Marx and Engels: Prometheans or Pioneering Ecologists?
The classical political economists, then, included in their approach some important correctives to the limitations we found in Dasgupta: there is an account of the distinctive character, dynamics and structure of the emerging capitalist economy, together with a recognition of its connections to wider, often conflicting, class interests, and to the state.
While the dependence of production on the ‘spontaneous gifts of nature' is recognized, it is rendered marginal as, at that historical moment, it seemed relatively unproblematic. Marx and Engels inherited the key insights of classical political economy, but were writing later, as the ‘commercial society' became an industrial one, intervening, transforming and degrading the natural conditions upon which it depended. The extent to which Marx and Engels persisted with the relative marginalization of nature, even celebrated its mastery by capitalist industrialism, or, on the contrary, provided the means by which environmentalists in our own day should understand and contest ecological destruction, have become hot topics of controversy in recent years.To get clearer about this controversy, it will be worth reviewing some of the more influential of the original writings of these thinkers. There are five key points in the development of their thinking which have a bearing on the relationship between humans and their natural conditions of life. The first of these is the collection of notebooks written by Marx in 1844 but published much later as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx and Engels 1975). They were made public during the period of Stalin's ascendancy in the Soviet Union, and they became a key resource for humanist socialists who were repelled and outraged by Stalinism, and needed an alternative philosophical grounding for their beliefs.
The Manuscripts were transitional writings, and intended for Marx's self-clarification.
Perhaps the most striking feature, largely ignored by the secondary literature, was Marx's central concern with the relation between humans and nature. Fundamental to all the dimensions of the much-discussed concept of ‘alienation', was the estrangement of humans from nature under the dominance of private property. This estrangement tears from humans the fundamental ground of their being:Nature is man's inorganic body - nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature - means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.
(Marx and Engels 1975: 276)
Here, already, is a clear location of humans within nature, the beginnings of what will become a key concept for many Marxian ecological socialists - that of a continuous, life-sustaining ‘metabolism' between humans and nature. There is, too, something less often noticed: recognition of a ‘spiritual' connection with nature. Other passages in the Manuscripts elaborate on this dimension in terms of the development of science, the arts and the evolution of the human senses. I have argued elsewhere that these crucial insights are to some extent put at risk by Marx's continuing use of an opposition between human and animal natures, although in other passages he includes both humans and other animals as ‘active natural beings'. Marx also writes of an eventual reconciliation among humans, and between humans and nature in an imagined future communist society. The expression he uses for this reconciliation is the ‘humanisation of nature'. This notion is open to many different interpretations, but can easily be taken to suggest a form of human transformation of nature which obliterates its independent ‘otherness' - existing only to meet human wants, or satisfy their desire for beautiful surroundings (Benton 1988, 1993).
This is a more sympathetic vision than a technology-driven ‘mastery of nature', perhaps something like landscape gardening on a global scale, but it remains problematically anthropocentric.The second key piece of writing with a bearing on our theme is Engels's major early work The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels 1845, 1969). Engels draws on public reports of the day but also on his own investigations in Manchester and industrial Lancashire. He writes of the stratified design of the working-class districts, aligned to rental levels, and, at the bottom, the slums, with their overcrowded lodging houses, the stench of accumulated household and human waste, polluted streams and rivers, addiction, disease and the demoralized, stunted lives of children. These aspects of the non-working lives of the workers are intimately linked to their employment status, the diseases and injuries of work, insecurity and unemployment. The class segregation of these districts serves to conceal from the wealthy the costs to others of the wealth they enjoy. However, this segregation is not politically sustainable. The outbreaks of cholera caused by these polluted conditions also threatened the middle classes, whose resulting panic provoked official investigations and eventual public health reforms.
In this text, however, Engels is a long way from the long-running debate about limits to economic growth. Environmental concerns are directly and urgently to be understood as dimensions of a class society. Oppression and exploitation at the place of work have, as their indispensable counterpart, overcrowded, polluted and degraded conditions of life beyond work. It would have seemed ludicrous to Engels that environmental and class politics could have been seen as distinct struggles. It might be suggested that Engels was characterizing a phase in the history of Western capitalism, the worst of whose abuses were overcome by reforms in his own century. However, any global perspective will recognize much of The Condition in many of the world's cities - and not just of those in the poorest countries (Martinez Alier 2003).
An environmental justice movement inspired by the sort of approach pioneered by Engels still has purchase in urban parts of the United States, and the outbreaks of the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain have exposed to public view the persistence of overcrowded and degraded conditions of life and hunger in many of the towns and cities in the UK.What remain unclear (understandably enough) in Engels's great work are two matters that have risen to importance since that time. The first is the question ‘What is the significance of nature to us?' - Is it solely a matter of healthy and sustainable conditions of life - or is there a ‘spiritual' dimension, in Marx's sense? And, second, now that capitalism dominates the globe, its depredations are likewise global. How far does Engels's focus on the class distribution of ecological damage at a local level take us in addressing that challenge?
The third text in this trawl through the work of Marx and Engels is their jointly written Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels 1848, 1967). Perhaps the most widely read of their works, this is also the one most open to being read as an endorsement of ever-growing human mastery of nature. Its sketch for a history of human societies culminates in what many have taken to be an ecstatic celebration of the productive power of human labour under the domination of capitalist relations. On this interpretation, Marx and Engels can be taken to oppose capitalism primarily for its failure to distribute the results of this great expansion in the productivity of labour to the workers themselves. As the power of organized labour grows, on this interpretation, the workers will overthrow capitalist relations and institute a phase of yet further material abundance, now shared according to need.
This is the oft-quoted celebratory passage:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?(Marx and Engels 1848, 1967: 85)
It seems difficult to defend this and other passages elsewhere in their writings as evidence in favour of an ‘ecological' Marx, committed to sustainability and rational management of our relation to nature. However, there is another way of using this and similar passages. Whatever the normative frame of Marx and Engels's description, they understand the profound transformations imposed on nature during the previous century to be consequences of a specific system of ownership and combination of human labour - capitalism. Insofar as those transformations of nature bring in their wake unintended and adverse environmental changes (which Marx later came to analyse), then the causal nexus between capitalism and ecological degradation is established.
The starkly condensed sketch for a ‘guiding thread' in the study of history offered by Marx in his ‘Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy' (1859, 1971) is the fourth of our ‘staging posts' in the Marx/Engels legacy. Here, Marx indicates that historical processes are to be understood in terms of distinct phases dominated by a succession of ‘modes of production', each characterized by internal contradictions. These contradictions generate social antagonisms that eventually produce revolutionary transitions to new and ‘higher' modes. There are many problems with this scheme, but for our purposes it offers three main insights. First, in the concept of ‘mode of production' Marx suggests that central to the understanding of any society is the form of organization through which human labouring activity is mobilized and combined with conditions and materials provided by nature to produce the means of meeting the needs of the population, and the mechanisms by which the products are distributed among social groups within the population.
In short, it is the distinctive way its ‘metabolism' with nature is organized that gives to each society its specific character. Second, this framework undermines any universal-abstract understanding of ‘human ecology', such as those of the Malthusians and others, who attribute ecological crisis to ‘hierarchy', ‘population', ‘growth', ‘greed' or ‘industrialism'. Each of these may, indeed, play their part, but that part can only be understood as occurring within the context of a specific historical socio-economic system: in our day, globalizing neo-liberal capitalism. The third insight to be gleaned from Marx's ‘guiding thread' is the notion of transformation as an outcome of structurally grounded social antagonisms. For Marx, this was to be the internationally organized revolutionary working class. However sceptical one may be about that, there remains the key question of the need for some form of collective agency, emergent from societal development itself, as a condition for social transformation. This question of agency is posed by Marx's thinking for any such project - whether red, green or both.Finally, we come to Marx's monumental intellectual product: Capital. There are some respects in which Marx's way of thinking about production, even in this work, favour a ‘productivist', or ‘Promethean' reading. The definition Marx gives of the labour process under capitalism in Capital Volume 1, is open to that interpretation (argued at length in Benton 1989). Marx distinguishes the worker, instruments of production and the material worked up as elements in the process, through which the worker brings about a change in a material, or substance, so as to realize a purpose. He goes on to include nature itself as ‘one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs... The earth itself is an instrument of labour' (Marx 1867, 1967: 178-79). This formulation, in abandoning any distinction between the conditions necessary for labour, on the one hand, and the means that are used in the labour process, opens the way to thinking of the rest of nature as ultimately subordinated entirely to human purposes. It fails to give due recognition to the independent and sometimes constraining role of external, natural or social, conditions of work. This can be illustrated by distinguishing a range of labour processes that are not reducible to this transformative model of action: extractive processes, constrained by the geography of their natural distribution, involving separation of substances from their context, as distinct from transforming them, and ‘eco-regulatory' practices such as agriculture, horticulture or forestry, where labour is dependent on a range of conditions such as soil fertility, aspect, climate and so on and is primarily devoted to maintaining conditions for a transformation to take place autonomously in a domesticated plant or animal. Many other examples could be given of labour processes which recognize that human intentional activity is always embedded in a structure of external constraints and affordances, and is never sovereign in the way that the transformative model suggests. This adds force to arguments within critical realism concerning social structures as independently enabling or constraining social action - in these examples social structures are themselves both enabled and constrained by nonhuman physical or biological processes (see Chapter 8).
However, the overall argument of Capital does provide an indispensable resource for thinking about the ecological contradictions of the system. Marx derives from Adam Smith and the other classical political economists a crucial distinction. This is between the production of commodities for the market, on the one hand, and the provision of useful goods by ‘concrete' labour processes, on the other. In Marx, this distinction draws out analytically distinct aspects that are combined together in the complex reality of capitalist production. The production of commodities is the process whereby goods and services are bought, and transformed into new goods or services for exchange on the market. The process has a formal logic in which costs and incomes are calculated in monetary terms. Independent units of production (firms, businesses) compete with one another to accumulate economic value, giving rise to a tendency for growth overall. By contrast, concrete labour processes combine together many qualitatively different materials, forms of energy, diverse skills and knowledges and communicative capacities of workers, acting under specific physical, climatic, geological, social and technical conditions so as to yield products whose properties serve some need or use. Although the exigencies of competitive markets dictate that the logic of commodity production and exchange predominates over the concrete labour process, the former remains dependent on the latter, since a commodity without use value has no value in exchange, either.
This way of understanding production under capitalism provides Marx with his explanation of the intrinsic antagonism between the labourer as producer of use-values, and capitalist as purchaser and seller of exchange values. However, these ideas are also of great potential value in explaining the tendency of capitalism to generate wider social and ecological crises. The abstract and formal character of the monetary calculations that dominate business decision-making are of a different order of discourse from those involved in the concrete making of use-values. In overriding the concerns with availability, appropriateness and quantities of materials, skills, working conditions, capacities for coordination, time scales and so on that predominate in the ‘concrete’ labour process, the logic of commodity exchange and accumulation of capital is liable to cause disruptions, interruptions of supply and other negative consequences for the necessary ‘metabolism’ between the human-social and natural-material aspects of the process.
It is arguable that given the context ofmid-nineteenth-century Europe, it is not surprising that Marx’s emphasis in his analysis of capitalism would be on the emerging contradiction between capital and labour, leaving the development of his ideas in the direction of an ecology of capitalism relatively undeveloped. However, there is one extended passage in the first volume of Capital which is rightly drawn on by advocates of the interpretation of Marx as a pioneering ecological thinker. In a section on modern industry and agriculture, Marx notes the effect of industry in drawing population into the towns and so setting up a division between urban and rural life. This ‘disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil’, so that food and clothing are consumed in the towns, creating urban problems of waste and pollution (as Engels had shown many years previously), while in the country, nutrients are not returned to the soil, so causing soil fertility to decline:
[A]ll progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility... Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.
(Marx 1867, 1967: 506-7)
Important scholarship by Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster and others has revealed that from the 1860s onwards, Marx took a close interest in agricultural chemistry, and especially in the work of Liebig (Liebig 1840; Foster 2000; Brock 2002). This convinced him to move away from the earlier anti-Malthusian belief in unlimited possibilities for agricultural productivity to a recognition of the significance of declining soil fertility - though not, as in Malthus, a feature of the human predicament, but, rather, as a consequence of the separation of town and country imposed by the human geography of capitalist industrialization. This understanding of shifts in Marx's later thinking has been further explored in work by Kohei Saito (2017), based on so-far unpublished notebooks which were written in the last fifteen years of Marx's life. Marx was not only familiar with Leibig's work on the importance of inorganic nutrients, and the problems of replacing them with artificial fertilizers, but was also reading critics of Liebig who emphasized the role of deforestation, climate and moisture. In short, Marx was moving towards what we can now recognize as a fully ecological approach to agriculture.