By Ted Nordhaus and Alex Smith
In Part I of this series, we described the conquest of the old materialist Left in the post-war era. In Part II, we break down how the effort to transform Marx from modernization theorist to degrowther presaged broader center-left political debates about capitalism, biophysical limits to human aspirations, and the nature of social, political, and economic modernization. In Part III, we offer a very different reading of Marx. Were he alive today, he would almost certainly be an ecomodernist, not a degrowther, ecological economist, and perhaps not even a communist.
The End of History and The Second Contradiction of Capitalism
It is not coincidental that the effort to rebrand Marx as an environmentalist began roughly contemporaneously with the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Fukuyama’s famous 1989 essay and 1992 book of the same name are largely remembered today as triumphalist texts, celebrating global American capitalist hegemony. But Fukuyama was not referring to history in the conventional sense but rather in the Hegelian, dialectical way that Marx used the term.
What Fukuyama meant by the end of history was that there would be no “next” stage of history after capitalism, arguing instead that the liberal democracies and mixed economies that characterized the advanced economies of the late 20th century would represent an apotheosis of sorts. The end of history did not mean the end of crises, conflict, and socioeconomic change. The world might fall back into authoritarianism, feudalism, or other older forms of economic and political organization. But the central contradiction of capitalism that Marx had identified, that capitalists would immiserate labor and thereby eviscerate consumer markets for mass produced goods, would be resolved by new evolutions in democratic, market-based, welfare state economies, not a revolutionary new stage of human development.
At a moment when the Soviet Union was collapsing, organized labor was in crisis, and western post-industrial capitalist economies were thriving, Fukuyama’s argument was hard to resist. Indeed, early ecosocialist writing largely conceded his point, at least with regard to the internal contradictions of capitalism. A year before the publication of Fukuyama’s essay, the Marxist sociologist James O’Connor launched the ecosocialist journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism with an introductory essay in which he acknowledged that the contradictions and crises of capitalism would create increasing need for state planning and coordination and “social forms of production” which might resolve capitalism’s internal contradictions but held “only tenuous and ambiguous promises for the possibilities of socialism.”
O’Connor’s doctrinal innovation was to add a new class of contradictions, absent from Marx’s 19th century writings, that he dubbed “the second contradiction of capitalism.” Where the first contradiction was internal to capitalism, the result of the capitalist’s interest in exploiting labor (e.g. the capitalist’s drive to maximally exploit labor makes labor too poor to afford the capitalist’s product), the second contradiction involved an external contradiction—people and natural resources are not produced “capitalistically.” Capitalism cannot conjure more iron or copper or silicon into the world beyond what exists in the earth’s crust. It has no internal mechanism to assure that accumulation of toxic waste or greenhouse gasses does not kill or so deplete its workforce that it cannot continue to produce.
As with the first contradiction, O’Connor recognized that the second contradiction would drive more social forms of production to manage natural resources and pollution. But unlike the first contradiction, where those new forms of production distributed the economic surplus of productive forces more equitably, allowing for more consumption, continuing economic growth, and capitalist profit, the second contradiction only imposed costs upon capitalists. Rising costs from extraction, resource management, and pollution control would, O’Connor argued, increasingly erode capitalists’ profits.
A few years later, John Bellamy Foster, who would become a leading theorist of ecosocialism, would transform O’Connor’s second contradiction into “the absolute general law of environmental degradation under capitalism,” which, according to Foster, “increasingly constitutes the most obvious threat not only to capitalism's existence but to the life of the planet as a whole.” Capitalist production, combined with the second law of thermodynamics, would “maximize the overall toxicity of production.”
O’Connor had been critical of contemporary neomalthusianism and “Club of Rome technocracy,” arguing that such accounts “mangle Marx's theories of historically produced forms of nature and capitalist accumulation and development.” Foster, in contrast, embraced those claims, arguing, against the claims of environmental critics of Marx, that Marx and Engels had implicitly endorsed notions of natural limits to capital accumulation.
The problem, of course, was that neither Marx nor Engels had written anything to this effect. In an effort to reconcile Marx with environmentalism, O’Connor and Foster invented the new ecomarxist doctrine from whole cloth, first a second contradiction of capitalism, then an absolute law of environmental degradation, that were nowhere to be found in the actual writings of Marx or Engels. And so, Foster and his successors would set about scouring Marx’s early writings, appendixes to Capital, and obscure, unpublished texts and notes in order to find passages that supported the new ecomarxist doctrine.
The Metabolic Rift, or Marxology Gone Wild
By the late 90’s, Foster had seized upon a few sentences in a late chapter of Capital, in which Marx observed that capitalism “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” to claim that Marx was quite preoccupied with the planetary consequences of capitalist production. Foster tweaked Marx’s words, which he would henceforth refer to as the “metabolic rift” between capitalist societies and nature. In reality, the metabolic interaction that Marx described was far more prosaic. Agrarian laborers historically replenished the soil they farmed with their own feces and other organic household wastes. With the shift of large rural populations during the industrial revolution from feudal agrarian economic arrangements to the urban, industrialized, wage economy, waste from growing urban populations, distant from the sites of agricultural production, was no longer available for this purpose.
Foster nonetheless suggests that contemporary readers take the passage both metaphorically and literally. Marx, in Foster’s telling, anticipates global environmental catastrophe while never actually anticipating that capitalism would operate at global scales. Soil depletion, according to Foster, was not only a real world effect of capitalist overproduction in Marx’s time but also a metaphor for the collapse of the planetary life support system in our time.
In recent years, Foster’s revisionism has been further updated by thinkers like Kohei Saito, whose popular books Marx in the Anthropocene and Slow Down, reached a wide audience. Unlike Foster, who points to the metabolic rift as an example of where Marx’s thinking on the environment indicates a shift away from prometheanism, Saito argues that the concept of metabolism represents the core of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx, according to Saito, was the original degrowther.
For Saito, Marx’s growing appreciation for “metabolism” in his later years was more than a footnote to his broader productivist views. Rather, Saito argues, Marx’s late-career writing marked a fundamental turn away from historical materialism, Marx’s foundational contribution to political economy and social theory. Capitalism, according to Marx, Engels, and many others, would produce the necessary technological and social conditions that could enable a shift to socialist or communist forms of social organization. Marx’s dalliance with soil fertility, in Saito’s telling, instead implied an abandonment of historical materialism and recognition that the “productive forces” of capitalism would have to be fully abandoned. To avoid widening the “metabolic rift” between humans and nature, Marx had in fact concluded that socialism would have to start from scratch.
But, as with Foster’s original “metabolic rift”, Saito’s “uncovering” of Marx’s true environmental colors relies on fragmented notes and texts that are directly contradicted by Marx’s published work during the same period, most notably in Capital, Volume III. The claim that a set of unpublished notes should undercut the fundamental principles of Marx’s thought is truly astounding. But it is also necessary if the objective is to recast Marx as an environmentalist.
Marx’s interest in soil fertility, to be clear, was unquestionably real. Capitalist relations that had taken form over the centuries leading up to Marx’s life and writing took the fruits of agricultural production without a clear pathway to maintaining its productivity, a problem that those who still worked the land had, at the time of Marx’s writing, been unable to solve without resorting to high-cost and scarce inputs like seabird guano.
But throughout all of their major works, Marx and Engels were ambivalent about the ecological harms of the shift from feudalism to capitalism, seeing the disruption of the metabolic interaction between humans and the earth as one element of a much more complicated set of tensions between the growth of revolutionary and productive forces and their immediate negative outcomes on peasants, laborers, and to the least extent, nature.
Marx predictably engages the concept of “metabolism” dialectically alongside relatively promethean and teleological claims about capitalism more broadly. The ecological impacts of capitalist agriculture, urbanization, and other industrial production, then, are a necessary, arguably inevitable, part of capitalism’s growth as a revolutionary force. “The rationalizing of agriculture,” Marx writes in Capital: Volume III, “makes it for the first time capable of operating on a social scale,” But this is only possible after “first completely impoverishing the direct producers” by expropriating their land and resources.
Despite the violent expulsion of the peasantry from agricultural lands that often preceded capitalist agricultural development, Marx clearly saw increased agricultural labor productivity as a necessary step in his dialectical theory of history. The “freeing” of agricultural labor wreaks havoc on the social—and “metabolic”—relations of both rural and urban life, but it also makes possible “a higher form of society to combine this surplus-labor with a greater reduction of time devoted to material labor in general.”
What is clear is that Marx understood the shift from country to town as a precondition for the subsequent development of revolutionary forces. Urbanization, in Marx’s lifetime and prior, was often a violent process—as it remains to this day. And yet, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels celebrate the process. They write, “the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”
Marx’s writing on the subject is both critical of capitalist commodity agricultural production and highly supportive of rationalist and scientific agricultural production. He argued vehemently against Malthus and Ricardo’s claims that agricultural productivity growth was impossible without increasing labor hours. Marx, rather, was deeply influenced by the German chemist and agronomist, Justus von Liebig, who argued that a rational and scientific engagement with soil nutrients would allow farmers to continuously plant on acreage without losing fertility over time.
Indeed, the best rebuttal to Foster and Saito’s appropriation of Marx’s brief observation about the fertility challenges that agricultural production faced as peasants moved off the land, moved to cities, and joined the industrial proletariat comes from Marx himself. “Fertility always implies an economic relation, a relation to the existing chemical and mechanical development of agriculture,” Marx observed. “Whether by chemical means…or mechanical means,” he continues, “the obstacles which made a soil of equal fertility actually less fertile can be eliminated.”
And indeed that is exactly what came to pass. Nineteen years after the first publication of Capital, Volume III, the German chemical company BASF commercialized the Haber-Bosch process which allowed for the mass production of synthetic fertilizer and resolved the metabolic problem that Marx had actually referred to. Marx would hardly have been surprised.
In Part III of this series, we’ll offer a very different reading of Marx: as modernization theorist. Were he alive today, he would almost certainly be an ecomodernist, not a degrowther, ecological economist, and perhaps not even a communist.