Ecosocialism and Marx's Humanism

The tendency calling itself ecosocialism is a response not only to the massive environmental destruction in our capitalist world, but to the feeling that Green movements have not adequately challenged capitalism while socialist movements have treated ecology as an "afterthought," and neither has achieved its goals. It implies a recognition of the need to abolish capitalism if human society is to avoid catastrophe. Doing that requires grasping what is the core of capitalist relations that must be transformed.

Let's begin with a concept that is key to Marx's explanation of capitalism's social relations, its alienated labor, its fetishism, and the nature of the mysterious entity he called value: the dialectical inversion of subject and object, so that the object dominates the subject. In the factory the machine dominates the worker, but in Marx's concept of alienated labor, the same subject-object relationship also shapes the human relationship to nature, which implies that the alienation of humanity from nature cannot be overcome without overcoming the subject-object inversion inherent in alienated labor.

Crucially, Marx saw that the transcendence of alienation was more than simply eliminating private property. That was only the first negation, which itself would need to be transcended. As the founder of Marxist-Humanism Raya Dunayevskaya argued, our age has experienced counter-revolution coming from within revolution, as in the Russian Revolution.

That transformation into opposite showed the urgent need for new beginnings in philosophy, and the concreteness of Marx's point that social revolution goes beyond negating private property to the negation of that negation, that is, the transcendence of communism, or humanity reappropriating what it has made. That involves the reintegration of the human being's activity in all its moments, including relationship to nature.

The fact that revolutions as great as the Russian ended up being transformed into opposite, into bureaucratic state-capitalism, and that these totalitarian regimes called themselves Marxist, only served to disorient genuine revolutionaries. The "productivism" of these societies, their drive to industrialize no matter the cost to environment or to workers, did not stem from some alleged roots in Marx's theory but from the law of motion of capitalism, which they had no choice but to follow because the production relations were capitalistic.

How could ecosocialism avoid such an outcome? It is not so simple as setting a goal--such as "participating in ecosystems"[1]--since emancipating labor was a principal goal of the Russian Revolution, yet it turned into its opposite, with no freedom for workers. What is crucial to grasp is what post-Marx Marxism lost that was in Marx's philosophy. All the Green attempts to reject Marxism are on the ground of post-Marx Marxism's truncated concepts of what socialism is, what revolution is, what liberation means. Nothing short of a philosophy of revolution that recaptures Marx's Humanism can provide the foundation for enabling revolution to continue in permanence. To reject Humanism as "anthropocentric" is to mistake humanity in its current alienated condition for what liberated humanity could potentially be, as well as to cut oneself off from subjects of revolution.

MARX'S SOCIALISM AS 'HUMAN POWER'

Marx's concept is of a revolution so total as to uproot all conditions in which "the human being objectifies herself/himself inhumanly in opposition to self."[2] That includes emancipation of labor, it includes the transformation of the alienated man/woman relationship, and it includes the reappropriation of the human relationship with nature. We are alienated from our own activity, and therefore from the interchange with nature, which is unsustainable in its present form because it is alienated and irrational.

Since Marx is often accused of "productivism," or of glorifying human transformative and productive powers, particularly in the form of industry, it is important to make the distinction between human powers in their alienated form and as liberatory forces. The current alienated form of the relationship between humanity and nature is determined by humanity's alienation from itself. It would be a tremendous mistake to assume that this relationship is a fixed essence of humanity, that is to say, that the development of human power is transhistorically inimical to nature. But that mistake is central to such theories as Ted Benton's "ecological reconstruction of Marx" (The Greening of Marxism, ed. Ted Benton, Guilford, 1996).

Contemporary radical theory is dominated by an overwhelming consciousness of defeat, and loss of confidence in human power as the power to transform society. It is grounded in actual history of revolutions that have failed or transformed into opposite, as in Russia, China and Iran.

However, those failures are too often theorized as the universal essence of human nature, so that--in anarcho-primitivism, deep ecology, most Green theory, and many radical theories influenced by postmodernism--liberation becomes defined less by the need for human development than by the need to limit human activity. This retreat from revolution is developed in theory as the impossibility of any transformation that results in true liberation.

Ted Benton counterposes human powers to transform things, on the one hand, to natural limits on the other. His theory recognizes these powers only in an alienated shape, that is, as powers embodied in capital. The aspects of human power that then stand out are its technological forms, the sheer scale of social production, and the great destruction wrought by them. His theory skips over the contradiction within human power itself: human beings themselves struggling against their domination by their own products. Such a theory sees only the negative side of subjectivity trying to make itself objective by exercising "human transformative powers." Therefore, the domination of object over subject is accepted as natural and eternal, rather than a social form of a specific historical stage, capitalism. So we end up with a theory that rejects the transcendence of exactly what we need to transcend to break capitalism's destructive law of motion.

In claiming that basic concepts of Marx's economic theory fall short of his philosophy's materialist premises, Benton repeats a fallacy common in Green critiques: acting as if Marx's description of how capitalism actually functions is a prescription for theory. That is, Marx shows how value, capital, and abstract labor, as driving forces of capitalism, abstract from nature and from all dimensions other than quantity of socially necessary labor time. The critics wrongly read this as a gap in Marx's theory. They then revise his theory, and end up pushing the human subject out of the center, and losing sight of the dialectical inversion of object over subject.

MARX'S CONCEPT OF VALUE

Marx did not use the word "value" in the psychological or moral sense of what is judged good or evil, useful or useless. When we say that only labor, not nature, determines value, it is not a denial of nature's worth or of the part it plays in production and life but a recognition of how capitalism functions.

The key is to grasp value as the form of appearance of objectified labor under the capitalist mode of production. Value, which is really the objective form taken by alienated labor, takes on a life of its own as the driving force of society and stands in opposition to workers, the subjects of labor. In other words, the dialectical inversion of object and subject is the expression of value as dead labor dominating living labor. It is seen strikingly in production where the machine is the material bearer of value, subjugating the worker.

Since labor, which is the universal condition for humanity's metabolism with nature, takes definite historical forms, the ahistorical concept of "domination of nature" is inadequate. To arrive at a historical notion, we must confront the specific character of domination inherent in society based on value production.

Labor in commodity production has a dual character: while concrete labor is the activity of making a definite kind of useful thing, it is abstract labor that produces value. The discipline of the factory clock reduces concrete individual labor with specific skills to value, an abstract mass of "socially necessary labor time." The process of production becomes value's act of self-production through the instrumentality of the machine's domination of the workers. The machine embodies value, dead labor, which acts as the subject and dominates the living laborer, who is turned into an object, an appendage to the machine. The appearance of domination in the contemporary society's irrational, destructive relationship to nature is actually the reflection of the subordination of both nature and humanity to capital.

At the same time, because it abstracts from nature, mechanized value-driven production vastly increases the use of raw materials, draws in new materials such as petroleum, exhausts the fertility of the soil, and produces unprecedented amounts of waste. The scale of production is not limited by human needs but is driven by value's limitless drive to augment itself.

FOR USE-VALUE, OR A NEW KIND OF LABOR?

Ecosocialists have called for "a valorization of use-values over exchange-values" ("An Ecosocialist Manifesto," by Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy) and declared that "ecosocialism [is] a struggle for use-value" (The Enemy of Nature by Joel Kovel). Marx's socialism was never about use-value over exchange-value. He drove deeper to the forms of labor that produce use-value and value: concrete labor and abstract labor. This two-fold nature of labor in capitalist society is what Marx called, "the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns," yet it has played no part in ecosocialist theory. Without it, a theory cannot center on human activity, as alienated labor, as struggle against alienation, as the goal of a new society based on free self-activity.

This is compounded by the adoption by Kovel and others of the mystified concept of "intrinsic value" from Green theory. Passed off as an objective, trans-historical attribute of nature, "intrinsic value" is really a subjective attribute of human morality and psychology.

Posing value outside of its determination by alienated labor, and introducing "intrinsic value" as a spiritual essence floating outside humanity and beyond history, culminates in the old Green mystification of Nature as Subject. It goes back to an old idea, that human society's environmental destructiveness is due to an "anthropocentric" attitude, which must be fixed by putting nature at the center. That leads to displacing subjects of revolution, who can only be humans.

Other natural beings are seen in their capacity to suffer. Since social change cannot be left up to the action of non-human Nature, posing Nature as subject (or, as in "An Ecosocialist Manifesto," posing "the freeing of all beings as [a new society's] ground and goal") leads to human representatives acting on their behalf. This is no way to help spontaneous revolts of workers develop into the self-organization of a new society. One result is that the abolition of the division between mental and manual labor is missing from sketches of the new ecosocialist society, whether that be in Kovel's The Enemy of Nature or in any ecosocialist manifestos. Yet the need to begin breaking down that division even before the revolution, and certainly during and after it, is one of the foremost lessons of 20th Century revolutions.

WHO IS THE SUBJECT OF REVOLUTION?

The question of Subjects of revolution sheds light also on the critique of Marx's supposed "productivism," because he singled out the contradiction between productive forces and production relations. According to Michael Lowy in Ecosocialism or Barbarism, this is a "mechanistic scheme" that "should be replaced--or at least be completed--by the idea that productive forces in the capitalist system become destructive ones." Since Marx addresses the destructiveness of productive forces frequently in his writings, including in relation to the environment, Lowy should have asked why Marx did not elevate it as the primary contradiction. Lowy is harking back to the "second contradiction of capitalism" proposed by James O'Connor (Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, Guilford, 1997): a contradiction between the forces and relations of production on the one hand and the conditions of production on the other.

In both cases, the proposed substitute lacks a human subject at its heart, so it lacks an active force internal to the contradiction that can transcend it. This throws out what is central to the creation of a new society: the self-developing Subject. Revising post-Marx Marxism without recapturing what Marx's philosophy of revolution had achieved ends up undermining the ability to help revolution continue to a new society.

Value dominates, but can never totally submerge, the human being. The revolt of the workers is the quest by human beings to reclaim their own subjectivity from the machine and posit their subjectivity as objective, in the form of revolutionary activity. Marx's argument--theorized by Dunayevskaya's Marxist-Humanism as the projection of "new forces and new passions," including but not limited to labor, for reconstructing society on new beginnings--provides ground for comprehending today's multiple forces of revolution and mass opposition to environmental destruction as also challenging capitalism's perverse relationship of object over subject. The environmental movement has the potential to relate to other freedom movements on a deep, organic basis, rather than simply as tactical allies.

Ecosocialism's challenge to the capitalist concept of development needs to directly oppose the dialectical inversion of subject and object, and root itself in the potential of the self-developing Subject. Marx's dialectical approach, as reinterpreted for our day by Marxist-Humanism, is indispensable for arriving at that goal.

NOTES:

1. The Enemy of Nature, by Joel Kovel (Zed Books, 2002), p. 209.

2. From Marx's "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic."

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