John Bellamy Foster

Category: Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints

  • Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism: A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars

    “Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism: A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 9 (February 2013): 54-61.

    I would like to thank Zhihe Wang, Meijun Fan, Hui Dong, Dezhong Sun, and Lichun Li for doing so much to promote a global dialogue on ecological Marxism by summarizing some of the insights and concerns of Chinese scholars in this area, focusing in this case on my work in particular. The various questions, challenges, and critiques raised in relation to my work and that of related scholars are all, I believe, of great importance to the development of theory and practice in this area. I am therefore providing a brief set of responses to the problems raised, which I hope will be helpful in the further promotion of this global dialogue on ecology and Marxism.

    Marx and Ecological Marxism

    Many of the criticisms expressed relate to the question of the compatibility of Marx’s ideas with ecological Marxism. Xu Yanmei, Pu Xiangji, Li Benzhu, Gao Huizhu, Zhang Xiangli, and Leng Yunsheng have all raised what I consider to be important questions about how Marx’s materialism is depicted in my book Marx’s Ecology, and how this is related to classical Marxian conceptions of history, practice, and dialectics—as well as Marx’s own development. Xu Yanmei, we are told, contends that my work makes the mistake of placing Marx’s dissertation on a par with his mature work. In contrast to my interpretation, she argues that an ecological critique did not consciously enter into Marx’s critique of capitalism or his critique of religion. These are important criticisms. Here I will confine my response to the relation of Marx’s ecological critique to his critique of capitalism. However, the connections of his ecological thought to the critique of religion are also important. I have discussed these in the bookCritique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present, written with Brett Clark and Richard York.1

    The initial research that led me to write Marx’s Ecology began with an investigation into the ecological analysis that came to occupy such a central place in Marx’s critique in Capital. The most important discussions lie at the end of the core chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in Capital, vol. 1, and at the end of the long treatment of capitalist ground rent inCapital, vol. 3—but the same critical ecological viewpoint permeates all of Marx’s mature work. In particular, he relied heavily on Justus von Liebig’s critique of capitalist agriculture (contained espeically in the long introduction to the 1862 edition of Liebig’s great work on agricultural chemistry). But Marx went beyond Liebig in brilliantly incorporating the metabolism concept to explain the relation between humanity and nature, defining the labor process itself in these terms. Human production, like life itself, could thus be viewed in terms of “metabolism,” i.e., as an “organic exchange of matter”—as Engels put it in Anti-Dühring. Marx described capitalism’s necessarily antagonistic relation to nature as an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” He thus anticipated the entire direction that critical ecological science was to take in twentieth-century systems ecology, which made the concept of metabolism the key to ecosystem theory.2

    I wondered how was this possible? How did Marx arrive at such profound ecological conclusions, which could not be explained simply in terms of his encounter with Liebig? Could the answer lie in the nature of Marx’s materialism? What was the relation of Marx’s thought to natural science? The only way to find an answer, I decided, was to go back to the genesis of Marx’s thought—not just to his “early writings” but what I came to think of as his “very early writings,” i.e., his dissertation and other pre–1844 manuscripts.3 That led me to Marx’s early encounter with Epicurean materialism, which had played such a large role in the development of modernity and modern science. Marx approached Epicurus, like all other major thinkers, dialectically, which meant that he appropriated Epicurus’s thought in a critical-transformative fashion. There is no intention here of equating “Marx’s dialectical materialism with Epicurean natural materialism” as Zhang Xiangli and Leng Yunsheng have, it seems, pointedly accused me of doing, and as Pu Xiangji also strongly implied. Marx should be understood as a complex, dialectical, creative thinker. In transcending Epicurus’s views, he retained their rational core, just as in transcending other key thinkers, such as Hegel and Ricardo, he retained what was most rational and critical. Epicurus was significant for Marx both as “the true radical Enlightener of antiquity” and as the main root within antiquity of the viewpoint of scientific modernity. Moreover, Marx admired Epicurus’ concept of freedom (even if a contemplative one) and above all his notion of the “swerve.” (In Epicurean philosophy the infinitesimally small “swerve” of atoms in what was otherwise a smooth, linear movement, stood for contingency, and ultimately the possibility of human freedom.)4

    It is therefore highly significant that Marx chose to write his dissertation on the ancient Epicurean philosophy of nature. In this way the importance of science and naturalism in his thought is revealed very early. I came to the conclusion that Marx, who studied geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and other natural sciences throughout his life, saw the materialist conception of nature promoted by natural science as vital to his own development of thematerialist conception of history within social science (and social praxis). In directly advancing the latter in his work he also continued to explore the former, incorporating new scientific knowledge into his analysis where necessary—for the simple reason that in his view there was “only one science” and thus human history and human labor were inseparable from the human metabolism with nature.5

    In such a conception, then, our understanding of Marx’s dialectic is necessarily widened. Not only was Marx a historical and a dialectical thinker, but the nature of his understanding of the world made him an ecological one as well—and none of this contradicted in the least (indeed it intensified) the revolutionary character of his thought. Hence, I disagree respectfully with the view attributed to Li Benzhu that Marx in my interpretation (and that of others) is degraded from a revolutionary thinker to an ecologist. The two are not antagonistic to each other. In fact, an ecological revolution, which would necessarily also be a social revolution, is the particular historical burden of our time.

    This is not to say that Marx in himself provides us with views adequate to deal with all of the specific challenges of today. That would be an ahistorical viewpoint. But for a long time an influential stream of Western Marxism has followed Lukács in arguing that in Marxism “orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.”6 In this sense, Marx, with his wider dialectic, which was so revealing of the contradictions of capitalism and modernity, remains a guide.

    The additional criticisms of Pu, Zhang, and Leng that there is the danger, in addressing the complex relation between humanity and nature, of falling into dualism and of losing sight of Marx’s concept of “humanized nature” are, in my view, important. What we are learning today, though—and what in my argument Marx had already recognized—was that “humanized nature” in its capitalist form has generated a metabolic rift as a result of our failure to recognize that humanity is “a part of nature.” As Engels said, “we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but…we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and…all our mastery consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws an apply them correctly.” Developing a non-dualistic understanding of the dialectic of humanity and nature, in this sense, without simply subsuming one under the other, is the great theoretical challenge of our age.7

    It never occurred to me, as Gao Huizhu says, to substitute the concept of metabolism for “objective activity.” The notion of metabolism as employed in Marx’s thought had to do with what he called the “eternal natural conditions” within which life exists and human production occurs.8 Revolutionary praxis, in Marx’s conception, is obviously not independent of material conditions, which are partly given by nature and then transformed by human production. Studying natural conditions and limits is part of a materialist understanding of the world. For example, one of the big issues today with respect to global ecology is species extinction due in part to climate change as the temperature zones or isotherms shift faster than species are able to move toward the poles, resulting in increased loss of species.9 I think it is, therefore, of great significance that near the end of his life, in 1878, Marx was studying, and taking scientific notes, on isotherms and their relation to species extinction due to shifts in the former—even making drawings of the temperature zones in his notebook. He clearly regarded this as crucial to the understanding of the material conditions and limits of life.10 The idea that in extending his thinking in these directions he was simply acting as an ecologist and not also as a revolutionary thinker is I think far too narrow. Marx’s view, like Hegel’s, was that “the true is the whole.”11 Marx’s use of the notion of metabolism was thus dialectical in the widest, most critical sense—as Lukács was among the first to perceive, seeing it as the key to a meaningful dialectic of nature and society.12 None of this should be conceived as subtracting from the Marxian notion of praxis or “objective activity.” Today ours is the task of developing a more dialectical and revolutionary ecological praxis, which is vitally needed in our period of planetary crisis.

    It would be a serious mistake, I believe, to view ecological Marxism as a replacement for Marxism or as a superior Marxism. Rather the incorporation of ecological-materialist understandings as integral to historical materialism was conceived in broad outline by Marx, and is an essential element of the dialectical approach to theory and practice, science and history, that he promoted. This was understood by some of his earlier followers. However, the ecological element within Marxism was largely lost in the early twentieth century. In the Soviet Union the leading ecological Marxists were purged. While in critical Marxist philosophy in the West—in what came to be viewed by many as the defining trait of “Western Marxism”—an extreme revolt against physical science as an embodiment of positivism resulted in an unfortunate divorce between Marxism and the ecological ideas that were developing within science at that time.13 Both of these developments were “sins” against Marxism. Today we are in a position to repair these rifts between Marxism and ecology as part of a larger revolutionary movement aimed at repairing the rifts between society and nature.

    China and Ecological Marxism

    A further set of criticisms and challenges raised in the above article relate to the significance of my work and ecological Marxism in general for understanding the conditions governing the former Soviet Union and the situation of present-day China. From a viewpoint influenced by constructive postmodernism—that is, the humanist ecological vision inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy—Meng Genlong argues that my perspective fails to explain what happened in the former Soviet Union or the ecological problems facing socialist China today. He contends that constructive postmodernism offers a more powerful critique in this respect than ecological Marxism, which is unable to account for socialism’s own failures.

    This raises extremely complex historical and theoretical questions. In my own view, modernity, insofar as it is separate from the distinctive development of bourgeois civilization, is too abstract a concept to carry the full burden of ecological critique. Minus historical specificity it becomes prone to Whitehead’s famous “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”14

    In addressing the question of socialism and the environment it is important to understand the accumulation imperative of a capitalist system that drives it inexorably toward ecological disaster, while socialism lacks such an absolute economic growth imperative as an invariant standard and driving force. Nevertheless, this makes it all the more important to explain why socialist revolutions led to ecological results analogous to those of capitalism. The reality is that the Soviet socialist experiment emerged in what was largely an underdeveloped and peripheral (or semi-peripheral) area of the capitalist world economy and was immediately subject to the full force of imperialism—geopolitical, military, and economic, of which the Cold War was itself emblematic. The pressure to prepare for defense and put all other interests aside was intense. In its early phase, until the 1930s, the USSR boasted an unequalled ecological science. But with external pressures, the internal deformations and brutalities of the 1930s, and then fighting for survival against the Nazis, it evolved into a system geared to “production for production’s sake.” When emergency conditions began to ease, deep and lasting damage had been done. The USSR did not even remain socialist in the sense of continually promoting egalitarianism; in fact, a proletarianized working class remained. New ruling elements emerged. The USSR consciously copied methods and systems from advanced capitalist countries—including factory size and organization, scientific management, and agricultural practices. The kind of forced drafting of resources that is characteristic of war economies became institutionalized in the system.

    In terms of Marxist theory, then, the USSR lost most of the essential characteristics of societies in transition from capitalism to socialism.15 Accompanying this was a blatant disregard of ecological conditions—and the purging of the scientists who in the 1920s and early ‘30s had made Soviet ecological science foremost in the world. I have written briefly on the ecological contradictions of the Soviet Union and the role they placed in its demise in a section of my book The Vulnerable Planet, entitled “The Environment of the Cold War: Ecocide in the Soviet Union.” In Marx’s Ecology the destruction of Soviet ecological science is discussed.16

    In China the capitalist road to socialism, articulated by the Chinese Communist Party in the most recent period (since 1979), put development first, and also involved the forced drafting of natural resources and, to a significant extent, reliance on the profit motive to propel investment. In contrast to this, we are now seeing new ecological initiatives taking place in China, such as the New Rural Reconstruction program promoted by Wen Tiejun, basing itself on some of the strengths of the Chinese revolution.17

    An article that I wrote with Brett Clark on “The Planetary Emergency” for the December 2012 issue of Monthly Review points to the ecological significance of the New Rural Reconstruction movement in China.18 In my book, The Endless Crisis, written with Robert W. McChesney, there is a discussion of China’s current socioeconomic problems in which the growing ecological crisis of China—accelerating perhaps even more rapidly than the planetary crisis—is addressed. Our concluding chapter on China does not stop short of the critique of Foxconn and of the abysmal forms of labor exploitation in China, where, as Wang and his colleagues indicate, workers recently have been openly referred to by entrepreneurs as “animals” and compared to occupants of zoos—in obscene violation of everything that socialism has stood for historically.19 My article “James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy” in this issue of Monthly Review discusses China’s response to climate change and some of the challenges it faces.20 All of this makes the new “ecological civilization” discussion emerging in China all the more important. Fred Magdoff, with whom I recently wrote the book, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, published an article in the January 2011 issue of Monthly Review entitled “Ecological Civilization,” which was a talk delivered in 2010 at the Ecological Civilization Conference at Fudan University in Shanghai.21

    I would like to conclude by indicating my complete agreement with Zhihe Wang and his colleagues that ecological Marxism and constructive postmodernism represent overlapping and, to a considerable extent, complementary theoretical interventions, which, from all indications, are generating in China an intellectually powerful and praxis-oriented ecological critique. What Wang has elsewhere called “the indigenization of ecological Marxism in China” represents an extremely hopeful development not only for China but the world.22 China today must confront not simply capitalism as such, but the peculiar ecological and social rifts of a modern Chinese system, which, whatever its defining socioeconomic characteristics, is clearly threatened, both from within and without, by the cancerous spread of capitalist methods and mores.

    Notes

    1. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
    2. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949, and Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 283; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 75; John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–405.
    3. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective,” International Socialism 96 (Autumn 2002): 71–86.
    4. ↩ Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 141; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 21–65; Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
    5. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, excerpt from The German Ideology, in Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 408. This is a crossed-out passage in the manuscript, not included in the Collected Works edition.
    6. ↩ Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 1.
    7. ↩ Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975), 328; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.
    8. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 637.
    9. ↩ James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 146–47.
    10. ↩ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MEGA IV: 26 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 214–19. See also Joseph Beete Jukes, The Student’s Manual of Geology, , third edition (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1872), 479–93.
    11. ↩ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 11.
    12. ↩ Georg Lukács, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness (New York: Verso, 2000), 129–31; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 215–47.
    13. ↩ Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976).
    14. ↩ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 51.
    15. ↩ The general problem of such post-revoutionary social formations is discussed in Paul M. Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980). See also István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 622–54.
    16. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 96–101.
    17. ↩ See Wen Tiejun, Lau Kinchi, Cheng Cunwang, He Huili, and Qiu Jiansheng, “Ecological Civilization, Indigenous Culture, and Rural Reconstruction in China,” Monthly Review 63, no. 9 (February 2012): 29–35.
    18. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review 64, no. 7 (December 2012): 20.
    19. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 155–83.
    20. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “James Hansen and the Climate Change Exit Strategy,” Monthly Review64, no. 9 (February 2013): 1–22.
    21. ↩ Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,” Monthly Review 62, no. 8 (January 2011): 1–25; Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
    22. ↩ Zhihe Wang, “Ecological Marxism in China,” Monthly Review 63, no. 9 (February 2012): 44.

  • Joan Acker’s Feminist Historical-Materialist Theory of Class

    “Joan Acker’s Feminist Historical-Materialist Theory of Class,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (June 2012), pp. 48-52.
    [Bangla language edition printed in Bangla Monthly Review, June 2013.]

    Marxism and feminism are usually seen as divorced from each other today, following the breakup of what Heidi Hartmann famously called their “unhappy marriage.”1 Yet, some theorists still show the influence of both. In my view, Joan Acker is both one of the leading analysts of gender and class associated with the second wave of feminism, and one of the great contributors to what has been called “feminist historical materialism.” In the latter respect, I would place her next to such important proponents of feminist standpoint theory as Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, and Sandra Harding. These thinkers, as Fredric Jameson has rightly said, represent the “most authentic” heirs of Lukács’s critical Marxist view articulating the proletarian standpoint—giving this dialectical insight added meaning by applying it to gender relations.2

    It is noteworthy that Acker’s important theoretical work Class Questions: Feminist Answersappeared in 2006, one year before the onset of the Great Financial Crisis.3 This of course was no mere accident. Acker was deeply concerned about the waning of class analysis, particularly amongst feminist theorists. At the same time she recognized that class was becoming more important than ever, not only because of growing inequality but also growing instability in the capitalist economy. Thus in the beginning of her book she referred to the “bursting of the economic bubble of the late 1990s,” i.e., the 2000 stock market crash that brought an end to the New Economy bubble, as presaging a new era of class intensification and class struggle (1). Today in the wake of the bursting of the even bigger housing bubble, and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement with its slogan of the 99%, Acker’s analysis can be viewed as prescient.

    Class Questions: Feminist Answers provides a rich and insightful history of class analysis in the Marxian, Weberian, and feminist theory traditions, emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of each. Acker’s treatment of the long debate over capitalism and patriarchy is particularly useful. In her view the only meaningful approach to class is one that is understood to be gendered and racialized. In this sense, she prefers “verbal forms, such as gendering, or adjectival forms, such as racialized, that better capture the sense of process and diversity” as opposed to the omnipresent noun, which all too often “reifies processes and practices” (5). And while class must (as Marxists have always insisted) be seen as related to relations of production and paid labor, it must also, she argues, be seen as encompassing relations of distribution and unpaid labor too.

    This is less of a departure from classical Marxian theory than one might suppose. Marx employed the concept of class more flexibly than we commonly do today—referring to women as a class, i.e., as “slaves,” within the bourgeois family. “In private property of every type,” he wrote in Capital, “the slavery of the members of the family at least is always implicit since they are made use of and exploited by the head of the family.”4 Classical Marxist theory, as a great deal of scholarship in recent decades has shown, defined class primarily in terms ofexploitation, i.e., how surplus product/surplus labor was appropriated from the direct producers. And just as classical Marxism applied this concept of class to pre-capitalist and pre-market relations, and hence to non-paid relationships, so the concept was always applicable to unpaid labor, which in Marxian terms is a relation of production. Slaves, as Marx (as opposed to Weber) insisted, constituted a class despite the fact that they were not wage workers and were regarded as property themselves.5

    The uniqueness of Acker’s work comes out in her critique of “unreconstructed ‘class’” notions, particularly those that make race and gender invisible within the class conception (4–5). In exploring how class, race, and gender are “mutually constituted” she not only criticizes Marxian and Weberian conceptions, but also questions popular feminist and sociological treatments of class, race, and gender in terms of intersectionalities. It is not so much that these conceptions are wrong as they are too crude, trying to reduce class (and along with race and gender) to particular spatial or structural locations/intersections, rather than emphasizing class as a fluid social relation, involving diverse practices and processes, including its gendering and racialization. In this respect, her work draws inspiration from the introductory discussion on class in E.P. Thompson’s classic, The Making of the English Working Class—a work that had a profound effect on Acker and other feminist historical materialists, as did Thompson’s critique of structuralist Marxism.6 What Acker, then, is offering is a methodology that will allow us to look at class, gender, and race together in terms of their inter-relational historical formations (“makings”), with all of the dialectical complexities that this implies. Referring to Rose Brewer, she insists that, “race, class, and gender processes should be seen as simultaneous forces, and that theorizing must be historicized and contextualized” (36).

    In a key statement of her general point of view, Acker writes:

    Because [class] practices are gendered and racialized, there are probably considerable differences in any one grouping…. This is a fluid notion of fragmented aggregates, with shifting boundaries and shifting practices, particularly during times of economic and employment restructuring, such as the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although I am committed to this notion of class as relations always in process, there are times when a shorthand way of indicating location can be very useful. Therefore, I will sometimes use the designations manual working class, service and clerical working class, middle class—a large and heterogeneous grouping—and capitalist class to designate very large aggregates with similar situations of access to and control over the means of provisioning. (68)

    In all of her important theorizing of the gendering and racializing of class, Acker never loses sight of the questions raised by class itself, or the specific historical significance of class issues. Thus a central theme throughout her analysis is that while gender and race discrimination no longer have any direct, legitimate basis in developed capitalist societies, this is not true in the case of class; class exploitation and class discrimination are accepted as fully legitimate in a system that relies on these bases for its core process of capital accumulation. As she puts it: “Class-based inequalities in monetary reward and in control over resources, power, and authority, and the actions and routine practices that continually recreate them, are accepted as natural and necessary for the ongoing functioning of the socioeconomic system” (52–53).

    In the end, Acker holds out the hope of a Polanyian “double movement” in response to neoliberalism, i.e., the promise of a counter revolt from below, emanating from peoples who are subject to multiple, overlapping forms of exploitation. “Global corporate capital,” she writes, “seems to be in control at the moment, but changes toward radically restructuring gendered and racialized class practices, and reversing the race to the bottom in living and working conditions, could come as more and more people confront the realities that global market capitalism has brought affluence to perhaps the top 20 percent of the world’s population, anxiety and insecurity to others who are still consuming and surviving, but deep poverty and desperation to the rest” (183–85).

    If this seems slightly dated today, only six years later, it is only because the general situation is so much more desperate in the period of stagnation and rising unemployment and poverty that has followed the bursting of the housing bubble. Now we readily talk of the conflict between the 99% and the 1%.

    If I have one criticism—or questioning—of Acker’s analysis, it is that in one particular way she deemphasizes the role of class. This is because class too needs its adjectival form. We need to recognize that gender is increasingly “classed,” as reflected in the feminization of poverty even while the conditions of many women improve; and likewise race is “classed.” Class should be seen as a process that also modifies race and gender relations.

    Still, Acker’s criticism of the way in which many Marxian thinkers have employed the concept of class is a welcome one today. Although Acker does not generally describe herself today as a Marxist, and indeed sees herself a critic of that perspective (or at least its more structuralist versions), her work might well be accepted by today’s Marxists as an important advance not so much on but of Marxian theory, representing a further synthesis, and helping to further its critical-revolutionary potential. There is no contradiction between Acker’s deep feminist critique, and the fact that she can be regarded as part of the broad historical-materialist tradition. Indeed, she demonstrates that each is a requirement of the other.

    In all of Acker’s work one sees an attempt to envision new strategies of radical change. Hence, she has been a leader in the struggle for comparable worth, a devastating critic of the role that the welfare system has played in disciplining women as well as the poor, and a penetrating analyst of the gendering of organizations. For her the problem with the New Left was not that it was too revolutionary but that it was not revolutionary enough. As she wrote in Monthly Review in December 2001: “The daunting reality facing radical and socialist feminist visions was, and is, not only that we have no gender and race egalitarian alternative to capitalism, but that the interweaving of gender and race with the economic, political, and social relations of capitalism is much more complicated and pervasive than we had imagined. To fundamentally change the situation of women, almost everything else must change.”7

    Selected Further Reading

    • Acker, Joan. “Class, Gender, and the Relations of Distribution,” Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 473–97.
    • _____.Class Questions: Feminist Answers (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2006).
    • _____.“My Life as a Feminist Sociologist; or Getting the Man Out of My Head,” in Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne, eds., Feminist Sociology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 28–47.
    • _____.“Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 4 (January 1973): 174–83.
    • Harding, Sandra G., ed, The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).
    • _____. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
    • Hartsock, Nancy C.M., Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983).
    • _____. Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
    • Hennessy, Rosemary and Chrys Ingraham, eds., Materialist Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997).
    • Scott, Joan W., “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75.
    • Smith, Dorothy E., The Everyday World as Problematic (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1987).
    • Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

    Notes

    1. ↩ Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” in Lydia Sargent, ed.,Women and Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 1–41.
    2. ↩ Fredric Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness as an ‘Unfinished Project,’” Rethinking Marxism 1, no. 1 (1988): 64.
    3. ↩ Joan Acker, Class Questions: Feminist Answers (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006).
    4. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 1083. In his work on suicide we find Marx commenting on the “unbearable slavery” to which women are confined by law and “social conditions” in bourgeois society. See Karl Marx, Marx on Suicide (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 57–58.
    5. ↩ On the classical Marxian conception of class in relation to exploitation (and the contrast to Weber) see especially G.M.E. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World(London: Duckworth, 1981), 42–55, 88–91. Ralph Miliband pointed out that the emphasis onexploitation in Marx’s theory of class was entirely consistent with a wider understanding of a class system of domination, since it could be argued that “exploitation…has always been the main purpose of domination.” Nevertheless, it is important not to reduce domination in general to exploitation or class. “Patriarchy, for instance, as one form of domination, provides other advantages to its beneficiaries than the exploitation of surplus labour.” Miliband, “Class Analysis,” in Anthony Giddens and Jonathon Turner, eds., Social Theory Today (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 327–28.
    6. ↩ Joan Acker, “Class, Gender, and the Relations of Distribution,” Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 478; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 9.
    7. ↩ Joan Acker, “Different Strategies are Necessary Now,” Monthly Review 53, no. 5 (December 2001): 46–49.

  • Marx and Engels and ‘Small is Beautiful’- A Reply

    “Marx and Engels and ‘Small is Beautiful’—A Reply” [PDF] (coauthored with Samar Bagchi, Fred Magdoff), Monthly Review, vol. 63, no. 9 (February 2012), pp. 53-55.
    [Bangla language edition printed in Bangla Monthly Review, September 2012.]

    I am a regular reader of Monthly Review. I read with interest the recent articles on ecology and Marxism (Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism,” MR, March 2010, and Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,” MR, January 2011). It is true that Marx and Engels conceive that capitalism engenders a “metabolic rift” in nature and society. But both of them emphasize that the industrial growth that socialism would produce is beyond imagination under capitalism. Engels writes in Principles of Communism: “Once liberated from the pressure of private ownership, large-scale industry will develop on a scale that will make its present level of development seem as paltry as seems the manufacturing system compared with the large-scale industry of our time. This development of industry will provide society with a sufficient quantity of products to satisfy the needs of all.”

    In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels note: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” Soviet leadership took these words literally and wanted to outrace the United States in per capita production and collapsed.

    In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was impossible for Marx and Engels to envisage the ecological catastrophe that a constantly expanding industrial society can ensue.

    India’s Gandhi understood this. He writes in the beginning of the twentieth century: “God forbid India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” We can understand this today. If India and China, with a population of more than 2.5 billion, develops an ecological footprint of ten hectares per person as in the United States, which the rich and middle class of India are trying to emulate, the whole world will be stripped bare like locusts within a few decades. We have to redefine what is “development” or “civilization.” The creative outpourings of Mediterranean civilization, the ancient Indians, the Islamic civilization, and the renaissance in Europe are highly valued even today, compared to which, “We are hollow men / We are stuffed men / Our headpiece filled with straw,” as T.S Eliot said. But they did not have Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Internet, and rockets. The only advantage thatHomo sapiens has over other species is its immense capacity to create literature, music, arts, science, etc. which other species do not possess. A civilized society will foster creative potential and not the gluttonous consumerism of the industrial society.

    I think it is only a classless, egalitarian society with equity and justice, a simple-living society with decentralization of economy and polity, and gender equality that can bring an ecological civilization. More than 80 percent of the population in third world countries like India lead a very simple life. We have to remember Gandhi’s saying: “Nature has given man enough to satisfy his need but not enough to satisfy his greed.” It is perhaps very simple for a country like India to start an ecological society. But it is difficult for the Western society whose enchanting glamour is based on the sucking of blood and sweat of the periphery for more than 150 years. The dispossessed of the world have to engage in struggle and a process of construction to bring into existence an ecological society.

    I would very much like my views to be printed in MR and a debate generated. Best wishes and regards from a 79-year-oldie!

    A Response

    John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff

    Thank you for your letter. Your argument with regard to Marx and Engels is one that we have frequently heard, but with which we cannot agree in entirety. You begin by acknowledging the importance of the concept of “metabolic rift” as presented by the 49-year-old Marx of Capital, and then you suggest that this outlook was contradicted by the views of the 29-year-old Marx and the 27-year-old Engels of The Communist Manifesto. But do not their later, more mature assessments take precedence over their earlier ones?

    Marx and Engels’s thinking was not frozen in place in 1848. They continued to expand their knowledge as they progressed in their study of capitalism (as indicated by the concept of the metabolic rift). Theirs was an age of growing environmental awareness, and to their credit, they learned extensively from this, developing their own ecological assessment and building it into their overall critique of capitalism. In this, Marx’s Capital went considerably beyond theCommunist Manifesto—which was written well before Marx carried out his full critique of political economy. Where Capital and the Manifesto conflict, then, it is Capital that we should see as representing Marx’s developed view.

    Marx and Engels were acutely aware of the waste and environmental destruction that capitalism brought, as they indicated in numerous passages, though, as you say, they could not “envisage the [full] ecological catastrophe that a constantly expanding industrial society can ensue.” Marx found Tyndall’s experiments on the sun’s rays fascinating, sometimes attended the latter’s lectures in London in the early 1860s, and may even have been there when Tyndall first demonstrated his discovery that carbon dioxide, along with other gases, generated a greenhouse effect. Yet no one at that time could have foreseen the kind of planetary climate change that we are facing today as a result of this same greenhouse effect and climate forcing by human beings. But what of that? Marx’s real importance to the ecological discussion lies elsewhere, in his recognition of the deep, systematic, and enormously destructive conflict between capitalism and the environment. Marx, after Liebig, depicted industrial capitalism as a robbery-system (Raubbau) in its relation to nature. On that he left no doubt.

    What appears at first glance to be your strongest piece of evidence that Marx and Engels were uncritical proponents of industrialization is the quote from Engels’s Principles of Communism—a work that was written as a preliminary draft for what later became The Communist Manifesto. But it is significant that Marx, who at this point had more critical reservations about the ecological underside of industrialization than Engels did, chose not to incorporate that statement into the Manifesto itself.

    To be sure, the Manifesto declared that in the context of a revolution against capitalism the proletariat would have “to increase the total productive forces of society as rapidly as possible.” Marx and Engels were no enemies of industrialization per se, and by today’s standards these were still quite undeveloped economies. But the founders of historical materialism never saw this expansion of productive forces as the ultimate end of society. Rather, socialism/communism as an end goal, as Marx was later to explain in Capital, had to do with the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolic relations between nature and humanity, and therefore of the productive relations of human beings themselves. The object was to change the social relations—not in order to expand production, but in order to create a more human and sustainable community that fulfilled genuine needs. (Even in Engels’ quote from Principles of Communism he does not advocate perpetual growth, but industrialization to the point at which it would be possible “to satisfy the needs of all.”) There is no evidence of an empty worship of productivism in Marx’s thought. To the contrary, Paul Burkett has provided a fascinating description of “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development” (MR, October 2005).

    It is commonplace for critics of Marx and Engels on ecology to point their finger—as you do here—at the tragedy of the Soviet Union and the damage it inflicted on its environment (in which the Soviet Union, unfortunately, was hardly unique). But the Soviet Union in the 1920s had the most developed ecological science in the world and was extremely advanced in introducing ecological practices. All of this, however, was obliterated in the subsequent purge under Stalin. This was a tragedy of Marxism no doubt, but not one that could be easily laid at the feet of its classical founders. Some of the key victims of the purges, such as Bukharin, Vavilov, Hessen, and Uranovsky, were leading ecological thinkers as well as Marxists.

    As for the rest of your letter, we are in broad agreement. Gandhi’s eloquent statement was one of the earliest expressions of what is today called “the impossibility theorem” of ecology. As we observed in the opening sentences of our book, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2011—expanded from our earlier article):

    Ecological economist Herman Daly is well known for emphasizing what he called the “Impossibility Theorem” of unlimited economic growth in a limited environment. Put, concretely, an extension of a U.S.-style high consumption economy to the entire world of 7 billion people—much less the 9 billion-plus world population projected for the middle of the present century—is a flat impossibility. In this book we are concerned with extending Daly’s Impossibility Theorem by introducing what we regard to be its most important corollary: the continuation for any length of time of capitalism, as a grow-or-die system dedicated to unlimited capital accumulation, is itself a flat impossibility.

    Like you we believe that the ecological and social revolution that is necessary to change this situation has its basis first and foremost in the global periphery and what we have called in our book the “environmental proletariat.” But all peoples of the world will need to join in struggle to this same end—if we are to succeed. And to accomplish this they will need a developed critique of capitalism, and a strong commitment to socialism, i.e., a society of substantive equality and sustainable human development.

  • The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On

    “The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On” (coauthored with Fred Magdoff), Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 5 (October 2010): 52-55.

    The Great Financial Crisis began in the summer of 2007 and three years later, despite a putative “recovery,” it is still having profound effects in the United States, Europe, and in much of the world. Austerity is being forced on working people in many countries. Matters are especially difficult in Greece, a country that is being compelled by the demands of bankers, including the International Monetary Fund, to squeeze its workers in return for loans from abroad to help pay down government debts. Official unemployment in the United States is still around 10 percent, and real unemployment is much higher. An unprecedented 44 percent of the officially unemployed have been without work for over six months. A record number of people are receiving government food assistance as well as meals and groceries from charities. Many U.S. states and cities, facing large shortfalls in their budgets due to falling tax revenues, are cutting jobs and reducing funding for schools and social programs.Much of the attention devoted to determining the cause of the crisis has been directed at the role of “subprime” mortgages in the United States that were sold to low-income people who had little chance of being able to pay the mortgages on their homes. Many of these subprime loans were given out under predatory terms that were especially unfavorable to the unsuspecting borrowers. The bundling of these loans together to be sold to institutions around the world served to spread significant risk far and wide.Yet, despite the instability generated by such loans, and a whole host of exotic financial instruments associated with them, the very severity of the Great Financial Crisis suggests that it was not primarily a product of such speculative practices. Rather, it was the outcome in the main of long-term structural factors, reflected in the secular decline in economic growth rates and the long-run increase of financial fragility and instability.The economic growth rates of the rich countries at the center of the capitalist world system have been shifting into low gear for decades. In the United States, average GDP growth, corrected for inflation, dropped from 4.4 percent in the 1960s, to 3.3 in the 1970s, 3.1 in the 1980s and 1990s, and 1.9 in the 2000s (2000 to 2009). In response to these conditions of deepening economic stagnation within the “real economy,” excess money capital flowed into the financial sector seeking quick returns, leading to the creation of a massive financial superstructure on top of a weakening economic base. This resort to speculative finance as a wealth-generation strategy gave rise to huge artificial profits (and capital gains) seemingly out of thin air—with no real relation to the commodity economy.In this situation, larger and larger infusions of debt—household, corporate, and government—were needed to generate a given level of growth. At the same time, the whole debt balloon, which more and more took on the character of Ponzi finance, required constant infusions of cash merely to stave off the inevitable crash. The result was a literal explosion of debt, which reached an astronomical 350 percent of U.S. GDP by 2007.

    Financial bubbles are invariably symptoms of deeper underlying problems. To focus simply on subprime loans, or even the housing bubble itself, as the real cause of the crisis—as most orthodox economic commentators have done—is thus to mistake the symptom for the disease. If it hadn’t been for the housing bubble in the United States, there would have been another bubble that would have likely led to essentially the same results. Since the 1970s, the economy has seen more and more “credit crunches,” with central banks each time rushing in at the first sign of trouble to bail out failing financial institutions. This, however, has contributed to the growing financial fragility, while the underlying problem of stagnation has remained unaddressed.

    Three years since the onset of the Great Financial Crisis, matters have become so serious that Paul Krugman, winner of the Bank of Sweden’s Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences, has declared that we are now in (or entering) a Third Depression, i.e., a third period of economic stagnation. This Third Depression, he suggests, resembles both the stagnation that began in Europe and the United States in the 1870s, which he labels the Long Depression, and the stagnation of the 1930s, or the Great Depression. As Krugman writes: “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost—to the world economy, and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs—will nonetheless be immense.” Krugman contends that “this third depression will be primarily the result of a failure of policy”—the continuation, even in a severe downturn of the neoliberal policy of austerity aimed at erasing government deficits, as opposed to adopting a strong Keynesian stimulus policy as a way out of the crisis.1

    It is true that misguided neoliberal deficit-fighting economic policies during a slump will cause further damage to economic prospects. But Keynesian stimulus offers no genuine solution. The real problem, we argue, is not economic policy but capitalist development itself. Our thesis, in the briefest possible terms, is that the advanced capitalist economies are caught in a tendency to stagnation resulting from the dual processes of industrial maturation and monopolistic accumulation. Financialization (the shift in the center of gravity of the capitalist economy from production to finance) is to be regarded as a compensatory mechanism that has helped to lift the economic system under these circumstances, but at the expense of increased fragility. Capitalism is thus caught in what we call a “stagnation-financialization trap.”

    All of this is connected to the class structure of monopoly-finance capital, which has produced levels of inequality without precedent in the advanced capitalist world. The so-called “Forbes 400,” the 400 richest Americans, now own about as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, some 150 million people. A number of Citigroup analysts have recently argued that the United States and other rich economies are now so top heavy from the standpoint of wealth and income distribution that they are best described as “plutonomies,” in which small class fractions control increasingly large portions of social wealth.2

    To be sure, emerging economies, notably China and India, have not yet acquired the diseases of maturity and monopolization in the sense of the advanced capitalist states and thus are relatively free from the chronic illness that has crippled the countries at the center of the system. But emerging countries are far from being immune to the problems generated. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that they too will be impacted in multiple ways in today’s globalized economy as a result of the weakening of the system at its core. It is worth noting that the Long Depression was followed by a great wave of imperialist expansion leading up to the First World War, while the Great Depression led to the inter-imperialist conflict of the Second World War. The current Third Depression is already pointing ominously to heightened imperial conflict, centered especially in the Persian Gulf, which could potentially lead to devastating consequences for humanity as a whole.

    If all this were not enough, the world is now facing an even more serious peril: a rapidly accelerating planetary ecological crisis that threatens, if radical changes are not made in the next decade or two, the eventual collapse of most of the world’s ecosystems, together with human civilization itself.

    There is only one possible solution to this all-encompassing planetary crisis, and that is the euthanasia of capitalism, replacing it with a new economy geared to sustainable human development, ecological plenitude, and the cultivation of genuine human community. The sooner we begin to construct this qualitatively new system through our mass struggles, the better the long-term prospects for humanity and the earth will be.

    Eugene, Oregon
    Burlington, Vermont
    June 30, 2010

    [English language version of preface to the Bangla edition of The Great Financial Crisis. Spanish language translation by Alberto Nadal in El Diario Internacional (December 2010). Italian version published by Attac Italia, January 7, 2011, at HYPERLINK” http://www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip.php?article3525″
    http://www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip.php?article3525. French translation printed by Le  HYPERLINK “http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?anno=2&hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http://www.cadtm.org/&usg=ALkJrhhASr3MtAqVLKrb5KmngEWMpdgxrA” Comité pour l’Annulation de la Dette du Tiers Monde, December 29, 2010. Galician translation published by Avantar, December 21, 2010, http://www.galizacig.com/avantar/autor/john-bellamy-foster-e-fred-magdoff. Spanish translation by Alberto Nadal in Viento Sur, November 11, 2010. Catalan translation published by En Lluita,  HYPERLINK “http://www.enlluita.org/site/?q=node/3150” http://www.enlluita.org/site/?q=node/3150. Turkish translation appears in Kapitalizmin Finansal Krizi, edited by Prof. Dr. Abdullah Ersoy (Ankara, Turkey: Imaj Publishing, 2011), 330pp.]

    Notes

    1. ↩ Paul Krugman, “The Third Depression,” New York Times, June 28, 2010.
    2. ↩ Matthew Miller and Duncan Greenberg, ed., “The Richest People in America” (2009), Forbes, http://forbes.com; Arthur B. Kennickell, “Ponds and Streams: Wealth and Income in the U.S., 1989 to 2007,” Federal Reserve Board Working Paper 2009-13, 2009, 55, 63; Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances,” Citigroup Research, October 16, 2005; and “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Get Richer,” Citigroup Research, March 5, 2006.

     

  • Darwin’s Worms and the Skin of the Earth: An Introduction to Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on their Habits

    “Darwin’s Worms and the Skin of the Earth: An Introduction to Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on their Habits (Selections)”, (coauthored with Brett Clark and Richard York, Clark listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 22, no. 3 (September 2009), pp. 338-50.

    Charles Darwin’s discovery of the theory of evolution by natural selection is unquestionably one of the most profound scientific achievements in history. Darwin was heavily influenced by the great geologist Charles Lyell, who developed uniformitarianism, the methodological and substantive doctrine that sought to explain all geological formations as the result of the accumulation of small events happening continually over long periods of time. In The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, Darwin—inspired by Lyell’s grand conception—focused on how worms transform the surface of the earth through their constant, everyday activities.They contribute to the formation of soil,turning it over and over,which enhances the circulation of nutrients within ecosystems.All studies of nature are indebted to Darwin for his devotion to illustrating the power of the materialist approach and for illuminating how the world works through its natural processes, including the invisible labor of worms.

  • Postscript to “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis” (Monthly Review, April 2008)

    “Postscript to ‘The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis’ (Monthly Review, April 2008),” MRzine, October 25, 2008.

    Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis — the roots of which were explained in this article.   Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world.  We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history of capitalism.  More than a mere financial panic, what is taking place is a major devaluation of capital of still undetermined dimensions.  Marx explained that capital was invariably over-extended in a boom and that in the crisis that followed a part of that capital was devalued, enabling the rest to return to profitability and to the process of accumulation and expansion.  However, we are now to some extent in uncharted territory: a phase of monopoly-finance capital that is in many ways unprecedented.  Even at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes explained that after a crisis modern capitalism might return to profitability without a return to full employment, full utilization of existing capacity, and strong growth.  Our experience of the last half-century has shown that capitalism at its core was able to avoid stagnation only by vast military expenditures and, when that proved insufficient, by an enormous inflation of asset values and speculation, i.e. “financialization.”  This growth multiplied by the boom psychology on the way up (the “wealth effect”) turned out to also have a contracting multiplier effect on the way down.  These factors help to explain why the economic crisis in the real economy is so severe at present, and why there is no chance of an immediate restarting of the growth process.

    Many people first woke up to the seriousness of the crisis only on September 18, 2008, when U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson told Congress that the U.S. financial sector was within days of a complete meltdown and that a $700 billion bailout for the banks was urgently needed.  Since then (and indeed even before) vast amounts of government dollars have been poured into the financial structure (all told the financial exposure of the U.S. government alone in the entire crisis has exceeded $5 trillion at this writing), including direct injection of capital into major banks and partial nationalizations.1  Yet, still there is little sign of the crisis abating.  Insolvency is spreading through the economy from consumers to banks, to non-financial firms, back to consumers, in a vicious cycle.  The fact that the economy in recent decades was being lifted mainly by financialization makes the problem all that much more severe.

    The entire world economy is now affected.  Already one economy in the European sphere itself — Iceland — has experienced a meltdown, requiring rescue from outside, and some have called Iceland the “canary in the coalmine.”  Over this last neoliberal epoch, the United States and its European allies have forced upon the entire globe a model of the free flow of capital across borders.  The result today is the free flow of catastrophe.  Only by the imposition, first, of capital controls and the establishment, second, of non-market based “South-South” cooperation can “emerging” economies avoid becoming the worse victims of the crash.

    In these dire economic circumstances we should of course be careful not to fall into an exaggerated frame of mind.  It is important to remember that a breakdown of capitalism as a whole will not occur by mere economics alone.  Given time to work things out on its own terms the system will no doubt recover — though a full recovery could be many years away, if possible at all.

    The real historical issue before us is to what extent the world’s population is willing to wait for this crisis to be resolved on capitalist terms, so that the whole irrational process of exploitation and boom and bust can gain steam again — or whether they shall decide to insert themselves into the process to say Enough!  It is thispolitical insertion from below that the powers that be most fear.  From their Olympian position at the top of the system they know perhaps better than anyone else that the conditions exist for the possible renewal of socialism on a global scale.  Capitalism has reached its limits as a progressive force and its famous “creative destruction” has turned into a destructive creativity in which both the world’s people and the planet are now in jeopardy.  Indeed, for the world’s population and the earth taken a whole there is today no real alternative — to socialism.

    Translations:

    Spanish translation by Corporación Viva la Ciudadanía posted by the Instituto de Estudios Ecologistas del Tercer Mundo, http://www.estudiosecologistas.org/.

  • No Radical Change in the Model

    “’No Radical Change in the Model,’” foreword to “Brazil Under Lula: An MR Survey,” Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 9 (February 2007), pp. 15-16.

    Foreword

    In the 2006 presidential election campaign in Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula), leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT or Workers’ Party), was interviewed at length on July 11, 2006, by the Financial Times (which also interviewed Lula’s main rightist challenger Geraldo Alckmin). The interview touched on many topics but mainly concentrated on Lula’s adherence in his first term of office to the global neoliberal policies of monopoly-finance capital, particularly repayment of debt and “fiscal responsibility.” At two points in the interview the Financial Times bluntly asked whether Lula was looking toward a “radical change in the model,” i.e., whether he and his Workers’ Party intended to break with financial capital and neoliberalism in his second term of office. Lula gave them the answer they wanted: “There is no radical change in the model….What we need now, in economics and in politics, is to strengthen Brazil’s internal and external security.”y

    Lula’s attempt here to reassure the financial community marks the dramatic shift that the Workers’ Party of Brazil has undergone over the years, and especially since winning the presidency in 2002. Although Lula was reelected in October 2006 with 60 percent of the vote, it was not simply as a candidate with a populist base, but one who was also broadly acceptable to global financial capital.

    The PT arose in 1979 in the wake of a massive labor revolt by millions of industrial workers in the years 1978 and 1979. It was during this period of labor unrest that Lula—then president of the Metalworkers’ Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil’s most industrialized city—emerged as the new movement’s most charismatic leader, openly defying the military government. By 1989, when Brazil held its first free, democratic, presidential elections since 1960, the Workers’ Party had become such a mass, popular force that Lula came close to winning the presidency, losing in the end to his conservative opponent, Fernando Collor de Mello.

    At the time of that defeat MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy (“Notes from the Editors,” February 1990) observed that Lula’s and the PT’s strengths lay in “stressing the need for land reform, suspension of payment on Brazil’s enormous foreign debt, and above all redistribution of income and wealth.”

    Lula ran subsequently as the PT candidate in the 1994 and 1998 elections but was defeated both times by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who as a former Brazilian finance minister and then as president played a leading role in the introduction of a monetary stabilization plan for the Brazilian currency (the real) in line with IMF requirements, marking the triumph of neoliberal policy in Brazil.

    In 2002 Lula ran again. But this time the PT under his leadership indicated a greater willingness to accept the conditions imposed by neoliberalism, including full repayment of Brazil’s debt. Taking care of economic “fundamentals” was to be prioritized even at the expense of the PT’s broader social program. On that occasion his election campaign was successful. Lula’s first term consequently was characterized by its adherence to the main neoliberal agenda, including very stringent economic programs aimed at debt repayment and “fiscal responsibility.” This was coupled with a much less ambitious program than originally conceived on behalf of the poor. While passing out some benefits to its constituents the PT has also promoted neoliberal structural reforms that directly undermine the overall position of workers. This has then constituted a kind of Latin American social-democratic “third way” strategy in which neoliberal ends are hegemonic.

    Realizing the importance and complexity of the Brazilian political economy, its centrality to struggles throughout Latin America, and the general lack of an in-depth understanding of its key features outside of Latin America itself, MR last year solicited a group of articles by authors associated with the radical economic association, Sociedade Brasileira de Economia Política (SEP). The SEP publishes its own quarterly journal Revista, and we were able to obtain the help of members of the editorial board of that journal—principally the assistance of Rosa Maria Marques and Paulo Nakatani, who brought the various pieces together—but also the support of Leda Maria Paulani. The following special MR survey, consisting of four articles written last spring together with a more recent introduction commenting on the October 2006 presidential election, is the result.

     

  • Florence Kelley and the Struggle Against the Degradation of Life: An Introduction to a Selection from Modern Industry

    “Florence Kelley and the Struggle Against the Degradation of Life: An Introduction to a Selection from Modern Industry” [PDF] (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 19, no 2 (June 2006), 1-13. DOI: 10.1177/1086026606288224

    Florence Kelley illuminated how degraded environments stemmed from the social relations and operations of industrial capitalism. As a social reformer, she worked to document the various dangers that workers confronted. She presented how laborers were exposed to noxious gases, toxic substances, and poisonous chemicals and dyes. Dangerous materials, such as arsenic, were introduced into the production process without a concern for their health implications. Kelley’s critique of industrial capitalism and its exploitation of workers, especially in the form of child labor, revealed how a productive process driven by the accumu- lation of capital threatened the health of all people and hindered social development. She fought to make the public aware of the dangerous materials and hazardous conditions that were involved in the production of items for market. Kelley worked to unite consumers and laborers in a campaign to improve industrial relations, recognizing that a radical transformation of social relations was necessary in order to stop the degradation of life.

  • The Treadmill of Production: Extension, Refinement and Critique

    ”The Treadmill of Production: Extension, Refinement and Critique,” [PDF] (coauthored with Richard York, York listed first – special issue on ‘the treadmill of production, part II’), Organization and Environment, vol. 18, no. 1 (March 2005), pp. 5-6. DOI: 10.1177/1086026604270325

    Philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1978) argued that the key to evaluating merit in the sciences lies in the distinction between progressive and degenerative research programs. A research program is progressive if its theoretical growth anticipates its empirical growth (i.e., if it predicts novel facts with some frequency rather than merely explaining facts discovered by rival research pro- grams). In contrast, degenerative research programs are those whose theoretical development lags behind their empirical development. Needless to say, a research program may switch between these two states at different periods in time. This part of the special issue is focused on Schnaiberg’s (1980) “Treadmill of Production” (ToP), in environmental sociology and presents articles that implicitly explore the extent to which the (ToP) research program has been progressive and has the potential to be progressive in the coming years by providing novel insights into emerging phenomena. Whether the program ultimately proves to be progressive or degenera- tive remains to be seen, but it is indisputable that the (ToP) is one of the leading theoretical perspectives in environmental sociology and is at the center of most major contemporary debates in the subdiscipline.

     

  • Political Economy and the Environmental Crisis: Introduction to Special Issue

    “Political Economy and the Environmental Crisis: Introduction to Special Issue” [PDF] (co-authored with Richard York, Foster listed first—special issue on the treadmill of production, part I), vol. 17, no. 3 (September 2004), pp. 293-95. DOI: 10.1177/1086026604268016

    According to Frederick Buell (2003) in his book ‘From Apocalypse to Way of Life‘, perceptions of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s were both narrower in scope and more apocalyptic (usually Malthusian) in tone than those of today. Rather than diminishing, the problem of the environment has only expanded in the years since Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring‘, was published. Severe environmental crisis is no longer foreign to us—not some future to be feared and avoided so much as a present in which we are living. It has become a structural reality of modern life and accepted as such, even normalized. If anything, a certain fatalism has emerged. It is now increasingly understood by environmental sociologists and many others that global ecological degradation is at the core of the development of modern (particularly capitalist) forms of production and is inescapable as long as those relations of production remain unaltered. Proba- bly the earliest analyst to articulate such a structural view through a fully developed political-economic theory of environmental degradation under corporate capitalism was Allan Schnaiberg (1980) in his magnum opus, ‘The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity‘. It was here that Schnaiberg introduced the important concept of the treadmill of production—the topic taken up in this special issue. Schnaiberg rejected all apocalyptic notions, believing that something could be done if social relations could be radically transformed, yet his indictment of our present system of production for its degradation of the environment was all the more damning as a result.