At one point in the 1977 novel, Ceremony, by Native American author and storyteller Leslie Marmon Silko of the Laguna Pueblo people, the narrator, focalised through the perspective and voice of the protagonist Tayo (a Laguna Pueblo man), states:

The [Native American] people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren lands and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. (Ceremony, 189-90)

This passage powerfully captures the destructive and alienating effects of capitalist society, particularly within a settler-colonial context. It suggests that capitalism and ecological damage are intimately tethered. The narrator laments the “barren lands and dry rivers” that the “destroyers” — the rulers and the dominant class — have caused with their rapacious ideology and actions.

And it is not just the Indigenous peoples of the land who suffer the consequences, but also white settlers and their descendants. The narrator tells us that the deleterious impacts of such a system on white people are evident, in part, in “the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel”.

Alienation

This description resonates with Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx writes,

the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is, therefore, inseparable from the production of commodities. (Capital, Volume 1, 165)

A curious feature of capitalism is that it masks the social nature of its form of production, making it appear as if the commodities produced by “the aggregate labour of society” were actually produced “naturally”, autonomously, of their “own accord”, especially when they are encountered as finished products in the market to be bought and consumed (Capital, Volume 1, 165). In other words, the reality of the complex processes of capitalist production that go into making a commodity (with its sophisticated supply chains, divisions of labour, etc) are hidden or reified in the commodity that comes out at the end of the production process.

An implication of commodity fetishism is that instead of having agency over the things we produce, the things we produce dominate us; we become subordinated to the primacy of exchange value, profit and the commodities that are made and sold to realise these things. We are presented with a topsy-turvy situation in which there is an inversion between subject and object. It is as if we hand over our active subjectivity, willpower and productive capacities to the commodities we create in exchange for the commodity’s passive objectivity, which we internalise. In short, humans become the object while the commodity becomes the subject.

The quote from Ceremony about the dissolution of people’s “consciousness into dead objects” echoes Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. Silko’s novel implies a connection between this sort of alienation and environmental devastation. The narrator mentions the “dead objects” (or commodities) of “plastic and neon”, “concrete and steel”. Marxists and socialists are, of course, not against industrialisation in general, but we can infer from Silko’s quote a reproach of the capitalist mode of production and its pollution, wastefulness and exploitation of nature (plastic and neon especially being common signifiers of these sorts of things).

The final sentence of the passage offers a rather telling simile:

And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.

This image of a lifeless, calcified leaf stem — a symbol of biological nature/the ecosphere — represents the alienated condition of those in thrall to the power and logic of capital, even the white people who created this system. Indeed, in the context of capitalist society, the subjugation, exploitation and destruction of the natural world and the subjugation, exploitation, and destruction of human beings go hand-in-hand.

In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that within the framework of “Enlightenment” epistemology (whose cynical, instrumental “rationality” reaches its apogee in capitalist modernity), “[w]hat [humans] want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other [humans]. That is its only aim” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4). They add a few pages later,

[m]yth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. [Humans] pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards [people]. (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9)

Metabolic rift

The discussion of the alienating quality of capitalist society (in the forms of alienating labour and production, as well as alienation of society and individuals from nature) leads to another of Marx’s concepts, one that is directly relevant to ecology — the idea of the metabolic rift.

Marxist sociologist John Bellamy Foster contends that within the field of social science, “the most important critical insights this century have arguably emerged from ecosocialism” and that “[a]t the root of this critical understanding of the ecological problem is Marx’s famous theory of the metabolic rift, focusing on capitalism’s alienated social metabolism” (Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution, 26-7).

Foster writes in an earlier journal article,

The key to Marx’s entire theoretical approach in this area is the concept of social ecological metabolism (Stoffwechsel), which was rooted in his understanding of the labor process. Defining the labor process in general (as opposed to its historically specific manifestations), Marx employed the concept of metabolism to describe the human relation to nature through labor:

“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. . . . It [the labor process] is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence…” (“Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology”, 380)

However, with the emergence of capitalism, a “rift” developed in the metabolic interactions between society and nature, because capitalism takes and takes and takes from nature without giving back or replenishing it. Foster elucidates this by drawing on volumes 1 and 3 of Marx’s Capital,

the central theoretical construct is that of a “rift” in the “metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” or in the “social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life,” through the removal from the soil of its constituent elements, requiring its “systematic restoration.” This contradiction is associated with the growth simultaneously of large scale industry and large-scale agriculture under capitalism, with the former providing agriculture with the means of the intensive exploitation of the soil. (“Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 379-80)

In Marx’s own words,

All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility… Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker. (quoted in Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 379)

As we are well aware today, such degradation of the soil is just one of many examples of the environmental crises and the metabolic rift that capitalism creates. There is also, as Foster points out, climate change,

ocean acidification, loss of biological diversity, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, disappearance of fresh water, land cover change (particularly deforestation), and growing pollution from synthetic chemicals (leading to biomagnification and bioaccumulation of toxins in living organisms) (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 65).

Capitalism is the problem

Despite what liberals and capitalist ideologues argue (whether sincerely or disingenuously), capitalism does not have the capacity to adequately combat the ecological problems that it causes. It is an inherently unsustainable and wasteful system because it must always seek new avenues of profit generation and economic growth — otherwise it ceases functioning. The endless creation and accumulation of wealth for the sake of wealth is the essence of capitalism.

This requires the ever increasing exploitation of land and resources and the expanding proliferation of junk commodities that no one really needs, resulting in huge waste and pollution. As Marx says with such eloquent disdain in the Grundrisse,

workers, indeed, are productive, as far as they increase the capital of their master; unproductive as to the material result of their labour. In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk (Grundrisse, 202).

This is because the use values of the products of labour are completely secondary to their exchange value in the wacky world of capitalism. In other words, things are made primarily to be sold in order to make money, regardless of how useful or necessary they are in themselves, and irrespective of the human and ecological consequences. Following Marx, others realised that the capitalist

system increasingly demanded, simply to keep going under conditions of chronic overaccumulation, the production of negative use values and the non-fulfillment of human needs. This entails the absolute alienation of the labor process, that is, the metabolic relations between human beings and nature, turning it primarily into a form of waste” (Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 58-9, emphasis in original).

We must therefore reject the notion that reforming capitalism or that technological advancements alone can solve the ecological disasters that beset us — indeed that are inflicted upon us and the world by capitalism. Of course, technology is essential to the metabolic relation of human beings to nature,

but technology as conditioned by both social relations and natural conditions. Contrary to those who argue that Marx wore an ecological blinder when it came to envisioning the limitations of technology in surmounting ecological problems, he explicitly argued in his critique of capitalist agriculture, that while capitalism served to promote “technical development in agriculture,” it also brought into being social relations that were “incompatible” with a sustainable agriculture… The solution thus lay less in the application of a given technology than in the transformation of social relations. (Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 390)

Contrary to what the techno-utopians and other apologists for capitalism believe, what is needed is qualitative, revolutionary social transformation. However, to quote Foster again,

there is simply no indication anywhere in Marx’s writings that he believed that a sustainable relation to the earth would come automatically with the transition to socialism. Rather, he emphasized the need for planning in this area, including such measures as the elimination of the antagonism between town and country through the more even dispersal of the population … and the restoration and improvement of the soil through the recycling of soil nutrients. All of this demanded a radical transformation in the human relation to the earth via changed production relations. (“Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 386)

Ecosocialism is the solution

Although socialism will not be sufficient in and of itself, it is certainly necessary for a sustainable world. What is required, then, is not just socialism but ecosocialism. In the face of the multifaceted, compounding environmental catastrophe confronting humanity as a result of capitalism,

what is needed is a decades-long ecological revolution, in which an emergent humanity will once again, as it has innumerable times before, reinvent itself, transforming its existing relations of production and the entire realm of social existence, in order to generate a restored metabolism with nature and a whole new world of substantive equality as the key to sustainable human development. This is the peculiar “challenge and burden of our historical time.” (Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 125)

The aim is to build a system in which

socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their own collective control rather than being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature (Marx, quoted in Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, 382).

According to Foster, the emergence of an “environmental proletariat” is central to the struggle to overcome capitalism and construct ecosocialism. He claims we can

expect the most radical movements to emerge precisely where economic and ecological crises converge on the lives of the underlying population. Given the nature of capitalism and imperialism and the exigencies of the global environmental crisis, a new, revolutionary environmental proletariat is likely to arise most powerfully and most decisively in the Global South. Yet, such developments, it is now clear, will not be confined to any one part of the planet. (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 124-5).

Those of us in the Global North/imperial core (of which so-called Australia is a member) bear the responsibility of putting our shoulders to the wheel and playing a part in the struggle of the international environmental proletariat, not least of all because of our disproportionate wastefulness, carbon footprint and overconsumption. 

These come at the expense of the Global South/periphery through the hyperexploitation of its labour power and resources, and because the poorest areas of the world are bearing, and will increasingly bear, the brunt of various ecological disasters that the Global North is primarily responsible for.

Foster rightly asserts, “In the dire conditions of the Anthropocene epoch, there is no answer for the human world that does not address the triple threats of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism” (Capitalism in the Anthropocene, 492). But the richer countries are not insulated from these crises either, so it is also in our own direct self-interest to fight for ecosocialism.

What humanity stands to achieve, among other things, is the overcoming of alienation both within society and between civilisation and nature. Social and technological advances, in conjunction, would enable us to come into a more harmonious relationship with the wider world around us, with which we are inextricably entwined, while also protecting human beings from the deadly whims of nature to an extent that no other social formation has hitherto been able to. 

In other words, and at the risk of sounding overly utopian, the human subject will be reconciled with the natural object. For the very first time in homo sapiens’ time on Earth, we will be truly free, in control of our collective destiny, and at home in the world.

In his monumental three-volume magnum opus, The Principle of Hope, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the theorist of hope and utopia par excellence, argues for the potential of reaching a historical condition in which the “naturalisation of man” and “the humanisation of nature” is attained through a reciprocal, dialectical process — an idea he borrows from Marx (The Principle of Hope, 205). Bloch’s concludes his book with the following sublime and inspiring words:

… man everywhere is still living in prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e., grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland. (The Principle of Hope, 1375-6, emphasis in original)

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