Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature

Source

Foster, John Bellamy [2000], Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. Introduction, Madrid: El Viejo Topo, pp. 17–45.

Translation: Oliver Ferran

A Brief Profile of the Author’s Work

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review. His work addresses the political economy of capitalism, ecology, ecological crisis, and Marxist theory.

Introduction

This text examines the relationship between materialism and science as two fundamental concepts for explaining the emergence of ecological thought.

Its analysis focuses primarily on the development of Marx’s ecological philosophy from Epicurean materialism, in order to illuminate the interdependence between nature and human beings in relation to the contemporary socio-ecological crisis.

Materialism

For materialism, the existence of things—the tangible dimension of reality—depends upon nature and matter. According to the philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar (1983), materialism encompasses three categories:

• Ontological materialism, which refers to the claim that the existence of things depends upon human empirical knowledge.
• Epistemological materialism, which affirms the existence of things that are independent of human existence.
• Practical materialism, which emphasizes the role of human beings in transforming their physical and social environment.

Marx’s materialism was primarily practical because he believed that a worldview was defined through the relationship between human action and the transformation of its surroundings. Nevertheless, he also considered the epistemological and ontological dimensions necessary to strengthen the scientific character of naturalistic materialism. His position was not mechanistic; rather, it drew substantially on the philosophy of Epicurus, who understood the materialist conception of nature as a means of developing an account of the limits of human freedom. It is also important to acknowledge that Marx was influenced by the works of Bacon, Kant, and Young Hegelians such as Feuerbach, all of whom engaged, in different ways, with philosophical traditions rooted in Epicurean thought.

Epicureanism emerged as an antithesis to the belief that the material foundation of things could be explained through divine intervention. This philosophy enriched the nineteenth-century debate concerning the origin of the world—namely, which comes first: spirit or nature? That question led to the formation of idealist and materialist positions.

During the 1830s, idealism was often synonymous with spiritualism: an attempt to disparage the material while emphasizing the virtues and properties of spirit. Sensualism, by contrast, represented a materialist orientation insofar as it sought to reaffirm the role of matter and the senses over and against spirit.

A third element in the debate over the explanation of the origin of things was David Hume’s empiricism, which was subsequently refracted through Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism—Kantian rationalism. The latter combined idealism and materialism. On the one hand, it acknowledged that things existed beyond the limits of human understanding, within the realm of the noumena¹. On the other hand, it maintained that knowledge had to be grounded in forms that were not exclusively a posteriori. A priori knowledge made it possible to structure everything that occupied a place within space and time. Kant’s difficulty, however, was that he prevented materialist philosophy from acquiring a firm foundation: anything beyond the field of human perception remained subject to Kantian rationalism.

This is where Hegelian philosophy became important as a possible way out of Kantian rationalism. Although it proceeded through a highly mediated use of idealism, it sought to address epistemological problems by emphasizing the relationship between spirit and history in the development of the world. In other words, as human beings evolve, their understanding of things evolves as well. The danger within this philosophy was its relapse into idealism: everything that exists for us would derive its reason for being from our own logic, implying that the finite possesses no independent substance.

For Marx, Hegel’s idealist philosophy had to be situated within the practical sphere in order to avoid reproducing a religious worldview. A similar problem appeared in Feuerbach’s critique of Hegelian idealism. His attempt to formulate a materialist position without adopting the mechanistic assumptions of Hobbes and Descartes led the young Hegelian toward sensualism—first human essence, and then spirit. Yet, as Marx emphasized, Feuerbach’s position remained merely contemplative. It lacked a practical definition. The practical dimension calls for action, and human action is what weaves the relationship between human beings and nature.

Initially, the value Marx found in Epicurean materialism lay in its recognition of human self-consciousness: the freedom to generate knowledge on the basis of one’s own thought rather than simply reproducing what others believe.

For Epicurean materialism, the world is mortal rather than divine. Nothing emerges from nothing, and everything that exists in the world is interconnected. The implications of this position reveal that nature cannot be treated as immortal or as something exempt from death.

As previously indicated, Marx did not abandon the ontological and epistemological dimensions of materialism. Instead, he incorporated them into a dialectical framework. The dependence of human beings upon nature—nature as their predecessor—was fundamental to his analysis. Marx also recognized the existence of an external physical world that did not depend upon human knowledge.

Hegel had likewise attempted to resolve the contradictions of Kantian rationalism through dialectics, but his reasoning led him to deny the autonomous existence of matter. From Marx’s perspective, everything related to human cognition does not constitute an independent world; rather, it is a product of human thought.

In this way, Marx advanced the thesis that the natural sciences and the social sciences, despite their differences, could be studied together. What was required was a materialist conception of human history grounded in its relationship with nature. This contradicted the understanding of Western Marxists who treated materialism as a merely verbal category for describing the capitalist mode of production through the concepts of base and superstructure. In order to understand the functioning of base and superstructure more fully, however, it was necessary to analyze the links between production and the conditions of the natural environment that made production possible.

Once the relationship between the development of human history and the natural environment was understood, Marx’s attention to scientific advances became essential. Overcoming idealism required a synthesis of material life with the physical and natural dimensions that condition its existence.

Ecology

Although Marx established the foundations of ecological consciousness ahead of his time, his critics have identified alleged weaknesses in his ecological materialism. These criticisms often reinforce one another. Some have argued that his ecological investigations were illusory because he did not incorporate them fully into his principal work or into his theory of value. Others have claimed that his arguments lacked scientific grounding because he never adequately studied the effects of technology upon nature, portraying him instead as fundamentally pro-technology. Still others have accused him of speciesism, on the assumption that he considered human beings superior to animals.

Nevertheless, Marx was also his own critic, and these accusations frequently revive pre-Marxian assumptions. The problem with such anti-Marxian positions is that they treat ecology primarily as a question of values, thereby approaching the idealist tendencies associated with spiritualism. Although they criticize Marx for failing to emphasize nature’s contribution, they do not necessarily analyze the ecological question as an object of study. This contributes little to understanding the underlying material relationships between human beings and their development on the planet, which necessarily includes nature.

For Marx, the task was to analyze the connections between the development of material life and its relationship to spiritualism itself. It was not to classify his materialism as Baconian on the basis of a misinterpretation of the idea of nature’s domination—an idea that, according to Bellamy Foster, can be found in many materialist approaches and may assume an anthropocentric form. The relevant perspective is one of co-evolution and metabolic relations, that is, the processes involved in the development of human beings in relation to nature, rather than a struggle between anthropocentric and ecocentric ideas.

Even when materialism has led some thinkers toward teleological and anthropocentric positions, Bacon himself argued that understanding the domination of nature required an understanding of the laws of nature.

As noted above, the notion of the domination of nature attributed to Bacon was transformed, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, into a set of quotations detached from substantive analysis. More conservative materialist and idealist thinkers rarely examined the concept in depth.

Caudwell, an advocate of the co-evolutionary relationship between Darwin and Marx, argued in Illusion and Reality (1937) and Hereditary and Development (1986) that, in the human pursuit of freedom—understood as freedom from nature—human beings tend to integrate with one another through society and collective labor. They seek not merely to remain subject to nature’s dictates, but to transform their relationship with it. Yet human beings cannot develop at any level without nature simultaneously taking root and participating in that development.

From this perspective, the concept of sustainability was already emerging around the seventeenth century through John Evelyn, an important interpreter of Baconian ideas. In Fumifugium (1661) and Sylva (1664), Evelyn anticipated the supposed antagonism between domination and sustainability by addressing, respectively, air pollution and the protection of forests.

Some of the most significant advances in ecological thought during the nineteenth century emerged from Epicurean philosophy, which challenged the anthropocentric idea of creation associated with theological interpretations and opened the way toward recognizing the interdependence of human beings and nature. Gradually, the conception of human beings as the center of the universe, together with assumptions concerning the finitude of time and space, was displaced toward agnostic positions. Both Bacon and Darwin maintained that this interdependence represented the structure of natural history.

Darwin’s ideas, although frequently interpreted as a form of mechanistic materialism, inspired the development of new perspectives. One example was Liebig, a precursor of modern ecology, whose research examined the relationship between soil and the nutrients it generated for animal nutrition. Like Bacon, Darwin helped undermine the wall of teleology, or at least construct an alternative to spiritualism. Caudwell argued that genuine Darwinism defended the continuity of life’s development with the rest of reality, in which every organism fulfilled a vital function within the structure of existence.

In practical terms, the informal laws of ecology attributed to Barry Commoner maintain that everything is connected to everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and nothing comes from nothing. In other words, these principles suggest that adaptability is fundamental to the chain of life’s development. If one element of life alters its functioning, the change may produce a domino effect upon the other elements involved in the structure of existence. Some may be capable of adapting while others may not; nevertheless, the alteration will affect the development of natural history to some degree. If elements foreign to nature—elements that are not products of evolution—are introduced into this system, the consequences may be extremely dangerous.

Even before Darwin, Epicurus had addressed questions of adaptability, though not in terms of natural selection. His concern was instead with the relationship between human beings and subsistence in a world governed by species that are not always capable of adapting. Marx’s task was therefore to crystallize the contributions of Epicurus and, to some extent, Hegel, within a theory oriented more closely toward praxis, without abandoning the interdependence between human beings and nature. In this sense, Marx is said to have anticipated the potential of the research conducted by Liebig and Darwin for understanding sustainable development and co-evolution.

Marx’s task was therefore to crystallize the contributions of Epicurus and Hegel within a theory more closely oriented toward praxis, without abandoning the interdependence between human beings and nature.

A genuinely ecological analysis requires a materialist and dialectical position. Such a position must recognize that organisms do not merely adapt to their environment; they also modify it. Plants, for example, enrich the soil with nutrients, and those nutrients in turn make the existence of other organisms possible. This is a reciprocal relationship.

For Marx, although human beings attribute qualities to their surroundings through use-value and exchange-value, this cannot be considered a universal law, at least not when attempting to understand the ontological reality of everything around us. A lamb’s use-value, for example, cannot be understood solely through its edibility for human beings. Beyond that economic determination, the animal constitutes an essential and significant component of nature itself.

The Socio-Ecological Crisis

One of the problems facing contemporary ecological thought is that sociologists have not succeeded in formulating a theory containing sufficient materialism, history, and dialectics to reconstruct the analysis of society and nature as intrinsically interconnected. Although they have criticized socio-scientific approaches that incorporate an anthropocentric understanding of the global environmental crisis and deny the ontological character of nature, they have not fully formalized their theories around the praxis proposed by Marx. This weakens their arguments concerning human dependence upon nature.

The absence of a critical intellectual inheritance among sociologists and environmentalists creates a situation in which constructivist and anti-constructivist ideas collide. This produces an antinomy between the claim that things exist independently of human beings and the position that demands recognition of the interdependence of the entire environment.

Put differently, the dispute between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism undermines attempts to address the contemporary problem of human beings and their environment.

For Bellamy Foster, the current vague understanding of the limits of human growth is related to the rupture between social theory and its relationship with nature during the Second World War. The material conditions of existence came to assume human domination over the ecosystem, neglecting the importance of the history of society and adopting constructivist positions in favor of technological Prometheanism—the conquest of the world through technology produced by human labor.

In this context, ecological Marxism has the advantage of recognizing social development without losing sight of the relationship between material conditions and the history of nature. It should not, however, be confused with dialectical materialism understood as a later category associated with Marx and Engels.

Foster’s purpose is to identify the alignment between human beings and nature through Marx’s ecological materialism, and partly through Darwin’s materialism, in order to provide contemporary green theory with a deeper analysis. Such an approach seeks to move beyond idealist and spiritualist positions adopted by the social sciences as a consequence of the late emergence of eco-social thought.

Finally, it is important to emphasize that Marx’s ecological ideas did not emerge solely from his individual intellectual genius. From his earliest studies, he demonstrated an interest in ecological questions. Moreover, the intellectual context of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries demanded the development of a materialist conception of nature. This tendency was reinforced by Marx’s interest in subsistence agriculture in the context of capitalist development. As Foster states, “Marx’s social thought is inextricably related to an ecological vision of the world” (p. 45).