"In London they
can find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human
beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense" - Karl Marx
The socialist task is to feed the world and protect the
planet. Marx was scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air,
rivers, seas and soil can be treated as a "free gift of nature" to
business."
Today, with climate change threatening life itself, the
ecological contradictions of capitalism have reached truly dire proportions.
The environmental crisis will undoubtedly play a far larger role in the demise
of the system than Marx and Engels realised 150 years ago.
Karl Marx’s analysis of the environment under capitalism
shows how saving the planet is inextricably linked to transforming our society.
Exploitation, war, hunger and poverty were not problems that could be solved by
the market system, he said. Rather, they were inescapable outcomes of the
system itself. This is because capitalism is dominated by corporations devoted
to profit above all else. According to Marx, capitalism is an economic system
profoundly at odds with a sustainable planet. The exploitation of nature is as
fundamental to the profit system as the exploitation of working people. Capitalist
farming is unsustainable because it inevitably starves the soil of nutrients.
It is nothing less than "an art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of
robbing the soil" Marx also pointed out that, the development of
civilisation and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the
destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their
conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
Capitalism has created a metabolic rift between human beings
and the Earth. Karl Marx came up with the term “metabolic rift” to explain the
crack or rift that capitalism has created between social and natural systems,
humans and nature. This rift, he claimed, led to the exploitation of the
environment and ecological crisis. Marx argued that we humans are all part of
nature and he was also the first one who saw social societies as an organism
with a metabolism similar to that of humans. The general idea is that
disruptions, or interruptions, in natural cycles and processes creates an
metabolic rift between nature and social systems which leads to a buildup of
waste and in the end to the degradation of our environment. The growth under
capitalism of large-scale agriculture and long distance trade only intensifies
and extends the rift. Large-scale industry and large-scale mechanised
agriculture work together in this destructive process, with industry and
commerce supplying agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil. All of
this is an expression of the antagonistic relation between town and country
under capitalism. As Engels later put it: “The
present poisoning of the air, water and land can only be put an end to by the
fusion of town and country” under “one
single vast plan.” Despite its potential cost to society in terms of increased
labor time, he viewed this fusion as “no
more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between
capitalist and wage-workers.”
The market system is incapable of preserving the environment
for future generations because it cannot take into account the long-term
requirements of people and planet. The competition between individual
enterprises and industries to make a profitable return on their investment
tends to exclude rational and sustainable planning. Because capitalism promotes
the accumulation of capital on a never-ending and always expanding scale it
cannot be sustainable. Engels explained this destructive dynamic:
"As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange
for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results
must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or
merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted
profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes
of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural
effects of the same actions"
We disrupt the natural ecosystem at our peril, Engels
warned. "Let us not, however,
flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For
each victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the
first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third
places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel
out the first." Engels added: "At
every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a
conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature."
On the other hand, "we have the advantage of all other creatures of being
able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." That is, we can
organise society in step with nature's limits.
This is impossible unless the profit motive is removed from
determining production in human society and a system of participatory democracy
and rational planning is built in its stead. A rational agriculture, which
needs either small independent farmers producing on their own, or the action of
the associated producers, is impossible under modern capitalist conditions; and
existing conditions demand a rational regulation of the metabolic relation
between human beings and the earth, pointing beyond capitalist society to
socialism and communism. Engels argued that only the working people organised
as "associated producers" can "govern the human metabolism with
nature in a rational way". This "requires something more than
mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode
of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social
order."
For Marx and Engels, people and nature are not two separate
things . Marx wrote that: “Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and
he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that
man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is
linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” Marx goes so far as to define
communism as “the unity of being of man with nature.”
The most basic feature of communism in Marx’s projection is
its overcoming of capitalism’s social separation of the producers from
necessary conditions of production. This new social union entails a complete
decommodification of labor power plus a new set of communal property rights.
Communist or “associated” production is planned and carried out by the
producers and communities themselves, without the class-based intermediaries of
wage-labor, market, and state. Marx often motivates and illustrates these basic
features in terms of the primary means and end of associated production: free
human development.
Marx does not see this communal property as conferring a
right to overexploit land and other natural conditions in order to serve the
production and consumption needs of the associated producers. Instead, he
foresees an eclipse of capitalist notions of land ownership by a communal
system of user rights and responsibilities:
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