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Workers Vanguard No. 1032
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18 October 2013
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John Bellamy Foster & Co.: “Ecosocialism” Against Marxism
Part One
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) released a new comprehensive review of climate-related scientific
research on September 27. The authoritative report finds that recent warming of
the planet is, in its words, “unequivocal” and that human activity is “extremely
likely” to be the primary cause. As the world continues to heat up, sea-level
rise and the loss of Arctic sea ice are expected to be somewhat greater than was
forecast in the IPCC’s previous report, issued in 2007, although extremes of
weather will likely not be as bad as some headlines have suggested.
Predictably, the “climate skeptics” launched a fusillade of
anti-scientific drivel in an attempt to discredit the report, whereas the full
spectrum of environmentalists read it as sounding the alarm for immediate
government action. Among the green missionaries is System Change Not Climate
Change: The Ecosocialist Coalition (SCNCC). This lash-up was initiated by the
reformists of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), along with the
Solidarity group, in the name of “bringing together eco and socialism.” Other
endorsers include the fake Trotskyists of Socialist Action, the left-wing
intellectuals of Monthly Review, the spiritually minded Ecosocialist
Horizons and chapters of the small-time capitalist Green Party.
For young radical activists, it might seem a natural to try to fuse
eco-radicalism with socialism. But environmentalist ideology and socialism are
entirely irreconcilable. All variants of environmentalism are an expression of
bourgeois ideology, offering fixes predicated on class-divided society and the
reinforcement of scarcity. Marxists fight for a society that will provide
more for the toiling and impoverished masses and ultimately
eliminate material scarcity altogether. To this end, it will take a series of
workers revolutions across the globe to rip the mines, factories and other means
of production from the grip of their private owners, paving the way for an
internationally planned, collectivized economy.
Until then, the profit-driven capitalist system—marked by the
anarchy of production and the furious chase for markets, the division of the
world into nation-states and the accompanying interimperialist rivalries—will
remain a fundamental barrier to addressing the unintended human-derived
contribution to climate change. Decaying modern capitalism also greatly
exacerbates the potential toll of a warming world on mankind. The wretched
conditions imposed by the imperialists on Third World countries make their
populations especially vulnerable to climate change, not to mention disease,
famine and other ever-present ravages. (These issues are taken up in depth in
our two-part article “Capitalism and Global Warming,” WV Nos. 965 and
966, 24 September and 8 October 2010.)
In contrast to revolutionary Marxism, for the eco crowd the villain
is growth, and their watchword is less. Proposals to limit
consumption and cut back production dovetail with capitalist austerity measures.
The main political organization of the environmentalists, the Green Party, is
open about its defense of production for private profit, simply favoring
small-scale enterprise. The 13th-richest person in the world, the union-hating
Michael Bloomberg, is an outspoken environmentalist who, after Superstorm Sandy,
proposed that New York City “lead the way” in battling climate change. Even if
the city rulers take steps to protect Wall Street from storm surges like the one
that accompanied Sandy, it will still be hell—and perhaps high water—for those
in public housing. Then there are the many large corporations, such as DuPont,
not about to be mistaken for a paragon of virtue, that have voluntarily adopted
the emissions goals of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
Most SCNCC supporters do not openly subscribe to the primitivism at
the core of the environmentalist worldview, preferring to focus on dispensing
policy advice to the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the ISO and its SCNCC partners
proceed from the false equation of capitalism with economic growth. The putative
anti-capitalism of these and other eco-socialists is simply another means of
arriving at the doorstep of an anti-growth agenda, providing a thin reddish
veneer on retrograde green nostrums.
Take one of its foremost luminaries, Monthly Review editor
John Bellamy Foster, who has written or coauthored several books published by
Monthly Review Press. Foster’s seminal work, Marx’s Ecology (2000),
paints Marxism as “deeply, and indeed systematically, ecological.” In a February
2010 interview, Foster opined: “We need a new economic structure focused on
enough and not more. An overall reduction in economic scale on the world level,
particularly in the rich countries, could be accompanied by progress in
sustainable human development.”
Progress in human development, i.e., ending misery and want, will
not result from curtailing production but from raising it to
unparalleled heights. By lifting the dead hands of private profit and property
rights, the proletarian seizure of power would give great impetus to economic
growth. In this event, humanity also will be best equipped to consciously
marshal its collective resources to meet both known and unforeseen challenges,
including climate change.
Our vision of the socialist future accords with that expressed by
the great Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky in an article titled “If America
Should Go Communist,” which was published in the 23 March 1935 issue of
Liberty Magazine. In describing the vistas that would be opened by a
victorious socialist revolution in the world’s most advanced capitalist country,
Trotsky wrote:
“Should America go Communist as a result of the difficulties and
problems which your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover
that Communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and
individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and
shared abundance....
“National industry will be organized along the line of the
conveyor belt in your modern continuous-production automotive factories.
Scientific planning can be lifted out of the individual factory and applied to
your entire economic system. The results will be stupendous.”
It should be noted that Trotsky was writing long before U.S.
industry was hollowed out by its capitalist owners—a deterioration that itself
points to the need for the working class to overthrow the capitalist order.
Intellectual Dishonesty and Opportunism
In 2002, Foster published Ecology Against Capitalism, a
collection of essays written between 1993 and 2001. Leaning on sociologist Allan
Schnaiberg, Foster described capitalism as “a treadmill of production” that
consumes ever greater quantities of limited natural resources while disgorging
their waste products into the environment:
“Clearly, this treadmill leads in a direction that is incompatible
with the basic ecological cycles of the planet. A continuous 3 percent average
annual rate of growth in industrial production, such as obtained from 1970 to
1990, would mean that world industry would double in size every twenty-five
years.... It is unlikely therefore that the world could sustain many more
doublings of industrial output under the present system without experiencing a
complete ecological catastrophe. Indeed, we are already overshooting certain
critical ecological thresholds.”
Ecology Against Capitalism in its own way mirrored bourgeois
ideological triumphalism in the aftermath of the counterrevolutionary
destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Communism was declared “dead” and
capitalism was trumpeted as an ever-expanding global system. Government policies
in the major capitalist countries, especially control of the money supply and
interest rates, would supposedly henceforth ensure permanent and steady economic
growth. Bourgeois economists coined the term the “Great Moderation” to describe
conditions in North America and West Europe: low inflation and relatively
shallow and short-lived economic downturns.
But then came the financial crisis of 2007-08, plunging the
capitalist world into the deepest and most prolonged economic downturn since the
Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Moderation gave way to the Great
Recession. Mass unemployment, savage cuts in wages and benefits and the slashing
of government-provided social programs (fiscal austerity) became the order of
the day.
Logically, Foster should have welcomed the current downturn since
he identified the expansion of production with increasing environmental
degradation. Fewer automobiles manufactured and on the road mean less
atmospheric pollution. With less income, working-class families are forced to
“conserve energy” by reducing their heating in the winter and air-conditioning
in the summer. However, Foster does not argue that the Great Recession has
brought certain ecological benefits. To do so would provoke a hostile response
from the young left-minded activists—e.g., those who identified with the Occupy
movement—to whom he appeals.
So he sings a different tune about what’s wrong with capitalism.
Last year, he came out with the book The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance
Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the U.S.A. to China. It
begins:
“The world economy as a whole is undergoing a period of slowdown.
The growth rates for the United States, Europe, and Japan at the center of the
system have been sliding for decades. In the first decade of this century these
countries experienced the slowest growth rates since the 1930s; and the opening
years of the second decade look no better. Stagnation is the word that
economists use for this phenomenon.”
The “treadmill of production” has disappeared. Instead, we are told
that the core countries of world capitalism have been mired in economic
stagnation for decades and beset by perpetual crises. Foster continues: “In
human terms it means declining real wages, massive unemployment, a public sector
facing extreme budget crises, growing inequality and a general and sometimes
sharp decline in the quality of life.” Notably absent from this list of ills is
environmental degradation. In his speeches, Foster is known to describe
capitalism both as a constant growth engine when addressing the “environmental
crisis” and as a victim of stagnation when addressing the fiscal crisis, and
never the twain shall meet.
From New Left Maoism to Green Radicalism
Foster’s views are conditioned by his longstanding association with
Monthly Review. In the 1960s and early-mid ’70s, it was the main journal
propagating Maoism (the Chinese variant of Stalinist ideology) in American
left-wing intellectual/academic circles. Today a professor of sociology at the
University of Oregon, Foster attended Evergreen State College in Washington
State as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, when he first came under the
influence of Monthly Review and its leading figures, Paul Sweezy and
Harry Magdoff.
The Maoist-Stalinist politics expounded by Monthly Review
originated as the ideological expression of what Trotsky described as the
bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet workers state in the mid 1920s-30s.
Rejecting and fearing the fight for international proletarian revolution, which
animated the Bolshevik Party that led the October Revolution of 1917, the ruling
bureaucratic caste under J.V. Stalin put forward the doctrine of “building
socialism in one country.” This dogma turned Marxism on its head. Socialism is a
society of material abundance in which class distinctions are being finally
overcome. Despite its possession of abundant natural resources, the USSR could
not on its own surpass the material level of the advanced capitalist countries,
which exerted economic and military pressures that eventually brought about the
destruction of the Soviet workers state.
China experienced a profound social revolution in 1949 that
overthrew capitalism and liberated the country from imperialist subjugation. The
subsequent establishment of a planned, collectivized economy brought great
social gains to workers, peasants and deeply oppressed women. However, the
revolution, issuing out of a peasant-guerrilla war, was deformed from its
inception under the rule of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime, a
materially privileged, bureaucratic caste resting atop the workers state.
The Mao regime was modeled politically, economically and
ideologically on Stalin’s Russia, although China in this period was far more
backward than the Soviet Union. Mao’s version of “building socialism”—especially
during the so-called “Cultural Revolution” that began in the mid 1960s—glorified
the Spartan virtues of self-denial and self-sacrifice. While today’s CCP
bureaucrats are not known for professing such nostrums—to say the least—they
share Mao’s opposition to the Marxist program of world proletarian revolution.
Challenges to the capitalist order would give impetus to the Chinese proletariat
to sweep away the Stalinist caste that has politically suppressed it and
appeased the imperialists.
To understand the appeal of Maoism as propagated by Monthly
Review for critical-minded, young American intellectuals like Foster, it is
necessary to consider the outlook and evolution of the self-described New Left.
In the late 1950s-early ’60s, a generation of young liberal idealists, mainly
college students, was propelled leftward by the mass black struggle against
racist oppression domestically and the Cuban Revolution and escalating war in
Vietnam internationally. Many of these radicals looked to Mao’s CCP as an
alternative to the stodgy conservatism of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy.
In this period, the large majority of the American working class,
especially its predominant white component, supported U.S. militarism abroad in
the name of combating world Communism. In their own way, New Left radicals
accepted but then inverted official anti-Communist ideology. The political
leaders and ideological spokesmen for U.S. imperialism claimed that capitalism
was superior to Communism in Soviet Russia, not to speak of “Red China,” because
it provided the American people, including industrial workers, with a much
higher standard of living. New Left radicals agreed with the logic of this
argument but reversed its conclusion. That working-class families could afford a
late-model car, a washing machine and a TV set or two was viewed as the material
basis for their support to U.S. imperialist predations in the Third World.
The Monthly Review circle sought to provide a
“Marxist-Leninist” rationale for these prevalent New Left prejudices: disdain
for the working class in the advanced capitalist countries combined with
enthusing over “socialism” in the Third World. Sweezy argued that the working
class as a whole in North America, West Europe and Japan constituted a labor
aristocracy relative to the impoverished toilers of Asia, Africa and Latin
America. In Monthly Review (December 1967), he wrote that Bolshevik
leader V. I. Lenin “also argued that the capitalists of the imperialist
countries could and do use part of their ‘booty’ to bribe and win over to their
side an aristocracy of labor. As far as the logic of the argument is concerned,
it could be extended to a majority or even all the workers in the industrialized
countries.”
When describing the labor aristocracy, Lenin was explicit that he
was not painting the entire working class in the imperialist centers with the
same brush. Taking stock of England’s industrial monopoly and rich colonies in
the mid 19th century, Lenin observed in “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”
(1916): “It was possible in those days to bribe and corrupt the working class of
one country for decades. This is now improbable, if not
impossible. But on the other hand, every imperialist ‘Great’ Power
can and does bribe smaller strata (than in England in 1848-68) of
the ‘labour aristocracy’” (emphasis in original). This well-paid layer can
occupy a privileged social position only in relation to the working masses of
the society of which it is a part.
While disparaging the working class in the advanced capitalist
countries, Sweezy glorified Mao’s China for supposedly building an egalitarian
socialist society in one of the poorest countries in the world. Indeed, he
considered China’s poverty a socialist virtue while crediting Mao with
overcoming and eliminating what he contended were remnants of bourgeois ideology
embedded in classical Marxist doctrine: “It was only in China, where of all
countries in the world conditions were most favorable for revolution, that
Marxism could finally be purged of its (essentially bourgeois) economistic
taint” (Monthly Review, January 1975). By “economistic taint,” Sweezy
meant the identification of socialism with qualitatively raising the material
and cultural level of society.
At the time, we polemicized against those intellectuals like Sweezy
and Charles Bettelheim who had revived the anti-Marxist doctrines
of primitive egalitarianism and “socialist” asceticism:
“Far more so than Moscow-line Stalinism, therefore, Maoist
ideology is a sustained attack on the fundamental Marxist premise that socialism
requires material superabundance through a level of labor productivity far
higher than that of the most advanced capitalism....
“Maoism’s primitivism and extreme voluntarism—particularly as
presented during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ period—have had great appeal for
petty-bourgeois radicals in the West. It was the promise of an end to alienated
labor here and now, without the whole historical period needed to raise the
technological and cultural level of mankind, that enabled many of the followers
of [New Left theorist Herbert] Marcuse to transfer their loyalty to Maoist China
in the late 1960’s.”
— “The Poverty of Maoist Economics,” WV No. 134, 19 November
1976
Maoism, however, lost its luster, particularly following the
official rapprochement between the U.S. and China signaled by Richard Nixon’s
visit to Beijing in 1972 as American bombs rained down on Indochina. By the late
1970s, it was no longer attractive to American student youth of leftist
sympathies. So the Monthly Review circle latched on to the burgeoning
green radical movement, which also came out of the New Left. Whence John Bellamy
Foster, today the journal’s leading figure.
Bolivia and the Fraud of “Ecological Revolution”
Just as his mentors could posit the introduction of socialist
relations in China through a “Cultural Revolution,” Foster does the same today
in places supposedly in the throes of “ecological revolution.” In both cases,
the professed values of the ruling regime are sufficient evidence of socialist
achievement. This is despite the fact that whereas capitalism had been
overturned in China with the 1949 Revolution, the countries that Foster hails
today are unmistakably capitalist.
In the book The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth
(2011), Foster and his coauthors proclaim: “An ecological revolution,
emanating first and foremost from the global South, is emerging in our age,
providing new bases for hope.” In keeping with Monthly Review tradition,
they reject the unique capacity of the working class in both the advanced
countries and in the neocolonial world to overturn the capitalist order and
collectivize the means of production—a potential based on the proletariat’s role
in making the wheels of industry turn. Instead, Foster & Co. posit an
“environmental proletariat” consisting of “the third world masses most directly
in line to be hit first by the impending disasters,” especially sea-level rise,
as “the main historic agent and initiator of a new epoch of ecological
revolution.”
Ground Zero for this supposed revolution is Bolivia under Evo
Morales, whom Foster hailed in a 2010 interview as “probably the strongest
single voice for an ecological relation in the world today.” Environmentalists
widely laud Morales for hosting the World People’s Conference on Climate Change
and the Rights of Mother Earth in April 2010 as a counter-summit to official
United Nations climate negotiations. Foster also finds evidence of his
environmental proletariat in “the water, hydrocarbon, and coca wars” that
“helped bring a socialist and indigenous-based political movement to power” in
Bolivia.
Despite its name, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS—Movement Toward
Socialism) headed by Morales makes no bones about administering “Andean
capitalism.” The social turmoil that Morales rode into office as the head of the
bourgeois state involved a series of desperate struggles by Bolivia’s
impoverished masses to resist imperialist exploitation. For example, the “water
war” in 2000 consisted of large plebeian protests that broke out in Cochabamba
after the Bechtel corporation took control of the city’s water system and jacked
up rates by more than 200 percent.
In much of Latin America, popular revulsion at nakedly
pro-imperialist “neoliberal” governments resulted in the election of a layer of
bourgeois populists, including Morales and the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
This shift has nothing to do with socialism. Posing as defenders of the
oppressed and exploited masses, Morales, Chávez et al. sought to co-opt and
contain discontent within a capitalist framework, which necessarily means
subordination to the world imperialist system. To smash the chains of
imperialist oppression requires a proletarian revolution, led by a vanguard
party, that shatters the bourgeois state. Such a revolution must have the
perspective of spreading elsewhere in Latin America and, crucially, to the
United States and other advanced capitalist countries.
The Morales regime showed its true colors this May when it
unleashed violent repression against a nationwide strike called by the country’s
largest union federation, far from the first time that it had suppressed workers
and peasants struggles. The strike had galvanized tin miners, teachers and
health care workers in the fight for better pensions. Police repeatedly
attacked, gassed and beat striking workers, arresting hundreds. The guns have
also been turned on the indigenous population. In September 2011, the government
carried out a bloody crackdown on a protest against the building of a new
highway through indigenous lands. The brutal assault by paramilitary police
reportedly left a three-month-old baby dead.
The anti-proletarian essence of eco-socialism is captured in
Foster’s salute to Morales and earlier to Chávez, which also shows how empty his
“ecological revolution” is, even on its own terms. The economies of Bolivia and
Venezuela are heavily dependent on natural gas and oil, respectively. Both
regimes carried out partial nationalizations of their hydrocarbon industry. But
it is not as if output has slowed. Indeed, in an attempt to double the
production of natural gas by 2015, state-owned Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales
Bolivianos is seeking both new foreign partners and new areas for exploration
and production. The Bolivian government also plans to harness fossil fuel
resources in national parks and protected natural areas.
Marxists defend such nationalizations as a means by which countries
under imperialist domination can achieve a degree of economic independence. But
these nationalizations do not herald a new socialist era. The hydrocarbon
industries of Bolivia and Venezuela are part of national capitalist economies
that are subordinate to the world market. In the end, nationalizing the
hydrocarbon industry actually benefits the national bourgeoisies, not only at an
economic level but mainly at a political level, by tying the masses
ideologically to their own exploiters.
Taking a Bite Out of Consumption
There is another important element of continuity between the
version of Maoism espoused by Monthly Review in the 1960s-70s and its
eco-radicalism of recent decades: the condemnation of American capitalism for
creating a society of excessive consumption. For Sweezy/Magdoff, the wide range
of goods available to most workers in the U.S. came at the price of the
impoverishment of the peoples of the Third World. For Foster, the existing level
of consumption of the American populace is destroying the ecological basis for
the future survival of the human species and other higher forms of animal
life.
The notion that a large part of the living standard of working
people in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries consists of
artificially created wants that serve corporate profit-making has been a
recurring feature of left-liberal ideology since the late 1950s. It was
explicated in The Affluent Society (1958) by John Kenneth Galbraith, at
the time the best known and most widely read liberal economist in the U.S. (He
subsequently became an adviser to the Democratic Kennedy/Johnson administration
in the 1960s.) A few years later, the identification of American capitalism with
consumerism was given a “Marxist” gloss in Sweezy and Paul Baran’s Monopoly
Capital (1966), a book that strongly influenced Foster. In Ecology
Against Capitalism, Foster declares that “wants are manufactured in a manner
that creates an insatiable hunger for more.”
At the same time, Foster criticizes mainstream green intellectuals
and activists who appeal to individuals to curtail their personal consumption,
i.e., reduce their “carbon footprints.” As a polemical foil, he cites Alan
Durning of Worldwatch Institute, who argues: “We consumers have an ethical
obligation to curb our consumption, since it jeopardizes the chances for future
generations. Unless we climb down the consumption ladder a few rungs, our
grandchildren will inherit a planetary home impoverished by our affluence.”
Foster responds:
“This may seem like simple common sense but it ignores the higher
immorality of a society like the United States in which the dominant
institutions treat the public as mere consumers to be targeted with all the
techniques of modern marketing. The average adult in the United States watches
21,000 television commercials a year, about 75 percent of which are paid for by
the 100 largest corporations.”
Both Durning and Foster accept that the consumption levels of most
Americans should be curbed, differing only in the means of accomplishing this
goal. Foster worries that appeals for sacrifice in the name of some ecological
morality alone would fall on deaf ears. His answer is government action to
reorganize the economy. Somebody, then, would have to make decisions regarding
the genuine needs of working people as opposed to their supposedly unnecessary
wants. This task undoubtedly is meant to fall to Foster and other like-minded
guardians of green virtue.
This focus on opulent consumer faddism is above all a
petty-bourgeois critique of capitalism. For children of suburbia who turn to
individual lifestyle changes to find meaning, the problem might be having too
much. But “doing more with less” is not an option for the vast bulk of the
population struggling each month to pay the bills and make ends meet.
Rousseauean Moralism vs. Marxist Materialism
Denunciations of the culture of consumerism did not originate in
the post-World War II United States. The underlying idea that the striving of
most people for higher levels of consumption is driven by artificially created
wants conditioned by a competitive society based on private property was
expressed in the mid 18th century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The main
intellectual influence in the European radical left before Karl Marx, Rousseau
was the intellectual godfather of all later forms of leveling-down
egalitarianism. Describing the world after the advent of private property,
Rousseau wrote in A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755):
“Free and independent as men were before, they were now, in
consequence of a multiplicity of new wants, brought into subjection, as it were,
to all nature, and particularly to one another....
“Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective
fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others,
inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another.... In a word,
there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests
on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense
of others. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the
inseparable attendants of growing inequality.”
Marx opposed the leveling-down egalitarianism prevalent among the
socialist and communist currents in the early 19th century. The goal of
communism is not to reduce people’s wants to some preconceived minimum. Rather,
it is to realize and expand those wants. In a fully communist society, everyone
will have access to the great variety of material and cultural wealth
accumulated over the course of civilization. Consider what is required to do
research in particle physics or to investigate the archaeological remains of
ancient civilizations. We Marxists aspire to a future society in which all can
pursue the creative scientific and cultural work hitherto restricted to a
privileged few.
For Rousseau, the emergence of private property was the social
equivalent of the Christian concept of original sin, the moment when all manner
of evils entered into and disrupted mankind’s natural harmony:
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought
himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him,
was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders,
from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by
pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows:
‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that
the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’.”
—Ibid.
In opposition to Rousseau’s moralistic idealism, Marx applied a
dialectical materialist understanding to the history of the human species. To
reach a communist society, mankind must traverse a lengthy epoch of
class-divided societies in which the majority is exploited and oppressed by a
small minority of property owners:
“Although at first the development of the capacities of the
human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human
individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction
and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of
individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which
individuals are sacrificed.” [emphasis in original]
— Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II (Moscow, 1968)
In Marx’s Ecology, Foster makes a big deal about upholding
dialectical materialism. However, his actual outlook is essentially Rousseauean,
not Marxist. Thus, in his earlier Ecology Against Capitalism, he
describes the capitalist ruling elite as representing a “higher immorality” and
condemns capitalism for bringing about the perversion of humanity and
degradation of nature:
“By reducing the human relation to nature purely to
possessive-individual terms, capitalism thus represents (in spite of all of its
technological progress) not so much a fuller development of human needs and
powers in relation to the powers of nature, as the alienation of nature from
society in order to develop a one-sided, egoistic relation to the world.”
The left wing of the green milieu—neo-Rousseauean in its basic
outlook—is especially incensed by the statement in Marx and Friedrich Engels’
1848 Communist Manifesto recognizing the historically progressive
character of capitalism compared to earlier modes of production: “The
bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more
massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together.” In Marx’s Ecology, Foster offers a halfhearted apology for
this statement and then adds: “This leaves open the whole question of
sustainability which they did not address in the panegyric to the bourgeoisie in
the first part of the Manifesto.”
With the advent of industrial capitalism, there was for the first
time a material basis for envisioning an end to scarcity and class divisions
altogether. But the private ownership of the means of production increasingly
acted as a brake on the further development of the productive forces. The
emergence of modern imperialism at the end of the 19th century marked the onset
of an epoch of global capitalist decay. The nation-state system, which had
served as a crucible for the rise to power of a modern capitalist class, proved
too confining to the pursuit of profit. The imperialist powers, having divided
the world through bloody conquest, embarked on a series of wars for its
redivision, seeking to expand their colonial holdings and spheres of influence
at the expense of their rivals. The goal of proletarian revolution is to resolve
the contradiction at the heart of capitalism by collectivizing the means of
production, thereby making the bounty of society available to all and unleashing
the productive forces.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
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Workers Vanguard No. 1033 |
1 November 2013
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John Bellamy Foster & Co.: “Ecosocialism” Against Marxism
Part Two
Part One of this article appeared in WV No. 1032 (18
October).
In Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster contends that green
ideologues mistakenly ascribe to Karl Marx positions he did not in fact hold,
including that Marx “had an extremely optimistic, cornucopian view of the
conditions that would exist in post-capitalist society due to the development of
the forces of production under capitalism.” Foster goes on to state: “In this
interpretation Marx relied so much on the assumption of abundance in his vision
of a future society that ecological considerations such as the scarcity of
natural resources and external limits to production have vanished.”
Focused as he is on transforming Marx into a
proto-environmentalist, Foster completely misses the mark in assessing what
these critics got wrong. Marx did maintain that a future communist society would
be based on the elimination of economic scarcity. But he certainly did
not think that the forces of production developed under capitalism
were sufficient for this purpose. Quite the contrary!
The transition to communism requires a planned, socialized economy
to facilitate the development and application of new technologies and thus raise
the level of labor productivity far above that inherited from
capitalism. It is simply outside Foster’s framework that a future
socialist society would utilize the most advanced technology in order to redress
environmental degradation. But that’s not all; he falsely attributes a similar
pessimism to Marx, who, he writes, “demonstrates a deep concern for issues of
ecological limits and sustainability.”
In polemical writing, what is omitted is often just as important as
what is explicitly discussed, if not more so. By far the best-known exposition
in Marx’s writings of the transition from the overthrow of capitalism to a fully
communist society is in the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme. Yet
despite two passing references to this work in the 250-plus pages of Marx’s
Ecology, the relevant passages are not taken into consideration.
In the Critique, Marx explained that in the initial phase of
a socialist society “bourgeois right” would still persist. In other words, the
means of consumption allocated to individuals would be proportional to the
quantity and quality of their labor:
“The individual producer receives back from society—after the
deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it.... He receives a
certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour
(after deducting his labour for the common funds), and with this certificate he
draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount
of labour costs. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one
form he receives back in another.”
Marx proceeds to describe the conditions enabling society to
transcend the principle “to each according to his labor”:
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the
antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has
become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive
forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and
all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow
horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on
its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his
needs!”
In this work, Marx also indicates how the productivity of labor is
to be increased during the transition period. He criticizes the Lassallean
program, which holds that the entire social product will be available for the
consumption of the direct producers. Instead, a portion of it must be deducted
for other purposes, not least the “expansion of production,” that is, the
construction and utilization of additional means of production embodying the
most advanced (labor-saving) technology.
How can Foster reconcile the Marxist vision of a communist society,
in which material resources are freely available to all, with his own contention
that the existing level of production and consumption is rapidly
destroying the environmental basis for human life? He can do so only by
projecting an eco-socialist society in which “to each according to his needs” is
substantially less than “to each according to his labor” in
today’s advanced capitalist countries! This program was spelled out by Foster at
a gathering of Occupy protesters in New York City in 2011. As reported in
Monthly Review online (MRZine.org, 29 October 2011), he implored
his audience:
“Move away from a system directed at profits, production, and
accumulation, i.e., economic growth, and toward a sustainable steady-state
economy. This would mean reducing or eliminating unnecessary and wasteful
consumption and reordering society—from commodity production and consumption as
its primary goal, to sustainable human development. This could only occur in
conjunction with a move towards substantive equality.”
What Foster is projecting is a reactionary utopia—the equality of
poverty on a global scale. A “steady-state economy” would condemn the hundreds
of millions of people in Third World countries to continued impoverishment. This
vision of the future is like a right-wing caricature of communism—what used to
be derided as “barracks socialism,” similar to the condition of uniform equality
imposed on conscripts in an army.
Nonetheless, some left-wing activists may respond sympathetically
to Foster’s argument that working people in the U.S. and other “rich” capitalist
countries have to accept a lower standard of living to avert a supposedly
looming ecological catastrophe. Yet they are virulently hostile to the
right-wing ideologues of the Tea Party, who contend that the American people
have to reduce their expenditure on consumption, especially in the case of
social programs, to avert a supposedly looming fiscal catastrophe. That Foster
denounces capitalism while the Tea Party types extol the “free market” system
does not make his program less reactionary, only more seductive.
Capitalism Is Not a “Treadmill of Production”
The basic argument in Foster’s Ecology Against Capitalism
can be stated briefly. Capitalists seek to maximize profits. They therefore
produce more and more commodities that embody surplus value, which is extracted
through the exploitation of labor. The expansion of production in turn causes
the ever-worsening degradation of the environment. Foster writes:
“Capitalist economies are geared first and foremost to the growth
of profits, and hence to economic growth at virtually any cost—including the
exploitation and misery of the vast majority of the world’s population. This
rush to grow generally means rapid absorption of energy and materials and the
dumping of more and more wastes into the environment—hence widening
environmental degradation.”
Why is it, then, that throughout the history of capitalism there
have been periods in which production and the employment of labor contract and
consequently the volume of profits decreases? For example, between 2005 and 2009
the gross (before tax) profits of U.S. corporations declined by 10 percent, from
$1.610 to $1.456 trillion. Profits in manufacturing fell especially steeply,
from $247 to $125 billion.
The answer is that capitalists seek to maximize not the volume of
profits but rather the rate of profit, or return on capital. Using Marxist
terminology, this rate is the ratio of surplus value over the value of the means
of production (plant and equipment) necessary to set labor into motion at the
prevailing level of productivity. The rate of profit is the main
regulator of capitalist production in both its expansion and contraction
phases.
During a period of expansion, the rate of profit tends to fall.
Increased demand for labor pushes up wage rates. The effects of increasing labor
productivity through investment in new technologies gradually diminish.
Increased investment drives up the market price of capital goods. Financial
speculation further inflates the market value of capital, contributing to much
faster increases in the price of corporate stocks compared to the earnings of
the underlying firms.
At a certain point, capitalists therefore cut back on new
investment. The overall economy then enters a period of contraction. As Marx
explained in Volume III of Capital:
“Not too much wealth is produced. But at times too much wealth is
produced in its capitalistic, self-contradictory forms.
“The limitations of the capitalist mode of production come to the
surface:
“1) In that the development of the productive power of labour
creates out of the falling rate of profit a law which at a certain point comes
into antagonistic conflict with this development and must be overcome constantly
through crises.
“2) In that the expansion or contraction of production are
determined by…profit and the proportion of this profit to the employed capital,
thus by a definite rate of profit, rather than by the relation of production to
social requirements, i.e., to the requirements of socially developed human
beings.”
Keynesian Economics in Pseudo-Marxist Garb
In The Endless Crisis, Foster purports to provide a Marxist
analysis of the post-2008 global economic downturn and, more generally, the
contradictions of present-day capitalism. While using some Marxist terminology,
his analysis actually corresponds to the main current of liberal reformism in
the U.S. associated with the doctrines and policies of the late British
economist John Maynard Keynes. Foster maintains that the income of the lower
classes is insufficient to purchase the output of goods under capitalism. He
writes:
“The system is confronted with insufficient effective demand—with
barriers to consumption leading eventually to barriers to investment. Growing
excess capacity serves to shut off new capital formation, since corporations are
not eager to invest in new plant and equipment when substantial portions of
their existing capacity are idle.”
In the terminology of bourgeois economics, this view can be
categorized as an “underconsumptionist” theory of cyclical downturns.
In outlining his argument, Foster makes no reference to the rate of
profit. As we have seen, during a period of expansion this tends to fall.
Therefore, capitalists can sell the increased volume of commodities only at a
price reflecting a lower rate of profit. From the capitalists’ standpoint, this
condition appears to be one of “over-production” or “over-capacity.” They cut
back on new investment, plunging the economy into a period of contraction until
a higher rate of profit is restored by factors prevailing during the
downturn—wage rates tend to fall, likewise the market value of capital.
The theory that the basic cause of cyclical downturns is a dearth
of consumer demand relative to productive capacity did not originate in the era
of monopolistic capitalism. The crux of this theory can be traced back to
certain leading exponents of classical British bourgeois economic doctrines in
the early 19th century, notably Thomas Malthus. Anticipating Foster by two
centuries, Malthus argued: “No power of consumption on the part of the labouring
classes can ever alone furnish an encouragement to the employment of capital”
(quoted in Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect [Cambridge
University, 1997]).
In Volume III of Capital, Marx rejected all
underconsumptionist/over-productionist theories then current. He stated:
“There are not too many necessities of life produced, in
proportion to the existing population. Quite the reverse. Too little is produced
to decently and humanely satisfy the wants of the great mass….
“Too many means of labour and necessities of life are produced at
times to permit of their serving as means for the exploitation of labourers at a
certain rate of profit.”
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the underconsumptionist
theory was revived and popularized by Keynes, who claimed Malthus as an
intellectual forerunner. The root cause of the contraction of production was,
according to this doctrine, a lack of “effective demand.” Keynes and his
followers advocated that the shortfall in effective demand be made up by
increased government spending on public works and social programs beneficial to
working people (e.g., unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, socialized
medicine, income transfers to the poor). This old-line Keynesian program is
propagated in the U.S. today by the liberal economist Paul Krugman in his New
York Times columns. If, as Foster (in line with Keynes and Krugman)
contends, the cause of the economic downturn is a lack of effective demand, then
expanded deficit spending would be effective in restoring production to full
capacity, with full employment of labor.
However, throughout the capitalist world, government policies are
moving in just the opposite direction. Fiscal austerity is the order of the day
from Obama’s America to Cameron’s Britain, Merkel’s Germany and the entire euro
zone. Krugman explains the drive for fiscal austerity as a triumph of right-wing
ideology over economic good sense. In a piece in the New York Review of
Books (6 June) titled “How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled,” he asserts:
“The case for austerity was and is one that many powerful people want to
believe, leading them to seize on anything that looks like a justification.”
In fact, fiscal austerity does serve the interests of the
capitalist class. Cuts to government-provided social programs reduce the
overhead costs of production broadly defined and therefore contribute to a
higher rate of profit. It is crucial for the working masses to wage class
struggle to beat back this austerity offensive. In the course of such struggles,
workers must be won to the understanding that the tendency toward immiseration
of the proletariat will be ended only with the expropriation of the
expropriators through socialist revolution.
Climate Change in Perspective
As Marxist opponents of the capitalist order, our role is not to
serve as economic advisers to the bourgeoisie. Rather, we strive to educate the
working class about its historic interest in sweeping away capitalism and
establishing its own class rule. The reformist “socialists” are die-hard
opponents of this program. With the destruction of the Soviet Union—a
catastrophe that was hailed by the International Socialist Organization (ISO)
and many others—they have increasingly junked even a hypocritical posture toward
the goal of getting rid of capitalism. And now they have latched on to the cause
of “climate justice” to urge the capitalist exploiters to moderate their
behavior. As ISO climate-change guru Chris Williams baldly put it: “Uniting
social and ecological demands into one unified movement independent of
mainstream politicians has the power to change state policy at the national
level” (Socialist Worker, 26 June). This is the calling card of the
System Change Not Climate Change (SCNCC) coalition, in which the ISO is a
driving force.
It is true that the Earth as a whole today is hotter than it was a
century ago, and human activity—e.g., the combustion of fossil fuels—is largely
responsible for the growing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases. One authoritative scientific review noted: “Through his
worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast
geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels
that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. The CO2
produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of
it remains there.” It continues: “The climatic changes that may be produced by
the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human
beings.” This report, “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” was submitted
to the Johnson administration in 1965.
The experiment continues to this day. For environmentalists, the
answer is to cut industrial civilization down to size and keep fossil fuels in
the ground. For Marxists, it is to replace the unwitting conduct with conscious
and informed planning. One must also keep in mind that the ultimate impact of
the current warming trend, which encompasses a wide range of possibilities and
could vary significantly from place to place, is not much more definitively
known today than it was a half century ago.
The eco-socialists, though, hold aloft the most calamitous
projections as scientific gospel. At the Left Forum held in New York City this
June, several speakers referred to climate change as the worst crisis humanity
has ever faced. Foster’s comments at its closing plenary were titled “The
Epochal Crisis.” Nation writer Christian Parenti even invoked the runaway
greenhouse effect that transformed Venus into the hottest planet in the solar
system. Far from a clarion call to uproot production for private profit, such
fear-mongering has one purpose: to sell various schemes for rolling back the use
of hydrocarbons under capitalism.
Current climate change may or may not pose a sustained, long-term
threat to human society. As long as the capitalist masters call the shots, it
truly is a roll of the dice. Environmental degradation is just one of a host of
problems, many far more pressing, linked to the workings of the capitalist
system: unemployment and extreme poverty, mass starvation, imperialist military
adventures and conquest, the reinforcing of social backwardness (interethnic
bloodletting, the subjugation of women in the family, etc.), to name a few.
Without a doubt, the gravest threat to mankind is the nuclear arsenal in the
hands of the U.S. imperialist overlords. Even a regional nuclear war, say
between India and Pakistan, could wipe out many millions of people while making
the Earth a colder, hungrier planet.
To elevate climate change above all else is a convenient excuse for
joining hands with the bourgeoisie—the very class behind all these
crimes. Counting carbon as a measure of progressive policy is its corollary. For
the 800,000 years preceding recorded human history, the atmospheric carbon
dioxide level never exceeded 300 parts per million (ppm); today it is around 400
ppm. By comparison, in the Jurassic period when the dinosaurs reigned supreme,
the concentration was likely in the neighborhood of 2,000 ppm. According to
Foster:
“We need to go down to 350 parts per million, which means very big
social transformations on a scale that would be considered revolutionary by
anybody in society today—transformation of our whole society quite
fundamentally. We have to aim at that, and we have to demand that of our
society. Forget about capitalism, forget about whether the system can do
it. Don’t let that be your barometer. Say this is necessary for the planet, for
human survival, for justice, for environmental justice, and we just have to do
it.”
—MRZine.org (30 October 2008)
One of the more active climate-justice groups based in the U.S.
today is named 350.org. Despite the popularity of this numerology, decades of
scientific probing of the extremely complex climate system have yet to pinpoint
a carbon threshold that, if surpassed, would trigger an insoluble crisis.
By the carbon barometer, Superstorm Sandy was a blessing in
disguise when it turned out the lights in the Northeast U.S., as is the Great
Recession that has brought empty pockets to countless working people around the
world. Likewise, capitalist Germany should be widely lauded for the more than 20
percent drop in its carbon dioxide emissions over the last two decades. Today, a
quarter of the country’s total energy on average comes from so-called renewable
sources—and nearly half on especially sunny days. But it still has a ways to go
to match the per capita “carbon footprint” of France, where nuclear fission is
the primary source of energy. These two mainstays of the imperialist European
Union have in recent years squeezed the working class of Europe dry and put
dependent countries like Greece through the wringer.
Some eco-socialist activists might blanch at the more distasteful
implications of judging everything by carbon content. But support to reduced
living standards is a part of that framework. A case in point is the carbon tax.
By the ISO’s estimation, proposed legislation from Senators Barbara Boxer and
Bernie Sanders that would impose a carbon fee on fossil fuel enterprises at the
source (the mine, wellhead or port of entry) in order to fund renewable energy
and similar technology “points in the right direction.” The bill proposes to
return some of the revenues to consumers to offset the higher prices that would
result when companies pass on the cost of the tax to the public. Even so, this
dividend would not cover the difference, bringing an increase in the cost of
living for working people and the poor. Meanwhile, the corporations producing
energy, no matter the source, will keep on rolling in money. No less an
interested party than ExxonMobil has recently announced support for “a
well-designed, revenue-neutral carbon tax.”
We are far from indifferent to climate change, whatever its
timetable and consequences. But our primary concern is human civilization, and
we are implacably hostile to its greatest enemy: the U.S. capitalist ruling
class. Nothing good will come from advising these plunderers of the world on how
to best generate energy. Instead, the proletariat must expropriate capitalist
industry and put it at the service of society as a whole.
As we wrote in Part One of “Capitalism and Global Warming”
(WV No. 965, 24 September 2010):
“When the workers of the world rule, energy will be generated and
used in the most rational, efficient and safe manner possible, including by
developing new energy sources. We do not rule out in advance the use of fossil
fuels or any other energy source—nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, etc.
Simply to promote modernization and all-round development in the Third World,
where today billions are locked in desperate poverty, would almost certainly
involve far greater energy production on a global scale.”
Even if fossil fuels have not been completely phased out, a world
liberated from the profit motive will have many arrows in its quiver to exert a
positive influence on the climate. For example, a concerted effort could be
undertaken to retool energy production and other industries and transform their
operations to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impact of
warming.
Fossil Fuels and Pressure Politics
The politics of the ISO’s eco-socialist gaggle boil down to
run-of-the-mill environmentalism. The “system change, not climate change” slogan
was appropriated from the direct-action wing of the environmental movement.
First popularized at the December 2009 protests outside the United Nations
climate talks in Copenhagen, it is purposely ambiguous in order to draw in the
greatest number of activists under its banner. In the green milieu, the proposed
“system change” runs the full gamut of environmentalist remedies, from curbing
economic growth and discouraging the “culture of consumption” to “leaving fossil
fuels in the ground” and abandoning automobiles.
The SCNCC has opted to focus its activity on “the struggle for a
fossil fuel-free world,” that is, pressuring the capitalist Democratic Party to
wean the U.S. economy off of hydrocarbons. To much fanfare, President Barack
Obama in June unveiled his “climate action plan” to curb greenhouse gas
emissions, which included ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to work
out new standards to limit the carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere by
coal-fired power plants. In response, Republicans in Congress and industry
magnates decried the supposed “war on coal” and warned of higher electricity
costs for the mass of the population. Unions such as the United Mine Workers
were angry that the plan did not even give lip service to the hardship and
suffering in store for coal miners, utility workers and their families.
Although many mainstream environmentalists were jubilant, the SCNCC
did not “celebrate President Obama’s speech.” In a July 4 statement titled “We
Need a Real Plan for the Planet,” the SCNCC lamented that the proposed measures
“do not go nearly far enough” and counseled the White House: “Instead of an ‘all
of the above’ energy policy, we should direct massive and exclusive funding
toward renewable energy sources like wind and solar.”
To argue that one source of energy is more sensible than another
under the profit-driven capitalist system and its anarchic relations of
production is playing with fire. Touted as a means to reduce carbon emissions,
the U.S. corn ethanol biofuels racket provoked a shortfall in the food grain
harvest five years ago, helping trigger a global food crisis. Solar is not
without its own risks. Both the mining and processing of rare-earth metals for
solar panels, and the very process of their manufacture, produce tremendous
amounts of toxic sludge and contaminants that have poisoned water supplies,
while the chemicals involved in making the panels pose additional hazards to
workers.
A current hobbyhorse of the eco-socialists is the northern leg of
the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from the Alberta tar
sands in Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. President Obama has yet to grant
approval for the section crossing the border. Supporters of Keystone consider
the project key to U.S. imperialism achieving “energy independence” from Near
Eastern oil; environmentalists portray it as a doomsday device.
A February anti-Keystone rally in Washington, D.C., organized by
the Sierra Club and 350.org attracted tens of thousands of protesters. The week
before, the ISO’s Socialist Worker (12 February) held out hope that this
“historic event” would “send a message to the Obama administration that the time
has come for real action on environmental issues.” The White House welcomes such
messages, as the Commander-in-Chief made clear in his June speech on climate
change: “What we need in this fight are citizens who will stand up, and speak
up, and compel us to do what this moment demands.” And there you have it: the
presidential seal of approval on the latest “grassroots movement.”
As to the Keystone XL pipeline, there is no reason for Marxists to
either support or oppose it. In general, oil pipelines serve a socially useful
function of transporting fuel. But cutting corners to boost profit margins—the
name of the game for the energy barons—is deadly business. Some Native Americans
oppose the pipeline out of legitimate concern that a spill would contaminate
water sources that supply their reservations. By all accounts, shoddy
construction, poor welds and substandard materials are features of the existing
Keystone pipeline. What’s needed are fighting unions that can exert control over
safety standards and practices (see “Lac-Mégantic Industrial Murder,” page
4).
Our position on the Keystone XL pipeline reflects a norm for
matters relating to bourgeois energy policy. But it is not universal. In the
case of the Northern Gateway pipeline, which is to run from Alberta to the
British Columbia coast, our Canadian comrades rightly oppose the project,
although not due to the arithmetic of greenhouse gas numbers or other
environmental considerations. Rather, the proposed construction brazenly flouts
the land rights of the Native peoples who are the predominant population in the
remote regions that the pipeline would traverse.
Going Green on Wall Street
To the delight of the eco-socialist crowd, a gimmicky “Do the Math”
speaking tour by 350.org founder Bill McKibben last year popularized calls for
divesting from coal, oil and gas producers. The divestment effort has since
spread to over 300 campuses around the country and found a hearing among a range
of city mayors. To date, six campuses and 18 U.S. cities, including Seattle and
San Francisco, have pledged to liquidate holdings in such companies.
In its article “Divest to Save the Planet” (Socialist
Worker, 13 March), the ISO enthuses: “The struggle for divestment is part of
a shift among activists away from calls for lifestyle changes and marks a new
focus on the systemic nature of climate change.” In fact, this “struggle”
consists of the very same strategy of moral suasion, only now directed at campus
administrations and city governments. In the name of “movement building,” the
ISO & Co. have thrown in their lot with a corporate-funded effort to
greenwash capitalist exploitation.
The divestment campaign was orchestrated in consultation with the
“progressive” Wall Street investor group Ceres. This standard-bearer of green
capitalism has recently garnered support from nearly 700 companies, including
General Motors and Microsoft, for a declaration that “climate change is one of
America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century.” Among its
suggestions to fund managers is to move money into natural resources and
infrastructure in “emerging markets”—i.e., promoting imperialist capital
penetration into and control over the semicolonial world. Small wonder that
McKibben was given a place of honor at the 2013 Ceres Conference, which drew the
likes of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Con Edison, Bloomberg, Sprint
and Ford.
Amid a recent spate of criticisms of McKibben within the green
milieu, the ISO’s Williams rushed to his defense in a three-part commentary
titled “Questions for the Movement” (socialistworker.org, 24-26 September).
Although mainly preoccupied with rationalizing the active participation of
ostensible socialists in selling capitalist investment strategies (the answer
has something to do with “the internal dynamics of social movements”), Williams
does allow that “McKibben continues to vacillate as to whether Barack Obama and
the Democratic Party can be part of the climate solution.” He then proceeds to
lament the six years of “hot air of no real consequence” coming from the White
House, whose current occupant urged in his June speech: “Invest. Divest. Remind
folks there’s no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic
growth.”
It was not so long ago that Williams himself was full of hope for
Obama. In the “Real Solutions Right Now” chapter of his book Ecology and
Socialism (Haymarket, 2010), Williams sketched “a government action plan on
the environment” and offered: “A program such as this could even get couched as
‘a Green New Deal for the Twenty-First Century—good for the planet, good for
people, good for profits.’ These proposals could theoretically be
carried out under capitalist social relations through governmental regulation,
particularly by a proactive and forward-thinking Obama administration” (emphasis
in original). Reflexively, Williams adds, “Reforms that are theoretically
possible under capitalism won’t be made because they ‘make sense,’ but because
the politicians are forced to implement them.”
That’s the ISO (and other reformists) in a nutshell: seeking to
pressure the capitalist government through the agency of the Democratic Party.
Or, as in the ISO’s SCNCC activity, embracing Green Party politicians to the
same effect. The fact that its Green Party allies eschew even paper-thin
pretensions to socialism never mattered much to the ISO, which has even run
candidates on the ticket of this bourgeois party.
“Green” Jobs and the Labor Movement
Green radicalism grew out of the New Left’s counterculture wing,
which was deeply hostile to Marxism and the organized labor movement. These
environmental activists advocated a dismantling of modern industrial society
while expressing nothing but disdain for the working class. One prominent outfit
was Earth First!, which at its 1980 founding pledged, “No compromise in defense
of Mother Earth!” Its efforts included driving spikes into trees to break chain
saws, a practice that put the lives and limbs of lumberjacks at risk. In road
blockades outside pulp mills, eco-radicals would confront truckers and chant:
“There are no jobs on a dead planet!”
This sentiment, if not the slogan itself, is today given a “worker
friendly” spin by some green apostles looking for converts in the labor
bureaucracy. In a September 8 letter to AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka on the eve
of the union federation’s convention, 350.org and over 60 like-minded groups
pleaded: “We must shift from Jobs vs. Environment, to Jobs for the Environment.”
The “Green New Deal” promulgated by the ISO’s Williams and other SCNCC
eco-socialists is cut of the same cloth. Its purpose is to mask the fact that
they would have jobs slashed in entire industries, even as they seek more
employment in favored areas.
Extracting and processing fossil fuels is dangerous work. But a
“green job” is not inherently preferable. Reflecting fears within the American
ruling class that it stands to lose out in innovation and cutting-edge
manufacturing to China, the Obama administration has devoted tens of billions of
dollars of stimulus money to renewable energy and projects to increase energy
efficiency. As a result, employment in the solar industry and the rest of the
“green economy” has steadily climbed. Poor wages, benefits and working
conditions prevail in these industries, with wages at many solar panel and wind
turbine plants below the national average for manufacturing. Few of the workers
are unionized.
One group of 62 black workers on the front lines of the “green
economy” filed a racial discrimination lawsuit in 2008 against their employer, a
General Electric subsidiary. The work team traveled the country, changing air
filters that capture toxic particulates at power plants and other industrial
sites. They were forced to work extra hours, denied adequate protection from the
dangerous matter they handled and heaped with racist abuse. If the crew tried to
take a break when the heat or soot became unbearable, they were derided as lazy
“n-----s” and threatened with firing.
Making a “Green New Deal” with America’s bourgeois masters will do
nothing to reverse the devastation of working people. Rather, it will take hard
class struggle against the rapacious exploiters, including a vigorous campaign
by labor to organize the mass of unorganized workers in the “green economy” and
elsewhere in industry.
For International Proletarian Revolution!
If “capitalism is killing the planet,” as the SCNCC proclaims, then
the ISO and its associates are doing their small part to set up the hit. We
value the wonders of the natural world; however, we do not deify nature.
Marxists approach the issue of climate change from the standpoint of its
potential impact on human society, not preserving some imaginary natural order.
Indeed, the climate, with or without humans, is constantly changing, sometimes
more rapidly, sometimes less so.
From the dawn of man, our ancestors have left an imprint on the
natural world, as it has on mankind. In his book Plows, Plagues, and
Petroleum (Princeton, 2005), climate scientist William Ruddiman notes:
“Advocates for the environment often frame their positions with
high-minded, preachy appeals to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the ‘noble
savage,’ the concept of a primitive but wise people who once lived lightly on
the land and in complete harmony with the environment. They contrast this
supposedly once-pristine world with the evils of heavy industrial development
during the last two centuries. They portray industrial development as the first,
and only, real human assault on nature....
“The concept of a pristine natural world is a myth: preindustrial
cultures had long had a major impact on the environment.”
Basically, it all started with agriculture.
Although John Bellamy Foster does not openly invoke the “noble
savage,” in his version of socialist society “it will be necessary for us to
live lightly on the Earth,” as he commented some years back. But precisely what
separates humans out from other animals is our capacity to perform work and
transform the world around us to serve our ends. In the 1883 Introduction to
Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels cogently observed: “Man alone has
succeeded in impressing his stamp on nature, not only by shifting the plant and
animal world from one place to another, but also by so altering the aspect and
climate of his dwelling place, and even the plants and animals themselves, that
the consequences of his activity can disappear only with the general extinction
of the terrestrial globe.”
Nature certainly would not reciprocate if mankind were to suddenly
“live lightly.” Disease and pestilence, droughts and wildfires, floods and
tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, meteor
showers and gamma-ray bursts: all these features of life on Earth and more would
remain. A human society that scales back technological development in the name
of protecting the environment will be placed at nature’s mercy.
The way forward is a qualitative development of the world’s
productive forces in an international federation of workers states. Only then
can scarcity be eliminated—the precondition for the disappearance of classes and
the withering away of the state. With the mass of the population no longer
struggling day-to-day to survive and with modern technique, science, culture and
education available to all, there would be an explosion in human creativity.
Man’s stewardship of the Earth would grow by leaps and bounds.
When production is planned and directed at satisfying human need
and not the profit motive, environmental considerations can be given their
proper due. The vast expansion in knowledge, technologies and resources will put
mankind in position to anticipate and prepare for whatever curveballs the
natural world throws at it. Increasing abundance would also eliminate the
material factors—and backward social values, such as those expounded by
religions—that fuel population growth. No longer will poor peasants and
agricultural workers be compelled to have more children in order to ensure
enough manpower to work the land. The division between town and country as well
as economic dependence on the family will be overcome.
To bring about a communist society, the rule of capital must first
be broken, in this country and beyond. Engels elaborated in Anti-Dühring
(1878): “To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical
mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical
conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed
class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act
it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression
of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.”
