Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 20:07:14 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Marx on capitalist agriculture


Siddharth Chaterjee's quotation from Engels on the despoliation of the Alps 
reminds us that Marx and Engels were a lot more ecologically 
minded than today's reactionary "green-greens" give them credit for. 
The green-greens accuse socialism of being interested in nothing but 
economic development at the expense of nature. Capitalism and 
socialism in their view must be rejected in favor of some kind of 
simple life style like the Amish's.

Marx mostly wrote about the exploitation of labor, but there was no 
question about his sensitivity to the destructive effects of capitalism on 
nature. The basic problem with the capitalist system is that it separates 
town and country and injects into the countryside the same industrial 
techniques that were reaping havoc in the towns. He is especially 
critical of capitalist agriculture. He says in volume one of Capital:

"All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only 
of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in 
increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is progress towards 
ruining the long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country 
proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its 
development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is the 
process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops 
the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of 
production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all 
wealth--the soil and the worker."

Louis Proyect


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