Re: John Bellamy Foster

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> lnp3@xxxxxxxxx 11/13/00 09:52AM >>>
[These comments were made by John Bellamy Foster on the electronic seminar
for his book "Marx's Ecology]

-clip-

Louis made a number of important points that I agree with. My view is that
Marx made some indispensable contributions to ecological analysis, which
may seem surprising since ecology in the nineteenth century was still in
its early stages, and Marx's main emphasis was on social development. But
Marx's ecological saving grace was his thoroughgoing materialism, which
meant that his analysis, while historical and social in orientation, was
never divorced from nature or from natural and physical science. As a
result, his method of analysis led him to recognize ecological problems,
such as the "metabolic rift" within capitalist agriculture, and to
interpret these within a context which was also social and historical.

One consequence of this is that classical Marxism, as a social theory, was
exceptionally well-equipped, as Louis says, to deal with the interactions
between human society and nature that constitute the crux of the ecological
problem.

The difficulty with "Western Marxism" that Louis raised and that George has
questioned, is not the renewed focus on the dialectic of praxis, which was
the main contribution of Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci in the 1920s, and which
was picked up subsequently by the Frankfurt School and others. I regard
this as an essential component of Marxist analysis. The problem was that
"Western Marxism" in an overreaction to positivism threw out nature--both
any relation between the dialectic and nature (aside from human nature) and
any materialist conception of nature. (The rise of Stalinism in the Soviet
Union where ecologists were purged and where the dialectics of nature was
changed into a sterile dogmatism had a similar effect.) Thus the objection
to "Western Marxism" in MARX'S ECOLOGY is not an objection to all aspects
of this tradition, but rather to the tendency to throw out nature and
science and concede them to the positivists. Obviously there were some
Marxist thinkers in the West who did not do this-mainly in the sciences,
but also in history and political economy, and these are referred to in the
text.

(((((((((((((((((((((


CB: Thank you so much to John Bellamy Foster for his book. I have been reading 
it, and
I have already started to study Epicurus more because of Foster's argument.

I want to thank Foster especially for reinvigorating the Engels dialectics of 
nature
tradition and Engelsian-Leninist dialectics in epistemology of science and the
relationship between dialectical and historical materialism.

Foster affirms the importance of Engels' general approach to dialectics of 
nature, and
demonstrates that Marx and Engels were in unity on this philosophical issue.

I am behind in the seminar , but look forward to the discussion there and here 
on
Marxism.