attack from the state and private interests, but ultimately have been defended. The Chinese economy is characterized to a considerable extent by widening inequality and growing financialization. It includes an enormous private sector in which migrant workers are exploited often at very extreme levels, as parts of global commodity chains linked to the Global North via multinational corporations. Ironically, it is China’s pivotal role in the global labor arbitrage benefiting generalized monopoly capital that is now under attack from capital in the center of the system, due to the threat this now represents to U.S. hegemony, forcing China to seek an alternative path.14

    In this rapidly changing global situation, Chinese President Xi Jinping has recently emphasized the importance of reviving the role of Marxian political economy in China and the rejection of the neoliberal extremes of neoclassical economics in conjunction with the reassertion of the importance of state property and rural revitalization within the overall economy.15 All the signs are that China is seeking to defend the strategic noncapitalist elements of its system as a response to the growing hostility of imperial capital at the center of the world economy. China’s answer to COVID-19, employing the model of “people’s revolutionary war” as a way of encouraging the self-organization of the population in its localities, has been a resounding success, pointing to the internal solidity of the polity and the potential revolutionary protagonism of its people.16

    In this complex context, the key element, we believe, is understanding China’s dynamic reality through critical Marxist analysis, and the recognition of the “mere possibility” in “historical time” of renewed radical, egalitarian change.17

    Notes

    1. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37–46.
    2. Richard N. Haass, “To the Brink with China,” Council on Foreign Relations, August 13, 2020. After acknowledging the struggle for hegemony, Haass repeats various U.S. ideological complaints about China as the reason for growing tensions in line with U.S. establishment views. But he leaves no doubt as to the primacy of the hegemonic struggle itself. For Haass’s role as a theorist of U.S. imperial hegemony, see John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 97–99, 115–16.
    3. See John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi, “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism,” Monthly Review 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 14–15; The Research Unit on Political Economy, “India, COVID-19, the United States, and China,” Monthly Review 72, no. 4 (September 2020): 41.
    4. Michael R. Pompeo, “Communist China and the Free World’s Future” (speech, Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, CA, July 23, 2020); Max Boot, “How to Wage Hybrid War on the Kremlin,” Foreign Policy, December 13, 2016.
    5. Laura Silver, Kat Devlin, and Christine Huang, “Americans Fault China for Its Role in the Spread of COVID-19, “ Pew Research Center, July 30, 2020.
    6. Two-thirds of 160 CEOs of multinational corporations surveyed in March 2020 in the United States indicated that they had already moved, were planning to move, or were considering moving their commodity chain operations out of China. Shefali Kapadia, “From Section 301 to COVID-19,” Supply Chain Dive, March 31, 2020.
    7. Darius Shahtahmasebi, “2021 Pentagon Budget Request Hints at Russia and China as New Focus of US Empire,” Mint Press, February 24, 2020.
    8. Navarro’s political-economic stance, which emphasized the inevitability of hegemonic conflict with China and the need for the United States to strike first, was the very reason he was brought into the Trump administration. See John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 84–85.
    9. The Research Unit on Political Economy, “India, COVID-19, the United States, and China.” If there has been a major foreign policy dispute between the Democrats and the Trump Republicans, it has been over the Trump administration’s promotion of a detente with Russia to enable a full-scale New Cold War on China. The Democrats, however, refused to agree to a detente with Russia, forcing the Republicans to follow along, but the Democrats have eagerly jumped on the Trump administration’s New Cold War with China. The result is that the United States is now engaged in a Sino-Russian Cold War, spanning much of Eurasia. This will continue no matter which party occupies the White House.
    10. Pompeo, “Communist China and the Free World’s Future.”
    11. István Mészáros, “The Uncontrollability of Global Capital,” Monthly Review 49, no. 9 (February 1998): 33–34.
    12. See Samir Amin, “China 2013,” Monthly Review 64, no. 10 (March 2013): 14–33.
    13. Samir Amin, “Marx and Living Marxism Are More Relevant than Ever,” Youtube video, 1:03:52, address at Tsinghua University, Beijing on May 7, 2018, posted by Global University for Sustainability, February 3, 2019.
    14. On the extreme exploitation of Chinese migrant labor in China through subcontractors to multinational corporations primarily based in the triad, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 165–80; John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 21-24..
    15. Xi’s Article on Marxian Political Economy in Contemporary China to Be Published,” China Daily, August 15, 2020.
    16. Wang Hui, “Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory: Commemorating Lenin’s 150th Birthday,” Reading the China Dream (blog), April 21, 2020. There is no doubt, as Wang Hui indicates, that local officials in Wuhan initially tried to suppress the first signs of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic, but the response of the CCP nationally was rapid and the unleashing of a bottom-up peoples’ war strategy was enormously effective.
    17. On the concept of the “merely possible,” see Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 231–32. On the notion of “historical time,” see István Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 50–55, 366–80.
  • The Renewal of the Socialist Ideal

    The Renewal of the Socialist Ideal

    The Renewal of the Socialist Ideal,” Monthly Review  vol. 72, no. 4 (September 2020), pp. 1-13.

    [Turkish translation at ÖzgürDenizli.com, September 16, 2020; Chinese translation at  HYPERLINK “https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/240093171” https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/240093171; Portuguese translation, Insurgencia, November 1, 2020]

    First climate demonstration in East Timor, in front of the government palace. Credit: Francisco Amaral, Presidency of East Timor - Facebook-Auftritt des Staatspräsidenten Osttimors, Public Domain, Link.
    First climate demonstration in East Timor, in front of the government palace. Credit: Francisco Amaral, Presidency of East Timor – Facebook-Auftritt des Staatspräsidenten Osttimors, Public Domain, Link.

    Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism’s creative destruction of the bases of all social existence. Since the late 1980s, the world has been engulfed in an epoch of catastrophe capitalism, defined as the accumulation of imminent catastrophe on every side due to the unintended consequences of “the juggernaut of capital.”1 Catastrophe capitalism in this sense is manifested today in the convergence of (1) the planetary ecological crisis, (2) the global epidemiological crisis, and (3) the unending world economic crisis.2 Added to this are the main features of today’s “empire of chaos,” including the extreme system of imperialist exploitation unleashed by global commodity chains; the demise of the relatively stable liberal-democratic state with the rise of neoliberalism and neofascism; and the emergence of a new age of global hegemonic instability accompanied by increased dangers of unlimited war.3

    The climate crisis represents what the world scientific consensus refers to as a “no analogue” situation, such that if net carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion do not reach zero in the next few decades, it will threaten the very existence of industrial civilization and ultimately human survival.4 Nevertheless, the existential crisis is not limited to climate change, but extends to the crossing of other planetary boundaries that together define the global ecological rift in the Earth System as a safe place for humanity. These include: (1) ocean acidification; (2) species extinction (and loss of genetic diversity); (3) destruction of forest ecosystems; (4) loss of fresh water; (5) disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; (6) the rapid spread of toxic agents (including radionuclides); and (7) the uncontrolled proliferation of genetically modified organisms.5

    This rupturing of planetary boundaries is intrinsic to the system of capital accumulation that recognizes no insurmountable barriers to its unlimited, exponential quantitative advance. Hence, there is no exit from the current capitalist destruction of the overall social and natural conditions of existence that does not require exiting capitalism itself. What is essential is the creation of what István Mészáros in Beyond Capital called a new system of “social metabolic reproduction.”6 This points to socialism as the heir apparent to capitalism in the twenty-first century, but conceived in ways that critically challenge the theory and practice of socialism as it existed in the twentieth century.

    The Polarization of the Class System

    In the United States, key sectors of monopoly-finance capital have now succeeded in mobilizing elements of the primarily white lower-middle class in the form of a nationalist, racist, misogynist ideology. The result is a nascent neofascist political-class formation, capitalizing on the long history of structural racism arising out of the legacies of slavery, settler colonialism, and global militarism/imperialism. This burgeoning neofascism’s relation to the already existing neoliberal political formation is that of “enemy brothers” characterized by a fierce jockeying for power coupled with a common repression of the working class.7 It is these conditions that have formed the basis of the rise of the New York real-estate mogul and billionaire Donald Trump as the leader of the so-called radical right, leading to the imposition of right-wing policies and a new authoritarian capitalist regime.8 Even if the neoliberal faction of the ruling class wins out in the coming presidential election, ousting Trump and replacing him with Joe Biden, a neoliberal-neofascist alliance, reflecting the internal necessity of the capitalist class, will likely continue to form the basis of state power under monopoly-finance capital.

    Appearing simultaneously with this new reactionary political formation in the United States is a resurgent movement for socialism, based in the working-class majority and dissident intellectuals. The demise of U.S. hegemony within the world economy, accelerated by the globalization of production, has undermined the former, imperial-based labor aristocracy among certain privileged sections of the working class, leading to a resurgence of socialism.9Confronted with what Michael D. Yates has called “the Great Inequality,” the mass of the population in the United States, particularly youth, are faced with rapidly diminishing prospects, finding themselves in a state of uncertainty and often despair, marked by a dramatic increase in “deaths of despair.”10 They are increasingly alienated from a capitalist system that offers them no hope and are attracted to socialism as the only genuine alternative.11 Although the U.S. situation is unique, similar objective forces propelling a resurgence of socialist movements are occurring elsewhere in the system, primarily in the Global South, in an era of continuing economic stagnation, financialization, and universal ecological decline.

    But if socialism is seemingly on the rise again in the context of the structural crisis of capital and increased class polarization, the question is: What kind of socialism? In what ways does socialism for the twenty-first century differ from socialism of the twentieth century? Much of what is being referred to as socialism in the United States and elsewhere is of the social-democratic variety, seeking an alliance with left-liberals and thus the existing order, in a vain attempt to make capitalism work better through the promotion of social regulation and social welfare in direct opposition to neoliberalism, but at a time when neoliberalism is itself giving way to neofascism.12 Such movements are bound to fail at the outset in the present historical context, inevitably betraying the hopes that they unleashed, since focused on mere electoral democracy. Fortunately, we are also seeing the growth today of a genuine socialism, evident in extra-electoral struggle, heightened mass action, and the call to go beyond the parameters of the present system so as to reconstitute society as whole.

    The general unrest latent at the base of U.S. society was manifested in the uprisings in late May and June of this year, which took the form, practically unheard of in U.S. history since the U.S. Civil War, of massive solidarity protests with millions of people in the streets, and with the white working class, and white youth in particular, crossing the color line en masse in response to the police lynching of George Floyd for no other crime than being a Black man.13 This event, coming in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic depression, led to the June days of rage in the United States.

    But while the movement toward socialism, now taking hold even in the United States at the “barbaric heart” of the system, is gaining ground as a result of objective forces, it lacks an adequate subjective basis.14 A major obstacle in formulating strategic goals of socialism in the world today has to do with twentieth-century socialism’s abandonment of its own ideals as originally articulated in Karl Marx’s vision of communism. To understand this problem, it is necessary to go beyond recent left attempts to address the meaning of communism on a philosophical basis, a question that has led in the last decade to abstract treatments of The Communist Idea, The Communist Hypothesis, and The Communist Horizon by Alain Badiou and others.15 Rather, a more concrete historically based starting point is necessary, focusing directly on the two-phase theory of socialist/communist development that emerged out of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and V. I. Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Paul M. Sweezy’s article “Communism as an Ideal,” published more than half a century ago in Monthly Review in October 1963, is now a classic text in this regard.16

    Marx’s Communism as the Socialist Ideal

    In The Critique of the Gotha Programme—written in opposition to the economistic and laborist notions of the branch of German Social Democracy influenced by Ferdinand Lassalle—Marx designated two historical “phases” in the struggle to create a society of associated producers. The first phase was initiated by the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” reflecting the class-war experience of the Paris Commune and representing a period of workers’ democracy, but one that still carried the “defects” of capitalist class society. In this initial phase, not only would a break with capitalist private property take place, but also a break with the capitalist state as the political command structure of capitalism.17 As a measure of the limited nature of socialist transition in this stage, production and distribution would inevitably take the form of to each according to one’s labor, perpetuating conditions of inequality even while creating the conditions for their transcendence. In contrast, in the later phase, the principle governing society would shift to from each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s need and the elimination of the wage system.18 Likewise, while the initial phase of socialism/communism would require the formation of a new political command structure in the revolutionary period, the goal in the higher phase was the withering away of the state as a separate apparatus standing above and in antagonistic relation to society, to be replaced with a form of political organization that Frederick Engels referred to as “community,” associated with a communally based form of production.19

    In the later, higher phase of the transition of socialism/communism, not only would property be collectively owned and controlled, but the constitutive cells of society would be reconstituted on a communal basis and production would be in the hands of the associated producers. In these conditions, Marx stated, “labor” will have become not a mere “means of life” but “itself…the prime necessity of life.”20 Production would be directed at use values rather than exchange values, in line with a society in which “the free development of each” would be “the condition for the free development of all.” The abolition of capitalist class society and the creation of a society of associated producers would lead to the end of class exploitation, along with the elimination of the divisions between mental and manual labor and between town and country. The monogamous, patriarchal family based on the domestic enslavement of women would also be surmounted.21 Fundamental to Marx’s picture of the higher phase of the society of associated producers was a new social metabolism of humanity and the earth. In his most general statement on the material conditions governing the new society, he wrote: “Freedom, in this sphere [the realm of natural necessity], can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism of nature in a rational way…accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy” in the process of promoting conditions of sustainable human development.22

    Writing in The State and Revolution and elsewhere, Lenin deftly captured Marx’s arguments on the lower and higher phases, depicting these as the first and second phases of communism. Lenin went on to emphasize what he called “the scientific distinction between socialism and communism,” whereby “what is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the ‘first,’ or lower phase of communist society,” whereas the term communism, meaning “complete communism,” was most appropriately used for the higher phase.23 Although Lenin closely aligned this distinction with Marx’s analysis, in later official Marxism this came to be rigidified in terms of two entirely separate stages, with the so-called communist stage so removed from the stage of socialism that it became utopianized, no longer seen as part of a continuous or ongoing struggle. Based on a wooden conception of the socialist stage and the intermediary principle of distribution to each according to one’s labor, Joseph Stalin carried out an ideological war against the ideal of real equality, which he characterized as a “reactionary, petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines.” This same stance was to persist in the Soviet Union in one way or another all the way to Mikhail Gorbachev.24

    Hence, as explained by Michael Lebowitz in The Socialist Imperative, “rather than a continuous struggle to go beyond what Marx called the ‘defects’ inherited from capitalist society, the standard interpretation” of Marxism in the half-century from the late 1930s to the late ’80s “introduced a division of post-capitalist society into two distinct ‘stages,’” determined economistically by the level of development of the productive forces. Fundamental changes in social relations emphasized by Marx as the very essence of the socialist path were abandoned in the process of living with and adapting to the defects carried over from capitalist society. Instead, Marx had insisted on a project aimed at building the community of associated producers “from the outset” as part of an ongoing, if necessarily uneven, process of socialist construction.25

    This abandonment of the socialist ideal associated with Marx’s higher phase of communism was wrapped up in a complex way with changing material (and class) conditions and eventually the demise of Soviet-type societies, which tended to stagnate once they ceased to be revolutionary and even resurrected class forms, heralding their eventual collapse as the new class or nomenklatura abandoned the system. As Sweezy argued in 1971, “state ownership and planning are not enough to define a viable socialism, one immune to the threat of retrogression and capable of moving forward on the second leg of the movement to communism.” Something more was needed: the continuous struggle to create a society of equals.26

    For Marx, the movement toward a society of associated producers was the very essence of the socialist path embedded in “communist consciousness.”27 Yet, once socialism came to be defined in more restrictive, economistic terms, particularly in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s onward, in which substantial inequality was defended, post-revolutionary society lost the vital connection to the dual struggle for freedom and necessity, and hence became disconnected from the long-term goals of socialism from which it had formerly derived its meaning and coherence.

    Based on this experience, it is evident that the only way to build socialism in the twenty-first century is to embrace precisely those aspects of the socialist/communist ideal that allow a theory and practice radical enough to address the urgent needs of the present, while also not losing sight of the needs of the future. If the planetary ecological crisis has taught us anything, it is that what is required is a new social metabolism with the earth, a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality. This can be seen in the extraordinary achievements of Cuban ecology, as recently shown by Mauricio Betancourt in “The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift” in Global Environmental Change.28 This conforms to what Georg Lukács called the necessary “double transformation” of human social relations and the human relations to nature.29 Such an emancipatory project must necessarily pass through various revolutionary phases, which cannot be predicted in advance. Yet, to be successful, a revolution must seek to make itself irreversible through the promotion of an organic system directed at genuine human needs, rooted in substantive equality and the rational regulation of the human social metabolism with nature.30

    Freedom as Necessity

    Building on G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy, Engels famously argued in Anti-Dühring that real freedom was grounded in the recognition of necessity. Revolutionary change was the point at which freedom and necessity met in concrete praxis. Although there was such a thing as blind necessity beyond human knowledge, once objective forces were grasped, necessity was no longer blind, but rather offered new paths for human action and freedom. Necessity and freedom fed on each other, requiring new periods of social change and historical transcendence.31 In illustrating this materialist dialectical principle, Lenin acutely observed, “we do not know the necessity of nature in the phenomena of the weather. But while we do not know this necessity, we do know that it exists.”32 We know the human relation to the weather and nature in general inevitably varies with the changing productive relations governing our actions.

    Today, the knowledge of anthropogenic climate crisis and of extreme weather events is removing human beings from the realm of blind necessity and demanding that the world’s population engage in the ultimate struggle for freedom and survival against catastrophe capitalism. As Marx stated in the context of the severe metabolic rift imposed on Ireland as a result of British colonialism in the nineteenth century, the ecological crisis presents itself as a case of “ruin or revolution.”33 In the Anthropocene, the ecological rift resulting from the expansion of the capitalist economy now exists on a scale rivaling the biogeochemical cycles of the planet. However, knowledge of these objective developments also allows us to conceive the necessary revolution in the social metabolic reproduction of humanity and the earth. Viewed in this context, Marx’s crucial conception of a “community of associated producers” is not to be viewed as simply a far-off utopian conception or abstract ideal but as the very essence of the necessary human defense in the present and future, representing the insistent demand for a sustainable relation to the earth.34

    But where is the agent of revolutionary change? The answer is that we are seeing the emergence of the material preconditions of what can be called a global environmental proletariat. Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, was a description and analysis of working-class conditions in Manchester, shortly after the so-called Plug Plot Riots and at the height of radical Chartism. Engels depicted the working-class environment not simply in terms of factory conditions, but much more in terms of urban developments, housing, water supply, sanitation, food and nutrition, and child development. The focus was on the general epidemiological environment enforced by capitalism (what Engels called “social murder” and what Norman Bethune later called “the second sickness”) associated with widespread morbidity and mortality, particularly due to contagious disease.35Marx, under the direct influence of Engels and as a result of his own social epidemiological studies twenty years later while writing Capital, was to see the metabolic rift as arising not only in relation to the degradation of the soil, but equally, as he put it, in terms of “periodical epidemics” induced by society itself.36

    What this tells us—and we could find many other illustrations, from the Russian and Chinese Revolutions to struggles in the Global South today—is that class struggle and revolutionary moments are the product of a coalescence of objective necessity and a demand for freedom emanating from material conditions that are not simply economic but also environmental in the broadest sense. Revolutionary situations are thus most likely to come about when a combination of economic and ecological conditions make social transformations necessary, and where social forces and relations are developed enough to make such changes possible. In this respect, looked at from a global standpoint today, the issue of the environmental proletariat overlaps with and is indistinguishable from the question of the ecological peasantry and the struggles of the Indigenous. Likewise, the struggle for environmental justice that now animates the environmental movement globally is in essence a working-class and peoples’ struggle.37

    The environmental proletariat in this sense can be seen as emerging as a force all over the world, as evident in the present period of ecological-epidemiological struggle in relation to COVID-19. Yet, the main locus of revolutionary ecological action in the immediate future remains the Global South, faced with the harsh reality of “imperialism in the Anthropocene.”38As Samir Amin observed in Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value, the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan is already using the planet’s bio-capacity at four times the world average, pointing toward ecological oblivion. This unsustainable level of consumption of resources in the Global North is only possible because

    a good proportion of the bio-capacity of society in the South is taken up by and to the advantage of these centers [in the triad]. In other words, the current expansion of capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity. The expansion’s logical conclusion is either the actual genocide of the peoples of the South—as “overpopulation”—or, at the least, their confinement to ever-increasing poverty. An eco-fascist strand of thought is being developed which gives legitimacy to this kind of “final solution” to the problem.39

    A New System of Social Metabolic Reproduction

    A revolutionary process of socialist construction aimed at building a new system of social reproduction in conformity with the demands of necessity and freedom cannot occur without an overall “orienting principle” and “measure of achievement” as part of a long-term strategy. It is here, following Mészáros, that the notion of substantive equality or a society of equals, also entailing substantive democracy, comes into play in today’s struggles.40 Such an approach not only stands opposed to capital at its barbaric heart but also opposes any ultimately futile endeavor to stop halfway in the transition to socialism. Immanuel Kant spelled out the dominant liberal view shortly after the French Revolution when he stated that “the general equality of men as subjects in a state coexists quite readily with the greatest inequality in degrees of the possessions men have.… Hence, the general equality of men coexists with great inequality of specific rights of which there may be many.”41 In this way, equality came to be merely formal, existing merely “on paper” as Engels pointed out, not only with respect to the labor contract between capitalist and worker but also in relation to the marriage contract between men and women.42 Such a society establishes, as Marx demonstrated, a “right of inequality, in its content, like every right.”43 The idea of substantive equality, consistent with Marx’s notion of communism, challenges all of this. It demands a change in the constitutive cells of society, which can no longer consist of possessive individualists, or individual capitals, reinforced by a hierarchical state, but must be based on the associated producers and a communal state. Genuine planning and genuine democracy can only start through the constitution of power from the bottom of society. It is only in this way that revolutions become irreversible.

    It was the explicit recognition of the challenge and burden of twenty-first-century socialism in these terms that represented the extraordinary threat to the prevailing order constituted by the Venezuelan Revolution led by Hugo Chávez. The Bolivarian Republic challenged capitalism from within through the creation of communal power and popular protagonism, generating a notion of revolution as the creation of an organic society, or a new social metabolic order. Chávez, building on the analyses of Marx and Mészáros, mediated by Lebowitz, introduced the notion of “the elementary triangle of socialism,” or (1) social ownership, (2) social production organized by workers, and (3) satisfaction of communal needs.44 Underlying this was a struggle for substantive equality, abolishing the inequalities of the color line and the gender line, the imperial line, and other lines of oppression, as the essential basis for eliminating the society of unequals.

    In “Communism as an Ideal,” Sweezy emphasized the new forms of labor that would necessarily come into being in a society that used abundant human productivity more rationally. Many categories of work, he indicated, would “be eliminated altogether (e.g. coalmining and domestic service), and insofar as possible all jobs must become interesting and creative as only a few are today.” The reduction of the enormous waste and destruction inherent in capitalist production and consumption would open up space for the employment of disposable time in more creative ways.

    In a society of equals—one in which everyone stands in the same relation to the means of production and has the same obligation to work and serve the common welfare—all “needs” that emphasize the superiority of the few and involve the subservience of the many will simply disappear and will be replaced by the needs of liberated human beings living together in mutual respect and cooperation.… Society and the human beings who compose it constitute a dialectical whole: neither can change without changing the other. And communism as an ideal comprises a new society and a new [human being].45

    More than simply an ideal, such an organizing principle in which substantive equality and substantive democracy are foremost in the conception of socialism/communism is essential not only to create a socialist path to a better future but as a necessary defense of the global population confronted with the question of survival. Dystopian books and novels notwithstanding, it is impossible to imagine the level of environmental catastrophe that will face the world’s peoples, especially those at the bottom of the imperialist hierarchy, if capitalism’s creative destruction of the metabolism of humanity and the earth is not stopped mid–century.

    According to a 2020 article on “The Future of the Human Climate Niche” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on existing trends, 3.5 billion people are projected to be living in unlivable heat outside the human climate niche by 2070, under conditions comparable to those of the Sahara desert.46 Even such projections fail to capture the enormous level of destruction that will fall on the majority of humanity under capitalist business as usual. The only answer is to leave the burning house and to build another now.47

    The International of Workers and Peoples

    Although untold numbers of people are engaged in innumerable struggles against the capitalist juggernaut in their specific localities all around the world, struggles for substantive equality, including battles over race, gender, and class, depend on the fight against imperialism at the global level. Hence, there is a need for a new global organization of workers based on the model of Marx’s First International.48 Such an International for the twenty-first century cannot simply consist of a group of elite intellectuals from the North engaged in World Social Forum-like discussion activities or in the promotion of social-democratic regulatory reforms as in the so-called Socialist and Progressive Internationals. Rather, it needs to be constituted as a workers-based and peoples-based organization, rooted from the beginning in a strong South-South alliance so as to place the struggle against imperialism at the center of the socialist revolt against capitalism, as contemplated by figures such as Chávez and Amin.

    In 2011, just prior to his final illness, Chávez was preparing, following his next election, to launch what was to be called the New International (pointedly not a Fifth International) focusing on a South-South alliance and giving a global significance to socialism in the twenty-first century. This would have extended the Bolivarian Alliance for Peoples of Our America to a global level.49 This, however, never saw the light of day due to Chávez’s rapid decline and untimely death.

    Meanwhile, a separate conception grew out of the efforts of Amin, working with the World Forum for Alternatives. Amin had long contemplated a Fifth International, an idea he was still presenting as late as May 2018. But in July 2018, only a month before his death, this had been transformed into what he called an Internationale of Workers and Peoples, explicitly recognizing that a pure worker-based International that did not take into account the situation of peoples was inadequate in confronting imperialism.50 This, he stated, would be an organization, not just a movement. It would be aimed at the

    alliance of all working peoples of the world and not only those qualified as representatives of the proletariat…including all wage earners of the services, peasants, farmers, and the peoples oppressed by modern capitalism. The construction must also be based on the recognition and respect of diversity, whether of parties, trade unions, or other popular organizations of struggle, guaranteeing their real independence.… In the absence of [such revolutionary] progress the world would continue to be ruled by chaos, barbarian practices, and the destruction of the earth.51

    The creation of a New International cannot of course occur in a vacuum but needs to be articulated within and as a product of the building of unified mass organizations expanding at the grassroots level in conjunction with revolutionary movements and delinkings from the capitalist system all over the world. It could not occur, in Amin’s view, without new initiatives from the Global South to create broad alliances, as in the initial organized struggles associated with the Third World movement launched at the Bandung Conference in 1955, and the struggle for a New International Economic Order.52 These three elements—grassroots movements, delinking, and cross-country/cross-continent alliances—are all crucial in his conception of the anti-imperialist struggle. Today this needs to be united with the global ecological movement.

    Such a universal struggle against capitalism and imperialism, Amin insisted, must be characterized by audacity and more audacity, breaking with the coordinates of the system at every point, and finding its ideal path in the principle of from each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s need, as the very definition of human community. Today we live in a time of the perfect coincidence of the struggles for freedom and necessity, leading to a renewed struggle for freedom as necessity. The choice before us is unavoidable: ruin or revolution.

    Notes

    1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 799. Catastrophe capitalism in this sense is distinct from Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism(New York: Henry Holt, 2007). Klein’s notion focuses on how neoliberalism as a political-economic project of capital has sought to exploit systematically disasters of all kinds, many of capital’s own making, to impose as a solution a “shock doctrine,” designed to further increase the power of capital. The notion of catastrophe capitalism employed here is concerned rather with the cumulative growth of the potential for catastrophe as an inherent characteristic of a mode of production that places the accumulation of capital before all other social (and ecological) ends, with the result that the tendency to catastrophe is universalized. See John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,” Monthly Review 63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1–17.
    2. For concrete depictions of these converging imminent catastrophes, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012); John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020): 238–87; John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi, “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism,” Monthly Review 72, no. 2 (June 2020): 1–20; and Mike Davis, The Monster Enters(New York: OR, 2020).
    3. Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).
    4. See Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 25: James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). Even striving for net zero emissions by 2050, though incorporated in the Paris Agreements, is not sufficient and is based on unrealistic assumptions regarding technologies that do not today exist at scale, and may never be feasible. The reality is that the carbon budget determined by the remaining emissions possible (while having a 67 percent chance of keeping the global average temperature below 1.5°C) will be exhausted under business as usual in a mere eight years. See Greta Thunberg, Speech at the World Economy Forum, Davos, January 21, 2020.
    5. Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 24 (2009): 472–75; William Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries,” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 745–46; Michael Friedman, “GMOs: Capitalism’s Distortion of Biological Processes,” Monthly Review 66, no. 10 (March 2015): 19–34.
    6. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 39–71.
    7. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 362.
    8. See John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
    9. It was Engels who first argued in an 1885 article for Commonweal edited by William Morris (an analysis that was later incorporated into the preface to the 1892 English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England) that the development of a socialist-oriented labor movement was made possible in Britain for the first time in the mid–1880s by the decline of the aristocracy of labor (consisting mainly of adult men and excluding women, children, and immigrant groups) brought about by the waning of Britain’s imperial hegemony. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 295–301. Lenin’s famous analysis of the labor aristocracy was built on this treatment by Engels. See also Martin Nicolaus, “The Theory of the Labor Aristocracy,” Monthly Review 21, no. 11 (April 1970): 91–101; Eric Hobsbawm, “Lenin and the ‘Aristocracy of Labor,’” Monthly Review 21, no. 11 (April 1970): 47–56.
    10. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
    11. Michael D. Yates, “The Great Inequality,” Monthly Review 63, no. 10 (March 2012): 1–18.
    12. In his The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara provides an image of Marx, divorced from the Critique of the Gotha Programme, according to which Marx and Engels envisioned a future in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere in which “a radically transformed democratic state held formerly private property and used it rationally under the direction and to the benefit of the people.” Rather than an attempt at an accurate depiction of Marx’s views, such an analysis is meant simply to buttress his own version of “class-struggle social democracy.” Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto (New York: Basic, 2019), 48, 216–17.
    13. See “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (July–August 2020).
    14. Curtis White, The Barbaric Heart (Sausalito: PoliPoint, 2009).
    15. Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49 (2008): 29–42; Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism,” in The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2010): 1–14; Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2015); Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2018).
    16. Paul M. Sweezy, “Communism as an Ideal,” Monthly Review 15, no. 6 (October 1963): 329–40.
    17. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 9–10, 18. Marx used the terminology here of “the first phase of communist society” and “the higher phase of communist society.” This edition of the Critique of the Gotha Programmeincludes correspondence and notes on the subject by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and passages from Lenin’s The State and Revolution. On the Paris Commune, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune, ed. Hal Draper (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971); Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 127–71.
    18. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 6–10, 14; Karl Marx, “Value, Price, and Profit,” in Wage Labor and Capital/Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 62.
    19. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 10, 17 (Marx), 31 (Engels), 47–56 (Lenin); Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 247, 267–68. For the lasting significance of the concept of the withering away of the state, see Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 460–95; Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 127–28.
    20. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 10; Sweezy, “Communism as an Ideal,” 337–38.
    21. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 34–35, 41.
    22. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 959.
    23. I. Lenin, Selected Works: One-Volume Edition (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 334.
    24. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 338; Sweezy, in Paul M. Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127.
    25. Michael Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015). 71; Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 171–72. See also Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Boston: Brill, 2012), 190.
    26. Sweezy, in Sweezy and Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism, 131.
    27. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 52.
    28. Mauricio Betancourt, “The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift: A Quantitative Approach to Latin American Food Production,” Global Environmental Change 63 (2020): 1–9.
    29. Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 2, Marx’s Basic Ontological Principles(London: Merlin, 1978), 6.
    30. On the question of an irreversible revolution, see Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 758–68; István Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 251–53; John Bellamy Foster, “Chávez and the Communal State,” Monthly Review 66, no. 11 (April 2015): 9, 11, 16.
    31. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 105, 460–62. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 207–20; John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 16, 20.
    32. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirico-Criticism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 174.
    33. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 142; Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature, 76–77.
    34. Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 184.
    35. Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4, 394. See the analysis of Engels’s work in Foster, The Return of Nature, 177–97; Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness (New York: Free Press, 1983), 70; Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon, The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952), 250.
    36. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 348–49. On Marx’s epidemiological analysis see Foster, The Return of Nature, 197–204.
    37. On the conception of the environmental proletariat and the Global South, see John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 439–41.
    38. John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, “Imperialism in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 71, no. 3 (July–August 2019): 70–88.
    39. Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 100–101.
    40. István Mészáros interviewed by Leonardo Cazes, “The Critique of the State: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective,” Monthly Review 67, no. 4 (September 2015): 32–37; Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 187–224. The concept of substantive equality as opposed to formal equality of course parallels Max Weber’s famous distinction between substantive and formal rationality. See Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 85–86.
    41. Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Kant: Moral and Political Writings (New York: Random House, 1949), 417–18; Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 193.
    42. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 72–73.
    43. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 9.
    44. See Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative, 111–33.
    45. Sweezy, “Communism as an Ideal,” 338–39.
    46. Chi Xu et al., “Future of the Human Climate Niche,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 177, no. 21 (2020): 11350–55; Ian Angus, “5 Billion People May Face ‘Unlivable’ Heat in 50 Years,” Climate & Capitalism, May 9, 2020.
    47. Michael Lebowitz, Build It Now (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006). On how Marx’s vision of communism as the socialist ideal was essentially a model of sustainable human development, see Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” Monthly Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34–62. On the scale of the change initially, see Andreas Malm, “Socialism or Barbecue, War Communism or Geoengineering: Some Thoughts on Choices in a Time of Emergency,” in The Politics of Ecosocialism, ed. Kajsa Borgnäs et al. (London: Routledge, 2015): 180–94. For a comprehensive notion of the creation of an ecological civilization, see Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
    48. On the First International, see Karl Marx, On the First International, ed. Saul Padover (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973); George C. Comninel, Marcelo Musto, and Victor Wallis, eds., The International After 150 Years(New York: Routledge, 2015).
    49. These comments on Chávez’s plans are based on conversations with Mészáros, following a 2011 meeting with the government in Caracas, which we both attended. See also István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 199–217.
    50. Samir Amin, “Audacious Movements Have to Start,” Frontline, May 25, 2018; Samir Amin, “It is Imperative to Reconstruct the Internationale of Workers and Peoples,” International Development Economics Associates, July 3, 2018.
    51. Samir Amin and Firoze Manji, “Toward the Formation of a Transnational Alliance of Working and Oppressed Peoples,” Monthly Review 71, no. 3 (July–August 2019): 120–26.
    52. See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008); Samir Amin, The Long Revolution of the Global South (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
  • Marx and Slavery

    Marx and Slavery

    Marx and Slavery (coauthored), Monthly Review vol. 72, no. 3 (July 2020), DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-072-03-2020-07_9

    The rise to prominence of analyses of racial capitalism represents a breakthrough in Marxian theory. This has necessarily been accompanied by a critique of previous Marxian analyses, which all too often ignored or minimized the relation of slavery to capitalism. In recent years, however, these criticisms of orthodox Marxist treatments of slavery have been extended, much more problematically, to the work of Karl Marx himself. Although Marx never wrote a treatise on slavery, the issue of slave labor was woven into his analysis of social formations, both ancient and modern, and was inextricably intertwined with his treatment of wage labor.

  • COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism

    COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism: Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises (coauthored with Intan Suwandi), Monthly Review vol. 72, no. 2 (June 2020), pp. 1-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-072-02-2020-06_1  [HTML]

    Since the late twentieth century, capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted the form of interlinked commodity chains controlled by multinational corporations, connecting various production zones, primarily in the Global South, with the apex of world consumption, finance, and accumulation primarily in the Global North. COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism.

  • The Rift of Éire

    The Rift of Éire (coauthored with Brett Clark), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 11 (April 2020), pp. 1-11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_1 [HTML]

    Karl Marx’s (and Frederick Engels’s) analysis of nineteenth-century Irish history revealed what is referred to as “the rift of Éire” in the colonial period. Indeed, it is in relation to the analysis of the systematic disruption of the Irish environment that Marx’s ecological inquiries can be seen as taking on a concrete and developed form, encompassing the ecological as well as economic robbery that characterized the Irish colonial regime.

  • Marx and the Indigenous

    Marx and the Indigenous (coauthored with Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 9 (February 2020), pp. 1-19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-071-09-2020-02_1 [HTML]

    The “turn toward the indigenous” in social theory in the last couple of decades, associated with the critique of white settler colonialism, has reintroduced themes long present in Marxian theory, but in ways that are often surprisingly divorced from Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.