This article on Liebig is sort of a response to Karl and others (Iwrote it a while
back, and it's on the website). I have not seen Foster's latest book, and have not
been greatly impressed by his earlier stuff, but I take Karl's view seriously and
will now get hold of it. (Incidentally, I'm sorry not to be participating much right
now; I'm trying to finish a book and I find I can't do as much as I used to so I
have to prioritise.).
The central question, as Karl rightly says, is to what extent has homo sapiens
*always* been a menace to the rest of life, even *before* the emergence of
capitalism? If it is true that we've always been baddest kid on the block, then just
eliminating capitalism won't save us (or Mother Nature). We have to do more. I like
Nikita Moiseev's starting point (Moiseev was a Soviet nuclear physicist and computer
designer who became a green). He speaks of the need to create new "Institutes of
Accord" which embody fundamental pricniples of solidarity both among humans and
between humans and all other species. We can do this, I believe (but I'm an
optimist) but if we don't do this, then we really are doomed, and in short order,
because it is now possible to foresee the complete collapse of the ecosphere in the
quite near future, so time is short. We shall have to make radical changes for the
better, in conditions of life which have changed sharply for the worse. It is hard
to imagine a bigger or more demanding challenge than that. And yes, I am convinced
that Marx (like other contemporaries) saw this. The uprush of industrial capitalism
made especially visible, vivid and urgent, the dilemma posed by the emergence of
homo sapiens, the first true intelligent form of life.
One other thing: trade and the evolution of commodity-production and exchange were
necessary preconditions for the emergence of philosophy, science and technology.
Only when you have commodity production based on a widespread division of labour,
does the objectification of Nature become possible in the first place. Without this
objectification, and the clear demarcation between Society and Nature it entails and
generates, humankind could not have emerged as an independent, and ultimately, a
completely dominant force within evolution. The first thinker to really nail this
down was Alfred Sohn-Rethel. In private correspondence with John Foster a couple of
years back, I tried to get him to take Sohn-Rethel's *Marxist* critique of kantian
epistemology on board, but he didn't get it. It doesn't surprise me to hear that he
and his collaborators have now invented what to my mind is a spurious Epicurean
provenance for the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic. I'll read the book, as I say, but
that idea strike me as nonsense, altho doubtless of a piece with Foster's apparently
incorrigible empiricism.
Here's my earlier thoughts on Marx + Liebig, anyway:
In 1842 an obscure professor of agronomy in the German provincial town of Giessen,
published a book in English which would revolutionise agriculture. Marx would say
that Justus, Baron von Liebig (1803-73) was 'more important than all the economists
put together'. Only one other natural scientist had as great an influence on Marx,
and that was the biologist Charles Darwin. Liebig's discoveries put soil science on
its modern footing. He analysed plant photosynthesis and found how plants fix
nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the air. The lab he set up pioneered work on
artificial fertilisers. By putting it on a scientific basis, he helped make
possible the capitalist agriculture which complemented capitalist industry. But
Liebig himself was no great fan of capitalism. He believed it led to a damaging
divorce between man and nature, and it was from Liebig's work that Marx drew the
conclusion that in the long run capitalist agriculture will lead to falling yields,
desertification and loss of biodiversity. Even more than his work as a soil
scientist, Liebig's lasting achievement was to postulate that any complex system
is always limited by a single boundary condition. Liebig's Law is fundamental to
most modern ideas about carrying capacity and the limits to growth. It states that
the productivity and ultimately the survival of any complex system dependent on
numerous essential inputs or sinks is limited by that single variable in least
supply. Thus, the lack of any essential soil nutrient limits overall soil
fertility. The shortage of iron constrained development of the English economy in
the 18th century. Removing such bottlenecks attracts resources on a scale
ultimately dependent only on the limits of the whole economy and the available
capital. But accumulation can never eliminate bottlenecks entirely. Instead,
expanding economies which constantly transform their technical basis, will always
press against new limits to growth, struggle to overcome them and sometimes
succeed, sometimes not. Liebig's Law has proven fundamental to understanding the
cyclical dynamics of capitalist accumulation, but what the Law points to is not the
existence of external limits to growth, as most environmentalists assume, but to
the limits which occur immanently, as a system's dynamics evolve. This is true of
any natural ecosystem, from soil itself to the large scale interactions between
species coexisting and competing within biomes. Liebig's Law points to the
existence of interdependences within holistic systems. It is not a simply question
of one nutrient or mineral in short supply determining the growth in numbers of all
populations within a system, but rather of the way the relative availability of
components conditions the complex interactions of the organisms making up an
ecosystem and without any one of which the integrity of the ecosystem as a whole
may be compromised. One mineral or nutrient is in short supply relative to the
reproduction and evolution of the whole system. Feedback processes may and often do
act to ensure that equilibrium is maintained by ensuring the continued existence
of a limiting factor. Well-functioning ecosystems do not normally overstress the
species inhabiting the common space by allowing populations to bloom to the point
of collapse and die-off. Rather, as Eugene Odum says, the tendency that seems to
characterize natural ecosystems is that of maximizing the quality of the overall
environment for the mutual benefit of all species within it. For Marx, too, the
limits to capitalist accumulation were immanent, not external, and derive from its
own operation. This is questioned not only by environmentalists but some Marxists
who have adopted Green arguments that the 'limits to growth' are external and are
posited by objectively-pre-existing environmental constraints, for example finite
resources, or the limits potentially imposed by environmental impacts such as
global warming resulting from anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. The exponents of
a Green-Red synthesis have actually adopted arguments from ecology which are
mistaken in their own, terms, however. In fact it is Marx who is closer to the
underlying thought: capitalism too can be regarded as a closed, self-sufficient
system, evolved and governed by its own laws. There is no need to resort to
externalities to explain either capitalist crisis or the limits to capitalist
growth. To reassert the holistic nature of Marxism does more than underline its
affinity with holistic ecology. It is also to demolish post-modern critiques of
Marxism which deconstruct Marxism (and the emancipatory task) into particularities
which deny hegemony and finally history. Thus Harry Cleaver has written about
hegemony and counter- hegemony: "Two great mistakes in the Western revolutionary
tradition have been the obsession with totalization and the idea that system must
follow system. Revolutionaries, despite their rejection of capitalism's imperial
efforts to absorb the world and impose a universal hegemony, have still thought the
future in terms of unity and counter-hegemony. Many Marxists have believed that
just as a unifying capitalist system followed feudalism, so must some unifying
system called socialism (or communism) be constructed to replace capitalism. Many
radical environmentalists, while condemning the destructiveness of capitalism's
imposed unity, think in terms of bio-systems, of a holistic Gaia." Cleaver is
wrong on both counts: Marxism is counter- hegemonic, and eco-systems are holistic.
Marx was the first to analyse the totalizing dynamic of capitalist accumulation,
to identify that as its revolutionary essence, and Marx showed how no piecemeal
reforms or emendations were possible precisely because capitalism's engulfing,
totalising nature either absorbed reforms, recuperating them to its own
[intensified] accumulation process, or destroyed them, evacuating their historical
meaning. Only the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state and liquidation
of the capitalist mode of production in its entirety could prevent
counter-revolution making a mockery of opposition; and only cynical hypocrisy and
self-seeking, could allow reformism to masquerade as real opposition. But Marx
never produced [utopian] schemes for 'some unifying system' as Cleaver suggests,
and always criticsed attempts at second-guessing what lay beyond capitalism. To
make the working class a class for itself, politically totalising it and
concentrating it historically, is a different mater: withoiut such hegemonic class-
consciousness, there can be no totalising politics adequate in real practice to
destroying capitalism. Marx showed how industrial capitalism, once it was
launched, had no choice but either collapse or continue on its growth-path.
Competition between individual capitals forced speed-up, intensified exploitation,
and the introduction of capital-intensive techniques and machinery. Capitalism's
growth-path entailed the growth of population including an exponentially-expanding
reserve army of labour. The mass production of iron led directrly to the final
break-out from protocapitalism to the era of dependence on machinery and
fossil-fuels, without which little of the improvements in labour- productivity of
the poast two centuries would have happened. The strains in the 18th century
English economy resulted from a prolonged period of development which produced
great gains in agricutlural productivity. The population doubled to over 8 million;
but the bottlenecks which appeared in energy and raw materials (primarily but not
only iron) threatened to bring the edifice down. The riots and disorders of the
period were magnified on the continent, where the same strains appeared in
intensified forms, reuslting in food shortages, social strain and finally the
French Revolution. We have seen that bottlenecks for example in metallurgy were
not the result of natural causes, but of leads and lags in the process of social
accumulation -- of protocapitalist development. Shortages had social causes. The
accumulation process (which prepared the way for take-off) was cyclical and
exhibited tendencies to stagnation followed by break-out which always occurred
when sufficient new forces (innovations, capital, labour supply, resource reserves)
had acumulated in discrete, apparently disconnected ways throughout the system.
When rapid growth began, the coalescing and mobilising of disparate reserves
reinforced feedback and further magnified growth rates. Enormous human misery
dogged primitive accumulation each step of the way. But the implied social
contract (the existence and form of which was the staple topic of Enlightenment
conversation) which emerged as the post-medieval logjams disintegrated, held then
as it does now. The many losses endured by large swathes of the working population,
as the guild and fedual protections of medieval collectivism disintegrated pr were
thrust aside, were tolerated as long as the promise of improved living standards
was honoured or anyway, not indefinitely deferred. The mix of coercion and consent
was decisive in guaranteeing social equilibirium. Coercion, terror and social
conscription were never enough by themselves to preserve order, and absolutism
everywhere debouched in insurrection or war. Throughout the British Isles, the
horrors of deruralisation were mitigated by the possibilities of emigration to the
cities or the colonies, where even idnentured servitude was compoensated by the
existence of open frontiers and empty lands awaiting settlement. As the rate of
growth accelerated, turbulence and immiseration prompted cultural responses which
included widespeard fear, insecurity, melacnholy and a sense of loss which was soon
associated with the celebration of the sublime, with nostalgia for the vanished
past or order and stability, and with the concomitant fixation of Nature by the
Romantics as a dissociated, extra-social -- and distinctly threatened -- category
of being. Wordsworth: Meanwhile at social Industry's command, How quick, how vast
an increase. From the germ Of some poor hamlet, rapidly rpoduced Here a huge town,
continuouis and compact, Hiding the face of the earth for leagues - and there,
Where not a habitation stood before, Abodes of men irregualrly massed Like trees
in forests, - spread through spacious tracts, O'er which the smoke of unremitting
fires hangs permanent... Growth was both ill and panacea. And this was true not
only culturally, but in a deeper historical sense. Wordsworth's use of the word
'Industry' already in 1814 reflected the cultural, etymological displacement
documented by Raymond Williams, from an adjective describing human activity to a
noun labelling a constellation of social practices: the economy as a realm of
production (also words whose meanings altered at this time). Within fifty years
Marx began to rethink this constellation of activities and relations as a 'mode' of
production. Accumulation, of the factors of production: land (raw materials,
technologies, innovations), labour (the proletariat, a mass of undiferentiated
labour-powers) and capital, money as a store of value, value as a representation
of the social potentialities available for mobilisation ('Capital is another word
for civilisation,' Marx would say. ). Thus capital was both a factor of
production, and the representational form, hypothesized, idealised, of the real
material factors, land and labour: capital was a social metaphysic, or a djinn or
even a vampire. When bottlenecks appeared, they were themselves the results of
previous accumulation, and they threatened accumulation's continuation. Capital
could be destroyed, land fall into desolation, labour could starve, reduced to
beggary. Therefore accumulation was a good in itself, above all others. Only if
the process was allowed to continue unfettered, could the concentration of reserves
occur which was the sole guarantee of the mode of production as a whole
breaking-out from the impasse of a cyclical downturn and relaunching accumulation
on a still higher, more intensive -- more beneficent! plain. The entire history of
protocapitalist accumulation seemed to confirm this.
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