Envisioning ecological revolution -- Excerpt from John Bellamy Foster's new book, `The Ecological Revolution'
With the permission of John Bellamy Foster and Monthly Review Press, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal is publishing an exclusive excerpt from Foster's latest book, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.
Links readers are encouraged to purchase a copy of this important new book HERE.
The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital’s rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet.
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“In this time of growing ecological and economic crisis, John Bellamy Foster’s voice stands out like no other. In his new book, The Ecological Revolution, he demonstrates that questions of ecology cannot be separated from questions of economics, and that building a truly sustainable future means putting people and the planet before profit.”
— Howard Zinn.
author of A People’s History of the United States
“Foster is the most systematic thinker on red-green politics writing today—and he is quite clear about What is to be done! In these essays, he applies Marx’s theory of metabolic rift to elucidate a variety of contexts—the Pentagon’s pursuit of oil, neoliberalism and the Jo’burg Manifesto, the poverty of contemporary sociology, imperialism and ecological debt, critique of the New Sustainability Paradigm—all the while keeping his synthesis of historical scholarship, natural scientific detail, and Marxist theory readily accessible to a wide readership. Here is reason and discipline driven by passion and care.”
Research Associate in Political Economy
at the University of Sydney,
author of Ecofeminism as Politics
Envisioning ecological revolution
By John Bellamy Foster
The goal of ecological revolution, as I shall present it here, has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.
This is no longer a very controversial proposition. To be sure, there are different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that this raises. At one extreme, there are those who believe that since these are human problems arising from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need is ingenuity and the will to act. At the other extreme, there are those who believe that the world ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to control, giving rise to the gloomiest forebodings. Although often seen as polar opposites, these views nonetheless share a common basis. As Paul Sweezy observed, they each reflect “the belief that if present trends continue to operate, it is only a matter of time until the human species irredeemably fouls its own nest.”[1]
Warning bells
The more we
learn about current environmental trends, the more the unsustainability of our
present course is brought home to us. Among the warning signs:
• There is
now a virtual certainty that the critical threshold of a 2°C (3.6° F) increase
in average world temperature above the pre-industrial level will soon be
crossed due to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientists
believe that climate change at this level will have portentous implications for
the world’s ecosystems. The question is no longer whether significant
• There are
growing worries in the scientific community that the estimates of the rate of
global warming provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC),
•
Experiments at the International Rice Institute and elsewhere have led
scientists to conclude that with each 1°C (1.8°F) increase in temperature,
rice, wheat and corn yields could drop
• It is now
increasingly believed that the world is approaching peak crude oil production.
The world economy is, therefore, confronting more constrained oil supplies,
despite a rapidly increasing demand. All of this points to a growing world
energy crisis and mounting resource wars.[4]
• The planet
is facing global water shortages due to the drawing down of irreplaceable
aquifers, which make up the bulk of the world’s fresh water supplies. This
poses a threat to global agriculture, which has become a bubble economy based
on the unsustainable
• Two-thirds
of the world’s major fish stocks are currently being fished at or above their
capacity. Over the last half-century 90 per cent of large predatory fish in the
world’s oceans have been
• The
species extinction rate is the highest in sixty-five million years with the
prospect of cascading extinctions, as the last remnants of intact ecosystems
are removed. Already the extinction rate is in some cases (as in the case of
bird species) one hundred times the “benchmark” or “natural” rate. Scientists
have pinpointed twenty-five hot spots on land that account for 44 per cent of
all vascular plant species and 35 per cent of all species in four vertebrate groups,
while taking up only 1.4 per cent of the world’s land surface. All of these hot
spots are now threatened with rapid annihilation due to human causes. According
to Stephen Pimm and Clinton Jenkins, writing in Scientific American:
“Substantial tracts of intact wilderness remain: humid tropical forests such as
the Amazon and
• According
to a study published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the world
economy exceeded the earth’s regenerative capacity in 1980 and by 1999 had gone
beyond it by as much as 20 per cent. This means, according to the study’s
authors, that “it would require 1.2 earths, or one earth for 1.2 years, to regenerate
what humanity used in 1999.”[8]
• The
question of the ecological collapse of past civilizations from
These and
other warning bells indicate that the present human relation to the environment
is no longer supportable. The most developed capitalist countries have the
largest per capita ecological footprints, demonstrating that the entire course
of world capitalist development at
The main
response of the ruling capitalist class, when confronted with the growing
environmental challenge, is to fiddle while
In stark
contrast, many environmentalists now believe that technological revolution
alone will be insufficient to solve the problem and that a more far-reaching
social revolution aimed at transforming the present mode of production is
required.
Great Transition scenarios
Historically,
addressing this question of the ecological transformation of society means that
we need to ascertain: (1) where the world capitalist system is heading at
present; (2) the extent to which it can alter its course by technological or
other means in response to today’s converging
As its name
suggests, the Global Scenario Group employs alternative scenarios to explore
possible paths that society caught in a crisis of ecological sustainability
might take. Their culminating report presents three classes of scenarios:
Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transitions. Each of these
contains two variants. Conventional Worlds consists of Market Forces and Policy
Reform. Barbarization manifests itself in the forms of Breakdown and Fortress World.
Great Transitions is broken down into Eco-communalism and the New
Sustainability Paradigm. Each scenario is associated with different thinkers:
Market Forces with Adam Smith; Policy Reform with John Maynard Keynes and the
authors of the 1987 Brundtland Commission report; Breakdown with Thomas
Malthus; Fortress World with Thomas Hobbes; Eco-communalism with William
Morris, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. F. Schumacher; and the New Sustainability
Paradigm with John Stuart Mill.[11]
Within the
Conventional Worlds scenarios, Market Forces stands for naked capitalism or neoliberalism.
It represents, in the words of the Great Transition report, “the
firestorm of capitalist expansion.”[12] Market Forces is an unfettered
capitalist world order geared to the accumulation
The drive to
amass capital that is central to a Market Forces regime is best captured by
Marx’s general formula of capital (though not referred to in the Great
Transition report itself ). In a society of simple commodity production (an
abstract conception referring to pre-capitalist economic
In the case
of capitalism, or generalized commodity production, however, the circuit of
money and commodities begins and ends with money, or M–C–M. Moreover, since
money is merely a quantitative relationship such an exchange would have no
meaning if the same amount of money was acquired at the end of the process as
exchanged in the beginning, so the general formula for capital, in reality,
takes the form of M–C–M’, where M’ equals M + ∆m or surplus-value. What stands
out, when contrasted with simple commodity production, is that there is no real
end to the process, since the object is not final use but the accumulation of
surplus-value or capital. M–C–M’ in one year, therefore, results in the ∆m being reinvested, leading to M–C–M’’ in the
next year and M–C–M’’’ the year after that, ad infinitum. In other
words, capital by its nature is self-expanding value.[13]
The motor
force behind this drive to accumulation is competition. The competitive
struggle ensures that each capital or firm must grow and, hence, must reinvest
its “earnings” in order to survive. Such a system tends toward exponential
growth punctuated by crises or temporary interruptions in the accumulation
process. The pressures placed on the natural environment are immense and will
lessen only with the weakening and cessation of capitalism itself. During the
last half-century the world economy has grown more than seven-fold while the
biosphere’s capacity to support such expansion has, if anything, diminished due
to human ecological depredations.[14]
The main
assumption of those who advocate a Market Forces solution to the environmental
problem is that it will lead to increasing efficiency in the consumption of
environmental inputs by means of technological revolution and continual market
adjustments. Use of energy, water, and other natural resources will decrease
per unit of economic output. This is often referred to as “dematerialization.” However,
the central implication of this argument is false. Dematerialization, to the
extent that it can be said to exist, has been shown to be a much weaker
tendency than M–C–M’. As the Global Transition report puts it, “The
‘growth effect’ outpaces the ‘efficiency effect.’”[15]
This can be
understood concretely in terms of what has been called the Jevons Paradox,
named after William Stanley Jevons, who published The Coal Question in
1865. Jevons, one of the founders of neoclassical economics, explained that
improvements in steam engines that decreased the use of coal per unit of output
also served to increase the scale of production as more and bigger factories
were built. Hence, increased efficiency in the use of coal had the paradoxical
effect of expanding aggregate coal consumption.[16]
The perils
of the Market Forces model are clearly visible in the environmental depredations
during the two centuries since the advent of industrial capitalism, and
especially in the last half-century. “Rather than abating” under a Market
Forces regime, the Great Transition report declares, “the unsustainable
process of environmental degradation that we observe in today’s world would [continue
to] intensify. The danger of crossing critical thresholds in global systems
would increase, triggering events that would radically transform the planet’s
climate and ecosystems.” Although it is “the tacit ideology” of most
international institutions, Market Forces leads inexorably to ecological and
social disaster and even collapse. The continuation of “‘ business-as-usual’ is
a utopian fantasy.”[17]
A far more
rational basis for hope, the report contends, is found in the Policy Reform
scenario. “The essence of the scenario is the emergence of the political will for
gradually bending the curve of development toward a comprehensive set of
sustainability targets,” including peace, human
The Policy
Reform approach is prefigured in various international agreements such as the
Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the environmental reform measures advanced
by the Earth Summits in
The failure
of both of the Conventional Worlds scenarios to alleviate the problem of
ecological decline means that Barbarization threatens: either Breakdown or the
Fortress World. Breakdown is self-explanatory and to be avoided at all costs.
The Fortress World emerges when “powerful regional and international actors
comprehend the perilous forces leading to Breakdown” and are able to guard
their own interests sufficiently to create “protected enclaves.”[20] Fortress
World is a planetary apartheid system, gated and maintained by force, in which
the gap between global rich and global poor constantly widens and the
differential access to environmental resources and amenities increases sharply.
It consists of “bubbles of privilege amidst oceans of misery.... The elite[s] have
halted barbarism at their gates and enforced a kind of environmental management
and uneasy stability.”[21] The general state of the planetary environment,
however, would continue to deteriorate in this scenario leading either to a
complete ecological Breakdown or to the achievement through revolutionary
struggle of a more egalitarian society, such as Eco-communalism.
This
description of the Fortress World is remarkably similar to the scenario
released in the 2003 Pentagon report, Abrupt Climate Change and Its
Implications for
Arguably
naked capitalism and resource wars are already propelling the world in this
direction at present, though without a cause as immediately earth-shaking as
abrupt climate change. With the advent of the “War on Terror,” unleashed by the
Still, from
the standpoint of the Global Scenario Group, the Barbarization scenarios are
there simply to warn us of the worst possible dangers of ecological and social
decline. A Great Transition, it is argued, is necessary if Barbarization is to
be avoided.
Theoretically,
there are two Great Transitions scenarios envisioned by the Global Scenario
Group: Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability Paradigm. Yet Eco-communalism
is never discussed in any detail, on the grounds that for this kind of
transformation to come about it would be necessary for world society first to
pass through Barbarization. The Global Scenario Group authors see the social
revolution of Eco-communalism as lying on the other side of Jack London’s Iron
Heel. The discussion of Great Transition is thus confined to the New
Sustainability
The essence
of the New Sustainability Paradigm is that of a radical ecological
transformation that goes against unbridled “capitalist hegemony” but stops
short of full social revolution. It is to be carried out primarily through
changes in values and lifestyles rather than the transformation
In the
explicitly utopian scenario of the New Sustainability Paradigm, the United
Nations is transformed into the “World Union,” a true global federation.
Globalization has become “civilized.” The world market is fully integrated and
harnessed for equality and sustainability not just wealth generation. The War
on Terrorism has resulted in the defeat of the terrorists. Civil society,
represented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), plays a leading role in
society at both the national and global levels. Voting is electronic. Poverty
is eradicated. Typical inequality has
Four agents
of change are said to have combined to bring all of this about: (1) giant
transnational corporations; (2) intergovernmental organizations such as the
United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade
Organization; (3) civil society acting through NGOs; and (4) a globally aware,
environmentally-conscious, democratically organized world population.[25]
Underpinning
this economically is the notion of a stationary state, as depicted by Mill in
his 1848 work, Principles of Political Economy, and advanced today by
the ecological economist Herman Daly and Whiteheadian process philosopher John
Cobb. Most classical economists—including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas
Malthus, and Karl Marx—saw the specter of a stationary state as presaging the
demise of the bourgeois political economy. In contrast, Mill, who Marx (in the afterword to the second German edition of
Capital) accused of a “shallow syncretism,” saw the stationary state as
somehow compatible with existing productive relations, requiring only changes
in distribution.[26]
In the New
Sustainability Paradigm scenario, which takes Mill’s view of the stationary state
as its inspiration, the basic institutions of capitalism remain intact, as do
the fundamental relations of power, but a shift in lifestyle and consumer
orientation mean that the economy is no longer geared to economic growth and
the enlargement of profits, but to efficiency, equity, and qualitative
improvements in life. A capitalist society formerly driven to expanded
reproduction through investment of surplus product (or surplus-value) has been
replaced with a system of simple reproduction (Mill’s stationary state), in
which the surplus is consumed rather than invested. The vision is one of a
cultural revolution supplementing technological revolution, and radically
changing the ecological and social landscape of capitalist society, without
fundamentally altering the productive, property, and power relations that
define the system.
In my view,
there are both logical and historical problems with this projection. It
combines the weakest elements of utopian thinking (weaving a future out of mere
hopes and wishes) with a “practical” desire to avoid a sharp break with the
existing system.[27] The failure of the Global Scenario Group to address its
own scenario of Eco-communalism is part and parcel of this perspective, which
seeks to elude the question of the more thoroughgoing social transformation that
a genuine Great Transition would require.
The result
is a vision of the future that is contradictory to an extreme. Private
corporations are institutions with one and only one purpose: the pursuit of
profit. The idea of turning them to entirely different and opposing social ends
is reminiscent of the long-abandoned notions of the “soulful corporation” that
emerged for a short time in the 1950s and then vanished in the harsh light of
reality. Many changes associated with the New Sustainability Paradigm would require
a class revolution to bring about. Yet this is excluded from the scenario
itself. Instead, the Global Scenario Group authors engage in a kind of magical
thinking—denying that fundamental changes in the relations of production must
accompany (and sometimes even precede) changes in values. No less than in the
case of the Policy Reform Scenario—as pointed out in The Great Transition report
itself—the “God of Mammon” will inevitably overwhelm a value-based Great
Transition that seeks to escape the challenge of the revolutionary transformation
of the whole society.
An ecological-social revolution
Put simply,
my argument is that a global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only
occur as part of a larger social—and I would insist, socialist—revolution. Such
a revolution, were it to generate the conditions of equality, sustainability,
and human freedom worthy of a genuine Great
In
conceiving such a social and ecological revolution, we can derive inspiration,
as Marx did, from the ancient Epicurean concept of “natural wealth.” As
Epicurus observed in his Principal Doctrines: “Natural wealth is both
limited and easily obtainable; the riches of idle fancies go on forever.” It is
the unnatural, unlimited character of such alienated wealth that is the
problem. Similarly, in what has become known as the Vatican Sayings,
Epicurus stated: “Poverty, when measured by the natural purpose of life, is
great wealth; but unlimited wealth is great poverty.”[28] Free human
development, arising in a climate of natural limitation and sustainability, is
the true basis of wealth, of a rich, many-sided existence; the unbounded
pursuit of wealth is the primary source of human impoverishment and suffering.
Needless to say, such a concern with natural
A Great
Transition, therefore, must have the characteristics implied by the Global
Scenario Group’s neglected scenario: Eco-communalism. It must take its
inspiration from William Morris, one of the most original and ecological
followers of Karl Marx, from Gandhi, and from other radical, revolutionary and
materialist figures, including Marx himself, stretching as far back as
Epicurus. The goal must be the creation of sustainable communities geared to
the development of human needs and powers, removed from the all-consuming drive
to accumulate wealth (capital).
As Marx
wrote, the new system “starts with the self-government of the communities.”[29]
The creation of an ecological civilization requires a social revolution, one
that, as Roy Morrison explains, needs to be organized democratically from below:
“community by community ... region by region.” It must put the provision of
basic human needs—clean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate sanitation,
social transport, and universal health care and education, all of which require
a sustainable relation to the earth—ahead of all other needs and wants. “An
ecological dialectic” along these lines, Morrison insists, “rejects not
struggle but the endless
Such a
revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable. But the continuation
of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove
impossible—if human civilization and the web of life as we know it are to be
sustained.
Notes
This chapter
has been revised and adapted for this book from an article originally
1. Paul M.
Sweezy, “Capitalism and the Environment,” Monthly Review 41, no. 2 (June
1989), 4.
2.
International Climate Change Task Force, Meeting the Climate Challenge, January
2005, http://www.americanprogress.org.
3. The
Times (
4. See
chapter 4.
5. Bill
McKibben, “Our Thirsty Future,”
6.
Worldwatch, Vital Signs 2005, http://www.worldwatch.org; Brett Clark and
Rebecca Clausen, “The Oceanic Crisis,” Monthly Review 60, no. 3
(July-August 2008): 91, 94–97.
7. Stuart L.
Pimm and Clinton Jenkins, “Sustaining the Variety of Life,” Scientific American,
September 2005, 66–73; Stuart L. Pimm and Peter Raven, “Extinction by
Numbers,” Nature,
8. Mathis
Wackernagel et al., “Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy,” Proceedings
of the
9. Jared
Diamond, Collapse (
11. Raskin
et al., The Great Transition, 17–18.
12. Raskin
et al., Great Transition, 7.
13. Karl
Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 247–57; Paul M.Sweezy, Four
Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 26–36. Much of
Marx’s analysis in Capital is concerned with where ∆m or surplus value comes
from. To answer this question, he argues, it is necessary to go beneath the
process of exchange and to explore the hidden recesses of capitalist production—where
it is revealed that the source of surplus-value is to be found in the process
of class exploitation.
14. Lester
Brown, Outgrowing the Earth (
15. Raskin
et al., Great Transition, 22.
16. See
chapter 6.
17. Raskin
et al., Great Transition, 22–24, 29.
18. Ibid.,
33.
19. Ibid.,
41, 77.
20. Ibid., 25.
21. Ibid.,
27.
22. See
chapter 5.
23. John
Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (
24. Raskin
et al., Great Transition, 47.
25. Ibid.,
71–90.
26. To be
sure, Mill at this time thought of himself as something of a socialist. See John
Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Longmans, Green,
and Co., 1904), 452–55.
27. See
Bertell Ollman’s discussion in “The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now),”
Monthly Review 57, no. 3 (July-August 2005): 78–102.
28.
Epicurus, The Extant Remains, translated by Cyril Bailey (New York:
Limited Editions Club, 1947), 161. On Marx’s relation to Epicurus see John
Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (
29. Marx and
Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1975),
519; Paul Burkett, “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development” in Monthly
Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34–62.
30. Roy
Morrison, Ecological Democracy (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 80, 188.