{"id":13356,"date":"2010-04-29T09:54:35","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T15:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=13356"},"modified":"2010-04-29T09:54:35","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T15:54:35","slug":"john-bellamy-foster-interviewed-by-solidairsolidaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=13356","title":{"rendered":"John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Solidair\/Solidaire<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Ecology of Socialism<\/strong>
\nJohn Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Solidair\/Solidaire<\/em><\/p>\n

Solidair<\/a>\/Solidaire<\/a>, the weekly journal of the Workers Party of Belgium (PVDA-PTB), interviewed John Bellamy Foster, editor of <\/em>Monthly Review<\/a>, 26 April 2010<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Solidair\/Solidaire<\/em><\/strong>: Many green thinkers reject a Marxist analysis because they think that the Marxist approach to the economy is a very productivist one, focused on growth and seeing nature as “a free gift” to mankind. \u00a0You contradict that idea.<\/strong><\/p>\n

John Bellamy Foster:<\/strong> Productivism has of course been the dominant perspective for the last two centuries or more, cutting across the ideological spectrum. \u00a0In many ways, though, Marx, who was hands down the most sophisticated social analyst of the environmental predicament in the nineteenth century, constituted an exception. \u00a0He argued that what was needed was the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolic relation between human beings and nature in such a way as to promote the highest levels of individual and collective human fulfillment at the lowest cost in terms of the expenditure of energy. \u00a0This was the end point of his critique of capitalism and at the same time a crucial part of his definition of communism. \u00a0He pointed to the “irreparable rift” in the metabolism between humanity and nature caused by the capitalist production. \u00a0Marx presented the most radical vision conceivable of sustainable human development, arguing that individuals didn’t own the earth, that all the countries and peoples on the planet did not own the earth, that it was our responsibility to maintain and if possible improve the earth for succeeding generations (as good heads of the household). \u00a0Some later Marxists (e.g. William Morris) followed Marx in these ecological views. \u00a0Others adopted a narrow productivism reminiscent of capitalist society, reinforcing a tragic legacy in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s on. \u00a0Nevertheless, Marxists, and socialists more generally, played pioneering roles in the development of the modern ecological critique. \u00a0All of this is explained in Marx’s Ecology<\/em><\/a> and in my more recent book The Ecological Revolution<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The claim that Marx believed that nature was a “free gift” to humanity is a statement that one hears over and over, but is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. \u00a0All <\/em>the classical economists — Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Say, J.S. Mill, Marx — referred explicitly to nature as a “free gift.” \u00a0It was part of classical economics and was inherited by neoclassical economics. \u00a0Neoclassical economists, even mainstream environmental economists, still include this same notion in their textbooks. \u00a0Marx, however, was distinctive in that he was writing not about economic laws in general but about the laws of motion of capitalism as a historically specific system, and from a critical standpoint. \u00a0He therefore argued, quite correctly, that nature was treated as a “free gift” for capital<\/em>. \u00a0Its non-valuation was built into capitalism’s law of value. \u00a0He argued that while under capitalism only labor produced (exchange) value<\/em>, that this merely reflected the distorted character of the system, since nature, he insisted, was just as much a source of real wealth <\/em>(use values) as was labor. \u00a0Indeed, labor was itself at bottom a natural agent. \u00a0This was not a minor matter for Marx. \u00a0He started off the Critique of the Gotha Programme <\/em><\/a>with this very point, criticizing those socialists who failed to recognize that nature and labor together constituted the sources of wealth, with nature as its ultimate source. \u00a0Marx argued that capitalism promoted private profits in part by destroying public (natural) wealth. \u00a0I have written repeatedly on this, most recently in “The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction”<\/a> (coauthored with Brett Clark) in the November 2009 issue of Monthly Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[Read more<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ecology of Socialism John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Solidair\/Solidaire Solidair\/Solidaire, the weekly journal of the Workers Party of Belgium (PVDA-PTB), interviewed John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, 26 April 2010 Solidair\/Solidaire: Many green thinkers reject a Marxist analysis … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-3tq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13356"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13359,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13356\/revisions\/13359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}