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On 9 Jul 2020 at 7:33, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: > > The Cosmonaut team inaugurates the ecology series by discussing John > Bellamy Foster´s seminal book Marx´s Ecology on its twentieth > anniversary. A review of John Bellamy Foster's "Marx's Ecology": Marx and Engels on protecting the environment by Joseph Green, August 2007 (http://www.communistvoice.org/40cMarx.html) Introduction The writings of Marx and Engels Alongside and after Marx and Engels Lenin and the early Soviet Union Stalinist and state capitalist ecocide Marxism and global warming --Not market methods, but direct regulation of production --Class basis of environmental destruction --The nature of state regulation --Bringing the masses into the environmental struggle Foster's Marxism without teeth Excerpt from the introduction: Heat waves, dry spells, storms, floods, and other disasters are raising the issue of global warming more and more urgently. This is going to put all economic ideas and practices to the test. Which ones contributed to global warming and other environmental problems? Which ones can help solve these problems? Many apparently well-established economic practices and views are going to become outdated rather soon. Will Marx and Engels' ideas be among them? Many people think that they could have cared less about ecological questions. But "Marx's Ecology: materialism and nature" by John Bellamy Foster is one of several books in the last decade that show that Marx and Engels were intensely interested in the ecological problems of their time. They wrote about these problems; kept abreast of the advance of scientific knowledge about them; showed the relationship of these problems to the free market and private ownership; regarded these problems as one of the important proofs of the need for social planning of production, land use, and the overall economy; and held that socialist society would have to reunite town and country in order to protect the environment. Moreover, Marx and Engels's views are of interest, not mainly because they were right in their controversies with various of the personalities of the time, but because Marxism remains relevant to today's ecological problems. ... global warming, if anything, raises the question of emancipating the economy from the dictatorship of private profit even more strongly than before. The failure of free market methods, such as carbon trading and carbon taxes, to sufficiently curb greenhouse gas emissions will lead to the need for direct regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. This and other environmental issues will eventually raise the issue of economic planning, locally, regionally, and even globally. This raises the question of whether this planning will be subordinated to the profits of the corporations, or whether corporate ownership will increasingly be infringed upon. Struggle will take place over who will pay for environmental disasters and the necessary economic reconstruction, and whether economic planning will go on behind the backs of the masses or with their participation. All this raises the questions of class struggle and socialism, and hence of Marxism. Unfortunately, Foster is more interested in protracted argumentation on the most general philosophical questions than with what has to be done to solve the ecological issues of our day. For example, he refers repeatedly to the Greek materialist philosopher Epicurus (341 - 270 BC), his Roman adherent Lucretius (99 - 55 BC), and their connection to Marx's original philosophical development. Hellenistic philosophy will always retain a certain interest, but it would seem rather peripheral to a book on Marxism and the environment. Foster ends up criticizing Engels, Lenin, and just about everyone else, for supposedly not being philosophically knowledgeable enough about materialism and dialectics, due to lack of sufficient attention to Epicurus. As a result, according to Foster, theorists who were "supposedly emphasizing dialectical perspectives that rejected both mechanism and idealism" would really be mired in "Marxist positivism". (2) This sort of windy nonsense aside, he nevertheless provides some background information on a number of the major scientific and political figures of Marx and Engels' times, both those whose work Marx and Engels valued and those whom they opposed. --------------------- (Footnote 2) Foster, Ibid. , pp. 230, 231. Foster laments that it was only at the end of his life that Engels, in his view, took real notice of Epicurus. He says that, worse yet, no subsequent Marxist had obtained even this level of philosophical awareness, and this "had important consequences for subsequent Marxist thought (after Engels)". He praises Lenin's philosophical sophistication, especially the Philosophical Notebooks, which, he notes, refer to Epicurus, but thinks that Lenin, nevertheless, "was caught up in the same difficulties". <> -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
