The Foster-O'Connor rhubarb

Last June, James O'Connor opened up the pages of "Capitalism, Nature and
Socialism" (CNS) for a hostile symposium on John Bellamy Foster's "Marx's
Ecology". There has been a running dispute between these two for some time
now. It also involves Paul Burkett, who wrote an attack on O'Connor's
"Natural Causes" in the February 1999 Monthly Review.
(http://www.monthlyreview.org/299burk.htm) After Foster turned down the
opportunity to present a presumably inadequate 3,000 word rebuttal for the
September issue, Burkett pinch-hit for him.

I want to submit my own rebuttal to all of these folks using the Internet
as is my wont. I will not count the words, nor will I worry about
alienating any of the principals. I burned those bridges long ago and then
dynamited the smoldering wreckage.

My interest in ecology began after hearing Joel Kovel speak on the topic
over 6 years ago at the Brecht Forum in NYC. His likening of capitalist
growth to metastizing tumors stuck with me. Although Kovel has spoken
critically of the Frankfurt School (in another presentation at the Brecht
Forum), he tends to retain some of their influences, especially around the
question of 'spirituality' which was a major bone of contention in his CNS
article on Foster.

A couple of years later, I took keen interest in a debate that had broken
out between Foster and David Harvey, after Harvey had attacked Foster as a
kind of neo-Malthusian in "Justice, Nature, and the Geography of
Difference." Because Foster had addressed the question of ecological limits
in "The Vulnerable Planet," Harvey concluded that Foster was suffering from
the same kind of philosophical parsimoniousness at work in Malthus. But
when minesweepers are converted into fishing boats, it is not Malthusian to
point out that tuna and other fish at the top of the food chain might
disappear at some point. Not only is it scientific to do so, it is a
problem that there is no neat "socialist" ribbon-wrapped solution to.
During the course of this debate, I communicated frequently with Foster
through email, offered him my solidarity and defended his ideas frequently
on the Internet. This was at a time when I held Marxist professors in much
higher esteem than I do nowadays.

After posting a brief critique of Harvey on Doug Henwood's LBO-Talk mailing
list, O'Connor, who was subbed there, invited me to expand upon my ideas
and submit them to his journal. Although I did not know it at the time, my
ideas were moving in the same direction as those that finally took shape in
Foster's "Marx's Ecology." Basically, I made a strong case for an ecology
rooted in Marxist materialism and even pointed out Marx's interest in
classical Greek philosophical materialism, a key element of Foster's study.

What I didn't know at the time was that Foster and O'Connor were on a
collision course around these very questions. So instead of simply telling
me that he disagreed with my approach, O'Connor rejected my submission,
telling me that CNS readers would not be interested in my rather obscure
critique of Harvey's reliance on Leibnizian metaphysics. One got the
impression from his correspondence that his readers were too busy chaining
themselves to redwood trees or something to bother with philosophy. In
reality, O'Connor was not bothered by the abstruseness of the article, but
by the politics. If O'Connor was seeking to weed out abstruseness, his
first target would have been Costas Panayotakis's "Nature, Dialectics and
Emancipatory Politics," one of the attacks on Foster in the June issue,
that contains gems such as:

"We have therefore arrived at an expanded conception of totality. In this
conception any given socio-ecological totality would be analyzed as the
complex and dialectical articulation of the economy and the realm of
production, family and the realm of reproduction, politics, culture and
this society's mode of appropriating nature. Such a view is dialectical
without turning dialectics into a metaphysical, transhistorical guarantee
of the inherent dynamism of reality. The degree of stability, the
contradictions, and the dynamic tendencies of a society cannot be
determined a priori but only emerge from a concrete analysis of this
society's dialectical structure."

If anybody observes me writing such opaque and elephantine constructions,
they have permission to take away my computer and then lobotomize me.

The first article in the June symposium is so banal that one wonders why
O'Connor bothered to include it. Titled "Failed Promise" and co-authored by
Maarten de Kadt and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, it makes the startling
revelation that Marx's ecological analysis revolved around the problem of
soil fertility and failed to address such problems as nuclear weapons or
PCB's. One wonders why de Kadt and Engel_Di Mauro did not fault Marx for
not living into the 1980s. Too much red meat, cheap wine and cigars, one
supposes.

Alan Rudy's "Marx's Ecology and Rift Analysis" gets to the heart of
Foster's study. For Foster, the question of a "metabolic rift" is key not
only to understanding Marx, but in developing ecosocialist solutions for
today's world. Basically, the metabolic rift was created as a result of the
development of cities under capitalism, when the source of organic
nutrients in the form of animal or human waste was separated from the soil.
It led to "guano wars" in the 19th century, open sewers in the streets of
London and a host of other social problems. In the Communist Manifesto,
Marx proposed the abolition of the distinction between town and country as
a first step toward mending the metabolic rift. Moreover, in the absence of
a socialist transformation of the world, every chemical advance to
compensate for the loss of soil fertility has led to further
contradictions, including the seepage of fertilizers into bodies of water
like the Gulf of Mexico, cancer epidemics due to pesticides, etc.

For Rudy, "[T]he concept of metabolic rift…has a far greater affinity for
natural resource economics than the dialectics of ecological Marxism." In
contrast, Rudy would shift the discussion away from scientific
considerations of natural resource usage altogether--either Marxist or
bourgeois. Why? Because, to put it bluntly, he is committed to the kind of
anti-scientific prejudices that characterized the Frankfurt School. Foster
supposedly subscribes to the "the Baconian conception of an atomized
nature." Such a conception "undergirds the assumption that there is one
scientific method because, at root, all of nature is comprised of discrete
piles of differently arranged, hierarchically organized, though
fundamentally similar things." That's odd. In my reading of "Marx's
Ecology," I found a steadfast defense of the kind of dialectical
understanding of science that you find in Lewontin and Levins.

After having declared his affinity for the kind of science spoofed by Alan
Sokal in "Social Text," Rudy attempts to refute the concept of metabolic
rift by referring to England at the time of the Enclosure Acts. He writes,
"The metabolic rift argument suggests that the movement of human and animal
waste from the country to the city leads to the accelerated depletion of
agricultural soils. However, the increase in rural livestock suggests that
the problem may have been as much related to the maldistribution of rural
wastes as the separation of rural from urban wastes. The scientific or
cultural or infrastructural incapacity to engage in this redistribution of
animal waste then would need to be explained."

This distinction is next to useless. Marx's concern was not just with the
separation of town and city, but the failure of capitalist farming in
general, which tended to put short-term profits over long-term social
considerations. Maldistribution of rural wastes simply suggests that the
English gentry's verbal commitment to "improvement" was at odds with the
mode of production. What else is new?

Perhaps Rudy's biggest problem is his tendency to assume that the concept
of metabolic rift rests upon some kind of binary opposition that was not
present in 19th century Europe at all. He writes:

"The imagery of rift suggests a chasm between country and city, nature and
society, and agriculture and industry. Yet the 19th century is the era of
massive road, canal and railroad construction; of extraordinary scientific
and technological innovation (only exceeded by the following century); and
of phenomenal introductions and migrations of non-native crops, peoples,
diseases, and invasive species all multi-directionally across the
increasingly accessible globe."

What can one say? Rudy simply doesn't get Marx's argument, nor Foster's
very effective presentation of that argument. All of the sweeping changes
described by Rudy, and which constitute the first part of the Communist
Manifesto as well, are simply mechanisms to facilitate the development of
the modern urban-based capitalist economy that is the root of our problem.
Railroad construction made and makes it possible to separate livestock from
their feed sources. The consequences are pig feces filling the rivers and
lakes of North Carolina and monoculture production of corn in the Midwest
with all the attendant problems. The idea is to reorganize society, not
stand breathless in the face of capitalist transportation "miracles."
(Unfortunately, Foster has not explored the connections between metabolic
rift and the consequences of farming based on nonrenewable energy. More
about that anon.)

Turning next to Costas Panayotakis's "Nature, Dialectics and Emancipatory
Politics," the less said the better. The opening sentences reveal that
Panayotakis was simply using Foster's book as a peg to hang his own
preoccupations on:

"John Bellamy Foster begins Marx's Ecology with an overview of his 'path to
ecological materialism.' In this overview the reader is informed that the
theoretical legacy of Lukacs and Gramsci, which I had internalized, denied
the possibility of the application of dialectical modes of thinking to
nature, essentially ceding that entire domain to positivism."

Which I had internalized? God, what ugly prose. In plain English,
Panayotakis is trying to say that Lukacs and Gramsci can provide a solid
philosophical foundation for ecosocialism. And how? He write, "As Lukacs
also pointed out in History and Class Consciousness, the transcendence of
the socially generated reified experience of the world is only possible
from the standpoint of a dialectically conceived totality." Oh, I see. Who
needs to look at the problems of metabolic rift or Marx's life-long
commitment to materialist thought when you can wrap yourself in
quasi-metaphysical blankets such as this.

Panayotakis continues:

"Lukacs and Gramsci, the other Western Marxist that Foster repeatedly
dismisses, were among the first Marxists to analyze social reality not
through the use of a simple, mechanical concept of causality but through an
exploration of the complex mediations between the different spheres of
social life."

All that is well and good. But unfortunately, Lukacs and Gramsci were not
engaged with *nature*. Panayotakis's article basically boils down to the
need to think dialectically, which for CNS readers is equivalent to
reminding Readers Digest subscribers to honor the American flag.

The final article in the symposium is by Joel Kovel and is titled "A
Materialism Worthy of Nature." Basically it is a defense of spirituality in
the following vein:

"Foster's errors are grounded in a misconception about the meaning of
'spirit.' We can infer (because, as with the Greens, there is no actual
critique of the spiritual) that for him, to be 'spiritual' is synonymous
with what is anti-scientific, irrational and superstitious, and is merely a
kind of rough congener for the pole of 'idealism' in the classic
materialism-idealism debate. He fails here to comprehend the distinction
between spirit and religion, that spirit is an elementary property of being
human, and that religions are the binding of spirit for the purposes of
social cohesion. Therefore he also fails to appreciate that there is much
more to spirituality than its religious elaboration, and much more to
religions than their spiritual impulse."

To the contrary, Foster's book is not an attack on spirituality but on
developing an analysis of the ecological crisis on other than a scientific
and materialist basis. This is in keeping with the record of Marx and
Engels, who both paid close attention to scientific matters throughout
their life. While the rigorous attempt to develop a dialectics of nature
based on the latest scientific findings was identified most often with
Engels, Marx supported and consulted on each of these initiatives. Marx
considered the soil chemist Van Leibeg to be more important to
understanding European society than a dozen economists--in his own words.
Marx's Scientific Notebooks have been published recently and lend support
to the notion that Marx was a consummate believer in rigorous scientific
methods, both in understanding the natural and social world.

There is, of course, another question entirely, which Joel appears confused
over--namely, the role of spirit or belief in the supernatural in politics
and human survival. Despite vulgar Marxist attempts to depict Marx as an
"enemy" of religion, he was in fact not hostile to it at all, but merely
described it as the necessary response to the cruelties and insecurities of
capitalist society. Only after society was changed could the material
conditions allow for a more scientific understanding of existence.
Furthermore, when the Taiping rebellion in China broke out in 1851, led by
Hung Hsiu-ch'üan who saw himself as the younger brother of Jesus Christ,
Engels hailed the movement in a letter to Marx. Finally, the British
colonists would get their comeuppance.

Much of the rest of the article is an attempt to enlist Marx and Engels as
possible recruits to the German mystic Jakob Bohme, which is quite a
different matter than seeing Marx and Engels as sympathetic to the
spiritual yearnings of the disenfranchised. Kovel bases this on a passing
reference to Bohme in "Socialism-Scientific and Utopian":

"mystic Bohme puts into the German word something of the meaning of the
Latin qualitas; his 'qual' was the activating principle arising from, and
promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation,
or person subject to it ...."

While Kovel admits that something more than this obscure reference might be
required before drafting Bohme into the Marxist tradition, one can only say
that there are thinkers who are much more adaptable to these purposes, such
as Bacon and other materialists who might alienate the romantic yearnings
of our Frankfurtish comrades. We do owe them an apology for offending their
poetic sensibilities, but must move forward.

Let me conclude with my own take on this grand battle between elderly
tenured professors who are largely speaking to their own mandarin circles.
Most of this discussion would be utterly arcane to the average
anti-globalization activist who is trying to address the ecological crisis
through direct action. One young correspondent of mine, who has braved tear
gas on more than one occasion, told me that he could not get through
"Marx's Ecology." Okay, he said, so Marx's roots are in the Greek
materialists. How does that help me fight logging in the Amazon rainforest?

Ironically, Foster was on the right track with "The Vulnerable Planet," but
much more is needed to create a pole of attraction based on Marxism for the
new radicals of today. Foster is correct to state that the analysis of the
ecological crisis must be rooted in Marxist materialism, but--after having
stated this--it is still a task that remains unfulfilled.

Just as the scientists of the early Soviet Union came together in
state-sponsored academies to apply ecological thinking to the new society,
we need to gather together left-oriented physical scientists and Marxist
social scientists today to come to grips with the ecological crisis of
capitalism. The Worldwatch Institute is a model for what needs to be done,
but the effort I am describing will be rooted in historical and scientific
materialism rather than Lester Brown's brand of Malthusian liberalism.

For this to begin to take place, it will be necessary for leftwing
academics to begin to think collectively, a task that very might well be
impossible in advance of a political reawakening of the working class.
Given the cataclysmic events that have transpired over the past few months,
that day may be sooner rather than later despite the grim appearance. After
all, shocks to the system have a way of shaking up modes of thinking.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org