by Michael Roberts
In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt
from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian
political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Marx and Engels are often accused of what has been called a
Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human
beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess,
can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is
called ‘nature’ – for better or worse.
The charge is that other living species are merely playthings for the
use of human beings. There are humans and there is nature – in
contradiction. This charge is particularly aimed at Friedrich Engels,
who it is claimed, took a bourgeois ‘positivist’ view of science:
scientific knowledge was always progressive and neutral in ideology; and
so was the relationship between man and nature.
This charge against Marx and Engels was promoted in the post-war period by the so-called Frankfurt School of Marxism,
which reckoned that everything went wrong with Marxism after 1844, when
Marx and Engels supposedly dumped “humanism”. Later, followers of the
French Marxist Althusser
put the blame on Fred himself. For them, everything went to hell in a
hand basket a little later, when Engels dumped ‘historical materialism’
and replaced it with ‘dialectical materialism’, in order to promote
Engels’ ‘silly belief’ that Marxism and the physical sciences had some
relationship.
Indeed, the ‘green’ critique of Marx and Engels is that they were
unaware that homo sapiens were destroying the planet and thus
themselves. Instead, Marx and Engels had a touching Promethean faith in
capitalism’s ability to develop the productive forces and technology to
overcome any risks to the planet and nature.
That Marx and Engels paid no attention to the impact on nature of
human social activity has been debunked recently in particular by the
ground-breaking work of Marxist authors like John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett.
They have reminded us that throughout Marx’s Capital, Marx was very
aware of capitalism’s degrading impact on nature and the resources of
the planet. Marx wrote that “the capitalist mode of production
collects the population together in great centres and causes the urban
population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance…. [It] disturbs the
metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the
return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the
form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal
natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. Thus it
destroys at the same time the physical health of the urban worker, and
the intellectual life of the rural worker.” As Paul Burkett says:
“it is difficult to argue that there is something fundamentally
anti-ecological about Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his projections
of communism.”
To back this up, Kohei Saito’s prize-winning book
has drawn on Marx’s previously unpublished ‘excerpt’ notebooks from the
ongoing MEGA research project to reveal Marx’s extensive study of
scientific works of the time on agriculture, soil, forestry, to expand
his concept of the connection between capitalism and its destruction of
natural resources. (I have a review pending on Saito’s book).
But Engels too must be saved from the same charge. Actually, Engels
was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and
damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing. While
still living in his home town of Barmen (now Wuppertal), he wrote several diary notes about the inequality of rich and poor, the pious hypocrisy of the church preachers and also the pollution of the rivers.
Just 18 years old, he writes: “the two towns of
Elberfeld and Barmen, which stretch along the valley for a distance of
nearly three hours’ travel. The purple waves of the narrow river flow
sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings
and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. Its bright red colour, however, is due
not to some bloody battle, for the fighting here is waged only by
theological pens and garrulous old women, usually over trifles, nor to
shame for men’s actions, although there is indeed enough cause for that,
but simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red.
Coming from Düsseldorf, one enters the sacred region at Sonnborn; the
muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left
behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing.”
Barmen in 1913
He goes on: “First and foremost, factory work is largely
responsible. Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and
dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the
age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life. “
He connected the social degradation of working families with the
degradation of nature alongside the hypocritical piety of the
manufacturers.
“Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes,
particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal; syphilis and lung
diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible; in Elberfeld alone,
out of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are deprived of education and
grow up in the factories — merely so that the manufacturer need not pay
the adults, whose place they take, twice the wage he pays a child. But
the wealthy manufacturers have a flexible conscience and causing the
death of one child more or one less does not doom a pietist’s soul to
hell, especially if he goes to church twice every Sunday. For it is a
fact that the pietists among the factory owners treat their workers
worst of all; they use every possible means to reduce the workers’ wages
on the pretext of depriving them of the opportunity to get drunk, yet
at the election of preachers they are always the first to bribe their
people.”
Sure, these observations by Engels are just that, observations,
without any theoretical development, but they show the sensitivity that
Engels already had to the relationship between industrialisation, the
owners and the workers, their poverty and the environmental impact of
factory production.
In his first major work, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,
again well before Marx looked at political economy, Engels notes how
the private ownership of the land, the drive for profit and the
degradation of nature go hand in hand. “To make earth an
object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first
condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an
object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality
surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original
appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion
of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields
nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.” Once the earth becomes commodified by capital, it is subject to just as much exploitation as labour.
Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature,
written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often
subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history
as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way. And yet, in his
book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between
humans and nature.
In a famous chapter “The Role of Work in Transforming Ape into Man.”, he writes: “Let
us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us.
Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on
which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite
different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first.
The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere,
destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that they
were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of these
countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and
reservoirs of moisture. When, on the southern slopes of the mountains,
the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests so carefully cherished
on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were …
thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part
of the year, with the effect that these would be able to pour still more
furious flood torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those
who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that they were at the
same time spreading the disease of scrofula. Thus at every
step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a
conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature —
but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist
in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that
we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and
correctly apply its laws.” (my emphasis)
Engels goes on: “in fact, with every day that passes we are
learning to understand these laws more correctly and getting to know
both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our
interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this
happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature,
and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural
idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul
and body. …”
Engels explains the social consequences of the drive to expand the productive forces. “But
if it has already required the labour of thousands of years for us to
learn to some extent to calculate the more remote natural consequences
of our actions aiming at production, it has been still more difficult in
regard to the more remote social consequences of these actions. … When
afterwards Columbus discovered America, he did not know that by doing so
he was giving new life to slavery, which in Europe had long ago been
done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave traffic. …”
The people of the Americas were driven into slavery, but also nature was enslaved. As Engels put it: “What
cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the
slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient
fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee
trees–what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed
away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only
bare rock!” .
Now we know that it was not just slavery that the Europeans brought to the Americas, but also disease, which in its many forms exterminated 90% of native Americans and was the main reason for their subjugation by colonialism.
As we experience yet another pandemic, we know that it was
capitalism’s drive to industrialise agriculture and usurp the remaining
wilderness that has led to nature ‘striking back’,
as humans come into contact with more pathogens to which they have no
immunity, just as the native Americans in the 16th century.
Engels attacked the view that ‘human nature’ is inherently selfish
and will just destroy nature. In his Outline, Engels described that
argument as a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.” Humans
can work in harmony with and as part of nature. It requires greater
knowledge of the consequences of human action. Engels said in his
Dialectics: “But even in this sphere, by long and often cruel
experience and by collecting and analyzing the historical material, we
are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote,
social effects of our productive activity, and so the possibility is
afforded us of mastering and controlling these effects as well.”
But better knowledge and scientific progress is not enough. For
Marx and Engels, the possibility of ending the dialectical
contradiction between man and nature and bringing about some level of
harmony and ecological balance would only be possible with the abolition
of the capitalist mode of production. As Engels said: “To carry out this control requires something more than mere knowledge.” Science is not enough. “It
requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of
production, and with it of our whole contemporary social order.” The ‘positivist’ Engels, it seems, supported Marx’s materialist conception of history after all.
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