There's a thoughtful interview with John Bellamy Foster -- On “Marx’s ecology” - materialism and nature which is worth a squiz. Foster explores the oversight in Marxism in way of recognising and embracing the rich ecological tradition that underpins a lot of Marx and Engels thinking and work.
He says:
The irony is that thinkers like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins and Steven Rose did carry on a Marxists tradition in science that was very dialectical. Gould, Levins and Lewontin (and they weren’t alone - think of Haldane) became major figures in evolutionary theory, but the rest of the Marxist tradition ignored them.
Fortunately not all Marxist were 'westernized'...
The handicap has been that Marxists haven't been able to integrate this ecological/biological science with their everyday work. There's been a separation as Marx was harnessed primarily as a political and historical tool. No one was actually rushing to sign on with Marx's view that dialectical materialism was the "one science " -- because, unlike Engels, no registered Marxist was planning to update The Dialectics of Nature for the 20th, let alone the 21st century (as Lenin tried to do in the lead up to the 1917 Russian Revolution in the wake of discoveries in quantum physics).
Except for the crew Foster dips his lid to...and that tradition in biology (but there were others like Lev Vygotsky who were similarly engaged with dialectics but in field of psychology).
As Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin reminded us in their dedication for the 1985 edition of The Dialectical Biologist:
'To Frederick Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time but who got it right where it counted''Part of the problem over the past 20 years has been that a lot of green theory has been sourced in anarchist tradition and in a few instances relied on the perspectives advocated by libertarians such as Prince Peter Kropotkin whose Mutual Aid: a factor in evolution was as much employed as a political treatise as it was a study in ecology. Green theory has also been held hostage to what Rudolf Bahro called "the last hesitation to socialism"-- a registered third way that was thought to be piloted without Marxian baggage.
Allied to this, as any keen reader of Stephen Jay Gould will tell you, is that comprehending ecology and the interactivity between organism and the environment had to weather the stormy debates that accompanied Darwinism, read as crude genetics. Then sociobiology , the quintessential biologic ideology of conservatism, asserted itself as a harsh determinism for almost everything about us as a species you care to question.
You know the mantra:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.So while the touchy feely edge of the green movement was moving into holistic mode -in health and pseudo science -- under the aegis of the I Ching and related metaphysical concepts-- this new spirituality which accompanied that drift was not matched or counteracted by a keener commitment to the philosophy of Marxism -- as the practice of it had fallen into a sort of neglect, and treated with disdain in some quarters under the influence of these same Western Marxists, Foster targets.
For those who can recall any of it, part of the drum was that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was thought to be a bit of a bad influence on Marx and the Marxists. But is was from Hegel that Marx got a lot of his radical philosophical bent. It was similarly argued that Frederick Engel was an unfortunate and too much a freehand editor of Marx...and soforth.
In my view, we missed an opportunity presented by the publication of Lovelock's and Margulis' Gaia Hypothesis back in 1979 to re-orientate.Not a Dialectical Materialist work as such, but holistic and inter relational.
I can blame the packaging: Greek goddesses are not kosher icons among dedicated materialists. And this "Gaia" concept -- offered to Lovelock by the novelist William Golding [The Lord of the Flies author]-- thereafter served to help seed the environment movement with a spiritual substrate rather than a rigorous and hard hat science. This approach was encouraged by the fact that Lovelock and Marguilis' hypothesis was canned by main stream science and Lovelock persisted for some time with the liberal use of deifying metaphors.
I think a bias crept in which was later shorn up by a preference in green debates to default to anarchy speak and defer to a crude concept of ecological "balance" -- balance being almost anathema in Marxism.
Today, the scientific work throughout the eighties and nineties which sort to steer investigation away from reductionism has facilitated this new promise and comprehension we are all -- Marxist and non Marxist; left and green alike --harnessing today.
There is, nonetheless, a core aspect of Marxism that needs to be asserted quite strongly I believe: that rather than 'having' an ecology, Marxism is ecology. It is study of the relationship between things: classes, celestial bodies, atoms, molecules,species, plants, ideas...any and everything in the way that any and anything relates to any and everything else.
So while the local forest may be a relationship between many living and inanimate things; capitalism is also a relationship between many living and inanimate things.
- Also see: Diamat makes a comeback (GLW 1993)
- and this review: Who said Marx wasn't a greenie?
