Unearthing Eco-Socialism: Dr. John Bellamy Foster on Marxism, the Metabolic Rift, and a Sustainable Future

Join the profound journey into the heart of eco-socialism with Dr. John Bellamy Foster, a guiding voice in the discourse on the environment and socioeconomic systems. Our thought-provoking conversation peels back the layers of the metabolic rift, a concept that reveals the tension between capitalism's exploitation of nature and the delicate ecological balance we must preserve. Dr. Foster, a luminary in the field, articulates the vision of Marx in a contemporary light, offering listeners a powerful understanding of how our societal structures clash with the planet's natural rhythms.

Today's episode navigates the often-misunderstood relationship between Marxism and our environment, exposing the historical schisms that have diverted Western Marxism from ecological considerations. With Dr. Foster's expertise, we confront the legacy of Stalin's Soviet Marxism and its impact on stifling ecological thought within the framework of Marxist theory. The conversation also touches on the relevance of the metabolic rift to current sustainability challenges and the profound alienation of our society from its ecological underpinnings, unraveling the complex interplay of economic, scientific, and ideological forces.

As we wrap up this compelling episode, the debate over sustainable development and degrowth takes center stage. We scrutinize the contrasting needs of nations at different stages of development, questioning the role of socialism in carving a path towards an ecological civilization. Dr. Foster's insights into China's environmental policies and the German Green Party's shifting emphasis provide a nuanced exploration of how countries are navigating the urgent call for environmental action. Armed with the wisdom shared today, listeners are equipped to consider the pressing question: how do we realign our economic systems with the planet's ecological imperatives for a sustainable future?

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

C. Derick Varn : 0:49

Hello, welcome to VarmVlog, and I am here with Dr John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, editor of the Monthly Review, author of many, many books, including the kind of bellwether text for ecosocialism Marxist ecology. Bellwether text for eco-socialism Marxist ecology. Also in 2010,. The ecological rift 2020, the robbery of nature and the return to nature, and I believe you have a book coming out called the Dialectics of Ecology, correct? Yes, all right, and today I've been doing a series on eco-socialism, but I wanted to get back to the basics of it, because the metabolic riff gets thrown around all the time in these discussions and often it is assumed people understand it and I don't know that. We can always assume that, can't always assume that. So I wanted to ask you you know what do in response to the early eco-socialist work in the 70s and how do you think that's helped us understand Marxist economics?

John Bellamy Foster: 2:31

Well, it's quite complicated and let me try and deal with this in stages. The concept of metabolism, or Stoffetz as they called it originally in Germany, or called it in Germany, arose in around 1815, early 19th century in cell biology. And you know, metabolism is basically, in its broad sense, it's the notion that we take energy and nutrients from nature, we energy, nutrients, resources from nature, appropriate them, say, in our own bodies, metabolize that energy, those nutrients, and then we give them off as waste on the other end, right. So metabolism is really about this process of exchange between human beings and nature and of course it applies to all species, to all animal species. We can talk about metabolism in that sense.

John Bellamy Foster: 3:49

The notion arose in the early 19th century and Marx was influenced by his friend Roland Daniels, who was a physician and a scientist and was caught up in the Cologne communist trials, spent time in prison and he actually Daniels, died at an early age as a result of his health being compromised in prison and he wrote one book and it was called Microcosmos and he only had one reader and that was his friend Karl Marx. And in Microcosmos Daniels took the concept of metabolism, which was already important in the development of thermodynamics and it's in the first law of conservation. And he made it into a kind of systems ecology perspective explaining how metabolism unites the world of plants and animals and inorganic nature through the flow of energy and nutrients. And so Marx was influenced by this and Marx actually dedicated the poverty of philosophy to Daniels. But Daniels had died and Marx in the early 1850s started using the term metabolism.

John Bellamy Foster: 5:37

Early 1850s started using the term metabolism and in the Grundrisse he developed the notion of social metabolism, began to use that as a sort of a regulative systems concept to deal with social metabolic processes and social metabolic reproduction. But as he went on and developed his political economy further, he came to define the production, the labor and production process as a process of social metabolism. That is, human beings who are social beings, their relation to nature is mediated by the labor and production process and he called that the social metabolism, the sort of the ecological side of the economic process. He referred to it as social metabolism. So the labor and production process was defined as a relationship to nature, how we appropriate from nature and process things from nature and therefore society survives and prospers. And Marx also introduced the concept of the universal metabolism of nature. Sometimes he would just use the term natural metabolism, but he used the term the universal metabolism of nature to refer to all the natural processes and cycles within nature of which, of course, human beings were a part and an emergent part. And so there are these two concepts the universal metabolism of nature and the social metabolism, which was sort of the ecological expression for production and the relation of production to nature.

John Bellamy Foster: 7:39

And as Marx started exploring ecological problems, particularly under the influence of a German scientist, agricultural chemist, justin von Liebig, he was exploring Liebig's work and Liebig was looking at the destruction of the soil nutrient cycle. And Liebig also used the term metabolism, but not social metabolism in Marx's sense being sent hundreds to thousands of miles to the new urban centers, manufacturing centers to feed the populations there, and the food and the soil nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium were ending up polluting the cities as waste rather than returning to the soil. And so this was a 19th century soil crisis and the reason why they ended up developing a fertilizer industry. But Marx looked at this and he recognized that this was what he called an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism within life itself and within the relation of human beings to nature. And from that comes the concept of metabolic rift, the rift in the metabolism. Because the social metabolism, that is, human production and its ecological side, you know, which we emphasize when we talk about social metabolism, came into conflict with the universal metabolism of nature. Essentially, the social metabolism is alienated and it ends up being alienated from nature and turning into a negative, destructive force, and this becomes the metabolic rift. Now it's a way of understanding ecological crisis, but it's a way of understanding ecological crisis that is completely unified with our understanding of the socioeconomic system. So the economic side of production and the ecological side are two sides of the same coin, and through production, particularly capitalist production, which has this alienating role, we're constantly robbing nature as well as human beings, as Mark said, robbing nature of its reproductive capability by not exercising reciprocity.

John Bellamy Foster: 10:56

Well then, this became actually the basis for most ecological theory. The term ecology, I think, wasn't introduced by Heckel until 1864, and it just meant then what Darwin called the economy of nature or, in Heckel's terms, the kind of survival of the fittest conceptual frame. But the original concept with which ecological problems were approached was metabolism, partly in Liebig and actually developed further, or in a broader sense, of Marx, because of his notion of the social metabolism and the metabolic rift, and he understood that capitalism was inherently anti-ecological or inherently destructive of the universal metabolism of nature, creating rifts and disruptions. This concept then of the metabolism became very important, the ecological concept of it. The greatest biologist, zoologist in England in the generation after Darwin was E Ray Lancaster, who was Darwin and Huxley's protege and he was also a very close friend of Karl Marx. And Lancaster became the greatest ecological critic in Britain or maybe anywhere at the time within science, explaining how capitalism was actually degrading the earth and species and he was a major theorist of extinction. But he dealt with the whole problem of nutrient cycling which is related to this notion of metabolism and his student, arthur Tansley Lancaster was kind of a Fabian socialist and Lancaster's student, arthur Tansley, a Lancaster was kind of a Fabian socialist and Lancaster student.

John Bellamy Foster: 13:16

Arthur Tansley, who was also a Fabian style socialist, introduced the concept of ecosystem, the ecosystem concept which is the basis of our understanding of ecology now, with the notion of metabolism as its basis, notion of metabolism as its basis. And he was also working out of the systems theory of Marxist scientists at the time, mainly Herman Levy. And so this was all part of the development of ecology. And then the concept of the biosphere, that is, of notion of metabolism and even its relation to production. Nowadays we talk about the Earth system metabolism in order to explain the balance of solar radiation, and we talk about the carbon metabolism to look at the whole carbon problem and global warming.

John Bellamy Foster: 14:45

And although Marx's analysis was first developed in terms of agriculture and the soil nutrient cycle, it was clear that it encompassed a wider critical principle because of the way he laid it out. And in more recent work Brett Clark and Richard York started this. They used the metabolic rift analysis to understand the carbon metabolism in an analysis that was very influential. And it's understood that the original rift, let's say of the soil, was shifted around. So it created the modern, you know, with the development of, of industrial fertilizer, it created the modern phosphorus and and nitrogen and with the disruption in the phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, which is one of the the key planetary boundary crossings. So all of this is fairly integrated and what's very, very powerful about it in Marx's conception is that it completely integrates the ecological and the economic within a single systems theory which doesn't exist anywhere else except in Marx and theories derived from him.

C. Derick Varn : 16:18

I guess a question that comes up immediately, that's more of a historiographic question than a question of contemporary socialism, is why was this ignored in socialist circles in the 1960s and 70s?

John Bellamy Foster: 16:36

Well, it wasn't ignored in socialism in the early years after Marx and I wrote a whole book, the Return of Nature, which I worked on for 20 years, to explain how some of these ideas went forward. And of course they were integrated within Marxist theory with the concept of the dialectics of nature. But they were carried forward by socialist scientists and material scientists. In fact socialists were arguably the main developers of systems ecology all the way down the line. So these ideas went forward but there were some splits in Marxism. In Western Marxism they decided that they rejected the whole notion of the dialectics of nature and with it they rejected the notion that Marxism had anything to do with nature. And so even the materials conception of nature of science that had been embedded in Marxist thought was discarded. And materialism within Western Marxism meant just economics or relation to production forces, and they moved away from any notion of the materials conception of nature or the dialectics of nature. And even though the leading the most famous Marxist thinkers in Britain, world-famous thinkers in the scientific community, many of them were Marxists and had pioneered in the development of ecological and evolutionary conceptions, these thinkers were basically discarded. Their work was ignored, sometimes partly because of the divisions within Marxism itself. And could we pause for a sec I'm getting beeps Both the dialectics of nature and the materialist conception of nature.

John Bellamy Foster: 19:00

In Soviet Marxism they held on to the notion of the dialectics of nature but beginning in the late 1930s, particularly with Stalin, it was made into sort of a positivistic idea, positivistic and deterministic and even mechanistic and divorced from any kind of real dialectics, any kind of critical analysis.

John Bellamy Foster: 19:38

So you had a loss of a lot of these essential ideas in both the West and the East. In the Soviet Union, of course they had the leading ecological scientists in the world, but many of them were purged and so that really put things back. So a lot of this analysis got lost as a result of the divisions that occurred within Marxism, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, as they called it. But there were still Marxist scientists who were going ahead with these concepts and using them. I mean even Barry Commoner's the Closing Circle, which was a fundamental ecological book. I mean it mentions Marx's metabolic rift, not using those terms but referring to his analysis of the depletion of soil fertility, and this was present within science and within the work of socialists, but scientists, but it got lost within Marxism more generally.

C. Derick Varn : 21:13

Marxism more generally. So you kind of have a dual tragedy where Western Marxists are abandoning the concept and in Soviet space you have it being turned into an almost positivistic concept. By the time we get to the 1970s it's kind of been for lack of a better term, reified into a bunch of conceptions. You see people pushing back on it. But here we are.

C. Derick Varn : 21:36

I guess one of the things that I wanted to ask you about the dialectics of nature there's the common critiques of Ingalls that like oh, ingalls is a Lamarckian, which I think is unfair. It's not and it's always about, like the thumb argument with labor and apes, which you know. But there's other stuff in that book and other stuff that seems crucial to Marx. And this leads me to ask you like one of the dialectics of the dialectics of nature tries to get at is the kind of dual nature of human beings in Marx, where humans are both part of and product of the natural world, but they're also a force that acts upon and acts as a force of the natural world. So I wanted to kind of parse that a little bit and how that might relate to the metabolic rift.

John Bellamy Foster: 22:43

Well, human beings are part of the natural world. I mean, we live within planet Earth and within the universe, and the natural world is something that conditions our entire existence, but it doesn't define us. Human beings are unemergent. In the terms of today's science, human beings are an emergent form of nature. So human society has its own laws, its own novel properties that can't be reduced to physics or to atoms or anything of that sort. We can't. The human society is an emergent form, but it's a new form of organization. Well, the material basis is universal. The material basis is the basis of physics, the basis of life. But we are emergent form in the fact that we were able to organize things differently and then have emergent powers and then have emergent powers, and this was, you know, this is very much part of nature, emergent part of nature.

John Bellamy Foster: 24:35

But what we do actually affects nature, right? So the human beings are also a force of nature. For example, when we're talking about climate change, we talk about anthropogenic climate change, right? That's climate change that's caused by human beings, basically by our economy. The Earth system now is primarily. Changes in the Earth system now are primarily affected by anthropogenic causes, as opposed to non-anthropogenic causes which dominated in all previous history of the earth.

John Bellamy Foster: 25:29

And so you know, the human beings are a force of nature that affect nature and, by virtue of our social organization and this is part of dialectics is part of the dialectics of nature and it's integrated with the metabolic rift right. So we actually represent an alienated force of nature in the sense that we are basically we're destroying the ecological foundations of our own existence, of the planet as a place for human habitation. We're polluting our own society to live sustainably. So the metabolic rift for Marx was also about sustainability. He developed and capitally presented the most radical conception of sustainability ever conceived up into the present. He said that human beings are not owners of the earth. He said that all the people on the earth and all the countries on the earth are not owners of the earth. We only hold it in trust as good heads of the household for the chain of future generations. And he actually defined socialism in terms of sustainability in precisely that way.

C. Derick Varn : 27:31

This leads me to a question that I may not have prepared you for, but I've thought a lot about. One of the things that's often used to discredit the dialectics of nature is attributing it to Ingalls in specific, and then trying to separate Ingalls' thought from Marx's. Now that tendency seems to have been reduced lately, although and I'm not going to ask you to speak on this directly it has come back up in the work of Saito, for example, or Saito, who does seem to think that you need to separate Ingalls out from Marx to remove the accusation of Prometheanism. But do you think that that's a wise way to approach this? Because it does seem to me that there's a lot of stuff in dialectics of nature that make other things and marks comprehensible, if you're paying attention.

John Bellamy Foster: 28:32

Well, returning to your earlier question, you mentioned Engels and you mentioned in the dialectics of Nature he had written the play by labor and the transformation of the ape to man, which you Origin of Species adopted Lamarckian notions, but I don't think that Engels was being Lamarckian in the part played by Lebron's transformation of Ape to man. You have to look at it in terms of I mean, sometimes things are said in shorthand terms, but everything he said can be explained in evolutionary terms, that in Darwinian evolutionary terms, and nothing has to be explained in Lamarckian terms. There is one statement where he got over, carried away, where he referred to the development of the hand and playing the piano. But everything can be explained in Darwinian terms and he was a very, very strong advocate of Darwin's theory and opponent of Lamarckianism. But the part played by labor in the transition from ape to man is very important because it was what we call.

John Bellamy Foster: 30:15

The theories of human evolution are called gene culture, co-evolution theories. They all involve explaining how the relation of human culture in society, human production, all that can be seen in terms of culture, interacts with the biological or genetic aspects to explain human evolution. You can't explain it in any other way, particularly the development of the brain, language and so on. And Engels introduced the theory most of the most of the I mean all of the theories practically were because of idealism were emphasized that the cerebral, the brain, as evolving first. That if you looked at human evolution, you looked at evolution from, say, ape or ape-like ancestors to human beings, you were going to see the brain develop first. Engels argued that you would first see the erect posture and then the development of the hands, because it was through human production, its interaction through nature, by way of the hands that human beings were able to distinguish themselves from apes and the other human capacities, the language, the development of the brain, came from that kind of interaction. And because of the Piltdown hoax that was thought to be wrong for about 40 years, even with archaeological I mean anthropological discoveries, but they finally, with the Australopithecines, they finally realized that Engels was right, it's not emphasized but that human beings were, as Marx emphasized, the tool makers and that's how we evolved. And so Stephen Jay Gould said that the part played by laborer and the transition from ape to man was the greatest work in gene culture, co-evolution, that is the greatest work in the theory of human evolution in the 19th century. That is going beyond Darwin, heckel and all the other thinkers, and it developed into an ecological argument.

John Bellamy Foster: 32:52

So that's where Engels talks about how capitalism is destroying the ecology, how we're treating nature, we're trying to conquer nature like a foreign conqueror, that we're crossing limits, and he gives all sorts of examples and he refers to the revenge of nature metaphorically as what's going to happen if we don't create a more sustainable society. So that is a very important work and that actually was part of his dialectics of nature. The dialectics of nature, I think I mean Marx subscribed to the dialectics of nature. He didn't go so far in developing it as Engels did, but there are plenty of places where Marx indicates that he not only has a materialist conception of nature but also dialectical conception of nature, and was one with Engels on that. But Engels was able to go further in developing that. So I think it's crucial. It allows us to have this comprehensive critical vision and it's out of that conception that many of the ecological discoveries arose and it's all related to the metabolic rift.

John Bellamy Foster: 34:25

In terms of Kohei Saito's analysis, he says all sorts of things about angles that are completely wrong. They're false, and I've written on that that, for example, he says that Engels deliberately undermined Marx's concept of the metabolic rift. That's false. He says that Engels lied about his relation to Marx. That is not correct. There are all sorts of places where he says that Engels attacked, did a critique of Liebig's concept of metabolism.

John Bellamy Foster: 35:17

He didn't and it wasn't Liebig's concept. It was a scientific concept of natural metabolism and Engels didn't criticize it at all. He was a major proponent of it. But he did criticize Lee Big for his vitalism and for his creationism and those things obviously don't fit with a historical materialist view. So I think that Saito is off base on that. I also think he's off base on the notion that Marx had a notion of degrowth communism. There's no evidence for that whatsoever and Marx didn't have a notion of sustainable human development. But there's no sign of any argument with respect to degrowth in Marx and you shouldn't expect it in the 19th century. It's kind of an anachronistic argument an anachronistic argument.

C. Derick Varn : 36:26

The equation of growth to capitalist economics was just beginning when Marx was right and correct. I mean, it doesn't seem like it was longstanding. In the same way that growth meant both growth in energy outputs and growth in I don't know. I've been reading a lot of William Pettis to try to figure out what early bourgeois economic thinkers actually thought.

John Bellamy Foster: 36:51

Well, the economic growth didn't really you know the way we think about it today didn't really rise until the time of the second world war and the development, the development of GDP accounting, national income accounting. So they talked in the 19th century about the accumulation of capital, which is of course the central issue, and they talked about expansion of production forces. They didn't talk about economic growth, the way we talk about it now, at all. So that's yeah.

C. Derick Varn : 37:34

I mean, one of the things about the concept of economic growth is it conflates a bunch of things that make it a much more nebulous concept. I mean, one of my personal critiques of degrowth is that it weirdly accepts a lot of capitalist growth narratives, like in its framework, by the very framework of framing it as degrowth. And you know, I liked I liked Saito's first book, karl Marx's Ecosocialism, quite a bit. But you know, I love books about Marxology and I love things that make other concepts and, like you know, the kind of bog-standard Capital Volume 1 stuff come pop out.

C. Derick Varn : 38:20

But it did seem to me that, um, that the degrowth framework was. It's just, and you're right, it's anachronistic, right, um, and I guess this leads me to a big question um, one of the big rifts in eco-socialism right now seems to be a debate between bright green socialists, uh, sometimes represented by people like lee phillips and matt hoover, uh, and degrowth socialists, which I guess is sito, and then a lot of non-marxist socialists, frankly, um, jason hinkle, uh, etc. How do you think the degrowth being attached to socialism? What's our understanding of both socialist possibilities and maybe even ecology itself?

John Bellamy Foster: 39:13

Well, you know, if we go back to Marx right, he had a concept of sustainable human development. Saito is now critical of that. He calls it sustainable. He said Marx had a notion of sustainable economic development which was productivist and that he only rejected that in his final years. But I don't think that's correct. I think Marx developed very early on, and further developed, a notion of sustainable human development that wasn't about growth or degrowth, but it's what's about sustainable human development itself. It could involve growth, it could involve non-growth, right, but it was really about human beings and their relationship to production and to the environment.

John Bellamy Foster: 40:18

Now we just did a special issue, a monthly Review, last year called Plan Degrowth. You know, on the Plan Degrowth, and the thing is that there's some people who want to make degrowth into a principle and it's a very complicated thing. I wrote about what you said a few years ago. I wrote about what you said a few years ago. I wrote an essay on degrowth, basically on capitalism and degrowth and impossibility theorem, where I said well, you can't have degrowth under capitalism. But I also said that the focus on degrowth tends to just invert the concept of growth as conceived in GDP, the concept of growth as conceived in GDP. So it doesn't really engage with the fundamental, many of the fundamental problems with socialism.

John Bellamy Foster: 41:30

Nevertheless, we have a problem where where the rich countries, the most developed countries, are unsustainable. If every country in the world were to be like the United States, we would need three or four planets. The US economy is unsustainable in terms of planetary limits and that means unsustainable and that has to be dealt with to some extent by degrowth, some kind of planned degrowth, but that doesn't make degrowth a universal principle. The universal principle is sustainable human development, and there are other countries that are poor, like Bangladesh. Well, like Nepal only uses like 1, 60th or 1, 69th, I forget of the energy per capita of the USS. Those countries are underdeveloped, they're using in some ways too little energy and they're not. They need to develop, they need to economically grow.

John Bellamy Foster: 42:57

So it's a complicated issue and some countries need to degrow and others need to grow. We need to. You know, in terms of energy use, the per capita level that's sustainable for the world is somewhere around where Italy is today and that's not really doesn't mean, you know, an underdeveloped state, but it means that some countries have to be able to develop to that level in terms of their energy use and other countries have to go down. If you look at the countries that have gone beyond their share of per capita emissions historically and 80% of all the surplus carbon dioxide emissions, or 80% to 90%, are accounted by the United States and Western Europe those countries have used more than their share. Well, some countries, like even China and India, have not yet have not used gone beyond their share their per capita share even as late as 2015, when that study was made.

John Bellamy Foster: 44:25

So it's very unequal, but we do need to have some planned degrowth in terms of you have to have greater efficiency, more rational use of the social surplus, change in distribution, elimination of waste, change in distribution, elimination of waste, the focusing on social needs, and all of this has to do with socialism, right? Only socialism can provide that kind of answer. Growth is such a universal principle that people who advocated growth or expansion of the productive forces in the 19th century, when the economy was only less than 1,000th as big as it is now, or that people in the global south and poor countries like Haiti, if they want to have economic growth, that's not a bad thing. In that case, they need more food production, they need more food distribution, and so on. So it's complicated and I don't like it when something like degrowth is made into the principle. The principle is actually eco-socialism or sustainable human development.

C. Derick Varn : 45:51

Yeah, I think there's a lot to think about there. You know, my bias is just the whole bright green degrowth debate misses the point. And for similar reasons that sustainable human development is important. There's going to be a an equaling out of divided and uneven resources distribution. There's gotta be a refocusing on on production that is meant to last. I mean planned obsolescence, because the profitability motive is is necessarily degrading to the environment, which is why, like, capitalism's always going to to exhaust all his resources and more.

C. Derick Varn : 46:31

But you know not, I don't want to tar de-Grofers with print of it is um, our, our naive third world is worldism or anything like that. But it does seem like when it becomes a principle it can easily degenerate into those things. So, but I do, there's something that you brought up. I mean there's been a lot of focus in the United States with the pollution levels of China, but that if you adjust for world population, they actually don't even use their per capita.

C. Derick Varn : 47:13

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the framing of China's attempt on ecological civilization and its current initiatives around that, which, I will admit, I don't find 100% successful, but I do think they seem pretty sincere in trying to develop that way and trying to develop that way. How do you see China's current attempt to build this into their planning models going, and do you see this as a way to maybe more concretize the meaning of something like what the metabolic rift may actually mean when we start moving beyond capitalism? Could China help us, like begin to see that? Admittedly, very early stages in China and I'm not going to, you know, get into the debate about whether or not they're capitalist or not yet it should I just want to accept that their orientation is sincere and they're doing something about it. Um so, uh, how do you think that might help us clarify what the metabolic whiff may mean to us beyond capitalism?

John Bellamy Foster: 49:06

So they're very, very explicit in their planning now, in their five-year plans, in everything they do, in moving beyond the stage that they're in, which is sort of they call socialism with Chinese characteristics, but it's sort of right now a kind of hybrid socialism, capitalism, sort of leaning towards state capitalism, and they're trying to move towards a more genuine socialism. And they define that in terms of the ecological civilization. They see that as coinciding with the development of full socialism in China, a more mature socialism, and they have done a lot right. They're the leaders in the world in solar energy, both the technology and the implementation. They're the leaders in the world in electric cars. There's a lot of controversy about electric cars, but certainly that can be seen as an attempt to go in an ecological direction. They have reduced their pollution, their air pollution, faster than any other country. They still have a lot of problems there, but it's been going down rapidly. They're the leader in afforestation in the world and reforestation. So they have been dealing with the river pollution and this is generated by big environmental movements from below as well as the top. So there is a lot, and this is Western.

John Bellamy Foster: 50:53

Observers have constantly emphasized their developments in this way. There's a lot that China is doing ecologically. That is very good. It's in the context of a kind of modernization, what they call their socialist modernization which they consider consistent with ecological civilization. Capitalist modernization is generally seen as opposed to environmental action, but they're trying to do it in a different way, to make modernization compatible with ecological civilization. And, of course, they have this big emphasis on economic growth because they're still trying to bring their per capita income up to close to the Western level, not all the way up, and they're still trying to have economic growth. So they're trying to have rapid economic growth while also making these environmental changes.

John Bellamy Foster: 52:05

And you know that's problematic in some ways. But we also I think we also have to hope that they succeed because after all, we live on the same planet and this is their project. We have to hope that what they're trying to do is successful. And there are all sorts of contradictions and the biggest contradiction, of course, is in coal production and consumption. They don't have a lot of petroleum or natural gas, so coal is their main energy resource and they've done a lot to reduce their dependence on coal in terms of their overall energy, but they're still heavily reliant on coal and recently they've increased it again, because they have a strategy of making coal the kind of the energy base to guarantee the power while they build the alternatives. And it's a rational policy and all I can say is I hope they succeed. All I can say is I hope they succeed.

John Bellamy Foster: 53:26

I'm in some ways skeptical, but it is a big ecological project and I think ultimately, as some have argued, that China is going to have to go in a direction of degrowth too. You know, in some ways, and you know certainly this has to be a project of sustainable human development and they can't sustain, and the planet can't sustain, China growing at a 5% rate of growth or 6% rate of growth forever 5% rate of growth or 6% rate of growth forever. But their plan is to have a slowing down of growth too, in the context of ecological civilization. Now, there are a lot of forces in China, capitalist forces, who don't support this project, even though the Communist Party does. So it's, you know, it's a big question mark.

John Bellamy Foster: 54:26

Some people might say, oh well, the capitalist elements in China will inevitably win out. Others will say, yeah, that the party may be able to continue to steer things in the direction of ecological civilization. But this is sort of a revolutionary project and I always think in terms of C Wright Mills when he wrote about. He wrote Listen Yankee, about Cuba at the time, shortly after the US invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs, and he said I don't worry about the Cuban revolution, I don't worry about the Cuban revolution, I worry with it. And I don't worry about China's ecological civilization project, I worry with it. And that's where I'm at. It may fail, but as long as they're trying to do that, then I support it.

C. Derick Varn : 55:36

I think it's interesting to contrast what China is doing with what say we're not going to talk about the United States because we can just assume that's a boondoggle in coal production, but for kind of different reasons, where there is a singular focus on one element of the power chain to the exclusion of other elements of their ecological impact. Why do you think you know? Why do you think no one's looking to the Greens and the SPD in Germany for a viable you know, eco-socialist transition? Why do you think that's the case?

John Bellamy Foster: 56:33

Well, you know, I mean it was. It goes way back to, you know battles in Germany, I don't know late 1970s, early 80s, between the fundamentalists within the Green Party and what they called the realists. Some of the Marxists at that time joined the realists, but basically it's very similar to the battle between the conditions have changed, very similar to what you call the battle between focus on keeping nuclear out of the energy equation. But other than that, their commitment to ecology became more and more questionable and they became a war party. They became a very determined war party in the wars in Europe that have occurred since the demise of the Soviet Union and under the renewed US hegemony in Europe. So they took on a lot of reactionary elements.

John Bellamy Foster: 58:11

So no ecologists ironically no really dedicated ecologists identify with the Green Party, the German Green Party, and they're increasing their coal production because they don't use nuclear, which I agree with. But they're relying on coal and now natural gas from the United States, now that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline there and the United States is now the leading producer of oil and the leading producer of natural gas in the world and the leading producer of natural gas in the world and the leading consumer of oil and, I believe, the leading consumer of natural gas. We're a little bit. We're still near the top in the production of coal, but not at the top, and so we talk about the United States as sort of doing something about climate change, but we've been expanding and expanding our production of petroleum and natural gas with the idea of exporting into the rest of the world and that will burn up the planet.

C. Derick Varn : 59:39

Yeah, I remember when our euphemistically liberal friends were celebrating Biden's Inflation Reduction Act having this halfway to the Paris Accord thing in there, but also tagged to it with all its subsidies for electric development was that we have to match them to the traditional extractive carbon industry, and I was just like, yeah, of course we'd ignore that part of it too, that basically, if we grow sustainable, they're also wanting to offset its economic input by growing dumping like growing dumping government funds into traditional carbon extraction, and it is particularly discrediting. I do think it does lead to a kind of nihilism about dealing with climate change that I don't think an eco-socialist or or any kind of socialist should really adopt. But it is interesting contrast and of course, yeah, I mean I just assume whatever the U? S is up to is going to be bad and at least in terms of of carbon footprints, our greening efforts are very superficial and very inefficient. And even when it comes to things like electric cars I mean one of the things I was thinking about with electric cars and yes, there's all kinds of problems with electric cars personal vehicles, blah, blah, blah as opposed to like electric trains, et cetera, as opposed to like electric trains et cetera, but you know, electric cars in the US are basically luxury goods.

C. Derick Varn : 1:01:35

Evs are more or less becoming almost a status symbol, particularly Teslas, but not just in Rivians et cetera. To give China a little bit of credit uh, china's, china's evs are affordable in africa, and the only reason they're not affordable in the united states is we tariff the shit out of them so they're not competitive on the market. Um, so it is interesting to me that, like some of the problems with our technologies are induced by the way we are, we are using them, marketing them and and then trying to recoup profits from, you know, turning moral impulses into a profit mechanism. You know it's it is. It's lot of smack on China about that. Um, uh, so, um, you know, one of the things I'll say is the debates around eco-socialism seem to have gotten slightly more contentious than they were a few years ago, but also that more people are talking about eco-socialism than they were 20 years ago when I first started reading this stuff. What exciting developments and maybe also what things are you particularly concerned with that we haven't mentioned are coming out of eco-socialist research?

John Bellamy Foster: 1:02:58

I have to think of that. Who I think is the greatest socialist ecological economist, died just a couple of weeks ago, which is a disaster in a way, and we need other people to step up and to build on his work, work and we need that kind of economic critique as part of eco-socialism. Of course he left a whole body of work behind that we can use and it would be very exciting to me if people took the opportunity. I mean, it seems a shame, but often a thinker is recognized most fully after they are deceased and people realize, well, this is a very important thinker and we have to look at all that that person did and I hope that that will be something that will happen In terms of really new developments.

John Bellamy Foster: 1:04:37

I have been advancing the notion for a long time of the environmental proletariat and that's a notion that socialism, marxism, sort of went askew at a certain point if you look at Engels' condition of the English working class or Marx's work. But Engels' condition of the working class is a good starting point and it was very much integrated with the historical struggle in his time, right In 1844, 1845, the working class was not defined simply by production in factories or by production at all. I mean, certainly that's part of how we define the working class, otherwise we wouldn't call them the working class. But Engels' condition of the working class was all about also how that class struggled over the environment. I mean the condition of the working class is struggled over the environment. I mean the conditional working class is mostly about the environment. So he was looking at pollution of water and air. He was looking at the destruction of the food. He was looking at the crippling workers. He was looking at the urban conditions, the housing. He was looking at the mortality rate and so on. He was looking at epidemics and the causes of epidemics. And this is all in the context. He was looking at social reproduction. He was looking at social reproduction. We have an article that coming out in the next issue month review of the March issue is going to have an article on Engels and emphasizes that part of his analysis of social reproduction. And so this was the working class was seen as very broadly in that. In fact it was very radical at the time and they were struggling as much over housing and over the quality of food and over epidemics and over water pollution and air pollution and over epidemics and over water pollution and air pollution and all of these things, as they were fighting about the factory.

John Bellamy Foster: 1:07:03

And I think that we're in that kind of phase again and it's most apparent in the global south where the working class, the proletariat or whatever you want to call it, is affected by the material conditions at the bottom of the society. And those material conditions can be either economic in that narrow sense related directly to production, or they can be environmental or ecological. And increasingly we're seeing struggles where those two things are coming together. And if you're in like the Middle East somewhere and you're short of food right, there's a food crisis you're not going to say well, this is an economic problem rather than ecological problem. It's actually both. It's both environmental and economic.

John Bellamy Foster: 1:08:03

So our struggles are taking a broader material frame and they have the effect of unifying our movements objectively, and this also involves social reproduction, and we're seeing this in a lot of struggles around the world, and I think that all of the great revolutions involved both of these aspects. So I think that we can start talking about environmental proletariat and stop focusing on just the working class, being about the production sector, and I think that that would help actually get us beyond some of our own divisions, which we think of like environmentalists on one hand and workers on the other. That's a naive conception in terms of where the world is going now and the kinds of struggles we're necessarily engaged in. So I have hope that, you know, I see signs that that kind of argument is developing and it's a reconception of social movements and the struggle that's really going to be most important of all.

C. Derick Varn : 1:09:27

All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I think people know they can find your works off end of the monthly review, but where else can they find your work?

John Bellamy Foster: 1:09:39

Maybe in bookstores. Yeah, climate and Capitalism is a really great website and it has my work on it. I guess this podcast is a place where they can find something, and I'm very honored to be part of this. So, yeah, my work is translated all over the world now, but it's not just me. There's a whole intellectual, theoretical development of eco-socialism which I like to think I'm a part of. There are many other thinkers that I think that people should look to. Kohei Saito is one, although I disagree with him on his interpretation of Marx and Engels. Now, I did like Karl Marx's eco-socialism, but I think he has a lot of good things to say about the nature of the struggle today. There's Brett Clark, hannah Holliman, fred Magdoff. There are so many Ian Angus, many theorists that I think are important and that are contributing to this general development.

C. Derick Varn : 1:11:08

Yeah, All right, thank you so much, and with that we are over and out.