秃公
加入时间: 2006/09/12
文章: 1667
经验值: 1777
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作者：秃公 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
by JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER
Review:
“When I first saw John Bellamy Foster's new book I thought, ‘Oh no, not another great, thick, fat book on Marx!’ But as soon as I started to read, I found it hard to put down. It has given me a new understanding of the totality of Marx's materialism and his development of the dialectic of human society and nature.”
— R.C. LEWONTIN, Harvard University
“In Marx's Ecology, John Bellamy Foster brilliantly expands our understanding of Marx's thought, proving that Marx understood alienation to encompass human estrangement from the natural world. Foster criticizes the current version of environmentalism that equates Marxism and modernity with the degradation of nature and points towards a sophisticated and less nostalgic environmentalism which sees capitalism, not modernity, as the essential problem to be addressed."
— BARBARA EPSTEIN, University of California, Santa Cruz
“In the best tradition of Marxist scholarship, John Bellamy Foster uses the history of ideas not as a courtesy to the past but as an integral part of current issues. He demonstrates the centrality of ecology for a materialist conception of history, and of historical materialism for an ecological movement.”
— RICHARD LEVINS, Harvard University
“Marx's Ecology is a bold,exciting interpretation of the historical background and context of Marx's ecological thought and a fascinating exploration of environmental history. Should be of interest to all who care about the fate of our `vulnerable planet.’”
— CAROLYN MERCHANT, University of California, Berkeley
Preface:
The original title for this book, at its inception, was Marx and Ecology. At some point along the way the title changed to Marx’s Ecology. This change in title stands for a dramatic change in my thinking about Marx (and about ecology) over the last few years, a change in which numerous individuals played a part.
Marx has often been characterized as an anti-ecological thinker. But I was always too well acquainted with his writing ever to take such criticisms seriously. He had, as I knew, exhibited deep ecological awareness at numerous points in his work. But at the time that I wrote The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (1999, 2nd Edition), I still believed that Marx's ecological insights were somewhat secondary within his thought; that they contributed nothing new or essential to our present-day knowledge of ecology as such; and that the importance of his ideas for the development of ecology lay in the fact that he provided the historical-materialist analysis that ecology, with its generally ahistorical and Malthusian notions, desperately needed.
That it was possible to interpret Marx in a different way, one that conceived ecology as central to his thinking, was something that I was certainly aware of, since it was raised day after day in the 1980s by my friend Ira Shapiro, New York-expatriate, farmer, carpenter, working-class philosopher, and at that time a student in my classes. Going against all the conventions in the interpretation of Marx, Ira would say to me “look at this,” pointing to passages in which Marx dealt with the problems of agriculture and the circulation of soil nutrients. I listened attentively, but did not yet appreciate the full import of what I was being told (in this I was no doubt held back, in contrast to Ira, by the fact that I had no real experience in working the land). In these same years, my friend Charles Hunt, radical activist, sociologist, part-time professor, and professional beekeeper, told me that I should become better acquainted with Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, because of its science and its naturalism. Again I listened, but had my hesitations. Wasn’t the “dialectic of nature” flawed from the outset?
My path to ecological materialism was blocked by the Marxism that I had learned over the years. My philosophical grounding had been in Hegel and the Hegelian Marxist revolt against positivist Marxism, which began in the 1920s in the work of Lukács, Korsch, and Gramsci, and which had carried over into the Frankfurt School and the New Left (part of the much greater revolt against positivism that dominated European intellectual life from 1890 to 1930 and beyond). The emphasis here was on Marx’s practical materialism, rooted in his concept of praxis; which in my own thinking came to be combined with the political economy of the Monthly Review tradition in the United States, and the historical-cultural theories of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams in England. There seemed little room in such a synthesis, however, for a Marxist approach to issues of nature and natural-physical science.
It is true that thinkers like Thompson and Williams in England, and Sweezy, Baran, Magdoff, and Braverman associated with the Monthly Review in the U.S., all insisted on the importance of connecting Marxism to the wider natural-physical realm, and each contributed in his way to ecological thinking. But the theoretical legacy of Lukács and Gramsci, which I had internalized, denied the possibility of the application of dialectical modes of thinking to nature, essentially ceding that entire domain to positivism. At the time, I was scarcely aware of an alternative, more dialectical tradition within the contemporary life sciences, associated in our time with the work of such important thinkers as Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, and Stephen Jay Gould. (When this awareness finally did dawn on me, it was a result of Monthly Review, which has long sought to link Marxism in general back up with the natural and physical sciences.) Nor was I yet acquainted with the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar.
To make matters worse, like most Marxists (outside of the biological sciences, where some of this history was retained), I had no knowledge of the real history of materialism. My materialism was entirely of the practical, political-economic kind, philosophically informed by Hegelian idealism and by Feuerbach’s materialist revolt against Hegel, but ignorant of the larger history of materialism within philosophy and science. In this respect the Marxist tradition itself, as it had been passed down, was of relatively little help, since the basis on which Marx had broken with mechanistic materialism, while remaining a materialist, had never been adequately understood.
It is impossible to explain the stages (except perhaps by pointing to the argument that follows) of how I finally came to the conclusion that Marx’s world-view was deeply, and indeed systematically, ecological (in all positive senses in which that term is used today), and that this ecological perspective derived from his materialism. If there was a single turning point in my thinking, it began shortly after The Vulnerable Planet was published when my friend John Mage, radical lawyer, classical scholar, and Monthly Review colleague, said that I had made an error in my book and in a subsequent article in tentatively adopting the Romantic Green view that capitalism’s anti-ecological tendencies could be traced in considerable part to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and in particular to the work of Francis Bacon. John raised the question of the relation of Marx to Bacon, and the historical meaning of the idea of “the domination of nature” that emerged in the seventeenth century. Gradually, I realized that the whole issue of science and ecology had to be reconsidered from the beginning. Among the questions that concerned me: Why was Bacon commonly presented as the enemy within Green theory? Why was Darwin so often ignored in discussions of nineteenth-century ecology (beyond the mere attribution of social Darwinist and Malthusian conceptions to him)? What was the relation of Marx to all of this?
I concluded early on in this process that attempts by “ecosocialists” to graft Green theory on to Marx, or Marx on to Green theory, could never generate the organic synthesis now necessary. In this respect I was struck by Bacon’s famous adage that, “We can look in vain for advancement in scientific knowledge from the superinducing and grafting of new things on old. A fresh start (instauratio) must be made, beginning from the very foundations, unless we want to go round for ever in a circle, making trifling, almost contemptible progress” (Novum Organum). The problem then became one of going back to the foundations of materialism, where the answers increasingly seemed to lie, reexamining our social theory and its relation to ecology from the beginning, that is, dialectically, in terms of its emergence.
What I discovered, much to my astonishment, was a story that had something of the character of a literary detective story, in which various disparate clues led inexorably to a single, surprising, source. In this case, the materialism of Bacon and Marx, and even that of Darwin (although less directly), could be traced back to a common point of origin: the ancient materialist philosophy of Epicurus. Epicurus’ role as the great Enlightener of antiquity—a view of his work that was shared by thinkers as distinct as Bacon, Kant, Hegel, and Marx—provided me for the first time with a coherent picture of the emergence of materialist ecology, in the context of a dialectical struggle over the definition of the world.
In a closely related line of research, I discovered that Marx’s systematic investigation into the work of the great German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, which grew out of his critique of Malthusianism, was what led him to his central concept of the “metabolic rift” in the human relation to nature—his mature analysis of the alienation of nature. To understand this fully, however, it became necessary to reconstruct the historical debate over the degradation of the soil that had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the context of the “second agricultural revolution,” and that extends down to our time. Herein lay Marx’s most direct contribution to the ecological discussion (see chapter 5). I am extremely grateful to Liz Allsopp and her colleagues at IACR–Rothamsted in Hertfordshire for making Lady Gilbert’s translation of Liebig’s “Einleitung,” which lies in the Rothamsted archives, available to me. In conducting this research I benefited from close collaboration with Fred Magdoff and Fred Buttel in the context of coediting a special July-August 1998 issue of Monthly Review, entitled Hungry for Profit—now expanded into book form. I also gained from the support of my coeditor for the journal Organization & Environment, John Jermier. Some of this work appeared in earlier, less developed forms in the September 1997 issue of Organization & Environmentand the September 1999 issue of the American Journal of Sociology.
Given the complex intellectual history that this book attempts to unravel, its excursions into areas as seemingly removed from each other as ancient and modern philosophy, I was obviously in need of an interlocutor of extraordinary talents. That role was played throughout by John Mage, whose classical approach to knowledge, and immense historical and theoretical understanding, is coupled with a lawyer’s proficiency at dialectic. There is not a line in this book that has not been the subject of John's searching queries. Much that is best here I owe to him, while whatever faults remain in this work are necessarily, even stubbornly, my own.
Paul Burkett’s magisterial work Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (1999) constitutes not only part of the background against which this work was written, but also an essential complement to the analysis provided here. If I have sometimes neglected to develop fully the political-economic aspects of Marx’s ecology, it is because the existence of this work makes this unnecessary and redundant. Years of stimulating dialogue with Paul have done much to sharpen the analysis that follows.
To Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and Ellen Meiksins Wood, the three editors of Monthly Review, I am indebted for their encouragement and the force of their example. Paul's commitment to environmental analysis was a major factor thrusting me in this direction. Christopher Phelps, who, as Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, was involved with this book from its inception, has aided me in numerous, important ways.
It goes without saying that love and friendship are essential to all that is truly creative. Here I would like to thank Laura Tamkin, with whom I share my dreams, and Saul and Ida Foster; and also Bill Foster and Bob McChesney. To Saul and Ida, and their entire young generation, I dedicate this book.
作者：秃公 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature
