Marx’s Ecology

tags : [[Marx]] [[ecology]]

source : cite:marx_ecology

type : literature

foo :

Preface

• Foster says that it was his research into German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig which led him to the concept of the [[metabolic rift]]

Introduction

Materialism

• [[Materialism]] can be defined as an ontological outlook that emphasizes that the physical world is independent of and prior to thought
• Foster outlines three types of materialism:
  • Ontological materialism: the unilateral dependence of social upon biological and physical being and the emergence of the former from the latter
  • Epistemological materialism: the assertion of the independent existence and transfactual activity of at least some objects of scientific thought
  • Practical materialism: assertion of the constitutive role of transformative agency in the reproduction and transformation of social norms
• Foster asserts that Marx was a practical materialist
• Marx was a materialist but not a determinist
• The German philosophers of Marx’s day saw [[Epicurus]] as the father of scientific thought
• Materialism had to contend with the skepticism of [[David Hume]] and [[Immanuel Kant]]
• For Kant, things-in-themselves were unknowable in their true form
• [[Hegel]] offered a way out of this as far as Marx and Engels were concerned. Hegel said that the correctness of our views is established as we transform ourselves and our world, and that the way in which we are alienated from the world is ultimately overcome in the development in the spirit of history.
• Unlike [[Feuerbach]], Marx sought to make materialism practical rather than purely contemplative
• Marx’s materialism was unique in that it not only accounted for a natural and scientific view of the world but also accounted for seemingly “immaterial” social phenomenon
• Contemporary biology (at least of the time of publication) has returned to a more mechanical and deterministic view of materialism, which Marx and other Marxists have sought ways out of

Ecology

• Foster is going to show that various arguments made against Marx in the realm of ecology are wrong
  • Arguments including:
    • Marx was speciest
    • Marx didn’t keep up with science
    • Marx was a “Promethean”, i.e. he believed in the ultimate triumph of technology over nature
    • Marx believed that capitalist technology would solve real issues
• The “informal laws of ecology” are:
  1. Everything is connected to everything else
  2. Everything must go somewhere
  3. Nature knows best
  4. Nothing comes from nothing
• Marx’s issue with Epicurus’s materialism was that it was merely contemplative

The Crisis of Socio-Ecology

• The [[Promethean struggle]] ceased to be a revolutionary struggle of the human relation to nature and the constitution of power and instead became a symbol for technological triumph
• Foster’s goal is to set the record straight on Marx’s ecological thought, that Marxism is reconcilable with an ecological world view, and is in fact necessary for such a view

1. The Materialist Conception of Nature

• [[Darwin]] made the connection between natural selection and species transmutation because he was reading about [[Malthus]]’s writings on population
• It is commonly thought that Darwin didn’t publish his work on evolution immediately because he was afraid as coming off as blasphemous, but it goes further than that: he was a dedicated philosophical materialist
• In Darwin’s day, the prevailing philosophy among scientists and philosophers was one of teleology: A “Chain of Being” existed, a gradient of nature, and that each species was immutable and always existed the way they were now. This placed mankind at the top of this scale, as per the Christian view that man was the most important creature
• Some theories in Darwin’s time implied a successive creation, that there were multiple “creation” events leading up to the creation of mankind. This was a compromise between the Biblical accounts and the scientific evidence
• Materialists, as ever, asserted that there was no need to explain natural forces with anything that existed outside of nature. This was in contrast to the idealists of the time who believed that scientific laws were external mechanical laws.
• Charles [[Darwin]]’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, asserted that life had descended from one “filament” of life that God had created
• [[Darwin]] emerged out of a time where a materialist attitude towards science was beginning to challenge the religious orthodoxy, and Darwin himself engaged with and struggled with these ideas
• [[Plato]] argued that “necessary ideas” come from the preexistence of the soul, not from experience, and the example he used was monkeys!
• “If all men were dead, then monkeys make men—Men make angels” —-[[Darwin]]
  • Darwin was noting that if humanity died out, some other species (monkeys) would take our place, and that mankind might evolve into something higher (angels)
  • This almost sounds like [[Feuerbach]]’s idea of “man making God”

[[Epicurus]]

• [[Epicurus]] lived under the Macedonian rule of Greece and his philosophy had radical implications. It shouldn’t be so surprising why [[Marx]] was so inspired by him.
• “Nothing is ever created by divine power out of nothing” — [[Epicurus]]
• “Nature never reduces anything to nothing” — [[Epicurus]]
• [[Epicurus]] believed that material activity (i.e. experience) precede ideas (as “anticipations”). This idea seems to anticipate [[Alexander Bogdanov]] in [[The Philosophy of Living Experience]].
• [[Epicurus]] believed in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but believed this in a collective sense and not an individualistic, hedonistic one
• The most important thing for [[Epicurus]] was the pursuit of friendship
• [[Epicurus]] argued for something that resembles the modern [[theory of evolution]]. He reasoned that humans have teeth for a post-hoc purpose. Without modern science, however, he basically was left with the idea that the Earth is the mother of life.

Epicurus and the Revolution of Science and Reason

• [[Epicurus]] was a major influence on English and French Enlightenments
• [[Thomas Hariot]] and [[Francis Bacon]] were strongly influenced by [[Epicurus]], who offered a way out of the Aristotelian worldview that English science was mired in at the time
• [[Pierre Gassendi]] was a contemporary of [[Rene Descartes]] and criticized Descartes’s idealism from a materialist perspective inspired by [[Epicurus]]
• Having been inspired by [[Epicurus]], [[John Evelyn]], a founder of the [[Royal Society]], wrote Fumifugium: Or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Disspated, a treatise on the effects of pollution in London
• Along with a rising materialism in England, there was also a growing theological movement to try and reconcile the new materialism with theology. [[Isaac Newton]] was among one of the people who squared this new scientific materialism with theology, arguing in a letter that originally the Earth revolved very slowly, “producing days of virtually any length.”
• [[Aristotelian thought]] was not eliminated overnight: it was part of an exchange of one set of ancient models ([[Epicurean]] models) with another
• [[Epicurus]] and those related had believed in “deep time”, which was an idea that was also gaining traction in England in the seventeenth century
• [[David Hume]] and [[Voltaire]] were also followers of [[Epicurus]] and [[Lucretius]]
• [[Immanuel Kant]] considered [[Epicurus]] to be the materialist counterpart to [[Plato]]
• [[Hegel]] credited [[Epicurus]] with being the founder of natural science

Marx and Epicurus