Notes on John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet

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Notes on John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological
Revolution Making Peace with the Planet

• Philosophy 100 (Ted Stolze)

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John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology
at the University of Oregon, Eugene.
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A Thought Experiment

• Imagine that life on Earth had evolved without
  the emergence of human beings. But now imagine
  that refugees from another planet, whose
  biosphere they had damaged beyond repair, hoped
  to relocate to Earth. What basic facts would
  they need to know about the Earths biosphere in
  order to avoid destroying it as well? What moral
  principles and values would have to guide them in
  their renewed effort to live in a sustainable
  way?

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The Ecological Problem

• economists have not grasped a simple fact
  that to scientists is obvious the size of the
  Earth as a whole is fixed. Neither the surface
  nor the mass of the planet is growing or
  shrinking. The same is true for energy budgets
  the amount absorbed by the Earth is equal to the
  amount it radiates. The overall size of the
  systemthe amount of water, land, air, minerals
  and other resources present on the planet we live
  onis fixed.
• The most important change on Earth in recent
  times has been the enormous growth of the
  economy, which has taken over an ever greater
  share of the planets resources. In my lifetime,
  world population has tripled, while the numbers
  of livestock, cars, houses and refrigerators have
  increased by vastly more. In fact, our economy is
  now reaching the point where it is outstripping
  Earths ability to sustain it. Resources are
  running out and waste sinks are becoming full.
  The remaining natural world can no longer support
  the existing economy, much less one that
  continues to expand.
• (From Herman Daly, On a Road to Disaster, in
  New Scientist, October 18, 2008, pp. 46-47.)

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What is Sustainability?

• From a human point of view, a sustainable
  society is one that satisfies its needs without
  diminishing the prospects of future generations.
  This ideal is the polar opposite to the ideal of
  unlimited material growth.
• (From Ernest Callenbach, Ecology A Pocket
  Guide, revised and enlarged Berkeley, CA
  University of California Press, 2008, p. 130.)

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One Way to Defend Sustainability

• 1. Assume that I dont know into which
  generation of human beings I am going to be born.
• 2. It is in my rational self-interest to
  minimize serious threats to my basic needs as
  a human being.
• 3. An important way to minimize serious threats
  to these basic needs is to insure that the
  global economy is ecologically sustainable and
  has as little negative impact as possible from
  one generation to the next.
• 4. Therefore, it is in my rational self-interest
  to insure that the global economy is
  ecologically sustainable.

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Three Features of any Critical Social Theory

• Analysis and Criticism ? Transition? Alternative

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What is Capitalism?

• Capitalism a socio-economic system in which
  the means of producing and distributing wealth
  are predominantly owned and controlled by private
  individuals and groups.

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What is Wrong with Capitalism?

• In a nutshell, Bellamy Foster argues that
  capitalism creates a metabolic rift between
  society and nature to the point that is
  ecologically unsustainable.

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Objection Thou Shalt Not Criticize Capitalism!

• Why not?
• It would be Un-American.
• Capitalism the Free Market.
• Only private ownership and decision making
  generate incentives and economic efficiency.

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Three Aspects of Capitalism

• Treadmill of Production
• Second Contradiction
• Metabolic Rift

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The Treadmill of Production

• Capitalism is an unstoppable, accelerating
  treadmill that constantly increases the scale of
  the throughput of energy and raw materials as
  part of its quest for profit and accumulation,
  thereby pressing on the earths absorptive
  capacity. Accumulate, Accumulate! Marx wrote,
  that is Moses and the prophets! for capital
  (p. 48).

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Second Contradiction

• Capitalism, in addition to its primary economic
  contradiction stemming from class inequalities in
  production and distribution, also undermines the
  human and natural conditions (i.e, environmental
  conditions) of production on which its economic
  advancement ultimately rests. For example, by
  systematically removing forests we lay the
  grounds for increasing scarcities in this
  areathe more so to the extent that globalization
  makes this contradiction universal. This
  heightens the overall cost of economic
  development and creates an economic crisis for
  capitalism based on supply-side constraints on
  production (p. 48).

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Metabolic Rift (1)

• The logic of capital accumulation inexorably
  creates a rift in the metabolism between society
  and nature, severing basic processes of natural
  reproduction. This raises the issue of the
  ecological sustainabilitynot simply in relation
  to the scale of the economy, but also even more
  importantly in the form and intensity of the
  interaction between nature and society under
  capitalism (p. 49).

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Metabolic Rift (2)

• In reflecting on this crisis of capitalist
  agriculture, Marx adopted the concept of
  metabolism, which had been introduced by
  nineteenth-century biologists and chemists,
  including Justus von Liebig, and applied it to
  socio-ecological relations. All life is based on
  metabolic processes between organisms and their
  environment. Organisms carry out an exchange of
  energy and matter with their environment, which
  are integrated with their own internal life
  processes. It is not a stretch to think of the
  nest of a bird as part of the birds metabolic
  process. Marx explicitly defined the labor
  process as the metabolic interaction between man
  and nature. In terms of the ecological problem
  he spoke of an irreparable rift in the
  interdependent process of social metabolism,
  whereby the conditions for the necessary
  reproduction of the soil were continually
  severed, breaking the metabolic cycle.
  Capitalist production, he wrote, therefore
  only develops the techniques and the degree of
  combination of the social process of production
  by simultaneously undermining the original
  sources of all wealththe soil and the worker.
  Marx saw this rift not simply in national terms
  but as related to imperialism as well. England,
  he wrote, has indirectly exported the soil of
  Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators
  the means for replacing the constituents of the
  exhausted soil (p. 50).

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Metabolic Rift (3)

• This principle of metabolic rift obviously has
  a very wide application and has in fact been
  applied by environmental sociologists in recent
  years to problems such as global warming and the
  ecological degradation of the worlds oceans.
  What is seldom recognized, however, is that Marx
  went immediately from a conception of the
  metabolic rift to the necessity of metabolic
  restoration, arguing that by destroying the
  circumstances surrounding that metabolism, which
  originated in a merely natural and spontaneous
  fashion, it capitalist production compels its
  systematic restoration as a regulative law of
  social reproduction. The reality of the
  metabolic rift pointed to the necessity of the
  restoration of nature, through sustainable
  production (p. 50).

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Metabolic Rift (4)

• It is this dialectical understanding of the
  socio-ecological problem that led Marx to what is
  perhaps the most radical conception of
  socio-ecological sustainability ever developed.
  Thus he wrote in the third volume of Capital
• From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic
  formation, the private property of individuals in
  the earth will appear just as absurd as the
  private property of one man in other men. Even an
  entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously
  existing societies taken together, are not owners
  of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its
  beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an
  improved state to succeeding generations, as boni
  patres familias good heads of the household
  (p. 51).
•  

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Metabolic Rift (5)

• For Marx, in other words, the present relation
  of human beings to the earth under private
  accumulation could be compared to slavery. Just
  as private property of one man in other men is
  no longer deemed acceptable, so private ownership
  of the earth/nature by human beings (even whole
  countries) must be transcended. The human
  relation to nature must be regulated so to
  guarantee its existence in an improved state to
  succeeding generations. His reference to the
  notion of good heads of the household hearkened
  back to the ancient Greek notion of household or
  oikos from which we get both economy (from
  oikonomia, or household management) and ecology
  (from oikologia or household study). Marx
  pointed to the necessity of a more radical,
  sustainable relation of human beings to
  production in accord with what we would now view
  as ecological rather than merely economic
  notions. Freedom, in this sphere, the realm of
  natural necessity, he insisted, can consist only
  in this, that socialized man, the associated
  producers, govern the human metabolism with
  nature in a rational way, bringing it under their
  collective control...accomplishing it with the
  least expenditure of energy (p. 51).

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What is the Alternative to Capitalism?

• Although Bellamy Foster allows for the
  possibility of a weakly sustainable capitalism
  through the introduction of greener
  technologies, he personally favor the replacement
  of capitalism by a democratic transition to a
  strongly sustainable type of socialism.

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What Kind of Transition?

• Bellamy Foster argues for a mass movement that
  would extend and deepen democracy from the
  political sphere into the workplace and
  communities, and into national and global
  economies. The historical analogies would be the
  labor movement, civil rights, and womens
  movementsbut this time on a global scale.