Eco-Marxism

“Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?” Starting with this provocative bumper sticker quote, historian Richard White reveals the extent to which work, especially outdoor physical labour and environmentalism have become opposed in the American imagination, giving rise to various unkind stereotypes. Environmentalists are privileged urbanites who preach sustainability from the comfort of their armchairs, failing to link their habits of travel and consumption to the extractive industries laying waste to the environment, while blue-collar, productive work in the woods, on the farm, or at sea is associated with wilful ignorance, greed, and destructive glee. In order to overcome such dualisms, White argues we need to rethink the notion of labour – even beyond the reconsiderations offered by New Agrarian writers (see previous post), who value only certain types of premodern, low-tech physical labour as ways of knowing, and living ethically with the land. Instead, White claims, “The choice between condemning all work in nature and sentimentalizing vanishing forms of work is simply not an adequate choice. I am not interested in replacing a romanticism of inviolate nature with a romanticism of local work. Nor am I interested in demonizing machines. Environmentalists need to come to terms with modern work.” What this means is that we need to realize that “all work … intersects with nature,” whether performed on an oilrig, or university campus. Indeed all life is embedded in nature and dichotomies between culture (leisure) and nature (labour) only work to obscure this fact.

Insightful though it is, White’s text is plagued by a conspicuous absence: consideration of the most important 20^th century theorist of labour, Karl Marx. Bringing Marx into the picture allows us to comment more critically on White’s understanding of labour and his trivialization of play. White argues that through work we extend ourselves into the world, which allows us to acquire knowledge. “Work entails an embodiment, an interaction with the world, that is far more intense than play. We work to live. We cannot stop. But play, which can be as sensuous as work, does not so fully submerge us in the world.” This is up for debate of course, but the point I want to emphasize that the world to which work connects us, is a world dominated by capitalism. Modern-day waged labour is geared to produce not use-value, which is indeed something we rely on to survive, but exchange value which only keeps the cogs of capitalism turning. This focus on exchange value corrupts the knowledge that labour imbedded in capitalism allows us to acquire. To use White’s own examples, we have come to know animals from working with and alongside them for thousands of years, but in a capitalist system this relationship, this knowledge, whether gained on the farm or at the circus shifts in favour of a different, more alienated and alienating understanding. Capitalism makes us know animals primarily as commodities, as suppliers of milk, meat, eggs or fiber. On the contrary, when we get to know animals in play, as peers, we get to know them very differently because play, precisely because it is unproductive, operates outside of capitalism (unless co-opted by it cf. “playbor” in Games of Empire). The knowledge gleaned from play is more forgiving than lessons of life generally are. Play leaves room for failure, thus allowing more creative experimentation, and this is exactly what enables us to see beyond hegemonic ideology, Play should therefore not be dismissed so easily. 

White’s neglect of Marx’ was, until recently, representative of a more general reluctance among environmentalist to engage with Marxism. Eco-Marxists like John Bellamy Foster, however, have started  redeeming Marx’s Ecology. Foster argues that “what is being questioned in most of these criticisms is Marx's materialism” which from a value ethics perspective can seem utilitarian, anthropocentric, and even Baconian in comparison (cf. Francis Bacon who argued nature ought to be subjugated for the good of mankind). But as Marx would argue, values are derived from material circumstances, which means that in order to understand (and change) the way we relate to the world, we need to understand how our material circumstance came about  – and is where Foster’s notion of “metabolic rift” comes in. He argues that for Marx the process of primitive accumulation which gave birth to capitalism did not only alienate workers from the products of their labour, but also from the land itself, which they no longer owned, or worked for their own benefit. The appropriation of poor people’s land and the enclosure of public property caused a rift between the country and the city, between the few who stayed to work for wealthy landowners, and the many who were forced to relocate to the city to become capitalism’s cheap, precarious labour force. Crucially, this sociological rift had destructive, environmental consequences as it meant that human waste, previously used as fertilizer, no longer found its way back to the field. This, according to Foster, is at the heart of Marx’s ecology – the fact that human history coevolves with environmental history, a metabolic process that describes both the limitations and possibilities of change.

Laura op de Beke 

Works Cited
Dyer-Witheford, Nick and Greg de Peuter. Games of Empire: Gloal Capitalism and Video Games. Minnesota UP, 2009. 

 Foster, John Bellamy. Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000. 

White, Richard. "'Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?' Work and Nature." Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature ed. William Cronon. Norton, 1996.