"And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses the more will humanity not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, humanity and nature, soul and body, such as arose after the decline of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in Christianity."
When Engels states we will know our "oneness with nature", he is really hearkening back to the classical materialist roots of Marxism. After all, Marx wrote his PhD thesis on the philosophy of nature in Democritus and Epicurus. These philosophers are in the materialist tradition begun by Parmenides and Heraclitus, who lived a century before. This tradition is continued in the philosophy of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, who are the forerunners of the science of nature and even of scientific ecology itself. The opposed philosophical tradition of Plato, which posits a duality between mind and nature, is certainly at the root of Christian theology itself which Engels attacks.
Was Engels's studies of the dialectics of nature something that he did while Marx's back was turned? There is a tendency to blame Engels for everything that has gone wrong in Marxism. While the Frankfurt School thinks that everything went wrong after 1844, when Marx and Engels supposedly dumped "humanism", it is the Althusserites who put the blame on Fred himself. They set the date when everything went to hell in a hand basket a little later, when Engels dumped historical materialism and replaced it with dialectical materialism, in order to promote a silly belief that Marxism and the physical sciences had some relationship.
In reality, both Marx and Engels oscillated between an anthropocentric and a nature-centric perspective. When they discover Darwin after 1860, the nature-based perspective begins to hold sway as well it might. The tension between the two poles can best be explained by the lingering impact of Hegel, whose philosophy emphasized historical and socioeconomic factors and incorporated a deeply-felt humanism.
Vaillancourt sees a subtle difference between the two subtly different nature-centrisms of Marx and Engels after 1860. "For Marx, the dialectic is situated more within science, within the human context--that is, than within nature itself--while for Engels, especially in his later works, the dialectic is situated in the very heart of matter, independent of man. Engels investigations into the dialectics of nature were encouraged by Marx. Both saw this investigation as being grounded in philosophy rather than science, but understood that scientific research could only help to strengthen the overall philosophical project."
In the late 20th century, we have begun to understand that nature can not simply a act as a faucet for the unlimited supply of raw materials and as a drain for noxious industrial waste that results from the transformation of raw materials into commodities by labor. Engels's comments on the despoliation of the Alps have been written large as we see huge sections of the planet being wasted by a profit-starved lumpen-bourgeoisie today.
In Martin O'Connor's collection "Is Capitalism Sustainable" (Guilford, 1994), we find an interesting essay by Jean-Paul Deléage titled "Eco-Marxist Critique of Political Economy" that is clearly informed by the sort of dialectical materialism that can help us to understand and resolve the environmental crisis.
Deléage describes the faucet/sink view of nature as an expression of capitalist ideology. Ricardo was typical of this view when he wrote, "The brewer, the distiller, the dyer, make incessant use of the air and water for the production of their commodities; but as the supply is boundless, they bear no price." Deléage's whole purpose is to quantify the unquantifiable: the environmental costs of capitalist production.
The key to this is energy, understood in its broadest sense as the transformation of natural resources into the raw material of production. "For example, when one shifts from copper extracted from porphyritic ores at a 1% concentration, to 0.5% and then to 0.3% ore, the energy cost of a ton of metal increases from 22,500 kilowatts to 43,000 and 90,000 kilowatts per ton of copper, respectively."
As capitalism grows old as a system and as resources become more scarce, the level of energy expenditures tends to rise. For example, half a century ago, over 10 times more oil was discovered per meter than today; the cost of an exploration well of 30,000 feet is 120 times higher than that of a well of 5,000 feet. The nuclear industry represents the most extreme sorts of costs, measured in this fashion. The costs, however, are not encountered when uranium is extracted from the earth, but when after the ore has been transformed into energy. The radioactive wastes require an inordinately expensive treatment, since the half-life of plutonium 239, for example, is 24,600 years. That is why the nuclear industry is so dangerous. The capitalist class does not want to invest in the storage capabilities to protect us from such wastes. They would prefer to send it off to places like Mali to poison poor people of color.
Agriculture is the most highly visible aspect of the capitalist economy's tendency to attempt to pay for these hidden costs in a destructive manner. Massive use of fertilizer and conditioning of the soil requires significant energy resources, mostly derived from petroleum and byproducts. In Britain, 6.5 calories of fossil fuel produced 1 calorie of food; the ratios were 6.1/1 in France in 1973 and 9.6/1 in the USA in 1970. 16.7% of energy consumed in the USA in the early 80s, according to some scientists, went into agriculture and food-production. The problem with all this, just as it was in the wasteful agriculture in the Alps described by Engels, is that it has environmental consequences.
Agricultural waste is one the biggest problems today that capitalism has no capacity to resolve. It is a daily feature on the news programs, as we discover that pesticides or fertilizers are producing mutant frogs in Minnesota or killing entire species of fishes in Montana, which all points ultimately in the direction of human birth defects. Deléage states:
"Most problems accumulate in the final phase of the productive process, in the form of waste. This applies, for example, to fertilizer, particularly to nitrates no longer held down by the colloids of the vegetal soil, but instead carried away by running water. This irrationality has already led to genuine ecological catastrophes in certain regions of Europe where intensive agriculture is practiced. Thus, in late May 1988 the North Sea, from the southern shores of Norway and Sweden to the northern shores of Denmark, was invaded across some 7.5 million hectares by a sudden proliferation of the seaweed Chrysochromulina polylepis, which destroyed all other forms of life to a depth of 10 meters below the surface of the ocean. The cause of this ecological catastrophe was the saturation of the seawater with nutrients, particularly nitrates used by farmers of the regions adjoining the North Sea, 50% of which are carried to the sea by rain and rivers. One must add multiple accidents of various kinds registered downstream of the estuaries of rivers flowing through regions of intensive agriculture. Such accidents occur every year in France along the shores of Brittainy. Across the Atlantic, in the estuary of the Saint Lawrence River, a proliferation of diatoms led to three deaths and hundreds of cases of food poisoning in 1987."
Deléage sees the second law of thermodynamics as key to understanding these problems and resolving them within a socialist framework: economic activity, intended to satisfy human needs, runs against the general tendency of the universe to move toward a state of greater disorder, of higher entropy. By definition, the overall increase of entropy associated with the productive process is always greater than the local decrease of entropy corresponding to this process. In other words, for example, the amount of energy that goes into industrial farming is much higher than the human energy associated with subsistence farming. When we drive a car, a gallon of gasoline that is burned in the process increases the entropy in the environment. When we produce a sheet of copper, the disorder entropy of the ore is decreased, but only at the expense of increased entropy in the rest of the universe.
Human beings are not immune from this process, which takes place at the level of matter itself. That is why the project that Engels began with Dialectics of Nature is worth understanding and building upon. We are not apart from the natural world, since we are composed of matter ourselves and the energy we expend in transforming matter into commodities transforms the natural world and society itself ultimately. All of the processes are dialectically interwoven.
Marx focused his analysis on the relation between labor and capital. The path that Engels set foot on but did not complete needs to be navigated by our generation of Marxists. In the face of such life-threatening problems as global warming, it would be foolish to think that we have no particular need to address them, or, even worse, that Marxism is for production at the expense of the environment.
The class struggle has been understood by Marxism as having purely a social dimension, but it is high time that we developed a much richer and deeper understanding of the natural underpinnings of the class struggle. Economics is not simply a function of labor; the natural world is intimately involved. This involvement confronts us every day of our lives. To anticipate what this will mean in the sharpening class confrontations of late 20th century capitalism, it is sufficient to look at East Asia. There is an ecological crisis as well as a financial and economic crisis and they are interrelated. Lumpen-capitalist exploitation of the Borneo rain-forests has resulted in out of control forest fires that have spread a toxic haze thousands of miles. The forest-fires are out of control because El Nino has caused a drought in the area. Scientists attribute the intensity of El Nino to global warming. Meanwhile, global capitalism is attracted to East Asia because ecological and trade union limits are hardly to be found. Indonesia is a prime example.
The socialism that we have to create must attack all of these problems because they are interrelated. You can not satisfy the economic expectations of people living in Brazil or Indonesia unless you are prepared to satisfy the overall needs of the planet to remain economically viable, which requires first of all clean air and clean water. To come up with these answers, we have to develop an ecosocialism that is scientifically informed. It also must be theoretically grounded as well. This means developing an appreciation for what Engels was trying to do in Dialectics of Nature and expanding upon it as well.
Extract from From Deleage et al:
>From then on [after the publication of Grundrisse], the society/nature
relation was considered only in the framework of a purely economic theory,
that of ground rent. Most Marxists thereafter conceived energy problems
only as problems of production and exchange; they made them part of the
notion of productive force which, in a context of abundant resources, they
used mainly for rhetorical purposes. Energy became one of the main blind
spots of Marxist thought. This prolonged drift eventually led to the
irrational conviction that natural constraints would soon be overcome, the
chief credo of 19th and 20th century scientific ideology, an ideology which
the various Marxisms propagated through the world. This scientific creed
was to become their common disorder--but could it have not been otherwise
in the ideological climate of the time? In this regard, we will not concede
anything to the prevailing anti-Marxism. For without Marx's theoretical
contribution and that of his followers, we could not begin to address the
energy operations of the different socio-economic formations. At the same
time, however, we cannot be satisfied with the present undeveloped state of
Marxist thought on this issue. We note in particular that this undeveloped
state has opened the way to theories that, by contrast, make energy the
ultimate mover of human history, and ecology the single criterion of their
radical critique of industrial society, the key to a post-industrial
society to be based on information science, the new myth of these times of
economic crisis. Thus, many ecologists, such as H.T. Odum, make energy the
central concept of their analysis of society and describe social mechanisms
in terms of energy flows...
Ecologists are right to denounce the irreversible character of the destruction of the biosphere. But they are wrong in believing that the crisis will be resolved by a mere ecological survival programme. This is the true limit of the energy models they advocate, for these models too often boil down simply to a more rational management of energy flows. One of the few exceptions to this energy reductionism is Barry Commoner. He has brought to light the relations between different levels of what is commonly called the energy crisis, without neglecting the social-economic moment, confirming Marx's thesis that that capitalist society is incapable of reconciling human beings with each other and humanity with nature. The acuteness of the ecological crisis urgently requires the advent of a society in which production choices are based on the real use value of goods and no longer determined by the implacable logic of material accumulation with its attendant ever greater waste of energy. Ecologists are probably right to stress that the accelerated destruction of energy reserves for the sake of growth contravenes the finiteness of the biosphere. But they should also grasp this other obvious point: just as productionist dreams cannot override the laws of ecology, ecologist dreams cannot overcome the constraints of society and history.
The appeal of both of these approaches, the economic or narrowly political versions of Marxism and the ecological interpretations of the economic crisis, can be explained by their ultimate complementarity and the identity of the logic underpinning them. Both turn one factor, whether capital, the commodity of energy, into the single determinant governing the dynamics of societies. Both block off the possibility of understanding their complex and contradictory dynamic and, therefore, of acting on them.
The ambition of this book is to move beyond the limits of existing approaches to the energy crisis. Not least among these is the proliferation of empirical research, ever more fragmented and obedient to the current trend in research--the infinite accumulation of findings--with its refusal to look at the totality, to place the energy crisis in a historical perspective. Such a perspective, however, is the only methodological choice that can provide a solid foundation for the analysis of society's relation to energy.
This historical perspective implies an analysis of past energy structures: those of the ancient Western world and medieval Europe, imperial China, industrial Europe and North America, as well as of the essential features of the present energy crisis: oil crisis, break-up of the energy structures of the Third World, contradictions of the nuclear chain. Four hypotheses have ordered our investigation:
1) energy is the most restrictive but not the only mediation of humanity's relation to nature and the fundamental condition for the existence of human groups;
2) the mobilization of energies is organized within systems with social, technical, political, mental and other dimensions, which we call energy systems;
3) all energy systems are currently deteriorating and one of the crucial battles of the future is the search for a path to energy transition and substitution;
4) this transition cannot be reduced to simple technical developments, to the designing of new energy chains. It necessarily implies an overall transformation of society on a world scale. This transformation, whatever is duration and pace, will be global. Until now, no revolution has truly or lastingly challenged the material foundations of social organization. In any case, these cannot be modified by fiat. Yet no social alternative can be conceived today that would not establish a new energy system.
(From the preface to "In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization through the Ages", by Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul Deléage and Daniel Hémery, Zed Press, 1986)
Mark Jones
-- http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~jones_m/frontline.htm