“Ecological Marxism in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review, vol. 77, no. 5 (October 2025), pp.1-19.
Xu Tao and Lv Jiayi: You have a broad influence in the field of ecological Marxism. Your texts are references for Marxist researchers worldwide. However, as far as we know, your early research focused on Marxist political economy and the theory of capitalist development, particularly the monopoly capital theory of Paul M. Sweezy and Paul A. Baran. What led you to shift your research focus to ecological Marxism? Do you still have further concerns and research in Marxist political economy today?
John Bellamy Foster: You are right that my work has increasingly focused on ecology, though this shift was more a question of adding another layer to my previous research in political economy than an actual reorientation. I was drawn to the ecological issue by the recognition that capitalism was generating a planetary ecological crisis rooted in the class-based system of accumulation that was increasingly endangering all humanity. But, at the same time, I have continued to publish major works in political economy. Political economy and ecology are not really distinct questions. Marx’s critique of the political economy of capital is fundamental to all Marxist ecological analysis, and his ecological critique—now known as the theory of metabolic rift—is crucial to our understanding of today’s economic malaise. In my view, they cannot be separated, although we often have to do so for the sake of analysis. Rather they constitute different sides of the material crisis of our times.
In many ways, much of the economic analysis that has been associated with Monthly Review, addressing the relation of Stagnation and the Financial Explosion—the title of a 1986 book by Harry Magdoff and Sweezy—has now been widely accepted, since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2010. But since these problems are clearly endemic to accumulation under monopoly-finance capital, the system itself has no answers, and it constantly seeks to divert attention from the core contradiction: capital itself. At present, issues of militarism, imperialism, and the planetary environment, which together present an existential crisis for humanity, often take precedence over the direct analysis of economic crisis, though they are all intrinsically related.
XT and LJ: In the study of ecological Marxism, many scholars, including yourself, believe that humanity is now living in the Anthropocene Epoch. Could you please elaborate on the origin and development of the concept of the Anthropocene? How does this concept help us understand the capitalist ecological crisis? Furthermore, many scholars (such as Andreas Malm) argue that the concept of the Anthropocene implies a narrative logic dominated entirely by natural science, attributing ecological issues to humanity as a whole, thus obscuring political and ideological positions. Therefore, they prefer the term “Capitalocene” (that is, the idea that capital is destroying the ecological environment). How do you view this perspective?
JBF: The term Anthropocene actually has a long history. The word first appeared in English as far back as 1973 in the English-language translation of the article “The Anthropogenic System (Period)” by E. V. Shanster in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Here, “Anthropocene” was used as an alternate term for “Anthropogene,” the name that the Soviets had given to the geological period now called the Quaternary (encompassing the Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs). This usage was introduced by the Soviet geologist Aleksei Petrovitch Pavlov in 1922 and influenced Vladimir I. Vernadsky, author of The Biosphere (1926). Vernadsky’s understanding of the biosphere provided a proto-Earth System analysis. The introduction of the concept of “Anthropogene” or “Anthropocene” at this stage was meant to suggest that somehow humanity was now affecting the geology and environmental system of the entire planet. Both Pavlov and Vernadsky strongly emphasized the dominant role of anthropogenic factors in the biosphere.
To be sure, Pavlov and Vernadsky introduced this shift in the way we looked at the human relation to the biogeochemical cycles of the earth in the context of a geological period, instead of the shorter geological epoch, thus relating their concept to the entire period in which human beings and their hominin ancestors have existed. Moreover, their framework was connected to the concept of the biosphere. In contrast, the recognition of anthropogenic factors as the main force in changes in the entire Earth System (beyond the biosphere and including the climate), outweighing nonanthropogenic factors in this respect, dates back only to the beginning of this century. The Anthropocene itself, in its most developed scientific conception today, is seen as having replaced the earlier Holocene Epoch in the 1950s at the time of what is called the Great Acceleration in global material and resource use, affecting the entire Earth System metabolism.
Still, while our geological/environmental understanding has broadened, it would be a mistake on mere technical grounds to downplay the forerunners of this holistic-dialectical kind of thinking prior to emergence of the contemporary concepts of the Earth System and the Anthropocene. In 1911, E. Ray Lankester, the foremost British zoologist of the late nineteenth-century, the protégé of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, and a close friend of Karl Marx, published his Kingdom of Man. In this work, an argument was put forward, similar to that of Frederick Engels in The Dialectics of Nature, that human beings had gained a power in relation to the earth that could lead to their own civilizational destruction, metaphorically referred to as the “revenge” of nature, if the conditions of the environment were not sustained. (The conflict between human domination of nature and “nature’s revenge” was symbolically depicted on the cover of The Kingdom of Man. Under the title was an image of the first species of the trypanosome blood parasite [genus Trypanosoma] to be discovered, in 1843, and rediscovered by Lankester, in 1871. A species of the trypanosome parasite carried by the tsetse fly was responsible for killing untold numbers of people in Africa in the sleeping sickness, due to the environmental effects of capitalism and colonialism—symbolizing for Lankester “nature’s revenge.”) The main enemy of nature for Lankester was capital. In effect, he was arguing, like Marx and Engels before him, that only a change in social and scientific relations could prevent global environmental degradation and epidemics, threatening life, including human life itself.
It was Nikolai Bukharin, one of the leading figures of the October Revolution, who declared at the Second International Conference on the History of Science and Technology in London, in 1931, that, “Living and working in the biosphere, social man has radically remoulded the surface of the planet.” Bukharin, following Marx, saw this in terms of a portentous alteration in the “metabolism” of humanity and nature. The unifying concept of the biosphere, however, was for many years largely excluded from Western thought, though included somewhat surreptitiously in scientific circles, until it appeared on the cover of Scientific American in April 1970, at the time of the first Earth Day. It is no coincidence that the author of the cover story in that issue was the prominent Yale ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a former student of leading British Marxist biologists Joseph Needham (also the lead author of Science and Civilization in China) and J. B. S. Haldane. Moreover, Hutchinson’s shift to ecology was induced by another leading British Marxist biologist, Lancelot Hogben. Both Needham and Hogben had been present during Bukharin’s 1931 talk in London. The whole discussion around the biosphere was thus largely associated for years with Soviet and Marxist thought.
What changed this in the late 1950s and ’60s was not only the growth of the environmental movement, but also the rapid growth of climate science, first in the Soviet Union and then the United States. This led to the discovery of accelerated global warming, first raised by Mikhail Budyko in the USSR. In the 1970s and ’80s, the growth of climatology, together with the notion of the biosphere, led to the emergence of Earth System analysis. Out of this arose the current notion of the Anthropocene, as articulated by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer—later taken up by the Anthropocene Working Group—indicating a whole new geological epoch, breaking with the Holocene of the last 11,700 years, such that anthropogenic forces were now the major determinants of Earth System change.
The previous history of the Anthropogene/Anthropocene concept in Soviet science is downplayed in the dominant Western view. The notion that the term was first coined in the 1980s by Stoermer (in a way largely devoid of systematic scientific meaning) and later by Crutzen is presented as the official history—if only because the concept could then be presented as an American one.
The origins of the concept of the Anthropocene aside, the widespread adoption of the term, which was directly associated with the planetary ecological crisis, is of enormous significance from a scientific standpoint, because it underscores that human society, due to its economic and technological advances, now has the responsibility for sustaining the planet as a place of human habitation (and with respect to innumerable other species as well), and that failure to do so would invite (metaphorically) Nature’s Revenge.
The term Capitalocene was coined by Malm from a social-scientific standpoint. He argued that simply to attribute the new geological epoch to human beings (through the use of anthro) served to deemphasize the principal cause of planetary environmental change, namely capitalism as a specific historical mode of production. However, there were a number of problems here. The natural-science concept of the Anthropocene in no way prevents a social-scientific analysis of this in terms of the role of capitalism. Moreover, attempting, with no real understanding of the construction of the Geological Time Scale, to foist the concept of the Capitolocene onto natural scientists, whose domain is not social science, was a somewhat imperious attempt to disregard the complexity of the problem from the standpoint of natural science.
Those natural scientists advocating the notion of the Anthropocene Epoch were already making a revolutionary breakthrough motivated by a need to deal with the planetary ecological crisis. To question this realization on the basis of imposing a narrow social-science perspective, as if this was all that was at issue, only served to make their task more difficult. In fact, the conservative view prevailed in the end and in 2024 the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences rejected the proposed designation of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch within the Geological Time Scale, a decision that was clearly in part politically motivated. Needless to say, this does not end the question, but it places a further obstacle before attempts to educate the world’s population on the nature of the transformation in the human relation to the Earth System that has taken place.
In Marxist ecological theory, it is necessary to see nature and society as dialectically related, with human society as an emergent form within the universal metabolism of nature. This means that it is a mistake simply to subsume the more naturalistic description within a social-scientific one focusing on capitalism, lest the nature of the dialectical interaction be lost. (By the same logic, a narrow natural-scientific perspective eliminates the essential social aspect of the problem, and the nature of the interaction.) Although capitalism is the main culprit in the degradation of the Earth System, the Anthropocene Epoch will persist within any conceivable socialist system as well, even in the context of a more sustainable relation to the planet. That is, once humanity becomes the main force in Earth System change, this is irreversible as long as industrial society continues. We will remain on the knife’s edge, with a sustainable relation to the planet constituting a core responsibility and constant concern from that point forward. The only issue in this respect is how we govern our relation to the planet now and into the future.
XT and LJ: In the study of ecological Marxism, the concept of degrowth has been widely discussed. Japanese scholar Kohei Saito even proposes that Marx ultimately points to a “degrowth communism.” How do you evaluate “degrowth” and “degrowth communism”? Does this concept represent progress in the study of ecological Marxism?
JBF: I have some reservations about the concept of “degrowth communism,” and especially in relation to Saito’s development of it. There are two issues here. One is the question of Saito’s particular claims with respect to Marx, and the other is the general notion of degrowth, along with the more specific concept of “degrowth communism.”
In his first book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (2016), Saito sought to extend the metabolic rift tradition, developed by numerous earlier thinkers, including myself. This analysis had rejected the charge of some first-stage ecosocialists that Marx himself could be understood as a “Promethean” thinker, or extreme productivist. (Such a definition of Prometheanism as instrumentalism or hyper-industrialism, it should be noted, had little relation to the original Promethean myth, as depicted particularly in Aeschylus play Prometheus Bound.) In this respect, Saito made significant contributions. However, in his two most recent books, Marx in the Anthropocene and Capital in the Anthropocene (the latter retitled Slow Down in its English translation), Saito has reversed his argument, now claiming that Marx was a Promethean/hyper-industrialist thinker up to the late 1850s. Even when he wrote Capital, we are told, Marx was a transitional “ecosocialist”—representing a perspective that Saito views negatively—who still believed in the necessity of economic growth (at least under socialism) and thus retained in large part a productivist perspective. In Saito’s framework, Marx finally abandoned productivism in the last decade and a half of his life and emerged as a “degrowth communist” who unequivocally rejected the expansion of productive forces and economic growth.
Thus, in his two most recent works, Saito, contradicting his own previous analysis, reinterprets the black-bearded Marx of the 1850s as a strong “Promethean” who supported the expansion of production as an end in itself. In contrast, the gray-bearded Marx of Capital in 1867 is criticized as a transitional ecosocialist, who has taken on some ecological values recognizing the metabolic rift, but still retains Promethean elements in his thought, and thus is still a productivist in overall orientation. Only in his final years do we find the white-bearded Marx who, according to Saito, has metamorphosed into a “degrowth communist.” Here Marx is seen as taking on a fully ecological stance by rejecting aggregate economic growth, both under capitalism and socialism.
The trouble is that both parts of Saito’s argument—his reintroduction of a Marx depicted as a Promethean hyper-industrialist for the better part of his life, and his description of Marx’s metamorphosis into a “degrowth communist” in his final years—are wrong. There is no evidence (Saito’s references to G. A. Cohen notwithstanding) that Marx was ever an extreme productivist, which would mean seeing the expansion of production in and of itself as the beginning-and-end-all of human development. The notion that Marx became a “degrowth communist” in his last years, is so lacking in any substance that Saito is unable to find a single sentence in Marx’s work that in any way presents such a view. In fact, the whole argument in this respect is textually insupportable.
Those statements that Saito takes as suggesting that Marx had adopted a degrowth perspective are all connected to Marx’s much broader, lifelong commitment to sustainable human development, as emphasized for decades in Marxist ecological theory. Marx’s approach was certainly ecological in this sense. But the notion of growth vs. degrowth was unthinkable in his time, and thus its application to Marx in Saito’s argument is historically anachronistic. Marx did not live in a full-world economy, but in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, where industrialization still had not developed in most of the world. Even in England, local transport was still in the horse-and-buggy stage.
Although figures like Engels and Lankester warned of global environmental depredations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this did not translate in their minds into a notion that economic growth in the abstract was the problem, and degrowth as a solution would certainly never have crossed their minds. Rather, they saw the ecological contradiction as lying in the nature of capitalism as a society geared simply to short-run profit, and thus necessarily failing to protect the environment. The issue was sustainable human development.
Still, setting aside Saito’s whole claim that Marx was a degrowth communist, there remains the question of the concepts of “degrowth” and “degrowth communism” themselves, as viewed in our own time. I think that a concept of planned degrowth is a necessary strategic perspective in the critique of the wasteful, destructive, unequal, and irrational world of monopoly capitalism in the Global North. Per capita energy use in the United States is sixty times that of Nepal. If all the world had the per capita ecological footprint of the United States, we would, at the present time, need three or four planet Earths. The United States and Europe account for the bulk of the historical carbon dioxide emissions, while their per capita emissions still exceed those of China, even though their role in world production is diminishing. The United States is the most automobile-dependent country in the world. In the Global North, we see a system geared to maximizing capital accumulation for a very few by means of the exploitation and expropriation exercised by multinational corporations, while generating a habitability crisis for the earth itself. Obviously, these conditions demand an ecological revolution in the twenty-first century.
All of this means that, in ecological terms, the rich countries need to reduce their per capita energy use, while the poorest countries need to increase theirs, so that we reach a sustainable global equilibrium. The wealthy countries of the capitalist core are also the historic imperialist countries, expropriating surplus from the Global South to benefit the apex of the world system in the Global North. A July 2024 study by Jason Hickel and his coauthors in Nature Communications shows that labor in the South provides 90 percent of the world’s labor contribution to production, while receiving only 21 percent of the income in return. This inequality lies at the center of the entire imperialist world system.
What is essential in the Global North then is not simply “degrowth” in the negative, purely quantitative sense, but also in a positive sense: the creation of a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability. This requires a focus on qualitative development; income, wealth, and resource redistribution; meeting basic human needs for the entire population; production for use, not exchange; rational distribution of resources; cultivation of social use and communal values; and so on. To say that limits to growth and even degrowth are necessary in the wealthiest, most globally exploitative, and wasteful parts of global monopoly-finance capital, is not to make degrowth into an absolute principle, any more than it is to make economic growth itself one. The governing principle of Marxist ecology is always sustainable human development. Moreover, it would be wrong to claim that the poorest countries do not need growth in the means of production. To be a socialist today means to stand for the building of a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, measured in global terms.
A definitive, detailed critique of Saito’s work in all of these respects can be found in Brian Napoletano’s article, “Was Karl Marx a Degrowth Communist?,” in the June 2024 issue of Monthly Review.
XT and LJ: For young students and scholars who focus on and study ecological Marxism, what are some cutting-edge issues and research directions worth delving into? In what aspects does Marx’s ecological thought still need further exploration?
JBF: Your question breaks down into a distinction between research, on the one hand, into Marx’s ecological thought and classical Marxist ecology more broadly, and, on the other hand, the further development of this analysis to address the present-day ecological crisis. In terms of Marx’s analysis, we have only just scratched the surface because the answers lie in the nature of his materialism, which was ecological at the roots, that is, connected to a materialist conception of nature, out of which Marx’s materialist conception of history arose. The failure to recognize the depth of his materialism, which, in Western Marxism, was reduced simply to a set of narrowly economic propositions oddly excluding nature itself, left Marxism impoverished. Closely related to this was the rejection in what is known as the Western Marxist philosophical tradition of the dialectics of nature of classical Marxism. I have just completed a book titled Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx(2025). A central goal of this analysis, already dealt with in part in my book Marx’s Ecology (2000), was to explore the roots of Marx’s materialism, understanding it in a more holistic way. To look at Marx’s development in this way, then, creates a massive project, requiring the deepening of Marxist theory and its organic bases.
Other projects I have in mind, some of which I have pursued, but only partially, involve an exploration of Marx’s aesthetics and ecology, the ecological bases of Marx’s anti-Eurocentrism, further research into the metabolic rift analysis in areas like epidemiology, investigations into the theory of ecological imperialism, and exploration of the relation of ecology to communal production. More attention needs to be given to Marx’s lifelong critique of the expropriation of nature (tied to his analysis of the expropriation of the commons), and the conception of the dialectics of nature as a dialectical naturalism or dialectical ecology. The Marxist notion of the labor theory of culture, that is, the whole anthropological origins of humanity, is closely related to an ecological conception of the origins of human beings, which needs to be revived and pursued. Engels’s “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man” is crucial here. There is also the question of classical Marxism’s relation to evolutionary theory. Most important in the development of Marxian dialectics is the theory of emergence or integrative levels, which is vital in any ecological perspective.
In exploring our contemporary ecological situation with the tools and methods of Marxian ecology, we have to be clear about our own methods, allowing us also to draw on the best that science and culture have to offer in the search for sustainable solutions. Marx’s critique of the political economy of capital remains crucial, but it has to be integrated with his ecological critique (as in his theory of metabolic rift) if we are to penetrate to the core of the contemporary ecological problem. We also need to turn our attention to a long history of ecological Marxism after Marx, which I explored in my book The Return of Nature (2020)—though much more is needed on this score. The recognition, first made, by Brett Clark and Richard York in 2005, that the whole problem of the carbon metabolism and thus climate change could be understood at its core in terms of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, opened up an area of critique of contemporary capitalism that continues to expand in manifold areas.
The dialectics of nature, which insists on the organic interrelationship of all things, is crucial in the Marxian perspective and requires continual application. For example, it is a mistake to fall into the reductionistic trap of seeing the current planetary ecological crisis in terms of climate change alone, however all-encompassing that may appear to be, since it is crucial to recognize that we have crossed or are in the process of crossing most of the other planetary boundaries as well. All ecological problems today need to be addressed, including conditions of human survival (and the survival of living species in general), along with the conditions of living well on the earth. The most important area of research, I believe, is ecological civilization, or the conditions of sustainable human development beyond capitalism. We are struggling to generate a whole new era of human development. Ecological Marxism is central here.
Ecology and the Multiple Crises of Capitalism
XT and LJ: The infinite expansion of capitalist production has destroyed the carrying capacity of the natural environment, causing a global ecological crisis. You have restored the original character of Marxist ecological thought with a large amount of factual evidence, especially your “metabolic rift” theory, which has gained wide recognition in the academic community. How does the metabolic rift theory reveal the relationship between the capitalist system and environmental crisis? Have you had any new thoughts on the “metabolic rift” theory in recent years?
JBF: I do not regard the theory of metabolic rift as my theory. My 1999 article in which I introduced the subject was titled “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift.” I have always regarded it at root as Marx’s theory, the ecological side of his theory of alienation. In numerous works, I have tried to provide what Marx in his own work termed a “genetic exposition,” which then has been elaborated in various ways and applied to concrete problems. The concept of the metabolic rift itself has limitations. Marxian ecology has a broader base in a materialist and dialectical understanding of the human relation to both nature and society that cannot easily be encompassed in its entirety in the theory of metabolic rift as such, which mainly relates to the question of ecological crisis. Thus, Marxian ecology as a whole needs to be seen in terms of the broader issues of the metabolism of humanity and nature and Marx’s organic materialism, which permeates all of his thought.
The dialectical construction of Marx’s metabolic rift theory was not brought out fully in Marx’s Ecology, though it was implicit there. It is elaborated in some of my later work, for example, The Return of Nature(2020), The Robbery of Nature (with Brett Clark, 2020) Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022), and The Dialectics of Ecology (2024). Here it is important to recognize that Marx had three concepts: “the universal metabolism of nature” (also sometimes referred to as the “natural metabolism”), the “social metabolism,” and the metabolic rift (or “the irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself”). The social metabolism, which Marx equated with the labor and production process, was the ecological side of production, the specifically human relation to the universal metabolism of nature. The metabolic rift arises when an alienated social metabolism ruptures the human connection to the universal metabolism of nature in such a way as to create an ecological crisis for social reproduction. The metabolic rift concept continues to be developed as we delve into various aspects of Marx’s analysis. For example, we now know that Marx’s theory here was impacted by the work of his friend Roland Daniels in the latter’s Mikrokosmos, a study that remained unpublished until the late 1980s. In recent years, the connection that Marx himself, inspired by Engels, drew between the metabolic rift and periodic epidemics in capitalism has been explored. Thinkers such as Rob Wallace in his Dead Epidemiologists (2020) and Sean Creaven in his Contagion Capitalism (2024) have applied the metabolic rift analysis to COVID-19.
It is true, as you note, that the contemporary ecological crisis can be seen in terms of the issue of carrying capacity, but to express it simply in this way is to reduce the whole problem to the question of scale. However, it is not only scale that is involved but also system, which more directly relates to the question of the metabolic rift. Crossing planetary boundaries is therefore not simply a matter of the scale of production, but also the way in which production is organized, the particular technologies used, the ends of production, and so on. Metabolic rift theory is thus concerned with system as well as scale, which raises all sorts of qualitative issues. For example, the production of toxics is not simply a matter of scale, it is a question of the production of toxics at all.
There are all sorts of ways in which the essential irrationality of the capitalist mode of production, particularly in its monopoly stage, generates ruptures in the biogeochemical cycles of the planet that are not simply a question of carrying capacity, but relate to the structure of production itself. In its attempt to expand itself in more and more irrational forms under global monopoly capitalism, capital intensifies the ecological problem. Metabolic rift analysis thus allows us to address the full complexity of the ecological problem in this respect, not reducing everything to a notion of carrying capacity—as if what we produce, how we produce, and for whom we produce were not also essential elements of the problem.
XT and LJ: Besides the ecological crisis, do you think capitalism is facing other crises? (For example, economic and financial crises, imperialist war crises, cultural and ideological crises, and so on.)
JBF: Production and financial crisis are endemic to capitalism as a class-based system of exploitation. Imperialism too is endemic to capitalism, and in its mature, monopolistic stage becomes all-encompassing, which means not only globally unequal economic (and ecological) exchange, but also constant tendencies to global war, which are heightened today, in the period of decline of the United States as the hegemonic global power of the capitalist system. Ideology is primarily about how a ruling class justifies its rule and how other classes resist—in the realm of ideas. Culture arises from forms of human kinship and community, and from the way in which use values are generated and absorbed in society, which affects “structures of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term), characterizing different historical epochs. Ideological and cultural conflict is inherent in a global capitalist system defined by class and imperialism and rooted in inequalities and the attendant global appropriation of value.
All of these contradictions of capitalism dialectically feed into the ecological crisis, which has elevated the entire field of the crisis of capital to a planetary scale. The British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson saw preparation for nuclear war and environmental destruction as together posing a new historical reality of “Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization.” If we alter Thompson’s phrase here to refer to “Exterminism, the Last Stage of Capitalist Civilization,” we get at the reality of today’s planetary crisis engendered by the social relation of capital. This represents the fundamental irrationality of our age. Everything in the globalized monopoly-capitalist system of today points toward exterminism—evident in the genocide that Israel (and the United States) are now imposing on the Palestinian population in Gaza. This is because the barrier to addressing the ecological crisis, along with all the other crises of capitalism/imperialism, is the barrier of capital itself. The accumulation of capital without constraint, according to its own inner logic, has turned into the accumulation of catastrophe on a planetary scale. All solutions, therefore, point to the need to go against the logic of capital.
A dialectical approach means seeking constantly to fight against reductionism even while addressing the question of totality. If capitalism threatens to draw the whole world into its negative ecology of exterminism, this is a product ultimately of the class-centered system of social exploitation and expropriation that constitutes the mode of capital accumulation itself. Fighting these oppressions at every level and the crises they engender is at one with the struggle against capitalist exterminism. It is no accident that fascism has returned in most capitalist societies. Monthly Review thus deals continually with economic crisis, the crisis of the state, imperialism, war, and oppressions based on racial and gender (and transgender) identities. This means combatting cultural/ideological impositions from above, reactionary movements, and, above all, capital itself.
XT and LJ: Digital capitalism, formed by the combination of capital and digital technology, has become a new form of contemporary capitalist exploitation. Academic research on digital capitalism is also on the rise. Do you think digital capitalism will cause ecological problems? Will digital capitalism face ecological crises?
JBF: The notion of “digital capitalism” now covers a wide ground. Digital technology is, of course, here to stay. It is not in itself of course a bad thing, but represents the expansion of human capacities. In the 1950s, Sweezy, a Marxist economist and one of the founding editors of Monthly Review, wrote a report in which he said there would come a day when it would be commonplace for people to walk around with computers in their pockets. The problem is not the technology itself but the way in which it is shaped by the social relations. The social relations of capitalism are class-based relations aimed at the accumulation of capital and the enrichment of the capitalist class as practically the sole end of society. In such circumstances, the development and use of technology, and even the limitations on technology imposed by society, are largely determined by class relations of accumulation.
Digital capitalism—which includes of course surveillance capitalism (a term first introduced in Monthly Review), AI capitalism, drone capitalism, and so on—poses serious problems, largely due to the way that the technology is utilized in the class war of capital against workers. Indeed, the operative word in all of this is capitalism. I do not think we can properly define any phase or stage of capitalism in terms of technology, though that necessarily plays a part. Rather, it has to be defined in terms of the latest, dominant phase of accumulation, focusing on social-class relations. Otherwise, it is too easy to fall into the trap of a kind of technological determinism.
It is crucial to scrutinize the social relations of technology, not technology in isolation. With regard to technology and the environmental crisis, one has to avoid all kinds of fetishisms. It is true that the digital revolution offers new ecological problems—just look at the astronomical amounts of energy needed for the new massive computer complexes. Yet, the real contradiction is not the technological mode, which of course is affected by the system, but rather the nature of the social relations of capitalism itself. Digital technology could be a much greater boon to society. But in the context of existing social relations of production, it is caught up in the contradictions of the system and its exploitative, crisis-prone, and exterminist tendencies that now embrace the entire planet. Digital technology is thus primarily being used by the accumulation system to further divide and control people, rather than to meet individual, social, and environmental needs. As a result, it is heightening all the contradictions of capitalism, including ecological ones. A very prophetic article on this titled “Imperialism in the Silicon Age” was written more than four decades ago by A. Sivanandan in the July–August 1980 issue of Monthly Review.
XT and LJ: Many scholars, including yourself, believe that capitalist countries exploit and control global ecological resources through political, economic, and military means, leading to ecological degradation and inequality, thereby forming ecological imperialism. How is ecological imperialism, as a new form of imperialism, related to and different from classical imperialism? Additionally, does ecological imperialism have its limits and might it encounter crises?
JBF: Ecological imperialism is not a new form of imperialism, but the foundation of all imperialism, making economic imperialism possible and always accompanying it. From the beginning, capitalism developed in large part from the colonial looting of the periphery of its resources and its labor, a process carried out by force with no pretense of equal exchange. Such expropriation was the direct expropriation of resources, including the expropriation of land and bodies. In Marx’s view, it was not exchange, but robbery. He argued that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by a process of “original expropriation” (a term that he said he preferred to “original [or primitive] accumulation,” since it better captured the actual nature of the process at work), in which the commons were forcibly expropriated from the population, creating the mass of the industrial proletariat. This same process of original expropriation also took place in the colonies, but there, as Marx explained, it was even more openly violent and brutal, involving extirpation (genocide) of Indigenous populations and slavery. If economic imperialism, as Marx wrote, involves a process of expropriation in which more labor is received for less, ecological imperialism involves a process where more nature is received for less. Colonialism was all about the robbing of nature/resources/bodies to benefit the “mother country.” The economic exchange aspect of this was often only the surface level.
A lot of study has been devoted in the metabolic rift tradition to the nineteenth-century guano trade in Peru (particularly on the Chincha Islands). The early to mid-nineteenth-century soil crisis, which was the focus of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, arose out of industrialized capitalist agriculture, in which key soil chemicals, including nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, were removed from the soil in food and fiber sent hundreds and even thousands of miles to the new urban manufacturing centers (also concentrated centers of population), where they ended up polluting the cities, rather than being returned to the soil. The result was the loss of soil fertility. To repair this capital turned at first to natural fertilizers, the most productive of which was guano from the Chincha Islands off of Peru. This led to a huge guano trade. Many of the guano diggers were Chinese indentured workers, referred to by the British as “coolies,” and in fact were subjected to a form of slavery. The workers who dug the guano on the Chincha Islands, under conditions of extreme exploitation and de factoslavery, invariably died on the job. In this, we find a classic case of ecological imperialism. The Opium Wars on China, which had their basis in the British creation of poppy plantations in India for the export of opium by force to China, were, arguably, a case of ecological imperialism of another type and can be studied in that context. These historical examples help us to understand the nature of ecological imperialism today.
Just as there have been frequent attempts to provide an accounting of unequal economic exchange, in a literature that grew out of the work of Marxist theorist of imperialism, Arghiri Emmanuel—whose book on Unequal Exchange has now been republished by Monthly Review Press in a new edition—so there have been growing attempts in recent years to account for unequal ecological exchange. Measuring imperialism of trade with respect to ecological resources, however, is much more difficult, since it cannot be done in terms of money, and thus raises issues of incommensurability. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made in delineating ecological imperialism. The most important work in this respect, in my opinion, is the model constructed by the great ecological systems theorist, Howard T. Odum, who synthesized his approach with that of Marx. Hannah Holleman and I wrote an article on Odum’s critique of ecological imperialism for the Journal of Peasant Studies in 2014.
The Ecological Future of Socialism
XT and LJ: In your book, Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution, you wrote: “We need to create a more sustainable future: a healing of the metabolic rift and the construction of a new realm of social freedom.” How can we bridge the metabolic rift? Is it through the struggle of the “environmental proletariat”? Does establishing new realms of freedom point to ecological socialism?
JBF: In his discussion of the metabolic rift in the first volume of Capital, Marx insisted on the need for the “restoration” of social metabolism in line with the universal metabolism of nature—something that was possible in its entirety only in the higher society of socialism. Obviously, the socialist movement would need to strive for that in the present as part of the movement toward the future. Marx clearly thought this would be a primary task in the construction of a socialist society. He insisted on the need to create sustainable conditions for “the chain of human generations.” For Marxism, the dialectic of necessity and freedom has always involved recognizing those material conditions that are objectively necessary at any given time, including both those imposed by nature and society. In order to promote social freedom in a socialist society a level of material development allowing for enough for all, and conditions of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, are required. It is only in this context that the development of a society characterized by what Marx called “freedom in general” is possible.
Today, the objective force for change is what can be called an “environmental proletariat,” that is, a working-class milieu that reflects a revolutionary materialism in the deepest and widest sense and is not restricted to the narrow economic sphere related to factory labor in which this is often conceived. We can see this as emerging globally in the context of today’s material crisis, which is also a struggle for survival. Movements of the dispossessed (including struggles of exploited workers, the Indigenous, the racially oppressed, the gender-oppressed, peasants, landless workers, and the like) are cohering. It matters little in the end whether we call these “environmental movements” or “workers’ movements,” they are necessarily both and represent an objective tendency in response to capitalist exterminism. Marx and Engels in The Holy Family, it will be remembered, stated that the proletariat is that class in modern society that is “compelled by absolute and compulsory need (the practical expression of necessity) to revolt against [the] inhumanity” of a system of production that seeks to alienate humanity from itself, from society, from nature, and from the possibility of human freedom.
XT and LJ: As you mentioned, the struggle of the environmental proletariat is an important aspect. However, many people today believe that the proletariat has lost its revolutionary nature and is gradually disappearing. How should we understand the environmental proletariat as a tangible existence in capitalist countries? Will the environmental proletariat lose its revolutionary nature as some people claim?
JBF: The concept of the environmental proletariat is meant to return to the conception of the proletariat in classical historical materialism, which has been largely lost, and, at the same time, to utilize these insights to examine the objective conditions and tendencies of our time. The notion of the proletariat got more and more reduced in Western Marxism to just the industrial proletariat and even to a factory proletariat, often to the narrow realm of organized labor (and sometimes merely to white organized labor). In the United States, it was often seen as simply consisting of “blue collar” workers. Hence, the proletariat was reduced merely to economic relations, which were themselves interpreted in narrower and narrower terms. In many respects the concept of the proletariat (and the working class) came to be interpreted in conformity not with socialist theory, but with a dominant capitalist economic ideology that relegated it to a minor mechanical role, a view that was unfortunately mirrored in much of Marxist theory.
Marx and Engels themselves, however, approached the issue differently. The original work on the proletariat in classical historical materialism was Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England. What is immediately apparent when one reads Engels’s work is that his orientation to the working class is more environmental and more holistic in its conception than today’s view in which the working class is simply an economic category. Writing shortly after the so-called Plug Plot Riots and during the Chartist movement, Engels was concerned first and foremost about the living conditions of the proletariat in the new industrial city, although he had separate chapters on the agricultural proletariat and the mining proletariat. He focused on the urban environment, including housing, pollution of all kinds, availability of clean water, the quality of food (and its adulteration), disease, mortality and life expectancy by class and age, disability, child labor, chemicals, urban segregation, and the ethnic division between the English and the Irish.
Of course, Engels was also concerned with the conditions of factory labor, exploitation, the reserve army of labor, and the conditions of industrial labor. But industrial work took second place in his analysis to the entire environment of the proletariat. His analysis revolved around the notion of “social murder,” the fact that the working class has a much lower life expectancy due to its overall living conditions. Not only Engels, but Marx as well, saw the proletariat primarily in this way. This was reflected throughout Capital, notwithstanding the fact that the more abstract economic analysis centered on exploitation and the production of surplus value.
To abstract a purely economic conception of the working class tends to weaken rather than strengthen the philosophy of praxis. Among other things, it downplays the whole area of social reproduction, including the domestic sphere, the reproduction of the working class, and gender relations, all of which played critical roles in classical historical materialism. But it also leaves out the wider environmental perspective with respect to the conditions of the working class. It substitutes for a materialist conception of history—Marx and Engels’s own perspective—a much narrower economic interpretation of history.
There is no doubt that isolation of the economic factor alone made a certain sense originally in the development of the socialist movement, concerned as it was primarily with capitalism as a system of exploitation and the need for the working class to organize economically and politically in response. Nevertheless, it is clear that in the most radical revolutionary periods, the working-class struggle is geared to material conditions in a much broader sense, beyond the merely economic, but also addressing those material conditions that we would classify as “environmental.”
The whole idea of the emergence of an environmental proletariat today has to do with the dissolving in the age of planetary crisis of any clear distinction between material conditions that are economic and those that are environmental, and a merging of the two so that the movement itself is objectively thrust in a more revolutionary direction. We can already see this happening throughout the Global South, and it is also happening in the Global North as well, especially in what we call frontline communities. Environmental justice movements that are class- and race-based, and that tie together the ecological and the economic, are most prominent in the United States in Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. Today it is an objective reality that the struggles to come will be more materialist, in the broad sense, reflecting a struggle not just for social justice, but also for survival.
XT and LJ: Marx pointed out: “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.” Marx’s premise for discussing future rational social systems is based on the development of productive forces and relations of production. However, ecological socialism does not seem to have centered on the conditions for the emergence of new relations of production. How should we understand the relationship between ecological socialism and Marx’s assertion? Does achieving ecological socialism require a high level of productive forces?
JBF: Marx, in his famous discussion of the forces and relations of production—part of his base-superstructure metaphor in 1859—was providing not a deterministic perspective, but what he called the “guiding thread” of his studies. Today things present themselves to us differently. The fetters imposed by social relations are still there, but the principal problem under monopoly-finance capital is not the development of productive forces as such, but rather, from an economic standpoint, the inability to absorb within the capital accumulation process the enormous productivity or surplus-generating capabilities of the system within the narrow class parameters of the existing order. The resulting overaccumulation tendencies in the capitalist core have made economic waste and destruction of all kinds formally “rational” for the system, even though it is substantively irrational. The problem of the forces of production then becomes one of the utilizations of productive forces and, in some cases, their redundancy.
In today’s monopoly-finance capitalist order, the enemy is any kind of conservation. In fact, in the United States, where the conservation movement was a major force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the very word, given the fetish of conspicuous consumption, has almost disappeared. Every kind of wasteful irrationality that will generate profits is promoted in order to enhance wealth at the top of society. The result is a system of economic stagnation, financialization, and the proliferation of wasteful and irrational commodities, while basic human needs, even the protection of the earth as a place of human habitation, are systematically neglected. A key element is the inability of capitalism to engage in planning (except in times of war), and hence an absolute discrepancy between the pattern of development and the needs of the population. Such irrationality and lack of socioeconomic planning is crucial to the preservation of monopoly capital itself. The system constantly generates bigger and bigger contradictions, which are now enveloping the entire earth. In terms of the ecological problem, we know exactly what to do to solve the problem. But the fetters of capitalist social relations block the necessary changes at every point, and even create opposing or counterrevolutionary forces that are not only irrational, but now exterminist in nature. It is not simply a question of the quantitative expansion of the productive forces, but rather their qualitative development and rational use that are fettered by present-day capitalist social relations.
XT and LJ: As a major country, China has made great efforts in protecting the ecological environment. How do you evaluate China’s efforts and contributions in environmental protection? For developing countries like China, could you provide some suggestions for environmental protection?
JBF: China is not only a major country, but even more significantly in the present world context, a country committed to “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Like all countries, China has huge environmental problems. But Xi Jinping Thought has linked the goal of developing a great modern socialist society between 2035 and 2050 to the building of an ecological civilization and an aesthetically beautiful China. He insists that mountains of green are more important and more valuable than mountains of gold. These are not just words, but represent principles that have been put into practice, constituting a coordinated effort that has already made China the leader worldwide in alternative energy technologies addressing climate change, in reforestation and afforestation, in the speed of pollution reduction, and in other areas. China is at present the leading emitter of carbon dioxide globally, but on a per capita basis is well behind countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. The main issue here is China’s dependence on coal-fired plants, which, however, is now considerably below its peak. Beijing is making strenuous efforts to reduce its overall emissions and its dependence on coal and is introducing hard emissions targets, no longer simply carbon intensity targets, beginning in 2026. Moreover, there are signs that China’s carbon emissions have now peaked and are decreasing ahead of schedule. With all the difficulties and contradictions, there is no doubt that China’s very serious efforts in this respect offer hope to humanity as a whole in this critical area. These efforts, moreover, are not simply top-down, as is often supposed. Not only are these struggles motivated by the Communist Party of China, but they are also in part responses to Chinese on-the-ground mass environmental movements.
The notion of an “ecological civilization” first arose as a systematic historical concept in the early 1980s in the Soviet Union. However, it was soon adopted, developed, and put into practice in China. Needless to say, the very idea of building an ecological civilization goes against the principal logic of capitalism. Although the contradictions are huge, China presently is charting a distinctive path toward sustainable human development, remarkable in a developing country. It has resurrected the mass line and is rebuilding the worker-peasant alliance with its rural revitalization and dual circulation models. I do not think China’s path is the only path, even in the Global South. We see other socialist-oriented countries making enormous strides based on their own conditions. Here I would point especially to Cuba and Venezuela. All paths toward sustainable human development by definition go against the logic of capitalism. Still, it is to be hoped that the connection between ecological Marxism and ecological civilization in China will inspire similar struggles worldwide.