Why We Love Marx and Hate Environmentalists

It doesn’t take much trolling around the internet to discover that Greta Thunberg is a Marxist. The climate skeptic website Climate Discussion Nexus has called her “Karl Marx in pigtails.” Thunberg, the Imaginative Conservative tells us, “is showing her true colors. And the color is red, not green.” The Spectator’s James Delingpole insists that Thunberg has “gone full Marxist.”

Thunberg is not the only prominent Marxist in our midst. Tucker Carlson, in recent years has compared the “church of environmentalism” to Marxism and described the Green New Deal as the “Great Green Leap Forward.” Indeed, the claim that environmentalists are really “watermelons,” green on the outside but red on the inside, is an evergreen cliché dating back decades.

Right wing critics of environmentalism, however, are not the only ones insisting that green is really red. Today, a very vocal cohort of left wing environmentalists deploy Marx under banners like degrowth and ecosocialism in the name of saving the planet.

But both the critics of watermelon politics and its proponents have the colors exactly backwards. The problem with the ecoleft today is not that they are hiding their communism behind a veneer of environmentalism, but rather that they are hiding their environmentalism behind a veneer of communism— they are red on the outside and green on the inside. This reverse watermelon politics reliably confuses capitalism with modernity, materialism with consumerism, and bohemianism with proletarianism.

The result is a class politics in which egalitarian elites, in the academy, NGOs, philanthropy, and the knowledge economy, wage economic war against the working classes. The new ecoleft revolutionary class demands regressive taxes, restrictions on consumption, and food, energy, and transportation policies that raise the cost of living for those least able to afford it—all justified by Malthusian claims that absent such measures, human societies will cross biophysical “metabolic” thresholds, resulting in apocalyptic consequences for humanity.

The core demands of the ecoleft are typically dressed up with a fig leaf of redistributionist socialism. The regressive nature of the new austerity will be leavened by redistribution, they insist, assuring that it is the rich, not the poor, who pay. But the tell that it is the “eco” and not the “socialism” that is in control here is that there is no clear theory as to how the post-capitalist ecoeconomy will produce economic surplus to distribute, or redistribute, fairly. It should not surprise that the most identifiably socialist features of the original Green New Deal—Medicare for All and a national jobs guarantee—were largely forgotten within months of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’ election to Congress. By the time the Inflation Reduction Act passed years later, loudly trumpeted as a triumph of the activist Left, all that remained were green tax credits, with hardly a complaint from the erstwhile ecosocialists taking credit for its passage.

The old Marxist Left had a theory of the economy, how it produces surplus and value, and how both the quantity and quality of production changes as political economies evolve. The ecoleft has no such theory, insisting instead that less will be more and that new forms of connection, to each other and to nature, will make up for any material want. In place of a working theory of surplus value, the ecoleft offers little more than catastrophism and nostalgia for the feudal, pre-industrial past while proposing to impose ostensibly science-based ecological thresholds upon unwilling polities. Combining ivory tower nihilism with hostility towards the working class, reverse watermelon politics is both antithetical to anything that might be described as democratic socialism and disastrous for any prospect that the Left might succeed politically in the 21st century.

The Rise of the Ecoleft

Attempts to reconcile the historical materialism of the old Marxist Left with the ecological demands of post-war environmentalism date to the very earliest days of the New Left. As the baby boom generation, raised amidst post-war abundance, flooded into American universities, environmental concerns increasingly challenged materialist politics and liberatory demands based on race, gender, and sexuality complicated older, universalist notions of class solidarity and consciousness.

Meanwhile, America’s post-war working class had become arguably the richest in human history. What was good for General Motors did appear, to most, to be good for the country. America’s industrial proletariat was moving to the suburbs and buying tract homes with government-guaranteed mortgages—hardly the stuff of revolution.

And so the foundational texts of the New Left, like the Port Huron Statement and Herbert Marcuse’s seminal, One Dimensional Man, embraced a radical, if mostly underappreciated shift with profound implications for the modern Left. Because industrial abundance and welfare state beneficence had rendered the working classes unreliable allies in the anti-capitalist project, students, not the industrial proletariat, would constitute the revolutionary class in the advanced democracies of the West.

In that shift lay the seeds of two related political transformations. Liberal and left wing parties, despite continuing to fashion themselves as voices for poor and working people, largely became tribunes of the educated classes across the advanced developed economies of the West. This first transformation then enabled the second: the incorporation of environmentalism fully into the politics of the Left. Once the Left had divorced itself from actual proletarian constituencies, whose interests it purported to advocate but whose concerns it dismissed as “false needs,” the path had been cleared for environmentalism to capture the gentrified revolutionary classes of the post-war Left.

Through the 1970’s and 80’s, organized labor and environmentalists struggled for the soul of liberal and left wing politics across the developed world. But by the 1990s it was clear that ecology would trump labor ideologically and politically, a development that would herald the abandonment of the Left by working class constituencies. For a political faction whose increasingly elite composition belied its egalitarian values, this last development was problematic. But the response was not to refashion the Left to reflect the changing interests of the working classes in advanced developed economies but rather to refashion Marx and the history of the Left in the image of the new ecoleftists. Much of that work, initially, played out in obscure academic journals. And while “who cares,” is, at one level, a not reasonable reaction, the intellectual gymnastic and talmudic debates involved in the effort to reconcile Marx and ecology that played out on the far left flank of center left politics also reflects a deeper conceptual rift that has challenged both liberalism and the leftist political project in the advanced, late-capitalist economies of the West.

The End of History and The Second Contradiction of Capitalism

It is not coincidental that the effort to rebrand Marx as an environmentalist began roughly contemporaneously with the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Fukuyama’s famous 1989 essay and 1992 book of the same name are largely remembered today as triumphalist texts, celebrating global American capitalist hegemony. But Fukuyama was not referring to history in the conventional sense but rather in the Hegelian, dialectical way that Marx used the term.

What Fukuyama meant by the end of history was that there would be no “next” stage of history after capitalism, arguing instead that the liberal democracies and mixed economies that characterized the advanced economies of the late 20th century would represent an apotheosis of sorts. The end of history did not mean the end of crises, conflict, and socioeconomic change. The world might fall back into authoritarianism, feudalism, or other older forms of economic and political organization. But the central contradiction of capitalism that Marx had identified, that capitalists would immiserate labor and thereby eviscerate consumer markets for mass produced goods, would be resolved by new evolutions in democratic, market-based, welfare state economies, not a revolutionary new stage of human development.

At a moment when the Soviet Union was collapsing, organized labor was in crisis, and western post-industrial capitalist economies were thriving, Fukuyama’s argument was hard to resist. Indeed, early ecosocialist writing largely conceded his point, at least with regard to the internal contradictions of capitalism. A year before the publication of Fukuyama’s essay, the Marxist sociologist James O’Connor launched the ecosocialist journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism with an introductory essay in which he acknowledged that the contradictions and crises of capitalism would create increasing need for state planning and coordination and “social forms of production” which might resolve capitalism’s internal contradictions but held “only tenuous and ambiguous promises for the possibilities of socialism.”

O’Connor’s doctrinal innovation was to add a new class of contradictions, absent from Marx’s 19th century writings, that he dubbed “the second contradiction of capitalism.” Where the first contradiction was internal to capitalism, the result of the capitalist’s interest in exploiting labor (e.g. the capitalist’s drive to maximally exploit labor makes labor too poor to afford the capitalist’s product), the second contradiction involved an external contradiction—people and natural resources are not produced “capitalistically.” Capitalism cannot conjure more iron or copper or silicon into the world beyond what exists in the earth’s crust. It has no internal mechanism to assure that accumulation of toxic waste or greenhouse gasses does not kill or so deplete its workforce that it cannot continue to produce.

As with the first contradiction, O’Connor recognized that the second contradiction would drive more social forms of production to manage natural resources and pollution. But unlike the first contradiction, where those new forms of production distributed the economic surplus of productive forces more equitably, allowing for more consumption, continuing economic growth, and capitalist profit, the second contradiction only imposed costs upon capitalists. Rising costs from extraction, resource management, and pollution control would, O’Connor argued, increasingly erode capitalists’ profits.

A few years later, John Bellamy Foster, who would become a leading theorist of ecosocialism, would transform O’Connor’s second contradiction into “the absolute general law of environmental degradation under capitalism,” which, according to Foster, “increasingly constitutes the most obvious threat not only to capitalism's existence but to the life of the planet as a whole.” Capitalist production, combined with the second law of thermodynamics, would “maximize the overall toxicity of production.”

O’Connor had been critical of contemporary neomalthusianism and “Club of Rome technocracy,” arguing that such accounts “mangle Marx's theories of historically produced forms of nature and capitalist accumulation and development.” Foster, in contrast, embraced those claims, arguing, against the claims of environmental critics of Marx, that Marx and Engels had implicitly endorsed notions of natural limits to capital accumulation.

The problem, of course, was that neither Marx nor Engels had written anything to this effect. In an effort to reconcile Marx with environmentalism, O’Connor and Foster invented the new ecomarxist doctrine from whole cloth, first a second contradiction of capitalism, then an absolute law of environmental degradation, that were nowhere to be found in the actual writings of Marx or Engels. And so, Foster and his successors would set about scouring Marx’s early writings, appendixes to Capital, and obscure, unpublished texts and notes in order to find passages that supported the new ecomarxist doctrine.

The Metabolic Rift, or Marxology Gone Wild

By the late 90’s, Foster had seized upon a few sentences in a late chapter of Capital, in which Marx observed that capitalism “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” to claim that Marx was quite preoccupied with the planetary consequences of capitalist production. Foster tweaked Marx’s words, which he would henceforth refer to as the “metabolic rift” between capitalist societies and nature. In reality, the metabolic interaction that Marx described was far more prosaic. Agrarian laborers historically replenished the soil they farmed with their own feces and other organic household wastes. With the shift of large rural populations during the industrial revolution from feudal agrarian economic arrangements to the urban, industrialized, wage economy, waste from growing urban populations, distant from the sites of agricultural production, was no longer available for this purpose.

Foster nonetheless suggests that contemporary readers take the passage both metaphorically and literally. Marx, in Foster’s telling, anticipates global environmental catastrophe while never actually anticipating that capitalism would operate at global scales. Soil depletion, according to Foster, was not only a real world effect of capitalist overproduction in Marx’s time but also a metaphor for the collapse of the planetary life support system in our time.

In recent years, Foster’s revisionism has been further updated by thinkers like Kohei Saito, whose popular books Marx in the Anthropocene and Slow Down, reached a wide audience. Unlike Foster, who points to the metabolic rift as an example of where Marx’s thinking on the environment indicates a shift away from prometheanism, Saito argues that the concept of metabolism represents the core of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx, according to Saito, was the original degrowther.

For Saito, Marx’s growing appreciation for “metabolism” in his later years was more than a footnote to his broader productivist views. Rather, Saito argues, Marx’s late-career writing marked a fundamental turn away from historical materialism, Marx’s foundational contribution to political economy and social theory. Capitalism, according to Marx, Engels, and many others, would produce the necessary technological and social conditions that could enable a shift to socialist or communist forms of social organization. Marx’s dalliance with soil fertility, in Saito’s telling, instead implied an abandonment of historical materialism and recognition that the “productive forces” of capitalism would have to be fully abandoned. To avoid widening the “metabolic rift” between humans and nature, Marx had in fact concluded that socialism would have to start from scratch.

But, as with Foster’s original “metabolic rift”, Saito’s “uncovering” of Marx’s true environmental colors relies on fragmented notes and texts that are directly contradicted by Marx’s published work during the same period, most notably in Capital, Volume III. The claim that a set of unpublished notes should undercut the fundamental principles of Marx’s thought is truly astounding. But it is also necessary if the objective is to recast Marx as an environmentalist.

Marx’s interest in soil fertility, to be clear, was unquestionably real. Capitalist relations that had taken form over the centuries leading up to Marx’s life and writing took the fruits of agricultural production without a clear pathway to maintaining its productivity, a problem that those who still worked the land had, at the time of Marx’s writing, been unable to solve without resorting to high-cost and scarce inputs like seabird guano.

But throughout all of their major works, Marx and Engels were ambivalent about the ecological harms of the shift from feudalism to capitalism, seeing the disruption of the metabolic interaction between humans and the earth as one element of a much more complicated set of tensions between the growth of revolutionary and productive forces and their immediate negative outcomes on peasants, laborers, and to the least extent, nature.

Marx predictably engages the concept of “metabolism” dialectically alongside relatively promethean and teleological claims about capitalism more broadly. The ecological impacts of capitalist agriculture, urbanization, and other industrial production, then, are a necessary, arguably inevitable, part of capitalism’s growth as a revolutionary force. “The rationalizing of agriculture,” Marx writes in Capital: Volume III, “makes it for the first time capable of operating on a social scale,” But this is only possible after “first completely impoverishing the direct producers” by expropriating their land and resources.

Despite the violent expulsion of the peasantry from agricultural lands that often preceded capitalist agricultural development, Marx clearly saw increased agricultural labor productivity as a necessary step in his dialectical theory of history. The “freeing” of agricultural labor wreaks havoc on the social—and “metabolic”—relations of both rural and urban life, but it also makes possible “a higher form of society to combine this surplus-labor with a greater reduction of time devoted to material labor in general.”

What is clear is that Marx understood the shift from country to town as a precondition for the subsequent development of revolutionary forces. Urbanization, in Marx’s lifetime and prior, was often a violent process—as it remains to this day. And yet, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels celebrate the process. They write, “the bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”

Marx’s writing on the subject is both critical of capitalist commodity agricultural production and highly supportive of rationalist and scientific agricultural production. He argued vehemently against Malthus and Ricardo’s claims that agricultural productivity growth was impossible without increasing labor hours. Marx, rather, was deeply influenced by the German chemist and agronomist, Justus von Liebig, who argued that a rational and scientific engagement with soil nutrients would allow farmers to continuously plant on acreage without losing fertility over time.

Indeed, the best rebuttal to Foster and Saito’s appropriation of Marx’s brief observation about the fertility challenges that agricultural production faced as peasants moved off the land, moved to cities, and joined the industrial proletariat comes from Marx himself. “Fertility always implies an economic relation, a relation to the existing chemical and mechanical development of agriculture,” Marx observed. “Whether by chemical means…or mechanical means,” he continues, “the obstacles which made a soil of equal fertility actually less fertile can be eliminated.”

And indeed that is exactly what came to pass. Nineteen years after the first publication of Capital, Volume III, the German chemical company BASF commercialized the Haber-Bosch process which allowed for the mass production of synthetic fertilizer and resolved the metabolic problem that Marx had actually referred to. Marx would hardly have been surprised.

Karl Marx, Ecomodernist

Beyond Marx’s very limited writing about agriculture and even more limited discussion of metabolism, the effort to recast Marx as an ecological thinker and opponent of modernity requires a willful disregard for Marx’s broader theory of history. Marx was, arguably, the first modernization theorist. Without moving much of the population off of the land and into cities, and out of agriculture and into industry, there could be no proletariat. The metabolic rift, such as it was, was an inevitable result of this process. Without it, there could be no capital accumulation, no large working class, no rationalization of commodities and production such that workers might seize control of it.

Both capitalism and the metabolic rift are necessary stages of human development for Marx. Without them, there is no history, only feudalism. Post-capitalism, in other words, is not possible without capitalism, and not in a perfunctory way. Capitalism’s dynamism and productivism is necessary to rationalize and reorganize productive forces. Only once that has happened can the working class, liberated from the land and the feudal social and economic arrangements associated with agrarian life, become a revolutionary force.

In fact, the history of revolutionary Marxist regimes, in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, all to varying degrees point to the catastrophic consequences of attempting to leapfrog capitalism and go straight to post-capitalism. All collectivized peasant agriculture while attempting to force industrialization via state fiat, to disastrous effect for many who endured it and, not incidentally, the environment as well.

By contrast, and against claims that capitalism in wealthy industrialized countries has avoided immiserating the Western working classes only by robbing the global periphery of wealth and resources, the spread of global trade, markets, and productive forces to the periphery has coincided with dramatic improvements of living standards and human material well being, from life expectancy to educational attainment to food security, most especially among the global poor.

That period corresponds not incidentally with the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s embrace of state capitalism and global trade. The global economy remains deeply inequitable. But the floor for virtually all has improved significantly, suggesting perhaps, to paraphrase Joan Robinson, that the only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.

In the advanced developed economies, meanwhile, increasingly social forms of capitalism, as James O’Connor would have it, have not only assured that workers would benefit from a greater share of capitalist surplus but increasingly shifted control over the means of production to workers. Even in the famously unequal United States, workers own a substantial share of the stock market, primarily through retirement plans as well as taxable investment accounts. 66% of US households own their homes. Redistributive tax and transfer programs have actually substantially reduced the income gap between those at the bottom and those at the median of the income distribution, even as incomes at the top have taken off. And even income growth at the top of the distribution has largely been driven by wages, not rents, among top earners in the service and knowledge professions.

Government spending, meanwhile, now accounts for over 40% of GDP in the United States, higher in most other advanced developed economies. Third sector spending—universities, social agencies, and other non-profits—accounts for a further 10%. 25% of Americans work in either the public or non-profit sectors. Another 10% are self-employed. If you want to know why the Left has largely abandoned faith that the industrial proletariat might lead the way to a revolutionary post-capitalist order, consider that about as many Americans today work in the non-profit sector as in manufacturing.

Viewed as a dialectical and emergent phenomenon, not as a radical or revolutionary break, in other words, advanced post-industrial societies have evolved in ways not so different than Marx imagined they would. 150 years of contradictions and crises have transformed capitalism into something profoundly different than what it was in Marx’s day. The mixed economies of the West have proven adept at distributing surplus sufficiently to assure that workers can afford to be consumers of capitalist production. Against the claims of O’Connor and John Bellamy Foster, there is little evidence that a second contradiction of capitalism has much constrained the profitability of capital, despite the presence of an increasingly baroque environmental regulatory state and notwithstanding breathless forecasts of impending disaster fueled economic calamities due to climate change.

Insofar as there are new class conflicts and contradictions in late capitalist societies driving history forward, it would appear to be neither the conflict between capital and labor, nor between materialism and ecology, but rather between the working and knowledge classes—between those with college educations and those without, those still involved in the production of material goods and services and those fully ensconced in the knowledge economy, those in the private sector and those in the public and non-profit sectors that capitalism’s surplus makes possible. These new class conflicts cut across the old distinctions between capital and labor and instead divide both capital and labor, with owners, managers, and workers who produce economic surplus in the private sector increasingly arrayed together against those who live off its rents in the public and non-profit sectors.

Today, this new divide represents a third contradiction of capitalism. Public policies and social forms of production that distribute both private surplus and public goods broadly across late capitalist societies have produced a growing class of rentiers, managers, and workers alienated not only from the means of material production but from the material economy itself. Capitalism produces such wealth and abundance that a growing share of the population becomes detached from the material processes and productive forces that allow for its reproduction.

It is this contradiction and crisis that is today, across the West, roiling the social, political, and economic order that has defined Western political economy since the end of the second World War. The fault lines aren’t neat or tidy. But they define the politics of most Western democracies today. Political alignment today runs along the contours of education, private sector employment, and involvement with sectors of the economy that still produce material goods. If it can be said that there is a rift, it is not between humans and nature but between the new post-material knowledge class and the material metabolism of capitalism itself.

The Third Contradiction of Capitalism

The new divide challenges the old materialist Left as well as the new post-Marxist Left. The organized industrial proletariat has long been a shrinking force in advanced economies, and not simply due to the predations of capitalists. Increasing labor productivity has shrunk employment in industrial sectors of advanced economies. This has not resulted in mass technological unemployment, as both Marx and many of the classical economists he criticized imagined. Material output continues to grow, albeit more slowly than in earlier periods. But labor, freed today from industrial production, as it was in Marx’s time from agricultural production, has been absorbed by massively expanded knowledge and service sectors in all of the advanced economies. 80% or more of both employment and economic output in advanced economies today occurs in those sectors of the economy.

A post-industrial leftism, then, would seem to offer more promising possibilities. In societies where material sufficiency, if not abundance, is assured for virtually all, an egalitarian politics decoupled from material need might, in theory, reorient itself around ecological concerns. But where material interests offered the old Left a mechanism capable of organizing class interests in a way that was both universalizing and disciplining, post-material politics offers no similar mechanism.

Once advanced economies successfully address industrial pollution in extremis—river fires, smothering air pollution, and the like—environmental policies frequently impose costs upon either production or consumption that often hit working class households the hardest, in pursuit of environmental and public health benefits that are, under the best of circumstances, not so stark as to make those benefits obviously worth pursuing. The tradeoffs associated with climate mitigation are even worse. It may be the case that the impacts of climate change will fall hardest upon the poor, but climate policy also often impacts working class constituencies the most, promising higher cost energy, transportation and consumer goods in the present in exchange for uncertain climate benefits decades in the future.

In response, an elite leftism grounded in the academy has weaponized scholarship, scientizing green ideological, cultural, and aesthetic demands as ecological necessities. It is here that the Left, long the enemy of Malthus and subsequent attempts to impose external limits upon the aspirations of the working classes, abandoned that faith, substituting global ecological limits for universalist and class-based material demands and insisting that the working classes must subordinate their material interests to hard biophysical realities that, definitally, can brook no dissent.

Saito, Foster, and their cohort at The Monthly Review predictably embrace the planetary boundary thesis—arguing that looming ecological collapse requires an eco-socialist future without large-scale agriculture, abundant energy, or mass consumption. In a telling recent exchange with Foster, the Marxist scholar David Harvey rejects Foster’s efforts to base his new-fangled ecosocialism upon neo-malthusian and naturalized claims of planetary boundaries, arguing, as leftists from Marx onwards have, that these have always been tools that elites use to deny power, agency, and resources to the working class and the poor. In response, Foster simply restates his claim that ecological limits are established, unimpeachable science while defending long debunked works, such as Paul Erhlich’s Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, that have inspired exactly the regressive and unjust responses from elites that Harvey warns off.

In any event, the effort to convince the working classes that looming planetary environmental crises require that they subordinate their material aspirations to ostensibly unbending ecological limits has not gone well. The college educated Left today insists that the working classes must forego material consumption that ecoleftists deem unnecessary. But necessity and sufficiency are ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. Whether working class and rural French motorists can afford to pay higher fuel taxes or Dutch farmers can survive economically while raising fewer animals or working class Hispanic men need “big ass trucks,” is largely beside the point. Popular sentiment rules and efforts from both the reformist and radical Left to reorient popular politics around ecological concerns have broadly failed almost everywhere, consistently ceding working class constituencies, and the balance of power, to the populist Right.

In the post-war era, assuring that all were able to meet their material needs and live and work in dignity was a political project capable of sustaining a broad majoritarian politics for the Left. Attempting to codify what constitutes “enough" and impose that upon the population, by contrast, offers no similar possibility for a broad, inclusive, or class-based politics. Once material necessities have been met for most or all in advanced developed economies, politics becomes, unavoidably, a competition of which political faction can best align its objectives and agenda with the values and aspirations of the working and middle classes, including their aspirations to consume more.

Whether under the guise of carrying capacity, planetary boundaries, limits to growth, or climate targets—the effort to constrain the material aspirations of the working classes is a recipe for driving them out of the center-left political coalition. The defilement of Marx by the ecosocialists, in this way, is exactly analogous to the capture of the Democratic Party and center left politics by the environmental movement more broadly. The working class has no interest in being told how much is enough. Whether under the banner of abundance, liberalism, or leftism, the center-left will have no future so long as environmentalists retain substantial power within that coalition.