The Dialectics of Ecology: Socalism and Nature

by John Bellamy Foster

Explores ecological socialism's potential against capitalist environmental degradation Today the fate of the earth as a home for humanity is in question—and yet, contends John Bellamy Foster, the reunification of humanity and the earth remains possible if we are prepared to make revolutionary changes. As with his prior books, The Dialectics of Ecology is grounded in the contention that we are now faced with a concrete choice between ecological socialism and capitalist exterminism, and rooted in insights drawn from the classical historical materialist tradition. In this latest work, Foster explores the complex theoretical debates that have arisen historically with respect to the dialectics of nature and society. He then goes on to examine the current contradictions associated with the confrontation between capitalist extractivism and the financialization of nature, on the one hand, and the radical challenges to these represented by emergent visions of ecological civilization and planned degrowth, on the other.The product of contemporary ecosocialist debates, The Dialectics of Ecology builds on earlier works by Foster, including Marx’s Ecology and The Return of Nature, aimed at the development of a dialectical naturalism and the formation of a path to sustainable human development.

Genres: Ecology, Environment, Nonfiction, Economics, Theory

359 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2024

About the author

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, editor of Monthly Review and author of several books on the subject of political economy of capitalism, economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory.

Reviews

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a compilation of essays, The Dialectics of Ecology holds together well. In fact, I thought it was an excellent overview of our current relationship with economy and ecology.

I particularly liked Foster's sustained discussion on posthumanism and its flat ontology as it relates to the dialectics of ecology:

"Still, posthumanism (even when compared with the postmodernism that preceded it) has had relatively little influence thus far on Marxian theory itself, since it is radically divorced from the philosophy of praxis. / According to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” A corollary of this is that in order to understand the world you have to seek to change it. Since posthumanism generally has been content to destabilize the human and the natural in ways that remove the theoretical bridges and ladders for changing the world – at times even seeking to undermine the notion of human praxis itself – its relation to Marxism has been quite limited. Posthumanism is caught in the world of “fixed phantoms” depicted by Marx, where the complete destabilization of the concept of the human means a disruption of the “human and natural subject, with eyes, ears, etc., living in society, in the world, and in nature.” The result is a flat, monistic world of object without subjects, populated by windowless monads, limitless assemblages (divorced from any conception of emergence), actants, hybrids, cyborgs, and enchantments – anything but a conception of material-sensuous human beings, production, and practice" (p.74).

[Simon B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly 20 years since I first read Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature and I doubt any other contemporary writer has had as large a political influence on me as John Bellamy Foster. I counted and this is the 14th book of his I've read. This latest of his works is a loosely connected collection of essays on ecosocialism, Marxist ecology, degrowth communism, and the radical political strategies required to respond to the planetary emergency. A couple of chapters assess the Chinese government's policy of "ecological civilisation" positively. I don't agree with that view. Foster expounds too much what the Chinese officialdom says about its ecological principles and too little on what it does in reality to undermine them. I suspect there is also a difference in opinion about the nature of China's social system. My own view is that China is far closer to a state-managed variant of capitalism than it is to any kind of socialism, bureaucratically deformed or otherwise. That criticism aside, The Dialectics of Ecology is another important and enlightening contribution from a major ecosocialist thinker.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here Monthly Review editor Foster patiently shows that reversing climate change cannot be done by carbon trades and market speculation:

What this means is that other, wider ecological principles, applicable to both natural and human systems, need to displace current attempts to solve the planetary crisis generated by capitalism by simply absorbing the earth itself within the logic of the system, extending commodity fetishism to the realm of nature." Ecology has generated new bases for promoting sustainable human development and the overcoming of economic and ecological imperialism. Within Marxism, there is a long, if disputed, tradition of the dialectics of nature, which stands strongly opposed to reductionist approaches to nature and its evolution, exposing the dangers of all attempts to commodify the natural world and insisting that human beings "belong to nature and exist in its midst, and... all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly."

Such a critical, dialectical, and materialist perspective requires the abandonment of both the naturalization of capital and the capitalization of nature, as well as the recognition of the inescapable social character of capital, associated with a particular historical system: capitalism.

Instead, Foster tells us, the only truly workable solution is to dump our consumerist lifestyles and embrace strategies of degrowth.

Overall this work is at its best as it develops not only its ecological dialectics, but also the largely unknown history of its dialectics, which you might say starts with the word ecology itself. On the other hand, several of the chapters were taken from lectures Foster has given over the last half decade. While not bad in themselves, there was still a lot of repetition which struck me as unnecessary to Foster's strong and detailed argument.

[Niko Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first read Marx's Ecology back in 2015 or so and was enamored with this otherwise subterranean tradition of environmentalism & ecological thought in Marx and 20th century revolutionary thinkers, crowned by Foster's original development of the theory of metabolic rift, based on his read of Marx. Unfortunately, he never meaningfully evolved from this original formulation, instead allowing this open-ended (and incomplete) critique of Marx to ossify into a dogma. This book is Foster playing his own "hits" but often failing to be convincing in his arguments or missing the point altogether (e.g. the chapter on the financialization of nature). Foster will proceed from topics I find crucial in this conjuncture and replace for analysis an exhausting stream of marxology/unrelated Marx/Engels quotes, citations of theorists either in the MR tradition or adjacent in a narrow way, and blocks of citations from ecological or climate science papers. After trudging through these meandering and incomplete thoughts, hoping for some resolution or novel argument, Foster often abruptly ends his articles (did I mention this is just republished MR articles with no attempt to provide cohesion?) with a quip or quote. Souring even someone sympathetic to the Chinese Ecological Civilization concept, Foster emphasizes an amusing reach of a lineage from Soviet scientists to Chinese theorists, an utterly anti-materialist read on the parallels of Epicurean (!) naturalism with Chinese Daoism, and a face-value read of eco-civ's goals -- no contradictions, no case studies, no class conflict. I picked this up to read as part of my DSA chapter's ecosocialist reading group, where this book served better as a foil than a useful guidepost. 2/5

[Ali Jones Alkazemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid read. Especially the insistence on defending Engels' Dialectics of Ecology as being a continuation of Marx' ecological theorizations and not - as for instance Saito has claimed - a divergence. Also the commentary on the pioneering work on "social metabolism" done by the early Soviet scientists was new. Works great as an alternative Marxist path diverging from the Western Marxism I know of, and which takes Chinese, Soviet, African, and Latin-American socialist governments and thinkers at their word, without being Eurocentrically patronizing or overly critical of Western Marxism. Balanced and serious.