Capital: Vampire of Body & Soil

“The Robbery of Nature – Capitalism and the Ecological Rift,” by John Bellamy Foster and B. Clark, 2020

This is an excellent history and polemic propounding Marx’s understanding of the ecological rift between capital and nature, a rift between the natural metabolism of the earth and the social metabolism of capitalist society.  Just as workers are robbed of their time, health and productivity, so the soil and all of nature is robbed because it is treated as a ‘free gift’ by capital.  This has created the present existential ecological crisis which can only be solved by a social revolution of the associated producers that leads to a sustainable society.

Guano Digging by Chinese Slaves

The book, which started as articles in Monthly Review, has modern implications, as Marx’s thoughts directly refer to present situations.  Factory farming and animal treatment, poor working-class diets, starvation and hunger, right-wing Green thinkers, the depopulation of rural areas, deforestation, air and water pollution, the degeneration of the soil, nitrogen dead zones in the oceans, animals as food and imperialist / colonialist extraction are all the kinds of issues Marx and Engels dealt with in the 1800s.

Philosophically Foster and Clark use the ideas of opponents of Marx and Engels on the issue of nature to expose their own falsity.  They defend Marx and Engels from some in the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Herkimer, deep ecology Greens and eco-socialists like Schmidt and Moore, semi-Marxists like Harvey, social-democrat techno-utopians from Jacobin, bourgeois anti-Marxists like E.F. Schumacher and those who thought Marx only paid cursory attention to colonialism. They contrast conservative ‘first wave eco-socialism’ with more Marxist ‘second-wave eco-socialism.’  They explain the concepts of exploitation and expropriation – twin motors of capitalist functioning.  The heavily rely, as Marx did, on the vast difference between use-value and exchange value.  Capital is based on the latter, not the former.  They show the consistent links between the ‘young’ Marx and the mature Marx.  They discuss productive, non-productive and reproductive labor.

Marx wrote 500 pages on the exploitation and expropriation of Ireland as his main study of colonialism.  Not only was the country seized, the land stolen and the Irish peasants exploited, but the fertility of their rich land robbed, as foodstuffs were sent to England even during the famine.  This process is still going on across the world – for example Mexico is the U.S.’s Ireland now, while Columbia’s fertile soil provides cheap flowers to every super-market in the U.S.

Foster/Clark study the role of women in the initial stages of the industrial revolution, noting that they provided over 60% of the workers in the textile factories, while nearly all servants were women.  Proletarian families had so little time due to long work hours that mothers did not even have time to breast-feed their babies and gave them alcohol or drugs to quiet them down.  As a result there was almost no housework being done in many working-class families.  There was no ‘free’ time to do it.  Hovels were filthy, clothes torn, cooking consisted of simple adulterated bread and tea with an occasional potato, and education non-existent. They suggest this is one reason why Marx and Engels did not intensively study reproductive labor at home.  Marx called female servants ‘little slaveys’ for working 18 hours a day for almost no money.  (This is not the prettified Downton Abbey.)  As the later 1800s went on, the share of women wage-workers went down due to protests by the labor movement, which understood that the reproduction of the working class was becoming impossible.  Engels noted that this increasing gender-segregated homework was also a ‘free gift’ to capital, like nature. 

Animal cruelty cages - nothing new.

Foster/Clark discuss Marx’s role as a food theorist, given bread, tea, beer and sugar were all adulterated with toxic additives.  Bread had pearl-ash, chalk, stone­-dust, sawdust and alum added to it – much like the toxic ingredients found in many modern processed foods.  Workers had no vegetables and little protein and suffered many dietary diseases like rickets and scrofula.  In the process they examine “English High Farming” of the time, which some writers claim was ecologic and sustainable.  It was only partially that and mostly the beginning of industrial farming.  Marx opposed the transition of English agriculture from a wheat economy to a meat and milk economy, as this led to hunger for the working classes - as the rich ate the meat and drank the milk.  It also employed far fewer farm laborers, hurting employment.  What might Marx think of bio-fuels?  Marx wrote against the “system of cell prisons” for animals and called them “disgusting.”  Nothing has changed in factory farming, it has just gotten worse. He was also against the large private monopolies on land, now our modern agri-business.  They point out that many leftist critics of Marx’s view of agriculture have either not read him thoroughly or have shallow critiques.

The authors also defend Marx from eco-socialists who falsely accuse him of ‘speciesism’ – especially for his use of the labor theory of value.  Marx and Engels understood the difference between humans and other animals, but also the similarities, as humans have ‘corporeal’ bodies too.  Capital considers animals to be ‘machines’ or ‘resources’ to be used and profited from.  Degrading animals is part of its degradation of nature and humans.  At one point in industrializing Britain women were even cheaper than horses to pull barges, so the barge owners switched to women!  But without human labor, nature will continue on its own path.  As if horses want to pull barges!

Foster/Clark explain the Lauderdale Paradox, which correctly states that scarcity is the key to private wealth.  So scarcity is embraced by capital to prop up exchange value and privatize everything.  Every neo-classical economist starting with Say and Malthus wanted to hide and then get rid of any concept of use-value - one that satisfies an unpriced basic human need outside the commodity economy.  Which is why in the present corona pandemic they are dumping milk, killing chickens and culling cow herds and the USDA is not buying surplus produce, leading to massive waste.  All while cars line up for miles at food pantries in Texas.  Selling ordinary tap water in bottles indicates the commodification of formerly free water.  What is next?  Green reformists want to price every natural ‘gift’ into capitalist economics.  Which, while impossible, would commodify everything - the ‘logic’ of capitalist economics!  The failure of carbon credits should tell us all we need to know.

Of most philosophic interest is the chapter on attempts by deep Green ecologists to denigrate human labor, hide capital as a deeply exploitative system and substitute a trans-historical idea of ‘energy’ labor as the real source of all value, not human labor working within nature.  I.E. to my mind basically ending up as pagan sun worship for all the heat and photo-synthesis!  It certainly makes sense as a religion but it doesn’t work as an analysis of capital.  Foster/Clark have this to say about this misfire, an argument Marx and Engels also dealt with long ago: 

“Ahistorical, idealist attempts to envision the internalization and integration of social and environment costs within the market system, or see nature as the true source of value, only play down the social (including class and other forms of oppression) and ecological contradictions of the capitalist system … To put a price on a forest, so that its work/energy is not longer ‘unpaid,’ that is, to commodify it – to turn it into so many millions of board feet of standing timber – is not more likely to save the forest than the lack of a price.” 

“All this suggests that sustainable human development requires not the incorporation of nature into the system of value, but the abolition of commodity value itself.”

This book is a revealing take on Marxist, non-Marxist and semi-Marxist attempts at ecologic theory, with very clear implications for the present and future.  The authors end with a look at modern capital - its vast waste, unproductive labor, planned obsolescence, fake recycling, expensive advertising, useless and poorly made products, inefficient industrial farming and throw-away consumption patterns. Imperialism is the highest point of capital and it has created the social environment we live in now.  Marx long ago made the salient point that an increase in capitalist development will bring increasing strain on the natural environment.  The world is approaching that end-point now.

P.S. - Their analysis of ‘first wave eco-socialism’ ignores the development of the USSR, which might have prompted the environmental criticisms of Marx by the European Frankfurt School.  The USSR's later industrializing leadership and Party failed to follow Marx and instead became Promethean and ‘productionist,’ laying waste to parts of nature.  In their criticism of Jacobin they cite a Promethean quote by Leon Trotsky from Literature and Revolution.  Indeed his writings on nature were in error.  What the authors omit is the practice of the CPs in the USSR and China, which make Trotsky's quote small potatoes.  Though of course nowhere near the natural holocaust being perpetrated by capital at present.  I am awaiting Foster's next book covering environmentalism in 'really existing socialism.'  The reason that book won't be written is because Foster and Monthly Review are weak or past supporters of Soviet and Chinese CP practice and lines, but rarely mention it anymore. 

Other prior blog reviews related to this book below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Ecological Revolution,” “Marx and the Earth,” and “Marx’s Ecology” (all by Foster); “Fear of the Animal Planet,” “Catastrophism,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “History of the World in Seven Cheap Things,” “Civilization Critical,” “Marx and Human Nature” “Anthropocene or Capitalocene,” “This Land,” "Tropic of Chaos," "Four Futures," "The Rise of China" or the word “ecology.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog

April 27, 2019