Re: [Marxism] Marx and the natural environment

[brownh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Haines Brown)]

> This is one of the best summaries of his work on Marx's views:
> 
> http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_1998_Bellamy.pdf

Thanks. Although I ordered Foster's book, I downloaded this essay and
am glancing at it as I write.

I can't give it the attention it deserves before replying to you, but
one thing is clear: environmental concerns do seem to have been on
Marx and Engels' mind. That causes me to back off somewhat from my
overly bold initial remarks, but at this point I'm not sure if Marx or
Engels really offer a sufficient explanation of mankind's relation
with the environment. A belief that a future communist society would
make the numan-nature relationship non-contradictory really does not
carry us very far. I'll elaborate this point a bit further on.

Based on the essay, it seems roughly that communism would bring with
it a kind of control of the environment that is responsive to social
needs and environmentally responsible. That is, the nurturing of the
environment and of social development need not be contradictory; there
need not be a contradiction between environmental health and social
development.

If this is an adequate summary based on a 30-second glimpse, it seems
off hand parallel the situation of mutual social development. For
example, a student learns at the "expense" of his teacher. The teacher
expends time and effort (that he may get paid for that time and effort
is irrelevant). So, in a sense, the student is "exploiting" the
teacher. However, we don't think of their relation as exploitive
because the teacher is happy to embrace the task. How does he benefit
from it? Because he is responding to his social being in that the
development of the student is in some way his own development. So, to
apply this analogy to mankind's relation to nature, social development
exploits nature, but if people see nature as their outer physical
body, they will minimize the damage to it and otherwise try to develop
nature in some fashion.

However, this raises some philosophical problems. For one thing,
nature has no states that are good or bad, healthy or ill, unless we
anthropmorphize them. For example, atmospheric warming is the main if
not the sole cause of the retreat of glaciers and the arctic icecap,
and these have very negative implications for human life in the
future. From our own viewpoint, then, global warming is seen in
negative terms. But if we don't adopt this human standpoint and
consider nature in itself, whether earth will be able to sustain life
in future millennia is a matter of total indifference.

On the contrary, it might well be argued that communism, just as it is
a realization of our social being, is also a realization of our
physical being in the sense that we are now looking at a single large
all-encompassing system that includes the ecosphere, biosphere and
oosphere (human consciousness) as its parts, and the condition of that
whole system acquires value because human consciousness is part of it,
determines it and is determined by it. This kind of argument has been
made before, although too often in rather vague terms.

One danger of being vague is that it allows us to skirt the fact that
no system taken as a whole can develop. Doing so would violate the
Second Law of Thermodynamics. The student and teacher don't have a
relationship that is exploitive because they exist within a broader
system that dissipates nature (has an economy) so that they can enter
their positive relation. So, while the hypothetical system above that
embraces our physical and biological environment as well as human
consciousness, might not be contradictory, that can only be because
that system has a contradictory relation with its own
environment. We've got somehow to make a real mess of our location in
the galaxy if earth is to develop toward harmony. That location in the
galaxy cannot be incorporated in the system, but must remain its
exploited (dissipating) environment. In other words, there remains a
very fundamental problem, a real constraint on global development that
can't be ignored. Contradictions can only be resolved locally, not
universally.

The extent to which Marx and Engels anticipated such a line of thought
is less important to me than whether today's Marxist thinkers, such as
Foster, do manage it, and that I won't know until I've had a chance to
read them. In the meantime, I concede that at least Marx and Engels
may have offered some suggestive hints, and perhaps some modern authors
have picked upon on them to develop them further.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM
         Dialectical Materialist        
         
        

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