Tag: Interview

  • Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now?

    Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now?

    Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now?” (John Bellamy Foster interviewed by John Molyneux and Owen McCormick), Monthly Review 73, no. 7 (December 2021), pp. 1-16.

    [Published in Irish Marxist Review, November 2021.]

    Against Doomsday ScenariosJohn Molyneux and Owen McCormack: Given the extreme summer weather and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, just how bad are things now? What do you believe the time scale is for catastrophe and what do you think that catastrophe will look like? Are things worse than the IPCC report claims? Some, including Michael Mann, have warned against “doomsday scenarios” that might deter people from acting. In your view, are doomsday scenarios the truth that needs to be told?

    John Bellamy Foster: We should of course avoid promoting “doomsday scenarios” in the sense of offering a fatalistic worldview. In fact, the environmental movement in general and ecosocialism in particular are all about combating the current trend toward ecological destruction. As UN general secretary António Guterres recently declared with respect to climate change, it is now “code red for humanity.” This is not a doomsday forecast but a call to action.

    Still, the word catastrophe is scarcely adequate in the present age of catastrophe capitalism. Catastrophes are now ubiquitous, since extending to the scale of the planet itself. We are experiencing throughout the globe a series of extreme weather events due in large part to climate change, each of which rank as “catastrophic” by historical precedents, sometimes lying outside the range of what was previously thought to be physically possible. The extreme conditions experienced this summer in the Northern Hemisphere—including floods in Europe; Hurricane Ida in the United States, which not only devastated New Orleans, but also ended up killing people in floods in New York and New Jersey; and the worsening drought and wildfires in California and the entire Pacific Coast of the United States—clearly represent something qualitatively new.

    The latest report of the IPCC, its Sixth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis, explains that the various climatic and extreme weather events will tend to compound, as in the case of droughts, desertification (dustbowlification), soil erosion, wildfires, and weakening monsoons, on the one hand, and a melting cryosphere, sea level rise, megastorms, and flooding, on the other—thereby intensifying and extending these catastrophic events, which will appear to come from everywhere at once. Moreover, the human consequences go deeper with temperature increases diminishing world grain production and putting strains on the world food supply; climate change contributing, along with the destruction of ecosystems by agribusiness, to the emergence of novel zoonoses, such as COVID-19 (along with numerous other health hazards); whole populations in cities throughout the planet exposed to unprecedented flooding; the prospect of climate refugees running into the hundreds of millions; and numerous other equally dire consequences, imposed on present and future generations.

    The IPCC, which has a record of scientific reticence, tells us that we will see in the next couple of decades, and indeed throughout this century, growing cataclysms and a shift toward an Earth System that is increasingly unsafe for humanity, even in the most optimistic scenarios. Thus, in the most “rosy” scenario provided by the IPCC (SSP1-1.9)—the only one of its scenarios where the increase in average global temperature at the end of the twenty-first century is projected to be below 1.5°C—the best that can be hoped for is a situation where a 1.5°C increase is staved off until 2040 and global temperatures only increase by a tenth of a degree after that, so that by the end of the century or the beginning of the next century the increase in global average temperature over preindustrial levels can be reduced to 1.4°C, removing humanity from the extreme danger zone. The point is that even in the most optimistic scenario—which would require a global ecological revolution on the part of humanity in order to be achieved, leading to carbon emissions peaking halfway through this decade and net zero emissions being achieved by 2050—the overall climate catastrophe facing humanity will be extremely dire.

    The second most optimistic scenario is one of staying below a 2°C increase (somewhere around 1.7°C). It too would require a global ecological revolution. The other three scenarios offered by the IPCC are basically unthinkable, for which the word apocalyptic is appropriate. In fact, we are currently headed toward the IPCC’s most apocalyptic scenario (SSP5-8.5), in which global average temperatures this century would, in the “best estimate,” rise by 4.4°C, which would, according to current scientific assessments, mean the collapse of industrial civilization, raising questions of human survival. In an ominous statement leaked from Part II of the Sixth Assessment Report, on “Impacts,” which will not be published until February, the IPCC says that if humanity is driven into extinction during the “sixth extinction” arising from anthropogenic causes, evolution will not bring the human species back.

    The trouble is that if we go beyond a 1.5°C increase, and especially beyond a 2°C increase, more and more climate feedback mechanisms, such as the loss of arctic ice and thus the weakening of the albedo effect (the earth’s reflectivity), the release of methane and carbon dioxide from the melting tundra, the burning of the Amazon, and the degradation of the ocean as a climate sink will compound the climate problem and create an irreversible situation, increasing the possibility of runaway climate change that would in effect feed on itself, to the extent that the very existence of humanity would be in question.

    There is still a possibility of avoiding absolutely catastrophic climate change on the level that would threaten human existence altogether. But to accomplish this would require revolutionary changes in social relations, as well as in technology and ways of living. Such a revolution would need to begin within the capitalist system but would lead beyond capital. There is no other way. As Karl Marx indicated, the struggle against capitalism is not simply about human freedom, it is also about human survival.

    I have a lot of respect for Michael Mann’s work on climate change and his fight against the absolute climate denialism of the right. I was, therefore, surprised to see his attacks on the left as “doomsayers” in his recent book, The New Climate War. He seems, by his own admission, to have been affected by what he called “mob-like” attacks on him by followers of Naomi Klein, for his questioning of her opposition to carbon markets (as if green capitalism were the solution). He sharply criticizes British climatologist Kevin Anderson for his claims that mainstream-liberal climate science has been too complacent and that there is a need to overthrow the current political-economic hegemony, as if this were not perfectly obvious at this point. Mann was sharply critical of Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal plan and has naively advanced the view that Joe Biden is “a climate change pioneer.”

    There is no doubt that Mann knows the science well, and he is worth paying attention to in that respect. But he seems to have no understanding whatsoever of the existing social relations of production of capitalism, leading him to dismiss as mere “doomsayers” everyone who points to the extreme urgency of the world’s present plight, rooted in the nature of our social system, and the need to change the social rules of the game—as if they were giving up, simply by insisting on the need for radical social change. He clearly believes there is some moderate, responsible, enlightened approach based on the existing political-economic system and the actions of established political elites, and to deviate from that is to be “defeatist” and a “doomsayer.”

    I am reminded here of Marx’s remark in Capital that natural scientists often “venture quite at random” and without understanding when they move beyond their own specific areas of expertise, and present themselves as authorities on social questions, which they do not even bother to take seriously or investigate. The climate problem (and Earth System emergency in general) does not arise from Earth processes directly, but from the inner drives of our contemporary socioeconomic system, namely capitalism. Failure to understand the nature of capitalism means that one can have little to offer with respect to organizing social action and solutions.

    JM/OM: Is there still time to avert disaster? Do you have any hope that existing powers and the present system will be able to avert the catastrophe of runaway climate change? Will they even seriously try? Some people are giving Biden a certain amount of credit for moving in the right direction—what do you think?

    JBF: We are now in a position, as I have indicated, where what we can only call catastrophic developments associated with the crossing of planetary boundaries (namely, climate change, the decline of biological diversity, ocean acidification, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, the elimination of ground cover, the loss of freshwater, chemical pollution, and so on) are unavoidable. The COVID-19 pandemic is itself a manifestation of the destruction of ecological systems by agribusiness, which is bound to create new zoonoses, transmitted by the circuits of capital. But climate change represents at present our most serious problem because of the speed with which it is developing and its irreversible character, often likened to a tipping point leading over the edge of a cliff (as much as some like Mann may dislike the metaphor). We are in a dangerous situation. But we can still avoid such dire, irreversible consequences, likely fatal to humanity, if sufficient social action is taken, allowing us to stop short of what scientists have designated as the climate tipping point (usually now thought of as requiring to stay below 1.5°C, or at most below 2°C, although this is inherently inexact).

    But this is only possible, as the leaked Part 3 of the Sixth Assessment Report (not scheduled for publication until March, and then in redacted form), on “Mitigation,” tells us, if we are willing to carry out fundamental structural change. And, as the report also informs us, at this point we would need to alter dramatically the “demand-side” of the equation, that is, the amount and structure of what is produced and consumed, including a shift to low-energy paths, rather than simply counting on the massive ecomodernization of energy systems, much less new technologies that do not exist at scale. Time is so short that the demand-side strategies, which require challenging the current production system, are the only changes that can be effected rapidly enough and on the scale required.

    In my view, the best historical analogy for the present world situation is Cuba’s Special Period following the demise of the Soviet Union. All at once in the early 1990s, Cuba had to do without the massive fossil fuel inputs (and petrochemical inputs) from the USSR on which its economy had come to depend. Fortunately, as the dialectical biologist Richard Levins explained, Cuba had seen the growth of ecological science in the form of “ecologists by conviction” of extraordinary ability, who were then joined in the Special Period by “ecologists by necessity.” Despite the U.S. blockade, Cuba was able to provide for its basic agricultural needs and reconstruct its economy based on organic agriculture and the development of socialist ecological science, creating a better society. This meant of course increased pressure on the population due to the external pressures they were under and the loss of external resources coming from the previous Eastern bloc. But Cuba in large part succeeded, in the process turning itself into the most ecological nation on earth (according to The Living Planet Report), while protecting and even increasing the quality of its human development. Tragically, it is Cuba’s success that has caused Washington in recent years to tighten the blockade, utilizing the methods of financial war. None of this, however, takes away from the depth of Cuba’s achievement.

    The hard truth is that we are already, due to the continuing destruction of the planetary environment by the capitalist world economy, facing deteriorating ecological conditions, which will, in the most optimistic IPCC scenario, continue to deteriorate this century. For example, there is absolutely no hope that sea level rise can be turned around (though it might be lessened) in this century. It will continue to rise to the end of the century, and possibly for a millennium depending on what we do and how soon. Much the same could be said of megastorms, desertification (dustbowlification), and so many of the other problems facing us. Our first priority has to be to decrease carbon emissions as fast as possible, which in the rich countries means now by double digits annually. This would require an emergency mobilization of the whole society and controls on corporate production. It would also require social and ecological planning. This might strike one as too extreme or too utopian, but such categories do not apply when we are in the midst of a planetary emergency, which promises to be extremely dangerous (or worse) for humanity as a whole, threatening all present and future generations.

    In the very beginning of the ecological era, in the mid–1970s, the Marxist sociologist Charles H. Anderson wrote a book called The Sociology of Survival: The Social Problem of Growth, in which he addressed climate change, ecological imperialism, and the enormity of the environmental problem, arguing that humanity needed an ecological revolution if it were to survive. The book disappeared almost as soon as it was published, receiving little attention from the left. Anderson, who was clearly despondent, committed suicide shortly after. But if there was one social-scientific thinker who approached reality with a vision of what the earth was facing a half century ago, it was him. He was clear that society had to be changed at every level, that capitalism and imperialism had to be transcended through a movement toward socialism, or humanity would not survive—exactly what science is telling us today.

    So far, the emphasis of the ecosocialist movement has rightly been on mitigation, in the hope that we can simply stave off disaster. But now the situation has changed, and we must enter the struggle on two planes at once. Not only do we have to take those actions to guarantee the survival of civilization and humanity, but we also need to take measures to protect populations in the present, because catastrophe, in one sense or another, is now at our door. For ecosocialists, this is less of a contradiction than for others. It is precisely the emphasis on both substantive equality and ecological sustainability, that is, the struggle for sustainable human development in terms that go back to Marx’s arguments in the nineteenth century, which defines the ecosocialist movement. It is simultaneously a struggle over the present as historyand the future as history, which demand essentially the same actions in the face of the enormous perils of our time. Whatever transpires, there is only one answer in the twenty-first century, and that is the creation of an ecological socialism aimed at the sustainable development of all of humanity. This obviously will not happen everywhere at once, but will emerge in pockets and then expand, while also inevitably facing counter-revolutionary trends, emanating from the centers of imperialism and monopoly-finance capital.

    JM/OM: In your book The Return of Nature, you show that ecological thinking has deep roots in the Marxist tradition. Do you see climate change as the ultimate expression of the metabolic rift first formulated by Marx?

    JBF: Marx’s notion of the metabolic rift (or the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” of humanity and nature) was a recognition of the alienated mediation between the capitalist “social metabolism” and the “universal metabolism of nature.” Marx originally explained this in terms of the depletion of the soil, as chemical nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium were sent to the new urban centers of the Industrial Revolution, where they contributed to pollution, and never returned to the soil. This was a phenomenon that Marx, following the German chemist Justus von Liebig, called the robbery system associated with industrialized capitalist agriculture. Metabolism, which first emerged as a concept in the early nineteenth century among cell physiologists, was quickly integrated with thermodynamics within physics and was to emerge as the basis of all systems ecology. The physician and scientist Roland Daniels, to whom Marx dedicated The Poverty of Philosophy, first introduced Marx to the notion of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) and employed it in a broad ecological sense, emphasizing the interdependence of life and the interconnections of the inorganic and organic. Marx then built on this in his writings beginning in the 1850s, using it to address the larger question of the material substratum and how this related to material flows, in a capitalist context, and later developing the notion of metabolic rift based in part on Liebig’s soil chemistry. It was the concept of metabolism that became the basis of ecosystem analysis and then Earth System analysis. It is significant that the greatest theorist of ecological crisis in England, in the generation after Charles Darwin, was the biologist E. Ray Lankester, a close friend of Marx (and Darwin and Thomas Huxley’s protégé). It was Lankester’s student Arthur G. Tansley, the founder of British plant ecology (and a Fabian-style socialist), who introduced the materialist concept of ecosystem, influenced by the Marxian mathematician Hyman Levy.

    Brett Clark and Richard York made a major theoretical breakthrough in an article on the “Carbon Metabolism” in Theory and Society in 2005 (later reprinted in our joint book The Ecological Rift in 2010), in which they applied Marx’s metabolic rift analysis to the problem of climate change. This then led to a wide-ranging (and still increasing) set of applications of Marx’s method to ecological problems, creating an integrated socioecological critique. Nevertheless, I would hesitate to say that climate change is “the ultimate expression of the ‘metabolic rift,’” since climate change is, in fact, only one of the planetary boundaries that are currently being crossed in the Anthropocene, defining the limits of the earth as a safe place for humanity. Each of these boundaries currently being crossed (such as loss of biodiversity and the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles), as a result of anthropogenic change, represent an Earth System emergency for humanity. The common denominator of all of them is the growth of capitalist accumulation. The Anthropocene crisis has in fact been defined within science as an “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System.

    The Return of Nature, going beyond my earlier Marx’s Ecology, tells the story of how socialists played leading roles—even the leading roles—in developing an evolutionary ecological critique, building on Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Marx’s materialism, and Frederick Engels’s dialectics of nature, giving rise to a dialectical systems analysis rooted in metabolic processes and the concept of emergence. The story extends from Darwin’s and Marx’s deaths in 1882–83 to the modern ecology movement, focusing particularly, within science in Britain, on Lankester, Tansley, H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, Lancelot Hogben, and Levy. These developments within science overlapped with a related aesthetic and cultural path to ecology within Marxism in the British Isles, building on the radical Romantics, in the work of figures like William Morris, Christopher Caudwell, George Thomson, and Benjamin Farmington. Many of these thinkers traced the same path as Marx’s own development with respect to materialism, extending from Epicurus to materialist dialectics and radical conceptions of science, which Marx often treated synonymously with dialectics. This legacy of critical historical-materialist ecology, precisely because it saw ecology from the first as dialectical and interlocked with society, is crucial to the development of our contemporary critique.

    JM/OM: Do you have any expectations for the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26)? What do you think the conference will do?

    JBF: I do not have any real expectations for COP26, given past experience. In 2002, in what was called the second Earth Summit (the World Summit on Sustainable Development) in South Africa, I pointed out that despite the initiation of the Kyoto Protocol process, the developed capitalist economies were increasing their carbon emissions, not decreasing them (this can be found in my book Ecological Revolution). The various climate summits have helped keep hope alive but only barely. The same pattern has been repeated again and again. We are now reaching the decisive point. My hunch is that the COP26 will move toward staying below 2°C since there is no pretending with respect to staying below 1.5°C anymore without acknowledging that it is, indeed, a “code red for humanity.” Climate scientists at the University of Washington came out with a study recently that said if the world’s countries were to pledge to reduce their emissions by 1.8 percent annually rather than 1 percent (which of course they are not doing anyway) there would be a 50-50 (coin toss) chance of limiting global heating to below 2°C. I think this is smoke and mirrors, but is the sort of thing that the world’s so-called leaders may grab onto in order to pretend that they can and will do something, without having to promise too much. They can then say they have saved the world through their mere promises.

    Yet, it is always possible, though it seems unlikely at this point, that something will shake this up. Conceivably, China, with its global insider-outsider role, will make a decisive move, or China and the United States will force each other’s hands. Maybe there will be a split at the top of the system within elements of the ruling capitalist class and its supporting echelons, given the dangers to all of humanity, breaking away. The French Revolution of 1789, after all, began at the top with the revolution of the aristocracy against the monarchy, and then it spread in successive revolutionary waves, each of which upturned the system, to the rest of society. We could see an explosion emanating from humanity, kindled by a match somewhere.

    But frankly, I do not see any of this happening in relation to Glasgow itself, which is likely to be characterized, unfortunately, by what Greta Thunberg has called “blah blah” and some significant protests. The big action, as in Copenhagen in 2009, will be when the world realizes that they have been “sold down the river” (an idiom incidentally that arose in the U.S. slave trade and seems quite appropriate in relation to the current expropriation of the earth). Most likely, COP26 will be a huge failure and people everywhere will then have to decide what to do. There will likely be more talk about how to provide international aid to the most endangered countries, such as the world’s small, low-lying islands. None of which is likely to materialize. It looks like it is shaping up to be another betrayal, which will of course fall mainly on those who expect to see this century out, and especially on those most vulnerable.

    JM/OM: There are a number of debates within the movement and among ecosocialists. (1) Should we speak of the Anthropocene or the Capitolocene? (2) Should ecosocialists advocate degrowth—and, if so, what about development in the Global South? (3) Do you believe it is meaningful to speak of “the rights of nature”? (4) Is the time right for sabotage and/or violence, such as “blowing up pipelines”? What are your views on any or all of these questions?

    JBF: This is taking on a lot of questions and debates all at once. I will try to answer them briefly, in succession.

    (1) The Anthropocene is a quite precise scientific concept, part of the geological time scale, which is one of the great achievements of modern science. It signifies that anthropogenic forces (via society) are now the main factors in Earth System change. There is no doubting this, and there is no possibility of this changing while industrial civilization in any sense persists. Even if capitalism were to go away, and socialism were to replace it, we would still be in the Anthropocene. There is no changing this without endangering human civilization and human existence. Indeed, capitalism is right now driving the world toward an Anthropocene-extinction event (and perhaps Quaternary-extinction event), in which the anthropogenic impact on the earth will conclude with the destruction of civilization and humanity itself, along with innumerable other species. In this sense, the term Capitalocene is simply a category mistake that ignores the results of natural science and represents an unwillingness to confront the reality of the new geological epoch in which we live.

    Approaching this more concretely, we can say that while, officially, we live at present in the Holocene Epoch in geological time, stretching back about 11,700 years, in truth we are now living in the still-unofficial Anthropocene Epoch, which stands for anthropogenic factors now being the predominant forces in Earth System change. This connects more closely to human history when related to geological ages, which nest within geological epochs. Viewed from this standpoint, we live today officially in the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch, going back about 4,200 years and often associated with early civilizational collapse due to climate change (though this is in dispute within science). The Meghalayan Age is viewed as the last geological age of the Holocene. Hence, Clark and I, as professional environmental sociologists, have recently argued (in “The Capitalinian” in the September issue of Monthly Review) that, with the coming of the Anthropocene Epoch, we have entered a new geological age, the first age of the Anthropocene, which began at the end of the Second World War together with the Anthropocene itself. We propose calling this new geological age the Capitalinian Age because it marks the point at which a globalizing capitalism, emerging as a geological force threatening the planet itself, began to disrupt the entire Earth System. Consequently, humanity is now faced with either an end-Anthropocene extinction event, in geological terms, evolving out of the Capitalinian (in the historical age of catastrophe capitalism), or else we will find a way to create a community with the earth, which will require a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality (ecosocialism), ushering in a new geological age: what Clark and I call the “Communian.” The value of this framework is that it tells us exactly what is at stake. We are thus confronted in the Anthropocene Epoch and the Capitalinian Age with a Great Climacteric, requiring the creation of a world that is coevolutionary with the Earth System, the Communian Age—or we will not survive. In this way, we can understand the relation between human history and geological history as it presents itself in our time.

    (2) If degrowth means that we have to decrease our impact on the Earth System; that Less Is More as Jason Hickel argues in his book; that exponential accumulation of capital on a world scale cannot occur in a finite Earth System; that we have to move toward a steady-state economy (with decreased economic weight in relation to the present) that promotes sustainable human development; that we need a socialist democratically planned economy that emphasizes low-energy solutions and decreases waste and destruction; that the world has to move toward equal per capita levels of energy use, somewhere around the level of Italy today (allowing poor countries to catch up); that we have to emphasize community rather than commodity production—yes, then, I support the notion of “degrowth,” though even then with some reservations. It captures an essential aspect of the problem. The capitalist pattern of growth is no longer possible.

    Yet, the concept of degrowth itself has problems in terms of the way we choose to articulate our strategy. It is simply an inversion of the notion of “growth,” which is the most powerful metaphor of the existing system, introduced after the Second World War to represent the increase in gross domestic product. Here, growth is simply the hegemonic accounting ledger, based on capitalist double-entry bookkeeping, raised to the national level. It stands for anything (war spending, crime, fossil-fuel production, nuclear waste management, immediately disposable products) contributing to “value added.” It includes everything that passes through the market, whatever the nature of the particular commodity is, and regardless of its wastefulness, destructiveness, irrationality, and the inequality, exploitation, and expropriation embedded in it. If one cuts down a forest, which in capitalist terms is millions of board feet of standing timber, that counts as growth. Ironically, the growth of the Amazon Forest itself would not constitute “growth.” The Amazon is, in fact, being destroyed today in the name of capitalist development.

    But to say, then, that what we are promoting as an alternative is “degrowth,” which merely inverts this distorted conception of growth, risks compounding the confusion, treating the ecological problem as simply a question of scale. The question is then reduced to its quantitative aspects, having nothing to do necessarily with qualitative issues, social relations, and so on. It is as though we can go along as we are, but only smaller, thus capturing only one dimension of the problem. While, in fact, the key issue is the nature of the accumulation system itself, the destructive ecological effects of which cannot be reduced simply to questions of scale. (The more sophisticated degrowth theorists, of course, realize this and incorporate qualitative concerns into their analyses.) We also run into the problem in which some influential degrowth theorists, like the French economist Serge Latouche, argue that degrowth is compatible with capitalism, as if capitalism were not a system for the accumulation of capital ad infinitum. Some degrowth theorists have also skirted the issue of the needed development in much of the Global South, which cannot be asked to degrow. In general, the degrowth conception is useful in establishing the necessary parameters. But the real issue is the social system itself. Also, we are faced with the problem of countering a fetishized concept of growth by simply turning it upside down, which produces real difficulties in building a popular conception. Some ecological systems theorists like Howard Odum have tried to get around this by addressing the question of a “prosperous way down.” I think the only real answer, however, is to make ecosocialism rather than degrowth the principal focus.

    The key problem is that we live in an “accumulative society,” as the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre called it. What we need is not so much a degrowth perspective as a deaccumulation perspective. Capitalism is dangerous to the environment not simply because it grows, but because of the way it grows (accumulation at all costs), which maximizes the dangers to the environment and to the world population. This issue is highlighted in my article (included in The Ecological Rift) called “The Absolute General Law of Environmental Degradation under Capitalism.”

    Nevertheless, the notion of degrowth does punch a hole in the capitalist growth ideology, which is essential. Exponential growth, and above all, capitalist accumulation, now actually destroys more than it creates in real-world terms, destroying the planet as a home for humanity. Moreover, in recent years, degrowth theorists have played the leading role in developing low-energy strategies for dealing with climate change. Thus, Hickel’s work (along with that of Andreas Malm and others) is referred to in the leaked Part 3 of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment as pointing to the possibility for low-energy strategies, seen as the main hope now of staying below a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature, and as providing arguments with respect to the unsustainability of capitalism.

    (3) I do not think it makes much sense to speak of “the rights of nature,” if only because nature is likely to lose out in any such perspective, as does humanity today. Political rights (the main way in which we refer to rights in capitalist society) are associated with being part of a political order, based on the notion of some kind of elemental social contract (a notion first introduced in antiquity by Epicurus), or from being part of a consciously created constitutional order. In the capitalist mode of production, right, in this sense, is essentially reduced to property right based on the concept of the commodity, which forms the basis of the entire legal system. There is also an ethical notion of natural right that is conceived in various ways and is separate from politically derived rights. This notion is even more confused because it is removed from the notion of a social contract. Here, if we are talking about justice, as Epicurus argued, and Marx concurred, the basic concept of justice is reciprocity, plus the recognition that our notion of justice must change along with changes in our relationships and our needs. Here we can talk about the need, in a relation of reciprocity, to sustain and reproduce the earth, and how this need evolves with history. We have to recognize our sensuous and aesthetic connection to nature, the fact that human beings themselves are a part of nature, which we relate to in a sensuous, material way, something that Marx insisted on again and again. Aldo Leopold, from a different perspective, but one that challenged the commodification of nature, stressed the need to extend our sense of community to nature. We should have a sense of the intrinsic value of nature, as of life itself, and an aesthetic relation to nature, derived from this larger sense of community with the earth.

    As Marx said, we relate to nature not only through production but through our concepts of beauty. And, of course, we have to have some protective sense of “animal rights,” to prevent their abuse in a capitalist commodity society. Aside from human slavery, nothing is worse than reducing nonhuman animals to mere machines without souls, as René Descartes did. In fact, Marx directly criticized Descartes’s mechanical philosophy for demoting nonhuman animals from assistants to human beings, as in medieval times, to the mere mechanical objects of bourgeois society. As Epicurus argued (and Marx reiterated), we have to live in a way that the world—that is, nature—is “our friend.” Trying to address all of this in terms of a bourgeois concept of rights confuses matters, as the real issue is the extent and nature of our community with the earth, with nonhuman animals, and with each other.

    (4) Whatever one may think of his particular stance—which derives from a view that we must now be prepared to consider using all the means necessary to save the earth as a home for humanity—Malm has done the movement a favor in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (a work that is more reasonable than its provocative title suggests), by raising some of the most difficult concrete issues of tactics and militancy. Specifically, Malm asks us to consider to what extent and in what ways the climate movement will respond to the violence of ecocide/omnicide with its own tactics, including sabotage and violence against property. Nonviolent mass protest is obviously to be preferred. Still, we live in the context of a capitalist state, which defines itself in terms of a self-referential system of law, designed to protect and legitimize the existing exploitative order and, as Max Weber stressed (only a decade and a half before the rise of the Nazi regime), confers on itself “the monopoly of the legitimate use of force.” It often responds to threats to established authority with the use of force and violence, including—where necessary to preserve the existing property order—martial law/states of emergency and imperial war, which today has become permanent. There is a dialectic of violence in how the system operates and through which it constitutes itself.

    Sabotage (which of course derives etymologically from the French sabot, wooden shoe, and from workers throwing shoes in machines) will necessarily be part of an ecological revolution, and so will attacks on private property, given that the owners of the means of production (the wealthy and corporations) are destroying the earth itself so as to expand their financial holdings. Malm quotes Nelson Mandela, in the struggle against Apartheid, in which he declared: “‘I called for non-violent protest as long as it was effective’ as ‘a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked.’” It seems inevitable to me that as the stakes for humanity rise, more and more people will inevitably take this general stance, recognizing that human survival (as well as human freedom) is at issue. How could it be otherwise, if the system refuses to respond to human needs to the point of endangering human survival? I think Kim Stanley Robinson was quite realistic in his recent novel The Ministry for the Future in making the recourse to violent resistance by some revolutionary ecological groups part of the mix and helping people develop a sympathetic understanding of why and how this could happen, while not actually advocating it.

    One example of a tactic that I do support at present is that of the valve turners in North America. On October 11, 2016, five climate activists closed the valves on four of the pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Canada into the United States. A full 15 percent of U.S. crude oil imports were closed down for nearly a day. To make sure worker safety was not violated, a call was made to each company’s emergency response around fifteen minutes before the valve turners entered the sites, giving the corporations plenty of time to shut each pipeline down. The valve turners were charged with felonies, including criminal sabotage. They are being defended by Lauren Regan, one of the foremost environmental and civil rights lawyers in the United States, as well as an MR author. Regan and her organization, the Civil Liberties Defense Council, where I am an advisory board member, has relied, with considerable success, on employing the necessity defense, not used for many years in U.S. law, arguing that the valve turners had no choice, since their actions were not only necessary but morally and legally justified in order to avoid catastrophic harm to humanity and all life on Earth. Juries several times refused to convict the valve turners, agreeing with their necessity defense.

    JM/OM: What do you think should be the immediate demands, goals, and tactics of the climate movement?

    JBF: This is a very big question. Since we have been talking already about tactics, I will focus on demands and goals.

    Clearly the goal, at a minimum, has to be to stay below a 1.5°C increase in global average temperatures until 2040, which is the most optimistic scenario of the IPCC, which will then, it is hoped, allow a return to a 1.4°C increase by the end of the century or into the next century. This, as the IPPC says in its leaked Part III report, however, requires facing the fact that fundamental structural change in the present socioeconomic system is needed and that capitalism, as a system, is “unsustainable.” Here, the IPCC cites figures like Hickel and Malm. The only real hope in the years immediately ahead, the leaked “Mitigation Report” suggests, is low-energy strategies, which can reduce energy use by 40 percent, while at the same time improving the human condition. It is this, and not the technology, which now cannot be introduced fast enough. (Solar and wind account for only 7 percent of total energy consumption worldwide at present; direct air capture and Bioenergy and Carbon Capture and Sequestration do not exist on an adequate scale as technologies today; nuclear with all its attendant problems cannot fill the gap, nor should it.) Negative emissions, the science tells us, are necessary on a supplemental basis, if we are to not break the climate budget, but this can be achieved by improved forestry, agricultural and soil methods, such as maintaining soil organic matter, without geoengineering. Basically, humanity needs a quick transition, and this can only occur by the self-mobilization of populations and fundamental alterations in social relations.

    Whatever way we look at it, it means an ecological revolution, affecting social relations, on a scale beyond anything humanity has ever seen before—or we will not make it. As Marx said when confronted with the severe ecological problems in Ireland, it is a question of “ruin or revolution.” Moreover, the burden in our time has to be put primarily on the rich countries, since they are the ones that have used up most of the global carbon budget, have higher per capita wealth, the highest per capita energy consumption, the highest carbon footprints per capita, and also monopolize much of the technology. The core capitalist system in the Global North is primarily responsible for most of the increases in carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Today, the bulk of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are concentrated in a few hundred global corporations and military spending. All of this underscores that the rich capitalist countries at the center of the world system owe an ecological debt to the rest of the world. They thus have the main responsibility for fixing the problem by bringing their economies more in line with the world average energy consumption. This requires going against the logic of capitalism in order to save the planet as a safe home for humanity.

    Part III of the leaked IPCC report explicitly supports climate strikes, a just transition, environmental justice, mass movements, protecting the vulnerable, and fundamental, “transformative change” in society. It says no new coal-fired plants can be started up from now on and that all existing ones have to be eliminated in a decade; sports utilities have to go; we need “new cities” that are not engines of ecological destruction; public transportation has to be expanded; pipelines have to be removed; fossil fuels have to stay in the ground, made possible by low-carbon pathways. Our whole production and consumption system has to change and to do this people will have to change it, going against corporations.

    However, mitigation itself is no longer enough, because catastrophe is at our doorsteps at present, even if we still have time to avoid the point of no return if we act decisively enough and on a big enough scale. Humanity needs to mitigate the problem, that is, to stop global heating and reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 (net zero is significant because we no longer have the possibility of meeting the below-1.5°C or even the below-2°C targets without negative emissions). But we are also facing the reality that, even in the most optimistic scenario, climate conditions will deteriorate for most of this century. We have to act to protect what Marx called “the chain of human generations,” reconstituting society on an ecosocialist basis—not just for the future, but also now for the present. This can help the cause of ecological revolution, propelling people into action.

    JM/OM: You often say, “it is ruin or revolution.” What do you think that revolution will look like, and how can and should we work toward revolution today?

    JBF: A revolution—as the cultural theorist Jacob Burckhardt said in the nineteenth century—is an enormous “acceleration of history.” The only way to address capitalism’s disruption of the ecological cycles of the planet is such an acceleration of history, one in which humanity mobilizes on the largest scale possible, based on a new environmental proletariat, encompassing the full range of material needs (environmental and economic, productive and reproductive), aimed at the radical transformation of existing social relations and the creation of a socialist ecological society. Such a movement will have to take place globally and at numerous levels, with breaks within the existing order not simply at the bottom, but cracking the entire class-power edifice and its political-economic hegemony, reflecting that this is an existential crisis. It will need simultaneously to be a cultural, ecological, social, and economic revolution. In my 1994 book The Vulnerable Planet, I argued that the economic impact on the earth due to capitalism was accelerating to the point that the economy was now rivaling the ecological cycles of the entire planet. In the second edition of the book, in 1999, I argued that the only answer was to accelerate history beyond the current mode of production through a social and ecological revolution—so as to transcend the accumulative society of capitalism and create a community with the earth. The issues remain the same, but we are much further down the garden path.

    All of this may sound utopian, but the negative sense of utopian as an ideal dream, reflecting the original Latin meaning of nowhere that Thomas More played on, has no real meaning in our time—nor can we afford to dwell on dystopia—when the world scientific consensus tells us that we either make fundamental, rapid, social-structural change on a global basis or industrial civilization and the future of humanity is crushed. There is only human struggle in an increasingly harsh environment, the product of the Capitalinian Age of the Anthropocene Epoch. The planetary environment as a whole is rapidly changing around us as a result of the system that we have created and there is no standing still. None of our existing social institutions will survive existing trends, which, if we continue much longer on the present path during this century, will almost certainly, the world scientific consensus suggests, bring down industrial civilization itself.

    Capitalism is rapidly carrying out environmental changes that have already compromised the planet as a safe space for humanity during this century. Its famous creative destruction is now undermining the earth itself. There is no option left but ecological revolution, which means simply that the people, in their endless numbers, will once again be compelled to take history into their own hands, in a struggle that is likely to be stormy and chaotic, but that will also demonstrate the power and endless creativity of humanity, offering the possibility of a new ecological renaissance. There is no guarantee, of course, that in such a struggle we will succeed. Marx once said no attempt at world-historical change is ever undertaken on the basis of infallible guarantees. All that we know for certain, is that, with whole generations seeing their future being stripped away, and humanity’s existence imperiled, it is inevitable that hundreds of millions of people, if not reaching into the billions, will resist, leading to what will undoubtedly be the greatest series of revolts in history, taking place throughout the planet. We can already see this in the farmers’ revolt in India, the school climate strikes in Europe, and the battle over Standing Rock in North America. This points to a new environmental proletariat, responding to the material needs that are equally economic and ecological, productive and reproductive. It is there that our hope lies: the creation of a whole new geological (and historical) age of the earth, the Communian.

  • The Planetary Rift

    The Planetary Rift” (Interview of Foster by Haris Golemis), transform! Yearbook 2021: Capitalism’s Deadly Threat (London: Merlin Press, 2021), pp. 57-72.

    [Reprinted in Monthly Review (November 2021), pp. 1-14.

    HG: With your pathbreaking article “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift” (American Journal of Sociology, 1999), you challenged the then prevalent view, even among non-dogmatic Marxists, that the effects of capitalist growth on nature was not of interest to Karl Marx. Could you briefly explain your thesis?

    JBF: In “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,” I argued that the widespread view on the left that Marx had adopted a Promethean (extreme productivist) view of the human domination of nature—and hence had failed to perceive the natural limits to production and ecological contradictions in general, giving them at most only marginal attention—was contradicted by his theory of the metabolic rift, which played a key role in his overall analysis. Marx built on the German chemist Justus von Liebig’s notion of the robbery of nature, in which nutrients were systematically removed from the soil and shipped hundreds and even thousands of miles to the new urban centers, polluting the cities, rather than being returned to the soil. Based on this, he constructed an ecological critique of capitalism, rooted in the concept of social metabolism, standing for the human relation to nature as a whole through production. Capitalism’s disruption of this metabolism generated an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” For Marx, the labor and production process constituted nothing less than the social metabolism between humanity and the universal metabolism of nature, mediating between the two. But under capitalism this had become an alienated mediation, rupturing this metabolism, which needed then to be restored under socialism, as an eternal requirement of life itself. In these terms, Marx developed a notion of sustainability, arguing that no one, not even all the people in the world, owned the earth, but rather they needed to sustain it for “the chain of human generations” as “good heads of the household.” Socialism itself was defined in volume 3 of Capital as the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolism of nature and society, so as to conserve energy, and promote human development.

    In short, Marx’s critique of political economy ushered in the most profound ecological critique ever developed, since it was dialectically connected to his overall analysis of capitalist production and constituting the basis of the creation of a higher society of the future. Later scientific ecology, including the concept of ecosystem, were to be developed on this same basis, with the concept of metabolism leading to systems ecology.

    The power of Marx’s analysis in this respect and the depth of his understanding of natural science surprised me and forced me to rethink Marx’s entire body of work. How had he developed such a profound ecological critique? The answer had to lie in his materialism, which went much deeper than most Marxist theorists had perceived. This led me back to the very beginnings of Marx’s thought, starting with his doctoral thesis on Epicurus, the greatest materialist thinker in antiquity, and analyzing the development of Marx’s materialist and ecological perspective from that point on, including his relation to thinkers such as Liebig and Charles Darwin. This reinterpretation of Marx’s thought resulted in my book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, published in 2000.

    HG: In a March 2020 interview you gave to Farooque Chowdhury, you said that David Harvey was critical of the theoretical scheme presented in your book The Vulnerable Planet (Monthly Review Press, 1994). Would you say that, since then, his and your analyses of contemporary capitalism have come closer?

    JBF: Harvey is a major Marxist theorist, and his wide-ranging work is always illuminating, presented with an elegance all of its own. In the last decade or so, he has moved closer, particularly since his The Enigma of Capital (2011), to the Marxian economic analysis pioneered by Monthly Review, focusing on the problem of surplus capital absorption under monopoly finance. So, there are a lot of places where our analysis overlaps.

    However, Harvey and I have long had major differences in how we see the planetary ecological crisis and as to the significance of Marxist theory in this respect. In the 1990s, he denied the severity of the overall environmental problem, arguing in response to my book, The Vulnerable Planet (1994), in his Justice, Nature, the Geography of Difference (1996), that with respect to the human impact on the planet, “The worst we can do is to engage in material transformations of our environment so as to make life less rather than more comfortable for own species, while recognizing that what we do also does have ramifications (both positive and negative) for other living species.” In these quiescent terms, he rejected the argument in my book that biogeochemical cycles of the Earth System were being disrupted by the increasing scale of capitalist production. Instead, he strongly criticized all notions that “ecocide is imminent” due to capitalist development, claiming rather that such a view was vulnerable to right-wing criticisms that said human conditions were constantly improving.

    In a debate between Harvey and me that followed in Monthly Review (April 1998), he declared that the 1992 “Warning to Humanity” focusing on the dangers of climate change signed by over 1,500 of the world’s scientists, including more than half of the recipients of the Nobel Prize among living scientists, were “every bit as problematic as the literature [of climate change deniers and anti-environmentalists such as Julian Simon and Greg Easterbrook] they rebut.” He insisted that a Marxist perspective should prevent us from falling for the ecological rhetoric “that we are reaching some limit, that environmental catastrophe is around the corner or that we are about to destroy planet earth.” His overall emphasis at the time was to downplay and, to a considerable extent, deny the planetary ecological emergency—on putatively Marxist grounds.

    It took him several decades, but Harvey has now come to recognize the environmental problems and admit to the shortcomings of his analysis in this regard. In his Anti-Capitalist Chronicles (2020), he indicates that a graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—the kind of graph that has been around for decades based on the Mauna Loa Observatory, but this one showing the rise in carbon concentration in the atmosphere all the way to 400 ppm (reached in 2013)—finally convinced him that climate change was as serious as the scientific consensus had long contended. The question is: Why had he taken so long to realize the full environmental dangers, despite coming from a historical-materialist perspective? In answering this, Harvey goes into a long discussion on how he had been misled by focusing too much on weaknesses of some of the environmental rhetoric on the left. In 2020, he says it was the NOAA graph showing the speed with which the Earth System had gone from 300 ppm to 400 ppm of carbon concentration in the atmosphere that “changed everything in my world view. The question of climate change went from something I thought to be manageable by normal techniques and sensible interventions to a recognition of the need for radical transformation of all our ways of thinking.”

    Even with this revelation, however, his emphasis in The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles tends to favor ecomodernization perspectives, whereby technology will save the day by carbon sequestration: taking the carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it in the ground. The fact that such technology does not exist at scale, and poses its own cataclysmic problems, is not considered in his analysis. There is simply no attempt to pose this problem in ecological Marxist terms as one of ruin or revolution.

    HG: In the same interview, you say that “it has suddenly become easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world, and indeed the former would likely preclude the latter.” What do you really mean by reversing Frederic Jameson’s quote? It is true that the number of radical left intellectuals and activists who believe that capitalism is not the end of history has grown considerably. However, the ruling classes are using the pandemic to hide this truth, by presenting the virus as an external threat, and in view of the power of the mainstream media, I am afraid that the TINA (there is no alternative) narrative still prevails in the general public. I would be happy if you could convince me that I am wrong.

    JBF: You will recall that Jameson’s statement in New Left Review (March–April 2003) read: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Well before I was conscious of his authorship of this statement, we commonly used that same exact phrase over and over in our discussions in the graduate program in environmental sociology at the University of Oregon, discussions and debates that included some of those who are now among the world’s leading environmental sociologists, who had come to study at Oregon, primarily in order to engage with Marxian ecology. In fact, I had used the exact same wording early in this century in talks I gave, though usually in the question-and-answer sessions after the talk, more as a kind of riposte to get the audience to think—just as we often raised it ironically in our seminar discussions in environmental sociology.

    The reason why the notion that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” was approached in this circumspect way in our discussions at the time was that, although capturing part of the contemporary environmental predicament—and the dystopian consciousness that was so pervasive among youth—it tended to represent a negative, even defeatist outlook, when not put into a concrete historical context. The problem is closely related to what Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay in What We Leave Behind (2009) were to call “the inversion of the real and the not real,” such that “the end of the world is less to be feared than the end of industrial capitalism.” If such a view were to be presented, it needed to be placed in a context of generating a revolutionary ecological consciousness, rather than signaling defeat. It was a question of countering the dominant ideology and received views in general.

    This was such an important part of our overall discussions on the environment that, when I became aware that the phrase had been introduced in print by Jameson, who had prefaced it with “Someone said,” I thought it had emerged somehow from our own discussions. Now, however, I think we picked it up from him indirectly, probably from Cade Jameson, Fredric Jameson’s son, who is himself a great environmental sociologist, now teaching in Hawai‘i, and who was part of our program at the University of Oregon. It may be Cade, knowing his father’s work, who inserted this phrase early on into our discussions. I am not sure.

    The point, though, is not that the consciousness of capitalism’s role in the destruction of the planet as a safe home for humanity is wanting; rather, the point is to change this. In reversing the famous Jameson quote, and indicating that “it has suddenly become easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world,” I was pointing to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic, coming on top of climate change, was threatening the ideological hegemony of the system, demonstrating that our ecological-epidemiological crises were products of capitalism itself. The illusion of the emperor’s clothes had vanished and suddenly the emperor was revealed as naked. The United States, at the center of capitalism, has now experienced over half a million deaths from COVID-19, which everyone knows have to do with the privatization of public health, not to mention the circuits of capital, as historical-materialist epidemiologists like Rob Wallace explain. For many, this allows them to see that what is constantly projected as the end of the world is indeed properly seen as the question of ending capitalism. You are right, of course, that in presenting the virus as an external threat to the system, the ruling ideology was attempting to steer the population away from such critical conclusions.

    You ask me about the views that prevail in the general public, given the constant outflow of propaganda on TINA under capitalism. I think that is the wrong way to think about it. A snapshot of public opinion tells one very little, given that the material conditions of humanity—the very conditions of life on Earth—are changing more rapidly than at any time in human history. People are like volcanoes and will erupt when the molten rock rises to the surface. If one starts simply with ideas, from an idealistic perspective, it looks like capitalism is supreme and will remain forever so. But the Catholic Church got Galileo Galilei to disavow his science, and yet, as legend has it, he touched the ground and said, “It still moves.” TINA is correct, but in a different way than Margaret Thatcher believed. There is no alternative to a society of substantive equality and environmental sustainability, that is, socialism—if humanity is to survive.

    HG: How do you evaluate the work of Murray Bookchin, a non-Marxist thinker, who has also tried to bring the ecological issue into the public debate? Indeed, we see radical leftists and anarchists fighting together in the streets of many cities in the world against the policies of governments that destroy the environment and increase class, race, and gender inequalities. In view of such an “alliance,” do you think that a theoretical and programmatic dialogue between different anticapitalist traditions is desirable and possible?

    JBF: I have always thought a great deal of Bookchin’s work in ecology, though it was seldom directly influential on my own thinking. I was first introduced in the early 1970s at the Evergreen State College to his Post-Scarcity Anarchism, which, however, left little impression. But his 1962 Our Synthetic Environment (written under the pseudonym Lewis Herber), which came out the same year as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, was pathbreaking. One of my favorite books by him is The Limits of the City. Another is The Ecology of Freedom. He could be very polemical and was a strong critic of Marxism on ecology. But he was careful in doing so to criticize Marxism and not Marx himself, for whom he always retained great respect. I cite Bookchin at various points in my work, though not extensively. When I was on the editorial board of Capitalism Nature Socialism in the early years, there was a stream of harsh criticisms of Bookchin and one edited collection opposed to his analysis that came out of the journal. I declined to be part of it. Instead, not soon after, when I was co-editor of Organization and Environment, we published a very favorable assessment of Bookchin’s ecology by Steven Best. Monthly Review has always been open to Bookchin’s ecological analysis. Brian Tokar, who is perhaps the most important figure in Bookchin’s social ecology tradition, has written for Monthly Review Press. In fact, Monthly Review as an independent socialist magazine has always been open to anarchist views, particularly where they overlap with Marxism, as part of the conversation. Our whole orientation from the beginning has been to unite various anticapitalist traditions. Of course, there are differences, but there is plenty of room for commonality. The role of anarchists in fighting neofascism; in the racial solidarity protests in the United States; and in the ecological movement has been very great. Forging coalitions in this respect is necessary in the common cause.

    HG: Ever since the 1960s, Monthly Review has been well known for its interest in developments in the Global South, or the “third world” in the language of the period. My view is that, as editor of the magazine, you keep with this very useful, internationalist tradition. In this framework, can you tell us the differences between the effects of catastrophe capitalism in the Global South as compared to the Global North?

    JBF: Monthly Review has always focused on imperialism, especially in terms of the relations of the Global North to the Global South, as the key to the critique of the capitalist world system. In terms of “catastrophe capitalism,” I think our most important contributions in the last couple of years have included the article on “Imperialism in the Anthropocene,” written by myself, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, and the work that we have done on COVID-19 in relation to Rob Wallace, especially his books Big Farms Make Big Flu and Dead Epidemiologistsand his article with others on “COVID-19 and the Circuits of Capital,” as well as the article that Intan Suwandi and I did on “COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism.”

    In “Imperialism in the Anthropocene,” we developed an argument that departs from most traditions on the left, in that it takes physical geography seriously as the climate catastrophe demands. Thus, we explained how low-latitude countries, essentially the Global South, are affected most, as a result of Earth System dynamics, by climate change, independently of the fact that they are already economically exploited by the nations of the Global North. Moreover, the effects of climate change on such factors as the elimination of glaciers (or water towers); desertification; the flooding of islands and other low-lying areas; the eradication of tropical forests and coral reefs; the extinction of species; and the creation of hundreds of millions, even as much as a billion, climate refugees expected this century—are all being factored into the global imperial strategy of the United States and other nations in the Global North. We, therefore, desperately need a theory of imperialism in the Anthropocene that would take all of this into account.

    In the work of Wallace and other theorists of what is known as Structural One Health (a historical-materialist approach to epidemiology), the emergence of COVID-19 and other zoonoses are seen as connected to the circuits of capital and the extension of agribusiness into ecosystems and wilderness areas. This work provides a rich understanding of the relation of global commodification to global contagions. Moreover, the same analysis points to the consequences of the privatization of public health under neoliberalism and the effects on the spread of disease, especially among the poor, pointing to the contemporary significance of Frederick Engels’s notion of “social murder.”

    HG: As the United States is one of the two world superpowers, its government’s economic policies play a crucial role in the climate crisis. Would you say that the Donald Trump administration has left its footprint on the development of catastrophe capitalism and, if so, how? Do you believe that Joe Biden might follow a different path?

    JBF: The Trump administration accelerated catastrophe capitalism in a number of ways. As detailed in our article “Imperialism in the Anthropocene,” it expedited the expenditure of trillions of dollars on the building of fossil fuel pipelines and fracking in North America in order not only to expand fossil fuel production, but also to entrench fossil fuel production so that it could not be displaced. It pulled out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and removed environmental protections wherever it could, both nationally and internationally. Meanwhile, it started a New Cold War directed at China. This included putting a tariff on Chinese solar panels imported to the United States.

    Politically, the Trump phenomenon had its basis in the development of a neofascist political movement/political formation based in the white lower-middle class, with its nationalist, racist, misogynist ideologies and its hatred of both the greater part of the working-class majority (the most diverse section of the population) and of the upper-middle class professionals. In essence, monopoly capital has drawn on the rearguard of the capitalist system, as C. Wright Mills called it, to stabilize itself during a period of declining U.S. hegemony, increasing class polarization, and the rise of a significant socialist movement.

    The Trump administration, backed by the Federal Reserve, poured trillions into the coffers of corporations and the rich in tax reductions followed by aid in response to the pandemic. The result is that U.S. billionaires are running off with the store. While the economy has had negative growth, Jeff Bezos saw his wealth increase by $74 billion and Elon Musk by some $76 billion year-to-date [December 2020]. All of this has been supported by increasing U.S. federal deficits. The financial system has been expanding at a record pace during the pandemic. All of this means a bubblier economy, which will burst in the end.

    Unfortunately, not much help in any of this can be expected from the Biden administration, which represents a neoliberal politics, different from that of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton only to the extent that the situation is now considerably more desperate. The current administration seems destined to attempt to expand its reach to elements of the non-Trumpist right, as the Democrats and Republicans continue to fight to gain the support of the lower-middle class section of the electorate. In terms of the forward movement of society, we will see very little. In fact, Biden promised Wall Street that nothing would change if he were elected. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that 83 percent of the top thirty members of the Biden team have close connections to the billionaire-plutocratic class (see the article by Laurence Shoup in the May 2021 issue of Monthly Review). In short, the Biden administration has no interest in rocking the boat.

    Part of this has to do with the already destabilized state of the system, resulting from the overaccumulation and financial crisis of capital, for which the ruling class and its political representatives have no answers. The current “solution” is in the direction of the greater repression of the population via an enhanced surveillance capitalism, the promotion of the carceral state, continuing privatization of public schools, a New Cold War with China, and so on. Biden is openly opposed to the Green New Deal (his proposed $2 trillion of spending in this area is only one-twentieth of that proposed by the Green Party’s Green New Deal, and one-eighth of what was proposed by Bernie Sanders), to Medicare for All, and to nearly every other needed progressive program. The result is likely to be a neoliberal disaster leading to a restoration of the neofascist wing. The left’s only choice is to find a way to break the current undemocratic rules of the game.

    HG: The new virus originated in China, both the second world superpower and the world’s biggest polluter. Can we expect that China’s ruling Communist Party will have learned the lessons of the pandemic, and change its policies in the future?

    JBF: To say China is the world’s biggest polluter is true in one respect and misleading in others. China, it is true, is the biggest carbon emitter. But it is way below the United States and the other wealthy countries in its carbon emissions per capita. Moreover, in terms of the carbon that has accumulated in the environment as a result of historic emissions (the really important figure), the bulk has come from Europe and North America. Finally, a very large share of China’s emissions is associated with production for multinational corporations in the core of the capitalist system, which import this production to their own countries. Essentially, production that would have occurred in the capitalist core is now happening in the periphery, but still for the capitalist core. It makes sense to see the bulk of such emissions as associated with the core countries. The United States has a trade deficit with China. China supplies produced goods and the United States asks them to hold dollars in return.

    The fact that the COVID-19 virus originated in China has less to do with China itself than with the circuits of capital globally and the destruction of ecosystems and wilderness areas, with zoonotic spillovers. No doubt China will institute and is instituting new regulations, for example, in relation to wet markets. But this is not the core of the problem.

    In terms of overall ecological responses, China, while an epicenter of ecological destruction, is also an epicenter of ecomodernism and environmental reform. It has made “ecological civilization” an official goal, unlike countries in the West. How we understand this is important. There are indications that China under its current leadership is taking decisive environmental steps (although hardly the ecological revolution that is needed). China is now the world leader in clean energy technology. I just read a very interesting book by Barbara Finamore, published by Polity, entitled Will China Save the Planet? (2018). We have plenty of reason to be skeptical. Yet, given all that China is actually doing in terms of seriously addressing its ecological crisis and that of the world, the question remains. As a post-revolutionary state, with a quite different social construction from that of the mature monopoly capitalist economies of the West, China, with all of its contradictions, may still have a hidden potential to move in the direction of its official goal of an “ecological civilization.” My view is that this depends ultimately, as elsewhere, on the spread of a genuine ecological revolution emerging from the ground up. That this is at least possible in China is suggested by its current rural reform movement.

    HG: The pandemic has not only considerably reduced U.S.-China trade, but it has also intensified the struggle between the two countries for global hegemony. Could this lead to broader geopolitical changes, and do you think that it could also signal the beginning of the end of globalization?

    JBF: A New Cold War is being launched by Washington against Beijing, explicitly aimed at bringing down the Chinese Communist Party, and then resubordinating China to the world imperial system, in a replay of the demolition of the Soviet Union. All of this is spelled out by the U.S. State Department and in foreign policy circles and is being supported by the U.S. capitalist class and multinational corporations, which realize that a China Century, replacing the American Century, is not in their interests. The Trump-initiated trade war and military buildup directed at China (and indeed both China and Russia) is now entrenched and is continuing in the Biden administration. U.S. allies, like Australia, are being asked to sacrifice their own trade interests to the New Cold War pact. This is meant to be a major geopolitical shift. China is responding in its own way by furthering its Belt and Road Initiative and creating with the 2020 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership the largest trade bloc in the world.

    I don’t think this will signal the end of globalization, which has its basis in global labor arbitrage, whereby multinational corporations mainly centered in the Global North locate the industrial production as measured by employment primarily in the Global South. The object is to exploit low unit labor costs, providing large profit margins (or rates of surplus value) for these corporations. But we are seeing a geopolitical shift in the growth of global blocs within this. U.S. multinational corporations are pulling out of China to some extent and relocating in other low unit labor cost countries such as India and Mexico.

    HG: In February, at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Italian radical philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote that the lockdowns and other government measures against the virus are intended to permanently establish a “state of exception” and make this appear to be normal. He was also worried by people accepting the restrictions of their freedoms almost with no complaint. However, we later saw people protesting violently in the streets against the lockdowns and refusing to comply with instructions even to wear face masks and keep social distancing. Do you agree with Agamben, and how do you explain these reactions to government measures? Is their reaction progressive or reactionary?

    JBF: It is hard to answer this since international situations vary so much. In the United States, we saw with racial solidarity protests in May and June 2020 the biggest mass protests in the country since the U.S. Civil War, with working-class whites and youth on a scale never seen before crossing the color line to join protest/revolt against the public police lynchings of Black people. But this was also a response to the pandemic, the lockdowns, and the laying off of millions of people. In many places, it took the form of a revolt against capital showing that there is a suppressed anger at the base of society. Of course, the neofascist, white supremacist movement based in the lower-middle class also was in evidence, but they lacked the numbers and power of those revolting against the system. For the neofascists, their main advantage is their ability to pull out their guns and even to fire them in some cases, with the support of the police. The Trump administration did everything it could to promote these “militias” and back them up with its own paramilitary forces. This is the situation in the United States. It is lessened somewhat on the surface with the coming into office of the Biden administration. But the contradictions remain.

    HG: To combat the virus, governments all over the world have resorted to, or are seriously contemplating, unprecedented state-interventionist measures (supplementary direct payments to people who cannot go to work due to the lockdowns, nationalization of private hospitals and health care providers in Spain, nationalization of railways in Wales, etc.), which conflict with free-market ideology. Could this lead to a change in the capitalist paradigm similar to what happened with the New Deal in the United States following the 1929 crisis and the implementation of Keynesian policies in Europe after the Second World War?

    JBF: One would hope so, but I am skeptical. It is strange to me that Europeans are looking to the U.S. New Deal, which was not nearly as radical as many historic changes that developed in Europe in the same period. The First New Deal, during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term in office, was to a considerable extent a form of conservative corporatism. The New Deal only radicalized, and we are only talking here of about four years, in the Second New Deal, beginning in 1935, due to the Great Revolt from Below with the formation of industrial unionism, which involved pitched battles all across the country. It was not a top-down development. Roosevelt merely saw a chance to get at the head of this movement and contain it, to save capitalism. The New Deal did not increase overall government spending on public works in the United States, since the federal increases in spending in this area merely compensated for the drop in government spending at the state and local levels. In 1937–38, there was a recession within the depression decade. All sorts of radical things were proposed in 1938 but nothing really happened. In 1939, the war orders from Europe began, and the New Deal and the Great Depression ended, with the Second World War. There were some important results, particularly social security legislation. But overall, the New Deal did little in transforming the system. It merely stands out in relation to the period of entrenched ruling class power that followed. U.S. civilian government spending on consumption and investment as a percentage of GDP did not increase in the decades after the Second World War, but has remained pretty much on the level of 1939. To change this in the United States would require a New Great Revolt from Below. Some of the nationalizations occurring in Europe could have a positive effect, but unless it is part of a movement toward socialism, it will be the usual nationalizations for capital, buying them out when they are losing money, and reprivatizing once these markets are profitable again.

    HG: It seems that even a section of mainstream politicians in the United States and Europe support a Green New Deal, a name that directly refers to Roosevelt’s 1933 New Deal. Do you see this as a victory of the ecosocialist movement or an initiative to promote green capitalism?

    JBF: It is difficult to say what the Green New Deal represents because there are so many versions of it, all of which are rejected of course by the Biden administration. (Obama, incidentally, officially included a corporatist Green New Deal in his first presidential race and then dropped it as soon as he was elected.) The Green New Deal with a “just transition” proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders could be described as a People’s Green New Deal and would be important if it inspired a genuine ecological revolution, forcing ever greater efforts. But this is not in the cards now without a massive movement from below, which briefly looked possible when the climate movement was on fire, but now has abated in 2020, due largely to the pandemic. Some versions of the Green New Deal are so feeble from the start as to be meaningless. And with Biden now in office, anything resembling an actual Green New Deal is off the agenda for the Democratic Party. In general, U.S. politicians will sign up for things that sound good if the polls point to a lot of public support, and if it is so nebulous as to not constitute a recognizable threat to business. So, the mainstream political support for real change in this sense is largely illusory, unless there is some push from below powerful enough to challenge capital. This, however, requires real organization, and there is little to point to in that respect.

    HG: The inability of capitalist states to fight the pandemic, largely due to the underfunded and understaffed health systems—together with the fact that vulnerability is closely tied to class, race, and gender—and the concomitant economic crisis have created hope among some radical leftists that an increasing number of people in the world might envision a noncapitalist alternative. Do you think that this hope is realistic?

    JBF: The question of whether hope is realistic always sounds strange to me. The question is whether hope is necessary. We shouldn’t be trying to predict the future so much as to engage in the necessary struggles, recognizing that the world’s population now has its back to the wall. I think this is what scares the ruling classes. They know a struggle is inevitable and they know they could lose. Marxists have long argued for freedom as necessity. At no time has this stance been more realistic than today, since the reality of our world is one of catastrophe capitalism. If it is impossible to save the world, humanity, and most of the world’s known species, then the struggle must become that much fiercer, the impossible has to be made possible.

    HG: In a discussion you had with Michael Yates, published in the April 19, 2020, online edition of Janata Weekly, you say that the way we can confront catastrophe capitalism is “the building of a vast, unstoppable socialist (or ecosocialist) movement.” This is a normative general statement, which however does not specify in what way the various national movements can achieve their anticapitalist goals: through revolution, or through the Poulantzasian “democratic road” to socialism? What is your view?

    JBF: I don’t think that revolution and a democratic road to socialism are necessarily contradictory. Nicos Poulantzas wrote numerous important works on the state but they were a product of the Eurocommunist period, and quickly receded. I, personally, prefer the analysis of Ralph Miliband, since he started with the harsher reality of the failure of the British Labour Party as a socialist party, as depicted in his Parliamentary Socialism. Since he was responding to a major defeat, he saw the problem of the capitalist state as a greater challenge and therefore raised harder questions. We need a more critical theory of the state than Marxist theory provided in the 1960s and ’70s, which was removed in many ways from the question of revolution—so much so that the Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio once declared there was no real Marxist theory of the state. It is necessary to turn back to the classical tradition of the withering away of the state associated with Marx and V. I. Lenin, and powerfully revived by István Mészáros in his Beyond Leviathan, which will be published by Monthly Review Press in the beginning of 2022. The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, despite the fact that it has been deeply scarred by the international siege warfare imposed on it by the United States, has things to tell us about how to promote a revolutionary strategy aimed at twenty-first-century socialism, based on Hugo Chávez’s notion of the communal state. But, of course, the conditions in every country are different. There is no universal model.

    HG: Thank you very much for your time. Before we end, could you say a few words about your latest book, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Economy?

    JBF: The Return of Nature was written to carry forward the story told in Marx’s Ecology, covering the period from the death of Darwin and Marx in 1882 and 1883, respectively. Marx’s Ecologyends with the death of Darwin and Marx. The Return of Nature begins with their funerals. It explores the interrelations between socialism and ecology in the century that followed, providing concrete research into ecology as it developed in relation to socialism and materialism. Of course, the developments went in all directions and the story becomes quite complex, especially if given historical depth so that we can comprehend the context in which the various figures emerged. Basically, the thesis is that socialists (some of them social democratic, some of them Marxist, but all deeply engaged with each other) generated ecology as a critical form of thought.

    In arguing this, I follow an analysis that is not only historical but also genealogical. One genealogical line can be seen in terms of those influenced by Marx’s ecological ideas directly, including figures like E. Ray Lankester and William Morris, and those who they in turn influenced, such as Arthur George Tansley, H. G. Wells, and Julian Huxley. The other genealogical line derives more from Engels’s ecological thought and especially his dialectics of nature, which are the focus of Part Two of the book. This leads to the dialectical and ecological contributions of such important scientists as J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, J. D. Bernal, and Hyman Levy. Some thinkers, such as Christopher Caudwell, Lancelot Hogben, and Jack Lindsay can be said to be products of both lines of development. All of these thinkers were involved not only in the development of ecology, but also in the debates on race, gender, class, and the making of socialism in their time. Nearly all of them contributed to materialist dialectics. The direct influence on the ecology movement in the 1960s and ’70s in the United States and Britain is quite evident, leading to discussions in the epilogue of the work of figures such as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Virginia Brodine, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Rose, Hilary Rose, and E. P. Thompson. We thus get a much wider picture of why ecology is such a critical, and indeed revolutionary, doctrine.

    The book also challenges the Western left to recognize that a materialist conception of history is meaningless without a materialist conception of nature—plus the role of dialectics as necessarily related to both. In this way, the long detour of Western Marxism away from the natural-material world is transcended, a necessary task in the deeper ecological and social revolution required in our times.

  • 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.

  • The Rise of the Right

    The Rise of the Right: John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Farooque Chowdhury,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 5 (October 2019), pp. 1-11. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-05-2019-09_1 [HTML]

    In an interview with Farooque Chowdhury, Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster speaks about the historical conditions associated with the rise of new far-right movements of a broadly neofascist character. What we are witnessing, especially in the advanced capitalist world, is the development of a neoliberal-neofascist alliance, reflecting the decline of the liberal-democratic state. Neofascism is the most dangerous and volatile phenomenon in this emerging right-wing historical bloc. All of this has to be seen in relation to the structural crisis of capitalism and growing ruling-class attempts to restructure the state-capital relationship so as to create regimes more exclusively for capital.

  • It’s Not a Postcapitalist World, Nor is it a Post-Marxist One

    It’s Not a Postcapitalist World, Nor is it a Post-Marxist One—An Interview with John Bellamy Foster” [PDF] (John Bellamy Foster and Evrensel Kultur) Monthly Review, vol. 54, no. 5 (October 2002), pp. 42-47.

    Evrensel Kultur: Postmodernism’s advice to u s was to have doubts towards all kinds of information acquired. The “security syndrome” following September 11 has spread these doubts to daily life. In other words, the twenty-first century has begun as an age of doubts/suspicions. How does the suspiciousness of the new century differ from that of past centuries? If we take “suspicion” as a metaphor, what kind of real relations/connections can be described or hidden with this metaphor?