Posted by Collectivist
Nature, Science and Revolutionary Struggle
by Louis Proyect
"Working my way through John Bellamy Foster’s magisterial “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology,” it dawned on me that there was a gap in my knowledge. I knew that Marx and Engels were consumed with ecological problems, even though the word wasn’t in their vocabulary. To a large extent, my awareness came from reading another great Foster book, “Marx’s Ecology.” However, I couldn’t help shake the feeling that in between Marx/ Engels and Rachel Carson it was mostly a blur. The failure of the socialist states to support Green values reinforced that feeling. From Chernobyl to the shrinking of the Aral Sea, there was not much to distinguish capitalist and socialist society."
After finishing “The Return of Nature,” that blur gave way to clarity. Foster’s intellectual history shows a chain of thinkers connecting Marx/Engels to today’s greatest ecological thinkers, from Rachel Carson to Barry Commoner. To use a cliché, they stood on the shoulders of giants.
On page 386, we learn that Rachel Carson applied lessons she learned from the Haldane-Oparin to life’s origin. I knew J.B.S. Haldane was a British Marxist scientist but had no clue how important he was to Carson and the ecosocialist movement of today. As for Alexander Oparin, he was a Soviet biochemist who wrote “The Origin of Life.” As for the Haldane-Oparin theory, it explained for the first time how life could have originated out of inorganic matter and why such a process was a singularity. Carson stressed the importance of the theory for her work and for anybody else trying to develop a holistic understanding of the connection between humanity and nature:
From all this we may generalize that, since the beginning of biological time, there has been the closest possible interdependence between the physical environment and the life it sustains. The conditions on the young earth produced life; life then at once modified the conditions of the earth, so that this single extraordinary act of spontaneous generation could not be repeated. In one form or another, action and interaction between life and its surroundings has been going on ever since. (From “Lost Woods”)
In a necessary but controversial leitmotif that appears throughout the book, Foster speaks of the need to apply a dialectical materialist approach to organic life, including homo sapiens in its social aspects. For decades now, dialectical materialism has been a dirty word in Marxism. Engels was supposedly responsible for creating a false philosophy that incorporated the worst, mechanical tendencies in Marxism. Later on, dialectical materialism became a kind of approved quasi-theology in Stalin’s Russia that spread throughout the world. To counteract its influence, Marxist scholars stressed their adherence to historical materialism that bracketed out most of the natural world except when it became an 800-pound gorilla such today when climate change becomes as important a factor as unemployment.
For Marxism to respond adequately to the threat of a Sixth Extinction, dialectical materialism is essential since the growing threats to the natural world threaten the social world. Engels understood this entirely, as indicated by his “The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” He wrote, “When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.” This single sentence encapsulates the thinking of ecologists ever since.
Engels’s essay was part of “The Dialectics of Nature,” a work that is fundamental to Foster’s thesis. In J.B.S. Haldane’s preface to the 1939 edition, he spoke of its laying “particular emphasis on the inter-connection of all processes, and the artificial character of the distinctions which men have drawn, not merely between vertebrates and invertebrates or liquids and gases, but between the different fields of human knowledge such as economics, history, and natural science.” While the book remains relatively obscure within the Marxist corpus, Foster understood the need to place it much closer to the center. It represents Engels’s attempt to synthesize Hegelian dialectics with modern science, especially Darwin’s theories that both Marx and Engels saw as reinforcing their own ideas about social evolution. By separating dialectics from its Hegelian idealist trappings, the methodology helps us understand the natural world.
For both Marx and Engels, the role of nature came into play because the diseases that were ravaging Europe at the time were largely a product of capitalism’s wrenching human beings from their natural, rural existence. As part of primitive accumulation, capitalism dragged farmers into the great industrial slums that bred cholera and other killer diseases, just as it does today. . . .
