Marxist ecological consciousness precedes the modern ecological movement. See the
following excerpt from "The Part Played By Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man"
by Frederick Engels. Since human production is always part of the context of Engels'
thought, this passage also demonstrates that our discussions of use-value and
exchange-value are relevant to ecology, contra complaints from some on this list.
Charles Brown
((((((((((
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876hand/index.htm
Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environment by their activities
in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we
have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them. In nature nothing takes
place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is
mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural
scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things. We
have seen how goats have prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece; on the
island of St. Helena, goats and pigs brought by the first arrivals have succeeded in
exterminating its old vegetation almost completely, and so have prepared the ground
for the spreading of plants brought by later sailors and colonists. But animals exert
a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals
themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further removed men are from animals,
however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated,
planned action directed towards definite preconceived ends. The animal destroys the
vegetation of a locality without realising what it is doing. Man destroys it in order
to sow field crops on the soil thus released, or to plant trees or vines which he
knows will yield many times the amount planted. He transfers useful plants and
domestic animals from one country to another and thus changes the flora and fauna of
whole continents. More than this. Through artificial breeding both plants and animals
are so changed by the hand of man that they become unrecognisable. The wild plants
from which our grain varieties originated are still being sought in vain. There is
still some dispute about the wild animals from which our very different breeds of dogs
or our equally numerous breeds of horses are descended .
It goes without saying that it would not occur to us to dispute the ability of
animals to act in a planned, premeditated fashion. On the contrary, a planned mode of
action exists in embryo wherever protoplasm, living albumen, exists and reacts, that
is, carries out definite, even if extremely simple, movements as a result of definite
external stimuli. Such reaction takes place even where there is yet no cell at all,
far less a nerve cell. There is something of the planned action in the way
insect-eating plants capture their prey, although they do it quite unconsciously. In
animals the capacity for conscious, planned action is proportional to the development
of the nervous system, and among mammals it attains a fairly high level. While
fox-hunting in England one can daily observe how unerringly the fox makes use of its
excellent knowledge of the locality in order to elude its pursuers, and how well it
knows and turns to account all favourable features of the ground that cause the scent
to be lost. Among our domestic animals, more highly developed thanks to association
with man, one can constantly observe acts of cunning on exactly the same level as
those of children. For, just as the development history of the human embryo in the
mother's womb is only an abbreviated repetition of the history, extending over
millions of years, of the bodily development of our animal ancestors, starting from
the worm, so the mental development of the human child is only a still more
abbreviated repetition of the intellectual development of these same ancestors, at
least of the later ones. But all the planned action of all animals has never succeeded
in impressing the stamp of their will upon the earth. That was left for man.
In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it
simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This
is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it
is labour that brings about this distinction.*
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories
over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is
true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and
third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel
the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed
the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the
forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis
for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used
up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern
slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the
dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby
depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making
it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the
rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these
farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading 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 creatures of being able
to learn its laws and apply them correctly.
And, in fact, with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of
these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote
consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular,
after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are
more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, also the more remote
natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more
this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with
nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a
contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body, such as arose after
the decline of classical antiquity in Europe and obtained its highest elaboration in
Christianity.
It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to
calculate the more remote natural effects of our actions in the field of production,
but it has been still more difficult in regard to the more remote social effects of
these actions. We mentioned the potato and the resulting spread of scrofula. But what
is scrofula compared to the effects which the reduction of the workers to a potato
diet had on the living conditions of the popular masses in whole countries, or
compared to the famine the potato blight brought to Ireland in 1847, which consigned
to the grave a million Irishmen, nourished solely or almost exclusively on potatoes,
and forced the emigration overseas of two million more? When the Arabs learned to
distil spirits, it never entered their heads that by so doing they were creating one
of the chief weapons for the annihilation of the aborigines of the then still
undiscovered American continent. And when afterwards Columbus discovered this America,
he did not know that by doing so he was giving a new lease of life to slavery, which
in Europe had long ago been done away with, and laying the basis for the Negro slave
trade. The men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laboured to create the
steam-engine had no idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than any
other was to revolutionise social relations throughout the world. Especially in
Europe, by concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority and dispossessing the huge
majority, this instrument was destined at first to give social and political
domination to the bourgeoisie, but later, to give rise to a class struggle between
bourgeoisie and proletariat which can end only in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and
the abolition of all class antagonisms. But in this sphere too, by long and often
cruel experience and by collecting and analysing historical material, we are gradually
learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our
production activity, and so are afforded an opportunity to control and regulate these
effects as well.
This regulation, however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a
complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a
revolution in our whole contemporary social order.
All hitherto existing modes of production have aimed merely at achieving the most
immediately and directly useful effect of labour. The further consequences, which
appear only later and become effective through gradual repetition and accumulation,
were totally neglected. The original common ownership of land corresponded, on the one
hand, to a level of development of human beings in which their horizon was restricted
in general to what lay immediately available, and presupposed, on the other hand, a
certain superfluity of land that would allow some latitude for correcting the possible
bad results of this primeval type of economy. When this surplus land was exhausted,
common ownership also declined. All higher forms of production, however, led to the
division of the population into different classes and thereby to the antagonism of
ruling and oppressed classes. Thus the interests of the ruling class became the
driving factor of production, since production was no longer restricted to providing
the barest means of subsistence for the oppressed people. This has been put into
effect most completely in the capitalist mode of production prevailing today in
Western Europe. The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are
able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their
actions. Indeed, even this useful effect -- inasmuch as it is a question of the
usefulness of the article that is produced or exchanged -- retreats far into the
background, and the sole incentive becomes the profit to be made on selling.
Classical political economy, the social science of the bourgeoisie, in the main
examines only social effects of human actions in the fields of production and exchange
that are actually intended. This fully corresponds to the social organisation of which
it is the theoretical expression. As individual capitalists are engaged in production
and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate
results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or
merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he
is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the
commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the
same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the
slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser 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! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode
of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible
result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions
directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in
character; that the harmony of supply and demand is transformed into the very reverse
opposite, as shown by the course of each ten years' industrial cycle -- even Germany
has had a little preliminary experience of it in the "crash"; that private ownership
based on one's own labour must of necessity develop into the expropriation of the
workers, while all wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of
non-workers; that [... the manuscript breaks off here ...]
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