My review of John Bellamy Foster's The Return of Nature is generating some interest. With a substantial second part on Engels, this book complements Foster's Marx's Ecology from 2000, recovering Marx and Engels as ecological thinkers.
The Return of Nature is an important book with important things to say on the connections between socialism and ecology. The book traces the theoretical and historical roots of eco-socialism.
I've been studying the book hard these past couple of months and pondering its lessons for environmental politics.
The return of nature is the recovery of a few things other than nature: dialectics, materialism as active, not some inert datum, of the importance of mediation, and, importantly, of politics. The book makes it crystal clear that politics is most certainly important, as the field of practical reason, where issues are thrashed out and truth is tested by experience. Without that mediation, truths are passive and sterile. As a detailed exposition of the ways in which various thinkers linked scientific knowledge and technical know-how to a powerful socio-ecological critique, John Bellamy Foster makes the case for substantial social and structural transformation positively, encouraging well-intentioned environmentalists with a deep concern about planetary harm to think deeply about the socio-institutional, and frankly political, conditions of effective action. The book contains an implicit appeal to environmentalists to develop a clarity with respect to the drivers of environmental crisis located in specific social forms and relations, and thereby understand precisely what is entailed by socialism, as per the requirements of system-change to avert planetary catastrophe (and, more positively, to establish the free, rational, egalitarian, and cooperative society, which ought to be a good enough end in its own right, the kind of society we should be looking to achieve regardless of crisis and catastrophe). The economy that functions within planetary boundaries is by definition socialism and is, also by definition, not the capital system. And whilst it doesn't matter too much what names we give to these rival systems, a systemic analysis and understanding is imperative. And, in creating and sustaining political will and consensus, there is a value in reclaiming the name and meaning of socialism.
The positive presentation of the eco-socialist case through its evolution in theory and practice proceeds by blending science, aesthetics, critique, and politics within a dynamic, sensuous materialism. This presentation is designed to persuade rather than antagonize those concerned with environmental justice and health. There is an implicit critique of environmentalism as a blunt rationalism or scientism which scotomizes class relations and division. In accordance with that concern, environmentalists ought to be open to identifying precisely the causes of the problems that agitate them as a condition of being able to address them effectively.
Suffice to say, I find the case for eco-socialism compelling. There is no evading power that is socially embedded and structured and institutionalised. I distrust 'non-political' workarounds of whatever variety, for the reason that, in a power-infused world, they will tend to default to an iniquitous and exploitative status quo that stands in need of transformation. I find it striking that so many are prepared to embrace a World War II-style climate mobilisation but are leery of notions of socialist revolution as social transformation. This, I maintain, is significant. World War II was a total mobilisation of society in face of a common enemy, but one that proceeded within existing institutions and already constituted authorities. To argue for the same approach to climate mobilisation is to effectively reinforce the very institutions and systems implicated in climate crisis in the first place, eschewing the transformations necessary to address that crisis. In effect, the large-scale ambitious actions required to address climate crisis are equated with system change, which they are most decidedly not. This is not to argue for a different approach to the same goal but to opt for another goal entirely. Socio-ecological crisis is a crisis with transformative potential. That potential will be canalised down sterile channels to the extent that action proceeds within already established institutions. The radical moment will be missed and radical energies will be channelled into system preservation as against system change.
I have learned today that The Return of Nature has won the Deutscher Memorial Award, which is awarded annually to 'a book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.' It's a worthy winner, but needs to be read most of all by people outside of the Marxist tradition. Marxists, I would suggest, have already got the message. It is environmentalists and ecologists outside of the social and political tradition who have the most to learn here.
It is an important book. As I read through the arguments and pondered their significance, my mind kept returning to István Mészáros' The Necessity of Social Control, the first Isaac Deutscher Memorial Lecture in 1971, which subjected the converging social and ecological crises to close analysis to argue for the necessity of socialism. Truth be told, I took the book with me when I went to the dentist in October, to give me something to do as I waited (the book is small and thin and fitted into my pocket). Mészáros opens the lecture by quoting the final pages of one of Isaac Deutscher's final works, 'The Unfinished Revolution':
“The technological basis of modern society, its structure and its conflicts are international or even universal in character; they tend towards international or universal solutions. And there are the unprecedented dangers threatening our biological existence. These, above all, press for the unification of mankind, which cannot be achieved without an integrating principle of social organization. ... The present ideological deadlock and the social status quo can hardly serve as the basis either for the solution of the problems of our epoch or even for mankind's survival. Of course, it would be the ultimate disaster if the nuclear super-Powers were to treat the social status quo as their plaything and if either of them tried to alter it by force of arms. In this sense the peaceful co-existence of East and West is a paramount historic necessity. But the social status quo cannot be perpetuated. Karl Marx speaking about stalemates in past class struggles notes that they usually ended 'in the common ruin of the contending classes'. A stalemate indefinitely prolonged and guaranteed by a perpetual balance of nuclear deterrents, is sure to lead the contending classes and nations to their common and ultimate ruin. Humanity needs unity for its sheer survival; where can it find it if not in socialism?”
- Deutscher 1967: 110-114
Deutscher concluded by stressing: de nostra re agitur: it all is our own concern.
He was right. But this notion of a crisis being all our concern needs to be understood properly, lest it be understood in a politically vacuous sense. Both Deutscher and Mészáros emphasise the class roots and material relations driving the twin social and ecological crisis. In contrast to this, there are many environmentalists who hold that climate crisis is non-political and beyond politics in affecting all people. Such views are profoundly misguided in inverting the true relations here, taking effects that spell common ruination as grounds for unity. Unfortunately, it is the lack of unity in the first place – the fact that some are able to free-ride at the expense of all, stealing an advantage over others through the pursuit of short-term interests – that is bringing about deleterious collective effects. That doesn't indicate a basis for common agreement and action, the very opposite.
Wishful thinking is a blight in politics, even a politics which presents itself as a 'non-politics.' Whilst I don't care much for Jordan Peterson, his bluntness can serve as a poke in the eye. Given a list of environmental ills growing as a result of climate change, Jordan Peterson was asked whether he thought that climate change could be an issue 'that could unite us all on left and right, moving us beyond debates' over environmental actions and politics to a place 'where humanity might finally discover its global map of meaning.' To that long and eloquently stated question, which encapsulated the ancient dream of humanity, Peterson responded with a resounding – and quite correct – 'no.' Dreams are not realised so cheaply. After a long pause for cheering and applause – a reaction which indicated that a good many people are hard-headed enough to have resisted the blandishments of humanitarian-communitarian appeals – Peterson offered a couple of reasons for his negative response. These boiled down to the fact that issues of sustainable economic and ecological development are inherently political and not remotely above politics and values. 'The climate change issue is an absolutely catastrophic, nightmarish mess,' he declared, and 'the idea that that will unite us is' fanciful, 'that's not going to unite us.' Peterson went on to state that 'it is very difficult to separate the science from the politics.' It is not only difficult to separate the science from the politics, it is undesirable, to the extent that the solution lies in bridging the two worlds of theoretical reason (science, knowledge, fact) and practical reason (ethics, politics, value). Peterson's response here shows the extent to which environmentalism has rendered itself impotent through maintaining a debilitating division between fact and value, science and ethics, theory and practice. Peterson moves to a second point to argue that 'even if the more radical claims are true, we have no idea what to do about it.' That's not true, but does raise another problematical area. Very many have a good idea what to do about the problem. There problem is that there is not one 'we' but a lot, entailing a lot of competing and contradictory ideas. Science cannot decide here, hence the need for politics, hence the inescapability of politics. Those who argue that their positions are 'beyond politics' and 'non-politics' are effectively saying that their position is the position, the truth, that everyone should unite around and agree to. The problem is that they are not alone in making such an assertion.
On politics, I will add that as part of my first degree in History, I did three years of High Politics and loathed every minute of it. I thought it boring, analysing in intricate detail the same 'yes/no' arguments advanced in the same game of 'ins' and 'outs,' year in year out, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. I saw them all come and go, from Lord North to Gladstone to Winston Churchill. The subject was essential grounding and a crucial learning experience, seeing how all the ideas, ideals, social interests, and movements I studied in the other fields were tested on the hard boards of a very human reality. As social beings, we live in a political world. You look 'beyond politics' at the peril of irrelevance, impotence, or authoritarianism.
I argue openly for eco-socialism, for the reason that it reconciles objectivity and subjectivity, theory and practice, knowledge and action, expertise and democracy. John Bellamy Foster is to be commended for recovering the core truth of socialism in linking human and natural ecology. People can keep looking past what they think is a shop-worn and compromised tradition, but they won't find the 'third way' alternative they seek, maybe at best a reformism on steroids (turning distinctly authoritarian).
Mészáros was pointing this out back in his lecture of 1971. Here, he notes that no status quo has ever lasted indefinitely. Capital's global status quo involves the whole of humanity. “The permanence of a global status quo, with the immense and necessarily expanding dynamic forces involved in it, is a contradiction in terms: an absurdity which should be visible even to the most myopic of game-theorists. In a world made up of a multiplicity of conflicting and mutually interacting social systems — in contrast to the fantasy-world of escalating and de-escalating chess-boards — the precarious global status quo is bound to be broken for certain. The question is not 'whether of not', but 'by what means'. Will it be broken by devastating military means or will there be adequate social outlets for the manifestation of the rising social pressures which are in evidence today even in the most remote corners of our global social environment? The answer will depend on our success or failure in creating the necessary strategies, movements and instruments capable of securing an effective transition towards a socialist society in which 'humanity can find the unity it needs for its sheer survival.'”
In tracing the theoretical and historical roots of eco-socialism, John Bellamy Foster has established the grounds of an effective democratic and political response to the converging social and ecological crises of the age. I would strongly advise people concerned with current crises to read this book and ponder its lessons. There are reasons why social and ecological alarms are meeting with little institutional response, and identifying those reasons means analysing material relations, systemic constraints, and contradictory dynamics in a class system. Ratcheting up pressure on decision-makers and lamenting their unresponsiveness is like taking a battering ram to concrete. That unresponsiveness reflects the systemic deafness at the heart of a capital system that pursues exchange value at the expense of use value. Further, actions designed to put pressure on those 'in power' to act on climate presume that governments do indeed govern. We have had long enough to have learned by now that the capital system is based on the primacy of the economic over the political, the private over the public. The state is determined and not determinant. To argue that governments should govern is to argue for precisely the primacy of the political – constituted by the democratic will of the people – that socialism spent the best part of a century trying to secure, only to be beaten back by the re-assertion of economic necessity – 'there is no alternative,' 'you cannot buck the market.' What is striking is how many people who style themselves radical have still to learn this lesson, for the very reason they tend to come from comfortable backgrounds and have had no need to learn the truth here. Their views express all the delusions of reformism and are not radical at all. The radical socialist demand, put by Karl Marx as early as 1843, was not to put pressure on decision-makers 'in power,' but to practically reappropriate that alien power and restore it to the social body as a democratically organised social power. Radicalism has fallen a long, long way from that demand.
I have been told many times that such thinking as I present above is 'outdated.' I respond to those who tell me this that they need instead to go tell it to a capital system that has now become the universal mode of production Marx envisaged it becoming in the 1840s. That class divided reality of the capital system is still very much here and is demonstrably implicated in twin social and ecological crises. This system, driven by accumulative imperatives, is not open to persuasion by rational and moral appeal. The capital system is not a public domain amenable to rational, moral, and democratic persuasion but a regime of private accumulation. It is taking an eternity for people to grasp that point. It is almost as if they know, deep down, that capital is the stronger power and, rather than confront it and contest with it for the heart and soul of a democratic public, they prefer to appease and propitiate it as the new god.
I think so.
As Eugene McCarraher recently argued in The Enchantments of Mammon (2019), capital is the new god, and capitalism the new religion. Foster concludes The Return of Nature with this line:
'What we must dethrone today is the idol of capital itself, the concentrated power of class-based avarice itself, which now imperils the ecology of the Earth. It is this that constitutes the entire meaning of freedom as necessity and the return of nature in our time.'
- Foster 2020: 530
My review
Here is a much larger text, covering the themes above in a more substantial way.