Antoni Doménech Elecciones en España: sonrisas y lágrimas



Escriba un comentario
En comparación con las elecciones del 20 D, Unidos Podemos ha perdido 1.062.704 votos. Y el PSOE 120.606. El 3,36% de aumento de la abstención casi se corresponde con la suma de estas dos cifras. La abstención ha afectado fundamentalmente a las izquierdas. Sobre todo a UP, el gran perdedor, cuyas sonrisas de campaña se trocaron en lágrimas la noche del 26 J.
Por el contrario, el PP ha aumentado sus resultados en 669.220 votos, 300.000 mil de los cuales los ha perdido Ciudadanos y han vuelto a los populares. La movilización plena de la derecha ante el peligro de una victoria de las izquierdas hegemonizada por UP le ha dado la victoria a Mariano Rajoy.
Aunque UP ha perdido votos en casi todas las circunscripciones, el grueso de la caída se ha concentrado en Asturias (-6%), Zaragoza (-5,5%), Cádiz (-5%), Málaga (-5%), Madrid (-4,9%) y León (-4,85). En Madrid ha perdido 209.844 votos. Y en el conjunto de Andalucía, unos 250.000.
Las causas de esta pérdida de votos son varias, y sólo un análisis objetivo detallado de los datos llegará tal vez a discernirlas. Parece que hay errores evidentes de campaña, acaso sumarizables en la conversión de Pablo Iglesias en una especie de Frégoli de nuestro tiempo, dispuesto a representar frenéticamente en escena casi todos los papeles de la obra, salvo, como observó con aliviada (y demoledora) sorna Rajoy, “el de demócrata cristiano”. Es seguro que el fregolismo de campaña de Iglesias –autonulificatoria finta “zapateril” incluida— no ayudó a movilizar el voto procedente de IU, la parte de la coalición más reticente a integrarse en UP: una vez decidida la coalición con IU, y sabiendo que las principales resistencias a UP provenían principalmente, no de los votantes de Podemos, sino de los de IU, era evidente que la campaña tenía que volcarse por lo pronto a afianzar ese flanco izquierdo, a asegurar la suma. Los numeritos de Frégoli de la campaña hicieron exactamente lo contrario. Ya hay datos suficientes para ver que el mayor desplome de Podemos se produjo allí donde era más fuere electoralmente IU. Véase, por ejemplo, este elocuente cuadro de la votación en los distritos de la ciudad de Madrid:
Y a propósito de la ciudad de Madrid, parece claro también que, salvo en el caso de la Barcelona de Ada Colau (que gana en todos los distritos, menos en Sarriá-San Gervasi –donde ganó CDC— y Les Corts –en donde ganó el PP—), la gestión municipal en las grades ciudades conquistadas por la izquierda no contribuyó al entusiasmo: en Madrid, por ejemplo, se sumó hasta un 36% menos de apoyos que los conseguidos en mayo de 2015.
No hay que descartar tampoco el que segmentos importantes de las clases trabajadoras que se habían movilizado a favor de las distintas alternativas de izquierda y centroizquierda se hayan abstenido ahora ante el espectáculo no demasiado edificante de la pugnaz competencia emocional –que no, ¡ay!, programática— por la “hegemonía”, frente a una derecha reunificada en la emoción del miedo. No pocos analistas y observadores españoles serios (comoJuliana en La Vanguardia o el sociólogo Toharía en El País) y extranjeros (como Leo Wieland en la Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) han insistido en el papel jugado por el Brexit en la generación in extremis de un clima de miedo al caos favorable a la derecha. Un miedo tanto más eficaz, cuanto que la política europea de UP estuvo seriamente lastrada en campaña por su estupefaciente decisión de esconder torpemente el fracaso capitulatorio de Tsipras bajo la alfombra, en vez de entrar a discutir crítica y autocríticamente el terrible papel desempeñado por las autoridades europeas en el desenlace del drama griego.
Y hay que decir que, una vez más, sólo el equipo de Ada Colau en Barcelona entró por uvas en el asunto, invitando al exministro griego de finanzas, Yanis Varoufakis, a participar activamente en la campaña de En Comú Podem. Dicho sea de paso: la moderación extrema del proyecto social de un Podemos que llegó a defender la Renta Básica incondicional en las elecciones europeas de 2014 –una propuesta, la de la RB, que ha merecido de nuevo todo el apoyo de Yanis Varoufakis— es otro ejemplo de lo que puede haber dejado indiferentes, cuando no decepcionados, a buena parte del potencial electorado de UP. En vez de la RB, se pasó a promover una renta para pobres diferenciable sólo con lentes de mucho aumento de la propuesta del PSOE y de la de… Ciudadanos.
Eso es lo que razonablemente se puede decir por el momento sobre la etiología del fracaso. Pero lo más importante ahora es estimar el alcance de la derrota de las izquierdas y sus consecuencias inmediatas.
Lo más probable es un gobierno minoritario del PP con la abstención del PSOE. No habrá terceras elecciones, y ese punto de partida determinará la posición del comité federal del PSOE el 9 de julio. No hay, por otra parte, alternativa a un gobierno más o menos minoritario de Rajoy, porque la derrota de la izquierda y del centroizquierda –no se olvide que el PSOE ha vuelto a sacar el peor resultado de su historia— imposibilita un gobierno también minoritario PSOE-UP.
La primera reacción del PSOE es buscar reconstruirse en la oposición tanto frente al PP como frente a UP. Y Ciudadanos se convertirá en un partido de la oposición frente a PP y UP. Un espacio de coincidencia, tras su doble derrota del 20 D y el 26 J, en un centro impotente.
El nuevo gobierno minoritario de Rajoy podrá constituirse con la abstención del PSOE. Pero necesitará de más abstenciones del PSOE para aprobar cualquier ley, en especial los presupuestos. Puede extender los presupuestos de 2016 –tras realizar los ajustes de 8.000 millones que le exige la Unión Europea— a 2017. Y tiene asegurado gobernar de esta guisa hasta la primavera de 2018.
Lo que se avecina es una dura ofensiva gubernamental a favor de la austeridad y la consolidación fiscal procíclica y contra la negociación colectiva. Una ofensiva, huelga decirlo, a la que el gobierno minoritario de Rajoy se verá apremiado por las presiones de su único aliado real: la troika.
Entramos en una fase defensiva en la que la izquierda social y política se encontrará con la espalda contra la pared. Si no comprende lo que está en juego y no saca el coraje y la determinación para resistir, en los próximos dos años sufrirá una derrota mucho más importante y profunda que la de estas elecciones.
El gobierno del PP contará con una mayoría en el senado para frenar cualquier reforma electoral, territorial o constitucional. Y con una derecha social y mediática plenamente movilizada. Con esta correlación de fuerzas puede también bloquear los procesos soberanistas en Cataluña y Euskadi, porque podrá utilizar la división de las izquierdas respecto al derecho a la autodeterminación en el contexto reaccionario que se ha ido conformando en Europa. Un contexto en el que la derecha extrema y la extrema derecha están rentabilizando las protestas de sectores obreros contra la austeridad, habida cuenta de la división y la falta de una alternativa creíble por parte de las izquierdas.
Dígase así: las izquierdas han sufrido una derrota electoral y sobre el horizonte se dibuja ya una derrota social que podría ser trágica en los próximos meses. No es hora de reproches. Hay que aprender de los respectivos errores y unir fuerzas. Y prepararse para resistir. El PSOE que ha resistido in angustiis al  temido sorpasso no puede esperar enmendar su fatídico curso de decadencia, si no es a través de la participación en un proceso que le permita dejar de ser parte del problema y empezar a ser parte de la solución.
Hay que apelar a la cordura del pueblo trabajador sufriente y doliente y al diálogo de las izquierdas. Los sindicatos, muy especialmente UGT y CCOO –que se juegan la negociación colectiva—, deben salir del marasmo en que se hallan enquistados desde hace demasiado tiempo y convocar mesas de movimientos sociales y de los partidos de la izquierda para preparar la resistencia a los recortes del estado social y democrático de derecho y al ulterior socavamiento de los derechos laborales. Las mareas y los movimientos sociales herederos del 15 M que estallaron contra el giro terrible austeritario de Zapatero en 2010-2011 deben volver a ocupar las calles.
Sólo podrá derrotarse al gobierno más minoritario y corrupto de la derecha reaccionaria, si somos capaces de transformar la división y los reproches en unidad. Si logramos poner por obra, de abajo a arriba, democráticamente, un plan de resistencia. Si, como recomendaba el clásico, dejamos de reír, de llorar y de detestar para poder entender y volver a dar prioridad a la defensa del interés público y a la satisfacción de las necesidades de la inmensa mayoría de la población trabajadora.

Miembro del comité de redacción de Sin Permiso.

Declaración Final del XXII Encuentro del Foro de São Paulo


Por Foro de São Paulo | Foro de São Paulo | 29 junio del 2016

  1. Del 23 al 26 de junio de 2016, el Foro de São Paulo realizó su XXII Encuentro en El Salvador, país gobernado desde hace siete años por el Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, que el día primero de este mes celebró el segundo aniversario de la toma de posesión del compañero presidente Salvador Sánchez Cerén.
  2. En sus veintiséis años de vida, la plenaria del Foro sesiona por tercera vez en San Salvador. Protagonistas de una fecunda historia de luchas en las que resaltan figuras como Augusto C. Sandino y Farabundo Martí, los pueblos de América Central, junto con sus hermanos de México, América del Sur y el Caribe, no sólo hacen una significativa contribución al Foro, sino también a la formación del actual mapa político del subcontinente, poblado por combativos movimientos populares y por gobiernos, legislaturas y alcaldías de izquierda y progresistas.
  3. Los procesos y acontecimientos ocurridos y en desarrollo desde nuestro XXI Encuentro, celebrado en agosto de 2015 en la Ciudad de México, demuestran la certeza de los análisis, reflexiones y planes de acción que, por más de un cuarto de siglo, hemos realizado en este espacio de convergencia, debate, acción conjunta y solidaridad de los partidos, organizaciones y movimientos políticos de izquierda y progresistas de América Latina y el Caribe.
  4. La derecha continental subordinada al imperialismo norteamericano ha intensificado las acciones con las que pretende desmantelar los procesos de cambio social que se vienen desarrollando a lo largo y ancho de nuestro continente, en lo que se perfila como una contraofensiva imperial.
  5. La brutal ofensiva destinada a desalojar a las fuerzas progresistas y de izquierda de todos los espacios sociales, políticos e institucionales conquistados por ellas en buena lid, indican la necesidad de apurar en paso en la construcción de los nuevos paradigmas de la izquierda del siglo XXI. Es vital no perder de vista el carácter instrumental de cualquier sistema político como medio de legitimación del poder de clase, al margen de quien lo ejerza, lo cual fundamenta la necesidad de los cambios estructurales, no solo en el ámbito económico, al cual se suele hacer referencia de manera exclusiva, sino en el ámbito político, en cuanto al diseño del modelo, que nos debe llevar a una democracia que sea, participativa y protagónica, como instrumento del poder popular que asegura las victorias locales y nacionales. La izquierda debe definir estrategias para aumentar su presencia en la integralidad del poder político, avanzando en el cambio de la correlación de fuerzas en la institucionalidad del Estado, lo cual requiere no reducir la lucha política al Poder Ejecutivo. A la par de ello, los procesos revolucionarios y de cambio social en marcha en nuestro continente deben luchar por su perfeccionamiento y contra todo aquello que desde dentro de los procesos mismos, atente contra el avance de éstos. Por otra parte, a pesar de los grandes avances obtenidos, debemos identificar todo aquello que podríamos haber hecho hasta ahora y aún tenemos pendiente.
  6. Los gobiernos de izquierda en nuestro continente han logrado dar estabilidad social, política y económica a nuestras naciones, y han sacado de la pobreza a decenas de millones de familias, que se han librado así de la marginación, el desempleo, accediendo a la salud, la educación y oportunidades de desarrollo humano. Estas acciones afectan los intereses de las clases históricamente dominantes y del imperialismo, y por ello desean recuperar el control de los gobiernos por cualquier medio y regresar al viejo esquema autoritario y subdesarrollado que tanto les ha beneficiado. La profundización de los cambios sociales alcanzados por los gobiernos de izquierda y el fortalecimiento de las luchas políticas y sociales en aras de esos cambios, es la mejor manera de enfrentar y derrotar esa contraofensiva de la derecha y el imperialismo.
  7. Nuestros inmensos logros y los que están por venir, son parte del legado de todas las luchas históricas de nuestros pueblos por sus derechos, soberanía, independencia y autodeterminación. Como parte de la situación actual, debemos destacar la heroica victoria de la Revolución Cubana en su batalla de más medio siglo frente a la agresividad del imperialismo norteamericano, con el reconocimiento de Estados Unidos de la derrota de su política hacia Cuba y con el inicio del proceso de normalización de relaciones entre ambos países, que sin embargo no será posible si no se pone fin al criminal bloqueo económico que ya ha sido declarado obsoleto por el propio gobierno estadounidense, y a la ilegal ocupación del territorio cubano por la base naval en Guantánamo.

  1. Una indudable victoria continental son los avances estratégicos para alcanzar la paz en Colombia en el marco del diálogo-negociación entre el gobierno colombiano y las FARC-EP, resultado de la heroica lucha de un pueblo combativo y tenaz, frente al terrorismo de Estado impuesto por una ultraderecha criminal y genocida. La paz en Colombia hará posible que todas las fuerzas populares, revolucionarias y progresistas de ese país logren avanzar unidas en la lucha política, garantizándoles la vida, los derechos civiles y la participación política a sus líderes y militantes. Hacemos un llamado al gobierno colombiano y al ELN a avanzar en el diálogo que permita dar conclusión final al proceso para alcanzar una paz definitiva en ese hermano país. Resaltamos el papel de apoyo y solidaridad de la comunidad internacional de apoyar el proceso de negociación y su decisión de involucrarse en el seguimiento y verificación de los acuerdos para su cabal cumplimiento.
  2. Manifestamos nuestro profundo rechazo a la militarización que se intenta restaurar en nuestro continente y propugnamos por la defensa de América Latina y el Caribe como zona de paz, tal como fue proclamada por la CELAC.
  3. En estos momentos, se presenta un desafío fundamental para los pueblos en lucha y para el movimiento revolucionario, que es la batalla en Venezuela, cuyo pueblo revolucionario encabezado por sus fuerzas organizadas ha demostrado una capacidad de lucha y resistencia pocas veces vistas en la historia de lucha de nuestros pueblos, frente a las embestidas brutales de la oligarquía apátrida y el imperialismo. La Revolución Bolivariana es una victoria permanente y estratégica en la lucha por la libertad de nuestros pueblos.
  4. Celebramos el triunfo de las fuerzas revolucionarias y progresistas por el rechazo del informe presentado en la OEA por el Secretario General de ese organismo, el cual vulneraria la soberanía y autodeterminación de este país. Respaldamos la iniciativa de diálogo promovida por el gobierno revolucionario venezolano encabezado por el Presidente Nicolás Maduro, el cual ha venido ganando cada vez más respaldo a nivel continental y mundial.
  5. Elemento esencial para preservar, ampliar y fortalecer la correlación de fuerzas favorables a las fuerzas políticas y gobiernos de izquierda y progresistas de América Latina y el Caribe, es la defensa de la integridad y la orientación popular, anti neoliberal, de los mecanismos intergubernamentales de concertación, cooperación e integración, a saber, la Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América – Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos (ALBA‑TCP), la Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR) y la Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños (CELAC).
  6. El proyecto del ALBA y PETROCARIBE ha sido y continúa siendo un ejemplo de la capacidad de los pueblos para ejercer la solidaridad, la complementariedad y avanzar unidos hacia un destino mejor. Es notoria la consolidación de los procesos de cambio en Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia y Uruguay.
  7. Es de destacar en el caso de Nicaragua, el contundente y sostenido respaldo popular al FSLN y a su líder, el Comandante Daniel Ortega, candidato presidencial para las elecciones de noviembre en ese país, en las cuales el pueblo nicaragüense, seguro de su triunfo, ha dado una lección de soberanía al no permitir la tradicional intervención de las potencias imperialistas en los procesos democráticos de nuestros países bajo el disfraz de la observación electoral, la cual será ejercida por organismos legítimamente constituidos a nivel de nuestra gran nación latinoamericana y caribeña.
  8. La izquierda impulsa la transparencia, la honradez en el uso y manos de los recursos públicos y nos manifestamos en contra la pretensión de Estados Unidos, de arrogarse prerrogativas fiscalizadoras en el enfrentamiento a la corrupción, irrespetando la soberanía de nuestros pueblos mediante mecanismos inconstitucionales, como resultado de lo cual llama la atención que no han sido señaladas ni afectadas las figuras políticas vinculadas con la oligarquía, de donde provienen los más grandes actos de corrupción, lo cual es también un engendro del intervencionismo imperialista. El caso de la CICIG en Guatemala es emblemático en ese sentido, pero el propio pueblo guatemalteco ha demostrado que no se necesita la tutela imperial mediante organismos intervencionistas para enfrentar la corrupción, pues la garantía para eso es la capacidad de lucha de los sectores populares, siempre que se cuente con un movimiento revolucionario unido, organizado y a la altura de su misión histórica.
  9. Reiteramos nuestro compromiso con la defensa de la independencia, soberanía y autodeterminación de nuestros pueblos. Condenamos el colonialismo en su condición como máxima expresión de la dominación imperialista sobre nuestros pueblos, y apoyamos la lucha heroica del pueblo puertorriqueño por su independencia y el justo reclamo de Argentina por su soberanía sobre las islas Malvinas. El FSP se proclama continuador histórico del Congreso Anfictionico de Panamá, convocado por el Libertador Simón Bolívar, en la lucha contra todo vestigio de colonialismo y neocolonialismo y por la unidad de nuestros pueblos.
  10. A Bolivia le expresamos nuestro respaldo solidario e internacionalista militante de los partidos del Foro, y a la revolución boliviana en su lucha contra la guerra no convencional, antidemocrática y desestabilizadora. Exhortamos a los partidos miembros del FSP tanto de Chile como de Bolivia a seguir dialogando en aras de una solución negociada sobre la demanda histórica boliviana de una salida soberana al mar, en el marco del respeto al derecho internacional.
  11. El Foro de Sao Paulo rechaza los paraísos fiscales, la evasión tributaria y la opacidad del gran capital en cada país, perjudicando su desarrollo económico y social. Asimismo, respalda la iniciativa del Presidente Rafael Correa de llevar a la Asamblea General de la ONU el planteamiento de la eliminación mundial de la figura de paraísos fiscales y generar mecanismos de transparencia y responsabilidad financiera.
  12. En Brasil, el Golpe de Estado contra la Presidenta Dilma Rousseff es parte de la contraofensiva imperial que será derrotada por las fuerzas populares en todo el continente. Apoyados por los medios de comunicación, sectores del aparato del Estado y del poder económico nacional e internacional, han montado el juicio político en Brasil que es un golpe contra la democracia, los derechos sociales, la soberanía nacional y la integración de América Latina y el Caribe. El Foro de Sao Paulo expresa al pueblo brasileño su irrestricta solidaridad en su lucha que es de todo el continente, contra el golpe de Estado, por la democracia y la defensa de las conquistas sociales del pueblo brasileño bajo los gobiernos del PT y sus aliados, encabezados por Lula y Dilma, y sumamos nuestra voz a todos aquellos que en todo el mundo, rechazan el ilegítimo gobierno golpista y demanda el retorno de la Presidenta legítimamente elegida.
  13. El Estados Unidos viven más de 55 millones de personas procedentes de América Latina y El Caribe que contribuyen al desarrollo económico, social de ese país. Un porcentaje significativo de las 11 millones de personas indocumentadas en Estados Unidos son de América Latina y El Caribe y el gobierno de ese país no ha cumplido su promesa de una reforma integral por los derechos de la población migrante, una parte de la cual sufre una crisis humanitaria, como es el caso de los niños y las niñas retenidos en las fronteras. El Foro de Sao Paulo motiva a los militantes y simpatizantes de sus partidos en Estados Unidos a que, como comunidad, se sumen a la lucha y demanda de sus derechos y denuncien la política injerencista del gobierno de Estados Unidos hacia nuestros países.
  14. Es necesario que el Foro de Sao Paulo fortalezca los esfuerzos por la construcciones de un frente político y social continental, integrado por movimientos políticos, sociales y populares de nuestra región, abarcando a amplios sectores de la sociedad, entre ellos aquellos que exigen el respeto a sus derechos personales y colectivo, como por ejemplo, sus orientaciones sexuales en el caso de los grupos LGBT, los sectores de la juventud, las luchas de género por la igualdad de derechos entre hombres y mujeres, los pueblos originarios, los afrodescendientes, que no necesariamente actúan partidariamente, pero que luchan en las calles por sus derechos y el ejercicio de sus expresiones culturales. Todos los partidos de izquierda debemos garantizar espacios en nuestras luchas y en nuestras estructuras a estos sectores.
  15. La cultura es hoy una de las principales armas de dominación de las oligarquías nacionales de las grandes corporaciones que pretenden controlar el mundo y frenar todo proyecto emancipador. Es necesario fortalecer la batalla de las ideas en todas sus expresiones y a través de todos los medios la lucha ideológica, cultural, mediática, resulta imprescindible para derrotar la invasión ideológica de las clases dominantes y así movilizar a los pueblos en la defensa de sus intereses. Debemos articular un frente de pensamientos contra hegemónico que incorpore sin prejuicios a nuestra lucha a persona y grupos de las más diversas filiaciones políticas.
  16. El Foro de Sao Paulo felicita al gobierno de El Salvador y al FMLN por sus logros, sobre todo por las efectivas políticas sociales, que han permitido reducir la pobreza, y el combate a la delincuencia, que ha mejorado el clima de seguridad. Estamos convencidos que el gobierno del FMLN seguirá profundizando los cambios iniciados desde su primera gestión, en el año 2009, en beneficio del pueblo salvadoreño.
  17. América Latina y el Caribe está en estos momentos y seguirá estando al frente de la lucha de los pueblos por una sociedad con justicia y libertad, sin explotación ni opresión; una lucha en la cual los pueblos, sus organizaciones políticas y sociales, y los gobiernos que defienden los intereses populares, se enfrentan a las más poderosas fuerzas del mundo, pero cuyo poderío económico y militar no podrá contra el poder de la razón, de las ideas, y de los más altos valores de la humanidad, que como proclamaba la Revolución Cubana en la Segunda Declaración de La Habana, “ha dicho BASTA y ha echado a andar…” Seguiremos construyendo el poder popular para asegurar las transformaciones económicas, sociales y políticas de los pueblos de América Latina y El Caribe.

Michael Roberts The impact of Brexit



Well, I got it wrong. I thought that the British people would vote to stay in the EU, if narrowly.  Instead they have narrowly voted to leave.  The turnout at 72% was much higher than the last general election in May 2015 (67%) that saw the Conservative party narrowly returned to office with a small majority of just 12 seats over other parties.  PM David Cameron had managed to squeak through to victory by agreeing to call a referendum on EU membership.  This sufficiently weakened the burgeoning vote for the euro-sceptic UK Independence party (UKIP) which had been polling over 20% in the EU and local elections.  By agreeing to a referendum, Cameron managed to reduce UKIP’s representation to just one seat in parliament.
But this political tactic has now backfired.  Cameron has lost the referendum and has announced that he will resign and give way to a pro-Brexit leader as PM to conduct the fraught and tortuous negotiations with the EU leaders in the autumn.  Winning the election has turned out to be a poisoned chalice as I suggested.
It seems that sufficient numbers of voters believed the arguments of the pro-Brexit Tories and UKIP that what was wrong with their lives was ‘too much immigration’ and ‘too much regulation’ by the EU (although Britain is already the most deregulated economy in the OECD).  It was not to do with the global capitalist slump, the ensuing Long Depression and the austerity policies of Tory government.
Yes, many voters did not swallow the immigration and regulation arguments; but these were mainly the young; those who lived in multi-ethnic areas like London and Manchester and the better-off households in the urban south.  They were not enough compared to those who voted to leave.  They were older, lived in small towns and cities mainly in the north or in Wales far away from London and from the sight of any ‘immigrants’, but who have suffered the most from low paid jobs, public sector cuts, run-down housing and high streets and general neglect.
Along with these were the die-hard racist elements of the petty-bourgeois small business who gain nothing from EU trade or its financial largesse.  They reckon that in some way a return to the good old days of British imperialism standing on its own (“taking back our country”) will be better.  Only it won’t because, it looks very likely that the Scots, having narrowly rejected the call for their own independence in September 2014, and who voted heavily to stay in the EU, will now insist on another vote to leave the UK and stay in the EU as an independent state.  Going back to the good old days of British imperialism is more likely going back to the time before union of 1603 when England/Wales and Scotland had separate kings!
So what now?  Well, the financial markets have naturally reacted with panic, with the value of sterling plummeting against the dollar to its lowest level since 1985 at the time of (another) oil crisis.  Stock prices have also dropped sharply.  But this is just a shocked reaction to the unexpected.  How financial markets react in the coming months will depend on how the negotiations go (and they could take two years or even more!) and what happens to the UK economy.
In previous posts, I have highlighted the near unanimous view among mainstream economists that Brexit would damage the UK economy both in the short and long term.  Most now reckon that the UK will drop into recession before the end of the year.  Why?  After all, with a weaker pound, British exporters will be able to compete on price in world and European markets.  Surely that will reduce the dangerously large external deficit (now 7% of GDP) that British capitalism has been running with the rest of the world?  And the Bank of England is to provide as much credit as banks and companies want and may even cut interest rates towards zero to help households with their mortgages and companies with their debts.
Well, maybe – except that history has shown that devaluation of a currency is seldom successful in turning round the economic growth, productivity and even trade of a country.  I have cited before how the Keynesians were wrong when they reckoned the devaluation of the peso in Argentina would turn that economy around in 2001 – the Great Recession soon disabused that claim.
And this deficit has to be financed by capital inflows – foreigners investing in British industry; buying British company stocks and government bonds; and depositing cash in British banks to earn interest or re-invest.  That funding had already started to dry up with the fear of Brexit – now Brexit is a reality.  The only way the deficit can be financed will be by raising interest rates on deposits, not cutting rates.
But the external deficit may actually shrink, not because exports will improve, but because imports of foreign goods and services will drop.  That’s because if the British economy shudders to a halt, companies and households will buy less from abroad, particularly as import prices will rise with the fall in sterling and inflation may come back.  That will squeeze real incomes in the average British household.
And the benefits of a weaker pound also depend on demand elsewhere in the world. If the Eurozone and US economy are struggling, then lower prices may be insufficient to lead to big increase in UK export demand.  Also, in recent years, British exports have proved to be quite inelastic. (British goods tend to be higher value goods and services – less sensitive to price change than manufactured clothes).
And here is the real point.  Devaluation only really affects demand. The other side of the equation is supply and productive capacity. Devaluation doesn’t necessarily do anything to promote investment and higher productivity. Some even argue that devaluation can reduce the incentive to be efficient because you become competitive without the effort of increasing productivity.  What really matters is what is going to happen to business investment and profitability.
Higher production costs from imports, weaker demand at home and abroad are likely to discourage UK companies from investing at home and foreign investors from stepping in.  And overall profitability of UK companies at the end of 2015 was still below the peak of 1997, while profitability in the key manufacturing sector for exports was half that of 1997.
If the UK tips into recession, the demand for EU exports (German cars, French wine, Italian clothing etc) is going to weaken.  And so a recession in the UK could push the EU back too.  And this is in an environment where global economic growth has slowed to its lowest rate since the end of the Great Recession, where global corporate profits are at zero and business investment is dropping in many economies.
Brexit in the long run may not make a huge difference to the health of British capitalism, but right now it could help accelerate a new global recession.  And that would have a much bigger impact on the lives of those who voted for Brexit than the perceived problems of ‘overcrowding’ from immigration or regulation from Brussels

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark Marx’s Ecology and the Left


Monthly Review Junio 2016
John Bellamy Foster is the editor ofMonthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. His most recent book, coauthored with Paul Burkett, isMarx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (Brill, 2016). Brett Clark is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah and the author, with Stefano B. Longo and Rebecca Clausen, of The Tragedy of the Commodity (Rutgers University Press, 2015).
This article is a substantially revised version of “Marx’s Universal Metabolism of Nature and the Frankfurt School: Dialectical Contradictions and Critical Syntheses,” in James S. Ormrod, ed., Changing Our Environment, Changing Ourselves (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 101–35.
One of the lasting contributions of the Frankfurt School of social theorists, represented especially by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, was the development of a philosophical critique of the domination of nature. Critical theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt were deeply influenced by the early writings of Karl Marx. Yet their critique of the Enlightenment exploitation of nature was eventually extended to a critique of Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure, especially in relation to his mature work inCapital. This position was expressed most notably in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s student, Alfred Schmidt, author ofThe Concept of Nature in Marx. Due largely to Schmidt’s book, the notion of Marx’s anti-ecological perspective became deeply rooted in Western Marxism. Such criticisms were also closely related to questions raised regarding Frederick Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which was said to have improperly extended dialectical analysis beyond the human-social realm. First-stage ecosocialists such as Ted Benton and André Gorz added to these charges, contending that Marx and Engels had gone overboard in their alleged rejection of Malthusian natural limits.
So all-encompassing was the critique of the “dialectic of the Enlightenment” within the main line of the Frankfurt School, and within what came to be known as “Western Marxism” (defined largely by its rejection of the dialectics of nature associated with Engels and Soviet Marxism), that it led to the estrangement of thinkers in this tradition not only from the later Marx, but also from natural science—and hence nature itself.1 Consequently, when the ecological movement emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, Western Marxism, with its abstract, philosophical notion of the domination of nature, was ill-equipped to analyze the changing and increasingly perilous forms of material interaction between humanity and nature. Making matters worse, some Marxian theorists—such as Neil Smith and Noel Castree—responded by inverting the Frankfurt School critique of the domination of nature with the more affirmative notion of “the production of nature,” which conceived nature and its processes as entirely subsumed within social production.2
Matters changed, however, with the rise in the late 1990s of a second-stage ecosocialism that returned to Marx’s materialist-ecological approach, and particularly to his concept of “social metabolism,” while also reincorporating elements of Engels’s ecological thought. This development represented a sharp break with the earlier Frankfurt School-influenced approach to the question of Marx and nature. Surveying this history, we will examine the debates on Marxian ecology that have emerged within the left, while pointing to the possibility of a wider synthesis, rooted in Marx’s concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” the “social metabolism,” and the metabolic “rift.”

Criticisms of Marx’s Concept of Nature

Paul Burkett described Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx in 1997 as “perhaps the most influential study ever written on Marx’s view of nature.”3 The book appeared in Germany in 1962, the same year as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, often seen as the starting point of the modern environmental movement.The Concept of Nature in Marx began as Schmidt’s dissertation in philosophy, written between 1957 and 1960 under the supervision of Horkheimer and Adorno, and was “impregnated with the influence of ‘critical theory.'”4 It thus antedated the modern environmental movement both historically and philosophically. Yet Schmidt’s work, carrying the imprimatur of the Frankfurt School, would come to shape the attitudes of many New Left theorists towards Marx in the context of the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1960s–1980s. As Marxian geographer Neil Smith put it in 1984, Schmidt’s book was considered the “definitive study” of nature in Marx.5
The Concept of Nature in Marx was deeply affected by the broader Weberian pessimism of the Frankfurt School, which viewed the “domination of nature” as an intrinsic characteristic of modernity or “the dialectic of the Enlightenment.”6 Under Enlightenment civilization, Horkheimer and Adorno declared, “either men will tear each other to pieces or they will take all the flora and fauna of the earth with them; and if the earth is then still young enough, the whole thing will have to be started again at a much lower stage.”7 Although Schmidt brought a number of important, positive contributions to the understanding of nature in Marx, it was his more pessimistic conclusions about the mature Marx, in the spirit of Horkheimer and Adorno, that proved most influential. Rejecting the outlooks of “utopian” Marxist theorists such as Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch who, based on the early Marx, sought a “reconciliation” between humanity and nature through socialism, Schmidt concluded,
The mature Marx withdrew from the [utopian] theses expounded in his early writings. In later life he no longer wrote of a “resurrection” of the whole of nature. The new society is to benefit man alone, and there is no doubt that this is to be at the expense of external nature. Nature is to be mastered with gigantic technological aids, and the smallest possible expenditure of time and labor. It is to serve all men as the material substratum for all conceivable consumption goods.
When Marx and Engels complain about the unholy plundering of nature, they are not concerned with nature itself but with considerations of economic utility…. The exploitation of nature will not cease in the future, but man’s encroachments into nature will be rationalized, so that their remoter consequences will remain capable of control. In this way, nature will be robbed step by step of the possibility of revenging itself on men for their victories over it.8
The last phrase was a reference to Engels, whose views on the need for human beings to control their social relation to nature under socialism in order to prevent ecological crises (which he referred to metaphorically as the “revenge” of nature) Schmidt interpreted as a case for the extreme “rationalization” and external control of nature.9 There was no real room in Engels, any more than in Marx, Schmidt insisted, for anything but a one-sided, conqueror’s approach to nature—despite Engels’s criticisms of precisely this perspective. Engels was reinterpreted as representing a crude, one-sided domination of nature outlook, with the implication that such views could be foisted on Marx himself. In the end, classical historical materialism was reduced to a reified, mechanistic worldview, which advocated a narrow instrumentalism, geared to unrestrained productivism, as the only possible forward course for humanity. The mature Marx, in the Frankfurt School interpretation, thus led inexorably to the same Weberian iron cage with respect to the instrumentalist rationalization of nature as did both capitalism and Soviet Marxism.10
Close readers of Schmidt’s work were no doubt puzzled by the contradictions in his reading of Marx. For Schmidt could not have arrived at these conclusions, in an otherwise sophisticated philosophical reading of Marx’s theory of nature, without turning the early Marx against the later Marx, Marx against Engels, Marx against Brecht and Bloch, and even, as we shall see, the mature Marx against the mature Marx.11 Brilliant as Schmidt’s analysis was, it was colored by a double polemic: first, against those who sought to apply the broad anthropological, humanistic, and ecologically utopian perspectives of the early Marx to the later Marx; and second, against all those, associated with a more classical historical materialism, who suggested that a more sustainable path of development could be achieved under socialism.12
Schmidt’s study was further compromised by a threefold failure to comprehend the depths of Marx’s critique. First, Schmidt’s deterministic notion of technology and industrialization under capitalism, and the automatic carrying over of this into socialism, obscured the full significance of Marx’s historically specific critique of the capitalist value form, in which value, emanating from labor alone, was in contradiction to wealth, deriving from both nature and labor.13 For Marx, the goal was not a society aimed at endless quantitative expansion (exchange value) but at the fulfillment of qualitative needs (use value). Second, Schmidt saw Marx’s emphasis on the metabolism of nature and society as a broad philosophical “metaphor,” a form of speculative metaphysics. It was not treated as a scientific category, related to actual material exchanges and systemic (thermodynamic) processes—though he recognized that element in Marx.14 Third, Schmidt attributed to Marx a conception of external nature as consisting of unchanging, invariant laws—that is, a passive, dualistic, and rigidly positivist conception of nature, in which even evolutionary development within nature (outside humanity) conformed to narrowly delineated, fixed processes. Nature, outside of human nature and human society, was in this vision both passive and mechanical.
Although Schmidt briefly discussed a more dialectical concept of nature in Marx, ultimately Marx was interpreted as adhering in his mature phase to a mechanistic-positivistic scientific view.15 “The attitude of the mature Marx,” Schmidt wrote, “has in it nothing of the exuberance and unlimited optimism to be found in the idea of the future society prescribed in the Paris Manuscripts. It should rather be called skeptical. Men cannot in the last resort be emancipated from the necessities imposed by nature.”16 Hence, Marx was transformed into a forerunner of the skepticism, world-weariness, and dualistic division between natural science and social science, and between non-human nature and society, that characterized Schmidt’s own mentors, Horkheimer and Adorno. Indeed, Adorno went so far as to declare that Marx “underwrote something as arch-bourgeois as the program of an absolute control of nature.”17
Adhering to a neo-Kantian epistemological outlook with respect to nature and society, Horkheimer and Adorno, along with Schmidt, rejected both the Hegelian idealist philosophy of nature and the Marxian materialist dialectics of nature (associated especially with Engels), while simultaneously rejecting the early Marx’s “unlimited optimism” toward the reconciliation of naturalism and humanism. The dialectic, in the Frankfurt School view, was applicable only to the reflexive realm of society and human history. Natural science, insofar as it was directed at the external, objective world apart from human beings, was depicted as inherently positivistic and separate from the human sciences. Hence, the early Frankfurt School thinkers were themselves for the most part caught in the contradictions of what they called the “dialectic of Enlightenment,” falling prey to a larger epistemological dualism between nature and society from which there was no exit. This did not prevent them from simultaneously developing a negative philosophical critique of the Enlightenment domination of nature; but it was one that had no meaningful relation to praxis. Here their views were closest to Max Weber’s well-known critical pessimism with respect to the Enlightenment.18 As in Weber’s tragic vision, the “iron cage” of formal rationality offered no visible escape, pointing inexorably to the disenchantment and domination of nature, against which one could only offer empty protests.
For Horkheimer, the “decay of civilization” in modern times arises from the fact that “men cannot utilize their power over nature for the rational organization of the earth”—a problem that he attributed to the formal rationalization common to both capitalism and socialism, and endemic to the modern human relation to the environment.19 The decay of civilization was associated with the reactionary rise of new repressive tendencies such as fascism, in which “raw nature,” in “revolt against reason,” represented animality, primitiveness, and crude Darwinism. “Whenever man deliberately makes nature his principle,” Horkheimer wrote, “he regresses to primitive usages…. Animals…do not reason…. In summary, we are the heirs, for better or worse, of the Enlightenment and technological progress.”20 A vain attempt to escape this trap could only lead to a world of barbarism. It followed that Marx’s notion of liberation was inevitably forced to accede to the Enlightenment vision of implacable technological progress as the determining force in history. In this sense, Horkheimer was quite distant from his Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse, who saw more room for struggle against the repressive use of technology and for the development of a non-alienated human-ecological metabolism.21
Schmidt recognized the abstract possibility of a more revolutionary-critical interpretation of Marx’s view of nature.22 Yet he dismissed this reading, not so much in terms of Marx’s own analysis, but rather those of mid-twentieth century critical theory, represented by Horkheimer and Adorno. “We should ask,” he wrote, “whether the future society [socialism] will not be a mammoth machine, whether the prophesy of Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment] that ‘human society will be a massive racket in nature’ will not be fulfilled rather than the young Marx’s dream of a humanization of nature, which would at the same time include the naturalization of man.”23 The utopian young Marx, in his view, was refuted by the realist mature Marx, who succumbed to the technocratic rationality of the Enlightenment. As a result, Marxism offered no way out of the “massive racket in nature.”
Schmidt’s account of Marx’s concept of nature, with all of its inconsistencies and convolutions, positing one contradiction after another in Marx’s own analysis, reduced historical materialism in the end to a repressive Enlightenment vision—one that reinforced and served to justify Frankfurt School skepticism, pessimism, and worldly alienation. Such views were in many ways a product of the divisions within Marxism that began in the 1930s and deepened after 1956.24 Western Marxism, as a distinct, largely philosophical, tradition, tended to see classical Marxism—particularly Engels but also extending to Marx himself—as falling prey to positivism.
Commenting on this tendency, William Leiss, a former student of Marcuse, observed in The Domination of Nature that “Alfred Schmidt’s excellent book…attempts (unsuccessfully) to present Marxism as an extreme form of Saint-Simonianism”—i.e., reflecting an inherently techno-industrial relation to the conquest of nature.25 Likewise, for Neil Smith, Schmidt depicted the socialist relation to nature as conceived by Marx as “pretty much like capitalism except worse: the domination of nature.”26 In Burkett’s more critical judgment, Schmidt’s analysis of The Concept of Nature in Marx ended up “in a quagmire of environmental despair.”27
Despite these limitations, Schmidt, in what can be considered the most original and profound part of his work, centered his argument on Marx’s now famous concept of social and ecological “metabolism.” Here, he wrote, “Marx introduced a completely new understanding of man’s relation to nature.”28 The metabolism category, as employed by Marx in relation to the labor process, made it possible to “speak meaningfully of a ‘dialectic of nature.'” The notion of social metabolism thus pointed to what Marx himself had called the possibility of a “higher synthesis” in the human-nature relation.29
Nevertheless, Marx’s metabolism argument was ultimately marginalized in the later parts of Schmidt’s analysis.30 Schmidt suggested that Marx’s notion of metabolism as a dialectical mediation between nature and society through labor and production involved recourse to a form of metaphysical speculation—one that constituted a negative, non-historical ontology.31 He erroneously attributed Marx’s use of the metabolism concept primarily to the influence of the crudely mechanistic scientific materialist Jacob Moleschott—rather than Roland Daniels and Justus von Liebig, the two thinkers Marx drew on most directly. Schmidt saw it as both pre-bourgeois, in the backward-looking sense of a utopian, almost mystical attempt to resurrect a past unity, and mechanistic, leading him to dismiss what he previously described as a meaningful dialectic of nature.32
Ultimately failing to comprehend the full complexity and range of possibility opened up by Marx’s concept of social metabolism—an approach that was at once philosophical, political-economic, and physiological—Schmidt rejected it as a metaphysical, metaphorical, and mechanical category, reflecting a “peculiarly unhistorical dialectic of the process of metabolism,” a “rigid cyclical form of nature” that was “anterior to man.”33 Recognizing that Marx had introduced a materialist dialectic that connected nature and society, human production/reproduction and the natural-material conditions of existence, Schmidt nonetheless pulled back, wishing to avoid the question of a dialectic of nature. He thus limited the dialectic to an abstracted social realm.
This general outlook on Marx’s concept of nature was carried forward and reinforced in various ways in the first-stage ecosocialism that arose in 1970s and ’80s. Early ecosocialist thinkers, following Schmidt, criticized Marx and Marxism for allegedly downplaying natural limits to economic growth, and thus ecological constraints. They therefore eclectically promoted “the greening of Marxism” by grafting onto Marx’s analysis neo-Malthusian notions of environmental constraints, together with purely ethical views of the nature-humanity interrelationship associated with deep ecology and “ecologism.”34 Although they constituted an important self-critique on the part of left theorists, these arguments generally avoided any close scrutiny of the foundations of historical materialism, particularly where issues of natural science were involved.
“The revival of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s” took for granted, in the critical assessment of historian Eric Hobsbawm, “the nonapplicability of Marx’s thought (as distinct from that of Engels, which was regarded as separable and different) to the field of the natural sciences.”35 The new Marxism of this period, as distinct from earlier periods of historical materialism, “left the natural sciences totally to one side.” Marx’s comprehensive analysis of the natural conditions underlying production and the capitalist economy was generally elided in studies of his work, or dismissed as uninteresting and inessential—even in early ecosocialist accounts.
The Western left concluded that an ecological outlook occupied at best only a marginal place in Marx’s historical materialism, and was largely discarded in his later economic works.36 Expressing what was then the general view within Western Marxism, Perry Anderson wrote in 1983 that “problems of the interaction of the human species with its terrestrial environment [were] essentially absent from classical Marxism.”37 This claim, however, nullified not only Engels’s voluminous discussions of the relation of human beings to their natural-physical environment, but also the extensive discussions of natural-material relations and natural science—and within these, ecological concerns—by Marx himself.38
For an important first-stage ecosocialist like Benton, Marx had gone overboard in his critique of Malthus, to the point of exhibiting a “reluctance to recognize ‘nature-imposed limits’ to human development” altogether. Malthus, meanwhile, was himself to be critically reappropriated in the process of the “greening of Marxism.”39 Gorz declared that socialism as a movement was “on its last legs,” hobbled by its narrow productivism, inherited from classical Marxism, and by its lack of a “reflexive modernist” view of nature-society relations.40 Likewise, Marxian economist James O’Connor, editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism, declared that “Marx hinted at, but did not develop, the idea that there may exist a contradiction of capitalism that leads to an ‘ecological’ theory of crisis and social transformation.”41 Alain Lipietz, writing in Capitalism Nature Socialism, went even further, declaring that Marx underestimated “the irreducible character…of ecological constraints” and adopted “the Biblico-Christian ideology of the conquest of nature.”42
Such first-stage ecosocialist thinkers commonly attributed the alleged ecological blind spots in Marx’s political economy to intrinsic flaws in the labor theory of value. Since “all value was derived from labor power,” environmental sociologist Michael Redclift wrote, “it was impossible [for Marx] to conceive of a ‘natural’ limit to the material productive forces of society.”43 Yet what Redclift and others failed to notice was that it was this very one-sidedness of the value form in capitalism that lay at the center of Marx’s critique, associated with the contradiction between wealth (derived from natural-material use values) and value or exchange value (which left out nature altogether). For Marx, once it was recognized that nature—consituting, together with labor, one of the two sources of all wealth—was not included in the capitalist value calculus, but was treated as a “free gift…to capital,” it was impossible not to recognize both the existence of natural limits and capital’s destructive tendency to override them, in its unending drive to accumulation.44
First-stage ecosocialists therefore erroneously perceived Marx’s critique of capitalism as, at best, neutral with respect to ecological issues, and, at worst, anti-ecological—even if the early Marx had alluded to the possibility of a unity of naturalism and humanism. Yet socialism itself, in the view of these thinkers, remained essential, chiefly for its critique of labor exploitation. Early ecosocialist thinkers thus grafted Green concepts onto historical-materialist analysis, creating a hybrid, Centaur-like construct. In the case of Benton, perhaps the most articulate spokesperson for first-stage ecosocialism, elements of Marx’s critique of political economy, such as his political hostility to “Malthusian ‘natural limits’ arguments”; the priority given to value theory; his neglect of ecological processes; and his alleged “Prometheanism,” or extreme productivism, all “obstructed the development of historical materialism as an explanatory theory of ecological crisis.” These presumed shortcomings of Marxism required an “interdisciplinary collaboration between a revised historical materialism and ecology.”45
Yet as commendable as such a program appeared on the surface, without a thoroughgoing exploration and reconstruction of Marx’s own analysis of the nature-society dialectic, the hoped-for higher synthesis could only end up as an eclectic mishmash in which the critical power of the historical-materialist tradition would be lost. More important, the criticisms of Marx within first-stage ecosocialist theory were often distorted, not only in their understanding of Marx’s own ecological conceptions, but in the adoption of views (e.g., Malthusianism) that were antagonistic to a fully developed Marxian ecology.

The Production of Nature: A New Human Exemptionalism

Other left theorists took an entirely different tack, distant from both the Frankfurt School and first-stage ecosocialism. Geographer Neil Smith embraced the basic structure of Schmidt’s interpretation of Marx, but sought to stand it on its head, contending that Schmidt had himself advanced a “quintessentially bourgeois conception of nature out of his reading of Marx.” If Schmidt’s Concept of Nature in Marx had argued that the mature Marx was caught in the technological determinism and extreme productivism that characterized the dialectic of Enlightenment, Smith offered a far more positive reading, depicting Marx’s view as one of the “production of nature,” or the constant reinvention and transformation of nature through production. As Smith’s follower Noel Castree acknowledged, Smith sought to solve the problem with a one-way causality from production to nature, leading to a “hyper-constructionist” outlook. Nature was reduced to a passive concept. Smith’s production of nature analysis, Castree noted, “looked more at how capitalism produces nature and less at how produced nature affects capitalism.”46 For Smith, in Castree’s words, “nature becomes internal to capitalism.”47 This kind of anthropomorphic monism subsumed nature almost completely within society, in an effort to solve the problem of “dualism,” which Smith and Castree charged characterized nearly all other views of the environmental problem.48
Hence, in Smith’s inverted Frankfurt School perspective on the domination of nature, nature as a whole was envisioned in almost Baconian terms as increasingly produced by human beings for their own ends. It was possible, he argued, to speak of “the real subsumption of nature” in its entirety within human production. The late twentieth century, he proclaimed, marked the infiltration of society into the last “remnant[s] of a recognizably external nature.” Indeed, there was no longer any meaningful nature anywhere apart from human beings: “Nature is nothing if it is not social.” “The production of nature,” in Smith’s words, was “capitalized ‘all the way down.'” From this perspective, the historical production of nature represented “the unity of nature toward which capitalism drives.” In this ever-increasing, capitalist-generated unity, “first nature” (i.e., nature at its most elemental) was “produced from within and as a part of second nature” (i.e., nature as transformed by society). Smith effectively dismissed any recognition of “external nature” as a dynamic, evolutionary force outside and beyond, and often interacting with, humanity itself, as “dualism,” “fetishism of nature,” and “nature washing.” Natural science was itself to be faulted for focusing on “so-called laws of nature” outside society.49
“Given Marx’s own treatment of nature,” Smith went so far as to argue, “it may not be unreasonable to see in his vision also a certain version of the conceptual dualism of nature.”50 Marx himself was therefore partly to blame for the rise of “left apocalypticism,” which Smith identified with contemporary environmentalism with its dualistic outlook.51
Castree followed the same line as Smith, emerging as a major proponent of the production of nature approach, though in a slightly more nuanced form. Castree stated that “Marx did not himself provide a systematic account of nature. This task was left to Alfred Schmidt.”52 The brilliance of Schmidt’s analysis, for Castree, was reflected in the fact that he detected a “fundamental flaw” in Marx. Although “Marx apparently envisioned a harmonious balance of nature and society” in his “anticipatory-utopian vision,” this pointed to “a subtext of a will to power: that is, an affection for technology in the service of human well-being which could unintentionally turn into the domination of nature, and ironically (after Adorno and Hokheimer) into the domination of humans themselves.”53 Following Smith, Castree leveled the accusation of “dualism” at almost all Marxist analysts of nature-society relations, from classical Marxism to the present—hardly sparing Marx himself, whose saving grace, in Castree’s view, was that he had inspired Smith’s unifying conception of the “production of nature.”54 In this view, the production of nature perspective eliminated the dualism arising from the separateness of nature by subsuming nature in society. Yet most contemporary ecosocialists, Castree suggested, had failed to incorporate this advance of Smith, and had “reintroduced nature’s putative separateness” in their treatments of Marx.55
Production of nature analysis, Smith and Castree declared, had gone beyond classical Marxism, in that it rejected altogether the idea of “external nature,” which had infected even Engels’s Dialectics of Nature. “As Smith correctly observes,” Castree pronounced, “nature separate from society has no meaning.”56 A developed Marxian approach in this realm rejected the notions of “universal” and “external” nature, since such conceptions inevitably led to the crudities of naturalism and dualism. On this basis, Smith and Castree discarded entirely Marx’s vision of a materialist, open dialectic in which human beings and society form a part of nature, and exist within it, in a complex, mediated, co-evolutionary relationship.57
The production of nature argument was itself rooted in a binary conception that pitted dualism against monism. In this view, which lacked the concept of dialectical mediation, in order to escape dualism, one was forced to choose between either a “monistic doctrine of universal nature,” or, at the opposite extreme, a monistic doctrine of the production of nature by society (sometimes given an added nuance by reference to “co-production,” and to a double or hyphenated reality).58 The production of nature school itself chose the latter: a monist, hyper-social constructivism, such that nature and natural conditions were entirely subordinated to human production. This in essence is the view that environmental sociologists criticize as human exemptionalism—the anthropocentric notion that human beings are largely exempt from natural laws, or can imperialistically transform them as they wish.59
The logical result was Smith’s critique of environmental apocalypticism, directed at the environmental movement. Writing in 2015 about the political consequences of Smith’s production of nature analysis, Castree noted that “certain strands of environmental and body-politics operative outside universities are now [like Smith himself] dispensing with ‘nature’ as an ontological referent.” Here he cited the book Break Through by leading ecological modernists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.60 “In a generic sense,” Castree declared, “this mirrors Smith’s insistence that we need new terms of radical political discourse.”61
Ironically, Castree failed to note that Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s analysis represented exactly the opposite: new terms of reactionary political discourse. The Breakthrough Institute, which Shellenberger and Nordhaus head, is the principal ideological think tank in the United States dedicated to the single-minded promotion of capitalist ecological modernization. As self-designated “post-environmentalists,” thinkers associated with the Breatkthrough Institute see technological innovation and market mechanisms as the solution to all environmental problems, and as entirely compatible with unlimited economic growth and capital accumulation. They are thus sharp critics of radical ecology and of environmentalism in general.62

Marx, Metabolism, and the Metabolic Rift

To escape such one-sided views—whether idealist or mechanistic, monist or dualist—which have dominated much left analysis of the nature-society relation since Schmidt, it is necessary to turn to Marx’s ecology itself, in which the materialist conception of history and the materialist conception of nature formed a dialectical unity. By excavating the ecological foundations of classical historical materialism, second-stage ecosocialist theorists since the late 1990s have moved well beyond earlier misconceptions, creating the basis for a wider ecological synthesis. Here the analysis has pivoted on the dialectical approach implicit in Marx’s triadic scheme of “the universal metabolism of nature,” the “social metabolism,” and the metabolic rift.63
Although, as in Marx’s analysis, it still makes sense abstractly to differentiate nature and natural processes from the labor and production process, there is no longer any pure nature untouched by human society; nor is there any pure realm of society free from the dire natural-material consequences of human actions. In the Anthropocene epoch, it is therefore all the more necessary to explore the complex, dialectical natural-social interconnections between the Earth system as a whole and capitalism as a system of alienated social metabolic reproductionwithin that Earth system. Today the drive to capital accumulation is disrupting the planetary metabolism at cumulatively higher levels, threatening irreversible, catastrophic impacts for countless species, including our own. It is in the theorization of this ecological and social dialectic, and in the development of a meaningful praxis to address it, that Marx’s analysis has proven indispensable.
Second-stage ecosocialism sought to return to Marx and earthly questions. The aim was to draw on the ecological foundations of classical historical materialism to develop a more unified socio-ecological critique. British Marxist sociologist Peter Dickens was among those who took initial steps to open up such an analysis. In his 1992 book Society and Nature: Towards a Green Social Theory, he focused on Marx’s early writings, such as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, insisting that this work provides key insights into how the organization, processes, and relations of the capitalist system alienated humanity from nature. He proposed that people’s understanding of nature tends to be shaped by their lived experiences within a society dominated by commodity production. Although some of the baggage of first-stage ecosocialism, such as an assumption that Marx in his mature works largely ignored natural limits and promoted an extreme productivism, still remained, Dickens’s work nonetheless represented a turning point. He was critical of simply grafting deep-ecology positions onto a revised Marxism. He insisted on the need to extend Marx’s method, which included both a historical-materialist and dialectical assessment of the relationship between society and nature. From a critical-realist orientation, he explained that larger emergent properties and boundaries within the biophysical world must be recognized, and that the capitalist system was “overloading these self-regulating ecosystems and stretching them to a point at which they [could] no longer cope.”64
Second-stage ecosocialist scholarship called into question the tendency to pit the young Marx against the mature Marx, Marx against Engels, and natural science against social science. Paul Burkett explained that elemental ecological ideas ran throughout Marx’s work, even though the language in which he expressed them changed. Marx had moved over the course of his studies from highly “abstract” to “more consistently historical and social-relational” concepts.65 Burkett also pointed out that Marx and Engels were both committed to a “materialist and social-scientific approach to nature,” which served as the basis for extending and developing their analysis, creating opportunities for complementary work between the social and natural sciences.66 In other words, they insisted upon employing both a materialist conception of history and a materialist conception of nature as necessary counterparts.67
Their efforts to analyze the interactions and transformations in the dialectical nature-society relationship was greatly enhanced by Marx’s use of metabolic analysis. Here Marx’s critique of political economy merged with his assessment of ecological relations, illuminating the interpenetration of nature and society, as well as the scale and processes through which these interactions had historically developed. Marx embedded socioeconomic systems in ecology and explicitly studied the interchange of matter and energy between the larger environment and society.68 Ecological economist Marina Fischer-Kowalski has proposed that social-metabolic analysis, arising out of Marx’s work, can illuminate the coupling of human and natural systems, because it “cut[s] across the ‘great divide’ between the natural sciences…and the social sciences.”69 The engagement and development of Marx’s triadic scheme—metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift—helped solidify the second stage of ecosocialist analyses and served as the springboard for the third stage, with the result that this methodology is now widely used to address many of today’s most pressing ecological challenges.
In developing his metabolic analysis, Marx drew on a long scientific and intellectual history. In the early nineteenth century, physiologists introduced the concept of metabolism to examine the biochemical processes between a cell and its surroundings, as well as the interactions and exchanges between an organism and the biophysical world. The physician and communist Roland Daniels, who was Marx’s friend and comrade, extended the use of metabolism to whole complexes of organisms, foreshadowing its application in ecosystem analysis.70 Although Daniels’s work was not published for more than a century, due to his untimely death in his mid-thirties (he contracted pneumonia while in prison during the Cologne communist trials), the broad idea he represented would, through the investigations of other thinkers, become the basis for examining higher levels of organization and interdependency, including the interchange of matter and energy, between human societies and the larger environment. The German chemist Justus von Liebig helped generalize the concept of metabolism, using it to study the exchange of nutrients between Earth and humans.71 He explained that soil required specific nutrients—such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—to produce vegetation. As plants grew, they absorbed soil nutrients. To maintain soil fertility, these nutrients had to be recycled back to the land.
Marx, who closely followed scientific debates and discoveries, incorporated the concept of metabolism into his critique of political economy, explaining that he employed the word to denote “the ‘natural’ process of production as the material exchange [Stoffwechesel] between man and nature.”72 He recognized that humans are dependent on nature and “can create nothing without” it.73 For “the earth itself is a universal instrument…for it provides the worker with the ground beneath his feet and a ‘field of employment’ for his own particular process.”74 As a result, there is a necessary “metabolic interaction” between humans and the earth. Labor serves as “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.”75 The labor process, including exchanges with ecological systems, is influenced by the dominant economic systems and social institutions, defining what Marx saw as the social metabolism.
The complex, nuanced ecological worldview in Marx’s formulation is evident in his conception of both the “universal metabolism of nature” and the social metabolism.76 The “universal metabolism of nature” stood for the broader biophysical world.77 Specific cycles and processes constitute and help regenerate ecological conditions. Human society exists within the earthly metabolism, continually interacting with its external natural environment in the production of goods, services, and needs. As a result, the social metabolism operates within the larger universal metabolism. Under capitalist commodity production, this relationship takes on such an alienated form that it generates ecological crises, manifesting as a “rift” in the metabolism between society and nature (or disjunctures within both the social metabolism and the wider universal metabolism). This demands the “restoration” of these necessary conditions. “The natural boundary” to human production, as Lukács, following Marx, stated, “can only retreat, it can never fully disappear.”78
Marx avoided subordinating nature to society, or vice versa, allowing him to elude “the pitfalls of both absolute idealism and mechanistic science.”79 His metabolic analysis recognizes that humans and the rest of nature are in constant interaction, resulting in reciprocal influences, consequences, and dependencies. These processes emerge within a relational, thermodynamic, whole, the universal metabolism of nature.
Humans transform nature through production. However, “they do not do so just as they please; rather they do so under conditions inherited from the past (of both natural and social history), remaining dependent on the underlying dynamics of life and material existence.”80 Each mode of production generates a distinct social metabolic order that influences the interchange and interpenetration of society and ecological systems.81 The social metabolic order of capital, for example, is expressed as a unique historical system of socio-ecological relations developed within a capitalist mode of social organization. Human social systems exchange with, work within, and draw on ecological systems in the process of producing and maintaining life and sociocultural conditions.
Yet within the social metabolic order of capital, this process materializes in a manner unlike other previous socio-ecological systems. The practical activities of life are shaped by the expansion and accumulation of capital. Marxian economist Paul Sweezy explained that in their “pursuit of profit…capitalists are driven to accumulate ever more capital, and this becomes both their subjective goal and the motor force of the entire economic system.”82 The compulsion to accumulate leads to continuous cycles of creative destruction (and destructive creation), as novel productive and distributive methods are developed and exploitable resources expanded to power industry and manufacture commodities. The needs of capital are imposed on nature, increasing the demands placed on ecological systems and the production of wastes.
To illustrate such social-metabolic analysis, it is useful to consider how Marx, drawing on the work of chemists and agronomists, analyzed the transformations associated with capitalist agricultural production. He explained that soil “fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought, it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time.”83 In many precapitalist societies, farm animals were directly utilized in agricultural production. They were fed grains from the farm, and their nutrient-rich manure was reincorporated into the soil as fertilizer. People who lived in the countryside primarily consumed food and fiber from nearby farms. Their waste was likewise integrated into the nutrient cycle, helping maintain soil fertility.
This particular metabolic interchange was transformed in large part by the enclosure movement, the rise of the new industrial systems, and social relations associated with capitalist development. A wider, more alienated division between town and country emerged, as food and fiber from farms were increasingly shipped to distant markets, which transferred the nutrients from one location to another. The nutrients in food were squandered, and treated as mere waste accumulated as pollution within cities and rivers.84 Liebig, in his Letters on Modern Agriculture, argued that these emerging social conditions contributed to the disruption of the soil nutrient cycle. In the introduction to the 1862 edition of hisOrganic Agriculture in its Application to Chemistry and Physiology (better known as Agriculural Chemistry), he described the modern intensive farming practices of Britain as a system of “robbery” that exhausted the nutrients within the soil.85 InCapital, Marx similarly suggested that new agricultural practices, including the application of industrial power, increased the scale of operations, transforming and intensifying the social metabolism while exacerbating the depletion of the soil nutrients.86
As a result, large-scale capitalist agriculture, Marx argued, progressively “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth.”87 Along with the various mechanisms used to intensify production and increase profits, it created a metabolic “rift” in the soil nutrient cycle, “robbing the soil” and “ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility.”88 As it violated the universal metabolism associated with the soil nutrient cycle (also conceived as a law of restitution), the rift undermined soil fertility and the conditions that supported human society. These nutrients from the consumption of food and fiber in the urban centers of the capitalist world were lost to the soil, and were turned into mere waste polluting the cities.
Reflecting on the industrialization of farming, Marx lamented that “agriculture no longer finds the natural conditions of its own production within itself, naturally, arisen, spontaneous, and ready to hand, but these exist as an independent industry separate from it—and, with this separateness the whole complex set of interconnections in which this industry exists is drawn into the sphere of the conditions of agricultural production.”89 In his discussion of “The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent” in volume three of Capital, he explained that the drive to capital accumulation “reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.”90
In the nineteenth century, the rift in the soil nutrient cycle posed a significant environmental problem for European agriculture and societies. Numerous attempts were made to find affordable means of enriching the soil. Bones were ground up and spread across fields, and massive quantities of guano and nitrates were imported from Peru and Chile to Britain and other regions of the global North to sustain agricultural production.91 The social relations associated with this metabolic rift expanded from the local to the national and international levels, as the bounty of the countryside and distant lands was transferred to urban centers of the global North. Just prior to the First World War, the process for producing nitrates by fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere was developed, allowing for the large-scale production of artificial nitrogen fertilizer. Nevertheless, the failure to recycle nutrients still contributes to the ongoing depletion of soil by intensive agricultural practices. As a result, the metabolic rift in the soil nutrient cycle remains a persistent problem of the modern social metabolic order.92
Dickens’s 2004 book Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, Changing Ourselves highlighted the important advances of the second stage of ecosocialism, especially the centrality of a historical-materialist conception of both nature and society, the nature-society dialectic, and metabolic analysis. He engaged a broad range of Marx’s works, exploring the depth of Marx’s ecology. He considered how distinct modes of production involved different demands and interactions with the larger environment, and explained—based on earlier research into “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”—that “the notion of an ecological rift, one separating humanity and nature and violating the principles of ecological sustainability, continues to be helpful for understanding today’s social and environmental risks.”93 Importantly, Dickens showed how to extend this analysis to contemporary environmental problems, especially those associated with cities. He proposed that “three metabolic problems” plague modern cities, namely “the provision of an adequate water supply, the effective disposal of sewage and the control of air pollution.” These problems highlight how “humanity’s metabolism with nature [is] not being ultimately destroyed but [is] being overloaded in the context of a particular kind of social and spatial organization.”94
Marxist metabolic research continues to thrive. In many ways, as the late Del Weston argued in The Political Economy of Global Warming, the “metabolic rift is at the crux of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism, denoting the disjuncture between social systems and the rest of nature.”95 It has been employed to analyze metabolic relations and ecological rifts in contemporary agricultural, climatic, oceanic, hydraulic, and forest systems.96 Other theorists have used the concept of the metabolic rift, and Marx’s ecological materialism in general, to develop a “Marxist ecofeminism” that explores the relation between rifts in nature and in gender relations.97
Much of this work examines how the social metabolism of capitalism as a global system has created specific environmental problems in the modern era by transgressing the universal metabolism of nature. The intensification of the social metabolism demands more energy and raw materials, generating an array of ecological contradictions and rifts.98 Other analysts consider how, as capitalism confronts environmental problems or obstacles—such as a shortage or exhaustion of particular natural resources—it pursues a series of shifts and technological fixes to maintain its expansion. In this way, environmental problems are addressed by incorporating new resources into the production process, changing the location of production, or developing new technologies to increase efficiency. Yet far from mending ecological rifts, such shifts often simply create new cumulative problems, generating additional disruptions on a larger scale.99 It is clear that the required “metabolic restoration” necessitates an ecological and social revolution to overturn the social metabolic order of capital—aimed at the creation of a higher society in which the associated producers rationally regulate the social metabolism in accord with the requirements of the universal metabolism of nature, while allowing for the fulfillment of their own human needs.100

Marx and Nature in the Anthropocene: Toward a Critical Synthesis

Horkheimer and Adorno wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment during the Second World War while in exile in the United States. They intended it as an account of the extreme domination of nature and domination of humanity that characterized all of the warring countries, all of which were in various ways heirs of the Enlightenment. It was followed several years later by Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, which argued that through fascism in Europe and social Darwinism in the United States, the domination of nature had provoked a “revolt of nature,” which was being harnessed in reactionary ways to reinforce the domination of both nature and society. For Horkheimer, “whenever nature is exalted as a supreme principle and becomes the weapon of thought against thinking, against civilization, thought manifests a kind of hypocrisy, and so develops an uneasy conscience…. Indeed, the Nazi regime as a revolt of nature became a lie the moment it became conscious of itself as a revolt. The lackey of the very mechanized civilization [capitalism] that it professed to reject, it took over the inherently repressive measures of the latter.”101
Social Darwinism emerged, Horkheimer argued, as “the main growth of the Enlightenment,” and thus represented a repressive force harnessed to a naturalistic revolt against machine civilization, creating an even greater repression. The result, he wrote, was a huge Faustian tragedy. “The history of man’s efforts to subjugate nature,” he explained, “is also the history of man’s subjection of man.”102 Yet, he insisted, there was no going back: “We are the heirs, for better or worse, of the Enlightenment and technological progress. To oppose these by regressing to more primitive stages does not alleviate the permanent crisis they have brought about. On the contrary, such expedients lead from historically reasonable to utterly barbaric forms of social domination.”103Projecting a highly abstract, idealist philosophical argument, he concluded that “the sole way of assisting nature is to unshackle its seeming opposite, independent thought.”104
It was in this context, as indicated above, that Schmidt wrote The Concept of Nature in Marx. As in Horkheimer and Adorno’s work, Schmidt treated the dialectic of the Enlightenment as a form of the domination of nature, from which there was virtually no escape. Schmidt insisted that Marx, like Hegel, saw the labor process as the mere “outsmarting and duping of nature.”105 Even when Marx pointed, according to Schmidt, to nature as a “co-producer” with labor, it was in the context of the promotion of narrow human ends.106 The needs of external nature were entirely “foreign” to Marx’s whole outlook. Bloch’s humane Marxian “philosophy of hope” was thus in reality a hopeless utopian quest, which turned into an empty “apocalyptic vision.”107
Smith accepted the main formulations of Schmidt’s analysis, while inverting the Frankfurt School critique, and promoting the “production of nature” as the Marxian ideal—a view that Smith acknowledged could not be found in Marx himself. Here the problem of the domination of nature simply disappeared before the unceasing expansion of the human production of nature. He thus dismissed the environmental movement’s growing resistance to this unsustainable economic exploitation of nature as “left apocalypticism,” condemning such so-called “apocalypticism” even more absolutely than Schmidt had in his criticism of Bloch’s “apocalyptic vision.” Nature, in Smith’s view, was increasingly without any reality at all, outside of its production by human beings.108
It is here, however, that we discover, by way of contrast to the social monism of the production of nature thesis, the liberatory potential that still lingered in the work of the more adamantly socialist-humanist thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. For in their concern with the domination of nature alongside the domination of humanity, the more critical and praxis-oriented representatives of the Frankfurt School never ceased to notice the contradictions of capitalism and the possibility of transcending contemporary reality. At the very inception of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, in 1932, Erich Fromm, in his seminal paper “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Philosophy,” pointed to Marx’s notion of the labor process as a metabolic relation, an integrated dialectic of nature and society.109 Here he underscored the significance of Bukharin’s 1925 book Historical Materialism, often dismissed for its mechanistic materialism, for its insight into this aspect of Marx’s analysis.
Georg Lukács, writing only a few years after History and Class Consciousness (in his Tailism manuscript of 1925–26)—though this reflected in part his break with Western Marxism—argued that a meaningful dialectics of nature in Marx was embodied in his theory of the labor process as the metabolic relation between humanity and nature. What is more, the fact that “human life is based on the metabolism with nature” meant, for Lukács, that “certain truths which we acquire in the process of carrying out this metabolism have a general validity.”110
Marcuse, the most directly ecological of the early Frankfurt School thinkers (though this was mainly manifested in his later writings), declared: “History is also grounded in nature. And Marxist theory has the least justification to ignore the metabolism between the human being and nature, and to denounce the insistence on this natural soil of society as a regressive ideological conception.”111
In Marcuse’s more hopeful, dissenting Frankfurt School vision, rooted in Marx’sEconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts, it was possible to conceive of an ecologically based liberation movement. “What is happening,” he wrote inCounter-Revolution and Revolt, “is the discovery (or rather rediscovery) of nature as an ally in the struggle against the exploitative societies in which the violation of nature aggravates the violation of man. The discovering of the liberating forces of nature and their vital role in the construction of a free society becomes a new force in social change.”112
Dickens likewise drew inspiration from Marx’s early writings, emphasizing in his early Society and Nature: Towards a Green Social Theory that a sociology of ecological liberation could be developed on the basis of the work of the young Marx. In his later book, Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, Changing Ourselves, Dickens criticized Horkheimer and Adorno’s “fearsome anti-Enlightenment critique” as sheer “pessimism.”113 Instead, Dickens argued for a more positive, ecological-revolutionary vision, rooted in Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. “Marx’s early [naturalist-humanist] background,” he observed,
led him to undertake no less than an analysis of what would now be called “environmental sustainability.” In particular, he developed the idea of a “rift” in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature, one seen as an emergent feature of capitalist society…. The notion of an ecological rift, one separating humanity and nature and violating the principles of ecological sustainability, continues to be helpful for understanding today’s social and environmental risks.114
The goal ultimately needed to be the creation of a sustainable and egalitarian society, able to “mend the ‘metabolic rift’ between nature and society.”115
Still, not all on the left would agree with second-stage ecosocialists in this respect; nor with the need to focus on the question of the ecological rift or domination of nature engendered by capitalist society. According to Smith, writing in the 2007Socialist Register, the Frankfurt School—referring mainly to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Schmidt—always dualistically conceived the “domination of nature” as “an inevitable condition of the human metabolism with nature.” Similarly, “ecological essentialists [his term for radical ecologists generally] recognize a parallel attempt at domination, but they see it not as inevitable but as a destructive social choice.” In sharp contrast, Smith’s own “production-of-nature thesis” rejected both of these so-called dualistic views: “The domination-of-nature thesis [encompassing both perspectives] is a cul-de-sac…the only political alternatives are an anti-social (literally) politics of nature or else resignation to a kinder, gentler domination.”116For Smith, “The externality and universality of nature…are not to be taken as ontological givens. The ideology of external-cum-universal nature harks back to a supposedly edenic, pre-human, or supra-human world.”117
Indeed, Smith, in the name of combatting dualism, went so far as to dismiss the entire ecological struggle to mitigate climate change, writing: “In the end, the attempt to distinguish social [i.e., anthropogenic] vis-à-vis natural contributions to climate change is not only a fool’s debate but a fool’s philosophy: it leaves sacrosanct the chasm between nature and society—nature in one corner, society in the other—which is precisely the shibboleth of modern western thought that the ‘production of nature’ thesis sought to corrode. One does not have to be a ‘global warming denier’…to be a skeptic concerning the way that a global public is being stampeded into accepting wave upon wave of technical economic, and social change, framed as necessary for immediate planetary survival.”118 On this basis, he condemned what he called “the apocalyptic tone of imminent environmental doom,” associated with much of science and the environmental movement.119
By inverting the Frankfurt School’s critical domination of nature thesis, and turning that into an uncritical production of nature notion (a kind of anthropomorphic social monism), Smith, Castree, and other like-minded thinkers effectively de-naturalize social theory to an extreme, imposing ecological blinders.120 What is excluded is a more developed, dialectical perspective, pointing to the alienation of nature under capitalism.
In contrast, the enduring value of Marx’s ecological materialism, incorporating such critical concepts as the universal metabolism of nature, the social metabolism, and the metabolic rift, is that it points in a co-evolutionary and co-revolutionary direction—highlighting the need for a new order of social metabolic reproduction rooted in substantive equality.121 Here social and natural necessity, natural science and social science, humanity and the earth become one human-mediated totality, in a wider universal struggle—one pointing to a revolutionary dialectic of humanity and the earth in which the necessary outcome is a world of sustainable human development. It is this higher synthesis of the various Marxian ecological and social critiques—building on the foundations of historical materialism—that we are most in need of today.

Notes

  1. ↩Russell Jacoby, “Western Marxism,” in Tom Bottomore, ed.,A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Fredric Jameson,Valences of the Dialectic(London: Verso, 2009),6–7; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 215–25.
  2. ↩Noel Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,”Capital and Class 72 (2000): 5–36; Neil Smith,Uneven Development (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
  3. ↩Paul Burkett, “Nature in Marx Reconsidered,”Organization & Environment10, no. 2 (1997): 164.
  4. ↩Alfred Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1970), 9.
  5. ↩Smith,Uneven Development, 31-2.
  6. ↩Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,The Dialectic of Enlightenment(New York: Continuum, 1972).
  7. ↩Horkheimer and Adorno,The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 224.
  8. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 154–55. The idea of a “reconciliation” of nature and humanity was a constant theme of the Frankfurt School. In practice, however, it took the form of negative criticisms of various ways of reconciling nature with humanity and society. See Martin Jay,The Dialectical Imagination (New York: Little, Brown, 1973), 267–73.
  9. ↩Frederick Engels, “Dialectics of Nature,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 460–64; Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 155–56, 160.
  10. ↩References here to the Frankfurt School’s critique of the “dialectic of the Enlightenment” (and of Marx and nature) relate primarily to Schmidt, as well as to Horkheimer and Adorno. It excludes most notably—unless otherwise indicated—Herbert Marcuse, who, though reflecting some of the same tendencies, was to respond affirmatively and dialectically to the growth of environmentalism in the 1970s.
  11. ↩On Schmidt’s criticisms of Bloch and Brecht, see Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 124–28, 154–63. See also Bertolt Brecht,Tales from the Calendar(London: Methuen, 1966), Ernst Bloch,The Principle of Hope, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
  12. ↩The first of the two polemical attacks was directly referred to by Schmidt. The second was not noted by Schmidt himself and was simply a product of his strict adherence to Western Marxism’s criticism of dialectical materialism. Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 9.
  13. ↩Schmidt recognizes the philosophical significance of Marx’s view of nature as the ultimate source of all wealth, without realizing its importance to Marx’s political-economic and ecological critique. Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 77–78. On Marx’s value theory and ecological critique, see Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 53–64.
  14. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 76, 80, 88–90.
  15. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 15, 59, 63–64, 90, 98, 139, 157, 162.
  16. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 139.
  17. ↩Theodor W. Adorno,Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1973), 244.
  18. ↩John Bellamy Foster and Hannah Holleman, “Weber and the Environment,”American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 6 (2012): 1660–62.
  19. ↩Horkheimer quoted in William Leiss,The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon, 1974), 154.
  20. ↩Max Horkheimer,The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974), 123–27.
  21. ↩See Herbert Marcuse,Counter-Revolution and Revolt(Boston: Beacon, 1972), 59–78;The Aesthetic Dimension(Boston: Beacon, 1978), 16.
  22. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 154.
  23. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 156; see also Jay,The Dialectical Imagination, 259, 347.
  24. ↩“Western Marxism” arose as a specific tradition in the West, defined in part by its rejection of the dialectics of nature. See Jacoby, “Western Marxism,” 523–26.
  25. ↩Leiss,Domination of Nature, 217.
  26. ↩Smith,Uneven Development, 44.
  27. ↩Burkett, “Nature in Marx Reconsidered,” 173.
  28. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 78–79.
  29. ↩Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 637.
  30. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 11.
  31. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 88.
  32. ↩Marx took his wider ecological notion of metabolism initially from the work of his friend the physician Roland Daniels, who may have been the first to point toward a larger ecosystemic perspective. See Roland Daniels,Mikrokosmos(New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 49. (Kohei Saito first brought this to our attention in personal correspondence. We are also grateful to Joseph Fracchia for his translations from the German in this regard). Later Justus von Liebig’s analysis of the soil problem, in which he incorporated the metabolism concept, proved decisive for Marx. See the discussion in John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 147–54; Kohei Saito, “The Emergence of Marx’s Critique of Modern Agriculture: Ecological Insights from His Excerpt Notebooks,”Monthly Review66, no. 5 (October 2014): 25–46. Despite Schmidt’s claim that Marx took his analysis of metabolism from Jacob Moleschott, there is no evidence of this, while considerable evidence suggests Marx’s reliance on other thinkers. See Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 86–88.
  33. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 11, 76, 90, 176. Reiner Grundmann considered Marx’s metabolism argument the strongest of the three approaches to ecological questions (the first being “capitalist production as a cause of ecological problems,” and the second the alienation of nature). Yet Grundmann, like Schmidt, interpreted Marx’s metabolism argument in simple instrumentalist-mechanistic terms, thereby losing sight of its complexity and missing the importance of Marx’s theory of ecological crisis. See Reiner Grundmann,Marxism and Ecology(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 90–98, 121–22.
  34. ↩See Ted Benton, ed.,The Greening of Marxism(New York: Guilford, 1996); Mark J. Smith,Ecologism(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 71–73.
  35. ↩Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Preface,” in Brenda Swann and Francis Aprahamian, eds.,J.D. Bernal(London: Verso, 1999), xix.
  36. ↩On the appropriation problem, see John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,”American Journal of Sociology105, no. 2 (1999): 391–96.
  37. ↩Perry Anderson,In the Tracks of Historical Materialism(London: Verso, 1983), 83.
  38. ↩Russell Jacoby sees the split that occurred in Marxism in terms of their distinct appropriations of Hegel. “Soviet Marxism,” he wrote, “was regularly sustained by a scientific Hegel, and European Marxism was regularly sustained by a historical Hegel.” See Russell Jacoby,The Dialectic of Defeat(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 57–58.
  39. ↩Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits,”New Left Review178 (1989): 55, 60, 64.
  40. ↩André Gorz,Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology(London: Verso, 1994), vii–9, 29, 100; Gorz,Ecology as Politics(London: Pluto, 1983).
  41. ↩James O’Connor,Natural Causes(New York: Guilford, 1998), 160.
  42. ↩Alain Lipietz, “Political Ecology and the Future of Marxism,”Capitalism Nature Socialism11, no. 1 (2000): 74–75.
  43. ↩Michael Redclift,Development and the Environmental Crisis(New York: Methuen, 1984), 7.
  44. ↩Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 745; see also Paul Burkett, “Nature’s ‘Free Gifts’ and the Ecological Significance of Value,”Capital and Class23 (1999): 89–110; Bukett, “Nature in Marx Reconsidered,” 173–74.
  45. ↩Ted Benton, “Introduction to Part Two,” in Benton, ed.,The Greening of Marxism, 103–10.
  46. ↩Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,” 27–28.
  47. ↩Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,” 28; Noel Castree, “Marxism, Capitalism, and the Production of Nature,” in Noel Castree and Bruce Braun, eds.,Social Nature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 204–05.
  48. ↩Castree points to these contradictions in Smith’s analysis, while nonetheless arguing that Smith’s approach to the production of nature is basically the one on which Marxian theorists should build—if in a more nuanced way.
  49. ↩Smith,Uneven Development, 31, 44–47, 78–91, 244–47; Neil Smith, “Nature as an Accumulation Strategy,”Socialist Register 2007(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 23–28.
  50. ↩Smith,Uneven Development, 31.
  51. ↩Smith,Uneven Devleopment., 247.
  52. ↩Noel Castree, “The Nature of Produced Nature: Materiality and Knowledge Construction in Marxism,”Antipode27, no. 1 (1995): 16–18.
  53. ↩Castree, “The Nature of Produced Nature,” 17.
  54. ↩Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,” 9–10, 21.
  55. ↩Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,” 8. It should be noted that since Smith and Castree had already faulted Marx for being dualistic, what ecosocialists were actually being charged with here was not a misinterpretation of Marx, but a failure to conform to Smith’s own monistic production of nature thesis. Contrary to such views, our own assessment is that neither Marx nor his major followers were dualistic. Rather, what Smith and Castree in their mechanistic-monistic worldviews mistook for dualism was really a dialectical analysis of the interpenetration of opposites.
  56. ↩Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,” 17.
  57. ↩Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,” 13–15; and “The Nature of Produced Nature,” 20–21, 24. Castree refers abstractly here to the “materiality of nature” but denies its “externality” or “universality,” which he characterizes as “essentialist.”
  58. ↩Castree, “Marxism and the Production of Nature,” 17; Jason W. Moore,Capitalism in the Web of Life(London: Verso, 2015), 46, 80–86.
  59. ↩See William R. Catton Jr. and Riley E. Dunlap, “Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm,”American Sociologist13 (1978): 41–49; John Bellamy Foster, “The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism,”Organization & Environment 25, no. 3 (2012): 1–27.
  60. ↩Noel Castree, “Capitalism and the Marxist Critique of Political Ecology,” in Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds.,The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology(London: Routledge, 2015), 291; Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus,Break Through(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
  61. ↩Castree, “Capitalism and the Marxist Critique of Political Ecology,” 291.
  62. ↩In his more recent work, Castree relies heavily on the analysis of the French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, a senior fellow of the Breakthrough Institute.
  63. ↩Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,Collected Works, vol. 30 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 54–66; Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1991), 949.
  64. ↩Peter Dickens,Society and Nature: Towards a Green Social Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 80, see also 76–81, 175–95 for the broader discussions noted above.
  65. ↩Paul Burkett,Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), 8–9.
  66. ↩Burkett,Marx and Nature, 9.
  67. ↩Foster,Marx’s Ecology.
  68. ↩Foster,Marx’s Ecology; Foster, Clark, and York,The Ecological Rift.
  69. ↩Marina Fischer-Kowalski, “Society’s Metabolism: The Intellectual History of Material Flow Analysis, Part I, 1860–1970,”Journal of Industrial Ecology2, no. 1 (1998): 62.
  70. ↩Saito, “The Emergence of Marx’s Critique of Modern Agriculture.”
  71. ↩Justus von Liebig,Letters on Modern Agriculture(London: Walton and Maberly, 1859), 175–83, 220; Saito, “The Emergence of Marx’s Critique of Modern Agriculture”; Foster,Marx’s Ecology, 160–62.
  72. ↩Karl Marx,Texts on Method (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 209; see also Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 553.
  73. ↩Karl Marx,Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 109.
  74. ↩Marx,Capital, vol. 1, 286-87.
  75. ↩Marx,Capital, vol. 1, 283.
  76. ↩John Bellamy Foster, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,”Monthly Review65, no. 7 (December 2013): 8.
  77. ↩Marx and Engels,Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66.
  78. ↩Georg Lukács,Labour (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 34.
  79. ↩Foster, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” 8.
  80. ↩Foster, “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” 8.
  81. ↩Foster,Marx’s Ecology; Foster, Clark, and York,The Ecological Rift; István Mészáros,Beyond Capital(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995).
  82. ↩Paul Sweezy, “Capitalism and the Environment,”Monthly Review56, no. 5 (October 2004): 86–93.
  83. ↩Karl Marx,The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 162–63.
  84. ↩Foster,Marx’s Ecology; Erland Mårald, “Everything Circulates,”Environment and History8 (2002): 65–84; Marx,Capital, vol. 1.
  85. ↩Liebig,Letters on Modern Agriculture, 175–83, 220; Foster,Marx’s Ecology, 149–54.
  86. ↩Marx,Capital, vol. 1, 637–39.
  87. ↩Marx,Capital, vol. 1, 637–38.
  88. ↩Marx,Capital, vol. 1, 637–38,Capital, vol. 3, 949.
  89. ↩Karl Marx,Grundrisse (New York: Penguin, 1993), 527.
  90. ↩Karl Marx,Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 949.
  91. ↩Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, “Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift: Unequal Exchange and the Guano/Nitrates Trade,”International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50, nos. 3–4 (2009): 311–34.
  92. ↩Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,”Monthly Review62, no. 8 (January 2011): 1–25; Phillip Mancus, “Nitrogen Fertilizer Dependency and its Contradictions: A Theoretical Exploration of Social-Ecological Metabolism,”Rural Sociology72, no. 2 (2007): 269–88.
  93. ↩Peter Dickens,Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, Changing Ourselves(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004), 81; John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,”American Journal of Sociology105, no. 2 (1999): 366–405.
  94. ↩Dickens,Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, 84–85.
  95. ↩Del Weston,The Political Economy of Global Warming (New York: Routledge, 2014), 66.
  96. ↩Kelly Austin and Brett Clark, “Tearing Down Mountains: Using Spatial and Metabolic Analysis to Investigate the Socio-Ecological Contradictions of Coal Extraction in Appalachia,”Critical Sociology 38, no. 3 (2012): 437–57; Brett Clark and Richard York, “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift,”Theory and Society34, no. 4 (2005): 391–428; Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, “The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the Oceanic Crisis within Capitalist Production,”Organization & Environment 18, no. 4 (2005): 422–44; Matthew T. Clement, “A Basic Accounting of Variation in Municipal Solid-Waste Generation at the County Level in Texas, 2006: Groundwork for Applying Metabolic-Rift Theory to Waste Generation,”Rural Sociology74, no. 3 (2009): 412–29; Ryan Gunderson, “The Metabolic Rifts of Livestock Agribusiness,”Organization & Environment 24, no. 4 (2001): 404–22; Stefano B. Longo, “Mediterranean Rift: Socio-Ecological Transformations in the Sicilian Bluefin Tuna Fishery,”Critical Sociology 38, no. 3 (2012): 417–36; Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark,The Tragedy of the Commodity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization”; Mancus, “Nitrogen Fertilizer.”
  97. ↩Pamela Odih,Watershed in Marxist Ecofeminism (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014); Ariel Salleh, “From Eco-Sufficiency to Global Justice” in Salleh, ed.,Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice (London: Pluto, 2009), 291–312.
  98. ↩Paul Burkett,Marxism and Ecological Economics (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Foster, Clark, and York,The Ecological Rift.
  99. ↩Brett Clark and Richard York, “Rifts and Shifts,”Monthly Review 60, no. 6 (November 2008): 13–24; Longo, Clausen, and Clark,The Tragedy of the Commodity; Weston,The Political Economy of Global Warming; Richard York and Brett Clark, “Critical Materialism: Science, Technology, and Environmental Sustainability,”Sociological Inquiry 80, no. 3 (2010): 475–99; Richard York and Brett Clark, “Nothing New Under the Sun? The Old False Promise of New Technology,”Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 33, nos. 2–3 (2010): 203–24.
  100. ↩For an excellent elaboration of Marx’s concept of “metabolic restoration,” see Weston,The Political Economy of Global Warming, 168–78. See also Rebecca Clausen, “Healing the Rift,”Monthly Review 59, no. 1 (May 2007): 40–52; Rebecca Clausen, Brett Clark, and Stefano B Longo, “Metabolic Rifts and Restoration: Agricultural Crises and the Potential of Cuba’s Organic, Socialist Approach to Food Production,”World Review of Political Economy 6, no. 1 (2015): 4–32; Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
  101. ↩Horkheimer,Eclipse of Reason, 123.
  102. ↩Horkheimer,Eclipse of Reason, 105.
  103. ↩Horkheimer,Eclipse of Reason, 127.
  104. ↩Horkheimer,Eclipse of Reason, 127. On the question of what Horkheimer meant by the Nazi “revolt of nature,” see Franz Josef Bruggemeier, Marc Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, eds.,How Green Were the Nazis?(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005).
  105. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 157.
  106. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 162.
  107. ↩Schmidt,The Concept of Nature in Marx, 162.
  108. ↩Smith,Uneven Development, 247.
  109. ↩Erich Fromm,The Crisis of Psychoanalysis(Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970), 153–54. See also Nikolai Bukharin,Historical Materialism(New York: International Publishers, 1925).
  110. ↩Georg Lukács,A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’: Tailism and the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2003), 96, 106, 113–14, 130–31; Georg Lukács,History and Class Consciousness(London: Merlin, 1968), xvii; Georg Lukács,Conversations with Lukács(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1974), 43.
  111. ↩Herbert Marcuse,The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon, 1978), 16.
  112. ↩Marcuse,Counter-Revolution, 59–60.
  113. ↩Dickens,Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, 10.
  114. ↩Dickens,Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, 80.
  115. ↩Dickens,Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, 144.
  116. ↩Smith, “Nature as an Accumulation Strategy,” 24–25.
  117. ↩Smith, “Nature as an Accumulation Strategy,” 23.
  118. ↩Smith,Uneven Development, 244.
  119. ↩Smith, “Nature as an Accumulation Strategy,” 27–29; Smith,Uneven Development,247.
  120. ↩See Moore,Capitalism in the Web of Life, 85–86. Moore presents a social “monist and relational” view, rooted in a metaphorical concept of “singular metabolism,” and defined in terms of “bundled” society-nature relations, in which he equates capitalism and “world ecology,” rejecting Marx’s own theory of metabolic rift.
  121. ↩On coevolution, see Richard B. Norgaard,Development Betrayed(London: Routledge, 1994). On co-revolution, see David Harvey,The Enigma of Capital(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 228–31. On a new order of social metabolic reproduction, see Mészáros,Beyond Capital, 170–77.