Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Kohei Saito

Hans Immler, best known as the author of Nature in Economic Theories (Natur in der ökonomischen Theorie), which is regarded as one of the earliest works of political ecology in Germany, also recently reinforced his rebuttal of Marx’s unacceptable productivism. According to Immler, Marx’s unecologocial standpoint is grounded in his anthropocentric value theory, which absolutizes human labor as the sole source of value and dismisses nature’s contribution in value production. He argues that “due to its one-sided concentration on value and value analysis and due to its fundamental neglect of the physical and natural sphere (use values, nature, sensuousness),” Marx’s critique “remains unable to address and analyze … those developments of social practice that result not only in the most fundamental threats to life, but also represent decisive impulses toward a transformation of socio-economic reality, such as ecological politics.”⁶ Both Sieferle and Immler agree with other critics of Marx in asserting that the founder of historical materialism was decisively unecological in his faith in the positive effects of unlimited technological and economic growth, a view that can no longer be accepted in the twenty-first century. Immler thus concludes: “So forget about Marx.”⁷

      The current state of German debates over Marx’s ecology surely gives an impression of outdatedness to English readers, who are more familiar with the development of Marxist ecology in the last fifteen years, initiated by two important works: Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature and John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology.⁸ Their careful reexaminations of Marx’s texts convincingly showed various unnoticed or suppressed ecological dimensions of his critique of political economy and opened up a way to emancipate Marx’s theory from the Promethean stereotype dominant in the 1980s and ’90s. Today many Marxist scholars and activists do not regard it as an exaggeration when Burkett claims that Marx’s critique of capitalism and his vision of socialism can be “most helpful” for the critical reflection upon ongoing global eco-crises.⁹

      As Foster recounts recent developments with respect to socialist environmental thought in his introduction to the new edition of Burkett’s Marx and Nature, the discursive constellation around Marx’s ecology has significantly changed with a series of publications by Marxists inspired by Foster and Burkett. These analyze environmental crises as a contradiction of capitalism based upon the “metabolic rift” approach: “A decade and a half ago the contribution of Marx and Marxism to the understanding of ecology was seen in almost entirely negative terms, even by many self-styled ecosocialists. Today Marx’s understanding of the ecological problem is being studied in universities worldwide and is inspiring ecological actions around the globe.”¹⁰ Various studies examine current ecological issues such as ecofeminism (Ariel Salleh), climate change (Del Weston, Brett Clark, and Richard York), ecological imperialism (Brett Clark), and marine ecology (Rebecca Clausen and Stefano Longo).¹¹ The concept of metabolic rift has subsequently become influential beyond a small circle of the radical left. Notably, Naomi Klein’s critique of capitalist global warming in This Changes Everything draws upon Foster’s approach in an affirmative manner, though she is not a Marxist.¹² The significance of “Marx’s ecology” is now positively recognized on both theoretical and practical levels, to the point that allegations of Marx’s Prometheanism are now generally regarded as having been proven false.

      However, despite or precisely because of the increasing hegemonic influence of the “classical” Marxist tradition represented by “second-stage ecosocialists” such as Foster and Burkett in the environmental movement, there remains the persistent reservation toward accepting Marx’s ecology among the so-called first-stage ecosocialists, such as Ted Benton, André Gorz, Michael Löwy, James O’Connor, and Alain Lipietz.¹³ Recently, first-stage ecosocialists have found new adherents, who in various ways seek to downgrade Marx’s ecological contributions. Recognizing the validity of Marx’s ecological analysis only to a limited extent, these thinkers always end up claiming that his analysis was fatally flawed in its failure to be fully ecological and that his nineteenth-century discussions of the ecological problem are of little importance today.¹⁴ For example, they argue that Marx was “no god of any kind” since he did not adequately anticipate today’s climate change due to the massive usage of fossil energy. Daniel Tanuro maintains that Marx’s time is now so distant in terms of technology and natural sciences that his theory is not appropriate for a systematic analysis of today’s environmental issues, especially because Marx did not pay enough attention to the specificity of fossil energy in contrast to other renewable forms of energy.¹⁵ Furthermore, Jason W. Moore, changing his earlier valuation of the metabolic-rift approach, now directs his critique against Foster, claiming that a theory of value is missing in Foster’s metabolic-rift approach. Foster, Moore claims, fails to comprehend the dynamic historical transformation of the whole ecosystem—Moore calls it “oikeios”—through the process of capitalist accumulation. According to Moore, Foster’s analysis describes no more than “a statistic and ahistorical theory of natural limits,” and so it is inevitable for the metabolic-rift approach to have “apocalyptic” implications.¹⁶ Critics of the theory of metabolic rift complain that “Marx’s ecology” as such can at best point out the banal fact that capitalism is bad for the environment.

      In order to refute such persistent misunderstandings of Marx’s ecology and to demonstrate its larger theoretical significance, this book aims at a more systematic and complete reconstruction of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism. Although Foster and Burkett have carefully examined various texts by Marx for the purpose of demonstrating the power of his ecological theory, their analyses sometimes give a false impression that Marx did not deal with the topic in a systematic but only in a sporadic and marginal way. On the one hand, it is thus necessary to reveal the immanent systematic character of Marx’s ecology, that there is a clear continuity with his critique of political economy. This constitutes the main task of Part I of this book. On the other hand, in Part II I offer a more complete examination of Marx’s ecology than the earlier literature, scrutinizing his natural science notebooks that will be published for the first time in the new Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, known as MEGA². These notebooks will allow scholars to trace the emergence and development of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism in a more vivid and lively manner, unraveling various unknown aspects of his astonishingly encompassing project of Capital. The notebooks display just how seriously and laboriously Marx studied the rich field of nineteenth-century ecological theory and integrated new insights into his own dissection of capitalist society. In this process, Marx consciously parted from any forms of naïve Prometheanism and came to regard ecological crises as the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. The key concept in this context is “metabolism” (Stoffwechsel), which leads us to a systematic interpretation of Marx’s ecology.

      The significance of a systematic reading becomes clearer if we take a look at a typical interpretation by first-stage ecosocialists. For example, believing that Marx’s work can be used at best as a source of citations that might resonate with today’s environmental concern, Hubert Laitko, a German Marxist, argues that Marx’s ecology “lacks a systematic character and rigor, and it can possibly give some stimulation for theoretical works, but not more than that.”¹⁷ Obviously, it is true that Marx was by no means a “prophet,” and thus his texts cannot be literally and directly applied to and identified with today’s situation. Nonetheless, this rather trivial fact does not justify Laitko’s judgment. If Marx’s Capital could only be used for the purpose of mere citations, then why refer to Marx at all for conducting an ecological investigation of contemporary capitalism? Indeed, this is the hidden implication when the first-stage ecosocialists point to a fatal flaw of Marx’s ecology, and this is precisely why one must be cautious when many ecosocialists seem to place value on this “precious heritage for political ecology” without actually providing any positive reason for returning to Marx. Alain Lipietz bluntly contends that “the general structure, the intellectual scaffolding of the Marxist paradigm, along with the key solutions it suggests, must be jettisoned; virtually every area of Marxist thought must be thoroughly reexamined in order to really be of use.”¹⁸ Similarly, André Gorz, another important figure among