For a Fallible and Lovable Marx: Some Thoughts on the Latest Book by Foster and Burkett

Abstract

W hen I first read the key works of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett—Marx’s Ecology,Marx and Nature,Marxism and Ecological Economics, and assorted articles—during the unusually hot Swedish summer of 2006, they struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. I had read Marx for more than a decade by then. I had just realized how catastrophic a threat global warming is and how, as the saying now goes, it changes everything. But I was fumbling for links between socialism and ecology, and I had never noticed any particularly environmental messages in the writings of Marx (due partly to flaws in Swedish translations; partly to the general preconception of Marx as a thinker concerned with other matters; and partly also, to be sure, to my own previous indifference). And then here were two scholars who demonstrated how it all fits together. Never missing a good quotation, Burkett and Foster relayed one striking flash of insight after another from Marx—and, not to be forgotten, Engels; integrated them into an overarching framework of ecological Marxism; and explained, with the greatest lucidity and precision, how a tendency to environmental degradation inheres in the accumulation of capital. It was an exhilarating, even liberating experience, because it allowed someone like me to throw myself into the nascent climate movement, organize, study ecology, and sharpen—not blunt—the critique of capitalism. Many other readers of Foster and Burkett have felt the same. Little wonder, then, that two scholars and the school they represent have also come in for a fair amount of criticism. With Marx and the Earth: An Anti-critique, we now have their comprehensive rebuttal and defense of (their own interpretation of) the ecological thought of Marx and Engels. It should be noted already here, however, that the Anti-critique makes no mention of what is undoubtedly the most influential attack on the school: that of Jason W. Moore. In Capitalism and the Web of Life and article piled upon article, he accuses Foster in particular of peddling “Cartesian dualism”