Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 13:27:40 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Dialectical materialism and the environmental crisis


Recent reading has convinced me that it is time to reconsider dialectical
materialism, the unjustly maligned attempt by Marx and Engels to provide a
unified analysis of society and nature. Dialectical materialism has gotten
a bad reputation from its use in Soviet apologetics, but, despite this, an
updated version can provide insights into the environmental crisis that
historical materialism simply can not.

Jean-Guy Vaillancourt's essay "Marx and Ecology: More Benedictine than
Franciscan" is contained in the collection "The Greening of Marxism"
(Guilford, 1996) raises this question in a most perceptive way. (By the
way, there's an essay by this guy named Michael Perelman titled "Marx and
Resource Scarcity" in there as well. It's pretty gosh-darned good.)

Vaillancourt singles out Engels's "Anti-Duhring" and the "Dialectics of
Nature" for special consideration since they are more directly concerned
with nature and ecology than any of the previous writings of Marx and
Engels. They are also considered bulwarks of dialectical materialist
thought. The "Dialectics of Nature" contains the famous chapter "The Role
of Work in Transforming Ape into Man."

Most people are quite familiar with the paragraph that describes how the
"conquest" of nature can have unexpected results:

"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on
us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results
we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different,
unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who,
in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to
obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the
forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying
the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the
Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so
carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by
doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their
region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their
mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it
possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during
the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware
that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading
scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing
outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to
nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in
the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able
to learn its laws and apply them correctly."

What is less frequently quoted is the paragraph which immediately follows:

"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.

Louis Proyect






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