Volume 57, Number 5


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Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster

October 2005

Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development
Paul Burkett

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Notes From
the Editors

Organizing Ecological Revolution
by John Bellamy Foster

Immokalee Workers Take Down Taco Bell
by Elly Leary

Privatization at Gunpoint
by Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

Paul Burkett teaches economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. With Martin Hart-Landsberg, he co-authored China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press, 2005).

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on the Work of Karl Marx and Challenges for the 21st Century, Havana, Cuba, May 6, 2003.

2. Marx’s Communism, Ecology, and Sustainability

Many have questioned the economic practicality of communism as projected by Marx. Fewer have addressed the human development dimension of Marx’s vision, one major exception being those critics who argue that it anchors free human development in human technological domination and abuse of nature, with natural resources viewed as effectively limitless. It is useful to address this environmental dimension on three levels: (1) the responsibility of communism to manage its use of natural conditions; (2) the ecological significance of expanded free time; (3) the growth of wealth and the use of labor time as a measure of the cost of production.

A. Managing the Commons Communally

That communist society might have a strong commitment to protect and improve natural conditions appears surprising, given the conventional wisdom that Marx presumed “natural resources” to be “inexhaustible,” and thus saw no need for “an environment-preserving, ecologically conscious, employment-sharing socialism.” Marx evidently assumed that “scarce resources (oil, fish, iron ore, stockings, or whatever)...would not be scarce” under communism. The conventional wisdom further argues that Marx’s “faith in the ability of an improved mode of production to eradicate scarcity indefinitely” means that his communist vision provides “no basis for recognizing any interest in the liberation of nature” from anti-ecological “human domination.” Marx’s technological optimism—his “faith in the creative dialectic”—is said to rule out any concern about the possibility that “modern technology interacting with the earth’s physical environment might imbalance the whole basis of modern industrial civilization.”31

In reality, Marx was deeply concerned with capitalism’s tendency toward “sapping the original sources of all wealth, the soil and the labourer.” And he repeatedly emphasized the imperative for post-capitalist society to manage its use of natural conditions responsibly. This helps explain his insistence on the extension of communal property to the land and other “sources of life.” Indeed, Marx strongly criticized the Gotha Programme for not making it “sufficiently clear that land is included in the instruments of labour” in this connection. In Marx’s view, the “Association, applied to land,...reestablishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of [private] property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering.” As with other means of production, this “common property” in land “does not mean the restoration of the old original common ownership, but the institution of a far higher and more developed form of possession in common.”32

Marx does not see this communal property as conferring a right to overexploit land and other natural conditions in order to serve the production and consumption needs of the associated producers. Instead, he foresees an eclipse of capitalist notions of land ownership by a communal system of user rights and responsibilities:

From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.33

Marx’s projection of communal landed property clearly does not connote a right of “owners” (either individuals or society as a whole) to unrestricted use based on “possession.” Rather, like all communal property in the new union, it confers the right to responsibly utilize the land as a condition of free human development, and indeed as a basic source (together with labor) of “the entire range of permanent necessities of life required by the chain of successive generations.” As Marx says, the association treats “the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.”34

Why have the ecological critics missed this crucial element of Marx’s vision? The answer may lie in the ongoing influence of so-called “tragedy of the commons” models, which (mis)identify common property with uncontrolled “open access” to natural resources by independent users. In reality, the dynamics posited by these models have more in common with the anarchy of capitalist competition than with Marx’s vision of communal rights and responsibilities regarding the use of natural conditions. Indeed, the ability of traditional communal property systems to sustainably utilize common pool resources has been the subject of a growing body of research in recent years. This research arguably supports the potential for ecological management through a communalization of natural conditions in post-capitalist society.35

Marx’s emphasis on the future society’s responsibility toward the land follows from his projection of the inherent unity of humanity and nature being realized both consciously and socially under communism. For Marx and Engels, people and nature are not “two separate ‘things’”; hence they speak of humanity having “an historical nature and a natural history.” They observe how extra-human nature has been greatly altered by human production and development, so that “the nature that preceded human history...today no longer exists”; but they also recognize the ongoing importance of “natural instruments of production” in the use of which “individuals are subservient to nature.” Communism, far from rupturing or trying to overcome the necessary unity of people and nature, makes this unity more transparent and places it at the service of a sustainable development of people as natural and social beings. Engels thus envisions the future society as one in which people will “not only feel but also know their oneness with nature.” Marx goes so far as to define communism as “the unity of being of man with nature.”36

Naturally, it will still be necessary for communist society to “wrestle with Nature to satisfy [its] wants, to maintain and reproduce life.” Marx thus refers to “the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control.” Such a rational regulation or “real conscious mastery of Nature” presumes that the producers have “become masters of their own social organisation.”37 But it does not presume that humanity has overcome all natural limits; nor does it presume that the producers have attained complete technological control over natural forces.

For instance, Marx sees the associated producers setting aside a portion of the surplus product as a “reserve or insurance fund to provide against misadventures, disturbances through natural events, etc.” especially in agriculture. Uncertainties connected with the natural conditions of production (“destruction caused by extraordinary phenomena of nature, fire, flood, etc.”) are to be dealt with through “a continuous relative over-production,” that is, “production on a larger scale than is necessary for the simple replacement and reproduction of the existing wealth.” More specifically, “There must be on the one hand a certain quantity of fixed capital produced in excess of that which is directly required; on the other hand, and particularly, there must be a supply of raw materials, etc., in excess of the direct annual requirements (this applies especially to means of subsistence).” Marx also envisions a “calculation of probabilities” to help ensure that society is “in possession of the means of production required to compensate for the extraordinary destruction caused by accidents and natural forces.”38

Obviously, “this sort of over-production is tantamount to control by society over the material means of its own reproduction” only in the sense of a far-sighted regulation of the productive interchanges between society and uncontrollable natural conditions. It is in this prudential sense that Marx foresees the associated producers “direct[ing] production from the outset so that the yearly grain supply depends only to a very minimum on the variations in the weather; the sphere of production—the supply- and the use-aspects thereof—is rationally regulated.” It is simply judicious for “the producers themselves...to spend a part of their labour, or of the products of their labour in order to insure their products, their wealth, or the elements of their wealth, against accidents, etc.” “Within capitalist society,” by contrast, uncontrollable natural conditions impart a needless “element of anarchy” to social reproduction.39

Contradicting their ecological critics, Marx and Engels simply do not identify free human development with a one-sided human domination or control of nature. According to Engels,

Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves—two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality....Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on natural necessity.

In short, Marx and Engels envision a “real human freedom” based on “an existence in harmony with the established laws of nature.”40

B. Expanded Free Time and Sustainable Human Development

Marx’s ecological critics often argue that his vision of expanded free time under communism is anti-ecological because it embodies an ethic of human self-realization through the overcoming of natural constraints. Routley, for example, suggests that Marx adopts “the view of bread labor as necessarily alienated, and hence as something to be reduced to an absolute minimum through automation. The result must be highly energy-intensive and thus given any foreseeable, realistic energy scenario, environmentally damaging.” For Marx, evidently, “it is the fact that bread labor ties man to nature which makes it impossible for it to be expressive of what is truly and fully human; thus, it is only when man has overcome the necessity to spend time on bread labour that he or she can be thought of as mastering nature and becoming fully human.” Less dramatically, Walker points to a tension between Marx’s vision of expanding free time, which “clearly implies that there must be resources over and above those needed for a bare minimum of survival,” and Marx’s purported failure to “mention...limitations on available natural resources.”41

The preceding discussion has already done much to dispel the notions that Marx and Engels were unconcerned about natural resource management under communism, and that they foresaw a progressive separation of human development from nature as such. However, it must also be pointed out that the ecological critics have mischaracterized the relation between free time and work time under communism. It is true that, for Marx, the “development of human energy which is an end in itself...lies beyond the actual sphere of material production,” that is, beyond that “labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations.” But for Marx, this “true realm of freedom...can blossom forth only with [the] realm of necessity as its basis,” and the relationship between the two realms is by no means one of simple opposition as claimed by the ecological critics. As Marx says, the “quite different...free character” of directly associated labor, where “labour-time is reduced to a normal length and, furthermore, labour is no longer [from the standpoint of the producers as a whole] performed for someone else,” means that “labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy”:

Free time—which is both idle time and time for higher activity—has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice, experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.42

In Marx’s vision, the enhancement of free human development through reductions in work time resonates positively with the development of human capabilities in the realm of production which still appears as a “metabolism” of society and nature. Marx’s emphases on “theoretical and practical” education, and on the de-alienation of science vis-à-vis the producers, are quite relevant in this connection. Marx sees communism’s diffusion and development of scientific knowledge taking the form of new combinations of natural and social science, projecting that

natural science...will become the basis of human science, as it has already become the basis of actual human life, albeit in an estranged form. One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie....Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.43

This intrinsic unity of social and natural science is, of course, a logical corollary of the intrinsic unity of humanity and nature. Accordingly, Marx and Engels “know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist.”44

In short, the founders of Marxism did not envision communism’s reduced work time in terms of a progressive separation of human development from nature. Nor did they see expanded free time being filled by orgies of consumption for consumption’s sake. Rather, reduced work time is viewed as a necessary condition for the intellectual development of social individuals capable of mastering the scientifically developed forces of nature and social labor in environmentally and humanly rational fashion. The “increase of free time” appears here as “time for the full development of the individual” capable of “the grasping of his own history as a process, and the recognition of nature (equally present as practical power over nature) as his real body.” The intellectual development of the producers during free time and work time is clearly central to the process by which communist labor’s “social character is posited...in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity regulating all the forces of nature.”45 Far from anti-ecological, this process is such that the producers and their communities become more theoretically and practically aware of natural wealth as an eternal condition of production, free time, and human life itself.

The ecological critics also seem to have missed the potential for increased free time as a means of reducing the pressure of production on the natural environment. Specifically, rising productivity of social labor need not increase material and energy throughput insofar as the producers are compensated by reductions in work time instead of greater material consumption. However, this aspect of free time as a measure of wealth is best located in the context of communism’s transformation of human needs.

C. Wealth, Human Needs, and Labor Cost

Some would argue that insofar as Marx envisions communism encouraging a shared sense of responsibility toward nature, this responsibility remains wedded to an anti-ecological conception of nature as primarily an instrument or material of human labor. Alfred Schmidt, for example, suggests that “when Marx and Engels complain about the unholy plundering of nature, they are not concerned with nature itself but with considerations of economic utility.” Routley asserts that for Marx, “Nature is apparently to be respected to the extent, and only to the extent, that it becomes man’s handiwork, his or her artifact and self-expression, and is thus a reflection of man and part of man’s identity.”46

It should be clear from our previous discussion that any dichotomy between “economic utility” and “nature itself” is completely alien to Marx’s materialism. A related point is that Marx’s conception of wealth or use value encompasses “the manifold variety of human needs,” whether these needs be physical, cultural, or aesthetic. In this broad human developmental sense, “use value...can quite generally be characterised as the means of life.” David Pepper rightly concludes that “Marx did see nature’s role as ‘instrumental’ to humans, but to him instrumental value...included nature as a source of aesthetic, scientific and moral value.”47

As per “man’s handiwork,” Marx does not employ an oppositional conception of labor and nature in which the former merely subsumes the latter. He insists that the human capacity to work, or labor power, is itself “a natural object, a thing, although a living conscious thing”; hence labor is a process in which the worker “opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces” and “appropriates Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants.” Marx views labor as “a process in which both man and Nature participate...the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature” in production. As a “universal condition for the metabolic interaction between nature and man,” labor is “a natural condition of human life...independent of, equally common to, all particular social forms of human life.” Labor is, of course, only part of “the universal metabolism of nature” and as a materialist Marx insists that “the earth...exists independently of man.” In this ontological sense, “the priority of external nature remains unassailed,” even though Marx does insist on the importance of social relations in the structuring of the productive “metabolism” between humanity and nature.48

But what of Marx and Engels’s notorious references to continued growth in the production of wealth under communism? Are these not immanently anti-ecological? Here it must be emphasized that these growth projections are always made in close connection with Marx’s vision of free and well-rounded human development, not with growth of material production and consumption for their own sake. Accordingly, they always refer to growth of wealth in a general sense, encompassing the satisfaction of needs other than those requiring the industrial processing of natural resources (matter and energy throughput). In discussing the “higher phase of communist society,” for example, Marx makes the “to each according to his needs” criterion conditional upon a situation where “the enslaving sub-ordination of individuals under division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour, from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual.” Similarly, Engels does refer to “a practically limitless growth of production,” but then fills out his conception of “practical” in terms of the priority “of securing for every member of society...an existence which is not only fully sufficient from a material standpoint...but also guarantees to them the completely unrestricted development of their physical and mental faculties.”49 Such human development need not involve a limitless growth of material consumption.

For Marx, communism’s “progressive expansion of the process of reproduction” encompasses the entire “living process of the society of producers” and, as discussed earlier, he specifies the “material and intellectual advantages” of this “social development” in holistic human developmental terms. When Marx and Engels envision communism as “an organisation of production and intercourse which will make possible the normal satisfaction of needs...limited only by the needs themselves,” they do not mean a complete satiation of limitlessly expanding needs of all kinds:

Communist organisation has a twofold effect on the desires produced in the individual by present-day relations; some of these desires—namely desires which exist under all relations, and only change their form and direction under different social relations—are merely altered by the communist social system, for they are given the opportunity to develop normally; but others—namely those originating solely in a particular society, under particular conditions of production and intercourse—are totally deprived of their conditions of existence. Which will be merely changed and which eliminated in a communist society can only be determined in a practical way.50

As Ernest Mandel points out, this social and human developmental approach to need satisfaction is quite different from the “absurd notion” of unqualified “abundance” often ascribed to Marx, that is, “a regime of unlimited access to a boundless supply of all goods and services.” Although communist need satisfaction is consistent with a “definition of abundance [as] saturation of demand,” this has to be located in the context of a hierarchy of “basic needs, secondary needs that become indispensable with the growth of civilization, and luxury, inessential or even harmful needs.” Marx’s human developmental vision basically foresees a satiation of basic needs and a gradual extension of this satiation to secondary needs as they develop socially through expanded free time and cooperative worker-community control over production—not a full satiation of all conceivable needs.51

Here, one begins to see the full ecological significance of free time as a measure of communist wealth. Specifically, if the secondary needs developed and satisfied during free time are less material and energy intensive, their increasing weight in total needs should reduce the pressure of production on limited natural conditions. This is crucial insofar as Marx’s vision has the producers using their newfound material security and expanded free time to engage in a variety of intellectual and aesthetic forms of self-development.52 Such a development of secondary needs is to be enhanced by the greater opportunities that real worker-community control provides for people to become informed participants in economic, political, and cultural life.

Of course, labor (along with nature) remains a fundamental source of wealth under communism. This, together with the priority of expanded free time, means that the amounts of social labor expended in the production of different goods and services will still be an important measure of their cost. As Marx explains in the Grundrisse:

On the basis of communal production, the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree.

Marx immediately adds, however, that communism’s economy of time “is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time.” For one thing, communism’s use of labor time as a measure of cost “is accomplished...by the direct and conscious control of society over its working time—which is possible only with common ownership,” unlike the situation under capitalism, where the “regulation” of social labor time is only accomplished indirectly, “by the movement of commodity prices.” More importantly, communism’s economy of labor time serves use value, especially the expansion of free time, whereas capitalism’s economy of time is geared toward increasing the surplus labor time expended by the producers.53

Marx and Engels do not, moreover, project labor time as the sole guide to resource-allocation decisions under communism: they only indicate that it is to be one important measure of the social costs of different kinds of production. That “production...under the actual, predetermining control of society...establishes a relation between the volume of social labour-time applied in producing definite articles, and the volume of the social want to be satisfied by these articles” in no way implies that environmental costs are left out of account. Equivalently, it does not preclude the maintenance and improvement of natural conditions from being included under the “social wants to be satisfied” by production and consumption.54

For strong evidence that Marx and Engels did not see communism prioritizing minimum labor cost over ecological goals, one need only point to their insistence on the “abolition of the antithesis between town and country” as “a direct necessity of...production and, moreover, of public health.” Observing capitalism’s ecologically disruptive urban concentrations of industry and population, industrialized agriculture, and failure to recycle human and livestock wastes, Marx and Engels early on pointed to the “abolition of the contradiction between town and country” as “one of the first conditions of communal life.” As Engels later put it: “The present poisoning of the air, water and land can only be put an end to by the fusion of town and country” under “one single vast plan.” Despite its potential cost to society in terms of increased labor time, he viewed this fusion as “no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalist and wage-workers.” It was even “a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production.” In his magnum opus, Marx foresaw communism forging a “higher synthesis” of “the old bond of union which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy.” This new union would work toward a “restoration” of “the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance of [the] circulation of matter...under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.” Accordingly, Engels ridiculed Dühring’s projection “that the union between agriculture and industry will nevertheless be carried through even against economic considerations, as if this would be some economic sacrifice!”55 It is obvious that Marx and Engels would gladly accept increases in social labor time in return for an ecologically more sound production.

Still, one need not accept the notion, repeated ad nauseam by Marx’s ecological critics, of an inherent opposition between labor cost reductions and environmental friendliness. Marx’s communism would dispense with the waste of natural resources and labor associated with capitalism’s “anarchical system of competition” and “vast number of employments...in themselves superfluous.” Many anti-ecological use values could be eliminated or greatly reduced under a planned system of labor allocation and land use, among them advertising, the excessive processing and packaging of food and other goods, planned obsolescence of products, and the automobile. All these destructive use values are “indispensable” for capitalism; but from the standpoint of environmental sustainability they represent “the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production.”56

3. Capitalism, Communism, and the Struggle Over Human Development

Marx argues that “if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.” He refers to “development of the productive forces of social labour” as capitalism’s “historical task and justification...the way in which it unconsciously creates the material requirements of a higher mode of production.” In short, the “original unity between the worker and the conditions of production...can be re-established only on the material foundation which capital creates.”57

Time and again, Marx’s ecological critics have found in such pronouncements evidence that he uncritically endorsed capitalism’s anti-ecological subjugation of nature to human purposes, and that he saw this subjugation continuing and even deepening under communism. Ted Benton, for example, asserts that in seeing capitalism as “preparing the conditions for future human emancipation,” Marx shared “the blindness to natural limits already present in...the spontaneous ideology of 19th-century industrialism.” This critique may be viewed as an ecological variation on Nove’s theme that Marx thought “the problem of production had been ‘solved’ by capitalism,” so that communism would not be required “to take seriously the problem of the allocation of scarce resources.”58

In addition to bypassing Marx and Engels’s deep concern with natural resource management and, more fundamentally, with the de-alienation of nature and the producers, under communism, these ecological critics have also misinterpreted Marx’s conceptions of capitalist development and the transition from capitalism to communism.

What, exactly, is the historical potential capitalism creates in Marx’s view? Does it lie in the development of mass production and consumption to the point where all scarcity disappears? Not really. It is, first, that by developing the productive forces, capitalism creates the possibility of a system “in which coercion and monopolisation of social development (including its material and intellectual advantages) by one portion of society at the expense of another are eliminated,” partly through a “greater reduction of time devoted to material labour in general.” In short, insofar as it develops human productive capabilities, capitalism negates, not scarcity as such (in the sense of a non-satisfaction of all conceivable material needs), but rather the scarcity rationale for class inequalities in human developmental opportunities. As Marx indicates, “Although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual.”59

Secondly, capitalism potentiates less restricted forms of human development insofar as it makes production an increasingly broad social process, “a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities.” Only with this socialized production can one foresee “free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.” For Marx, capitalism’s development of “the universality of intercourse, hence the world market” connotes “the possibility of the universal development of the individual.” As always, it is with all-round human development in mind (not growth of production and consumption for their own sake) that Marx praises “the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange” under capitalism.

The same goes for people-nature relations. The potential Marx sees in capitalism does not involve a one-sided human subordination of, or separation from, nature, but rather the possibility of less restricted relations between humanity and nature. It is only by comparison with these richer, more universal human-nature relations that “all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry.” In earlier modes of production, “the restricted attitude of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted attitude to one another determines men’s restricted relation to nature.”60

Marx’s analysis would only be anti-ecological if it had uncritically endorsed capitalism’s appropriation of natural conditions. In fact, Marx emphasizes “the alienated form” of “the objective conditions of labour,” including nature, in capitalist society. He insists that capitalism’s alienation of “the general social powers of labour” encompasses “natural forces and scientific knowledge.” As a result, in his view, “the forces of nature and science...confront the labourers as powers of capital.” Under capitalism, “science, natural forces and products of labour on a large scale” are utilized mainly “as means for the exploitation of labour, as means of appropriating surplus-labour.” Nor is Marx’s critique of capital’s use of natural resources limited to the exploitation directly suffered by workers in production and the limits it places on workers’ consumption. As shown by John Bellamy Foster, Marx had a profound grasp of the broader “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature produced by capitalism, one symptom of which is the anti-ecological division of labor between town and country with its “irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life.” Marx used this framework to explain how capitalism both “violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil” and “destroys the health of the town labourer.” According to Engels, the system’s alienation of nature is manifested in the narrow viewpoint on nature’s utility necessarily adopted by “individual capitalists,” who “are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions” in terms of “the profit to be made”—ignoring “the natural effects of the same actions.”61

For Marx, the “alienated, independent, social power” attained by nature and other “conditions of production” under capitalism poses a challenge to workers and their communities: to convert these conditions “into general, communal, social, conditions” serving “the requirements of socially developed human beings...the living process of the society of producers.” Such a conversion requires a prolonged struggle to qualitatively transform the system of production, both materially and socially. Communist production is not simply inherited from capitalism, needing only to be signed into law by a newly elected socialist government. It requires “long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.” Among these transformed circumstances will be “not only a change of distribution, but a new organization of production, or rather the delivery (setting free) of the social forms of production...of their present class character, and their harmonious national and international co-ordination.” This “long struggle” scenario for post-revolutionary society is a far cry from the interpretation put forth by the ecological critics, which has Marx endorsing capitalist industry as a qualitatively appropriate basis for communist development. Indeed, Marx’s vision corresponds more accurately to Roy Morrison’s view that the “struggle for the creation of an ecological commons is the struggle for the building of an ecological democracy—community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, region by region...the struggle and work of fundamental social transformation from below.”62

In Marx’s view, the struggle for “the conditions of free and associated labour...will be again and again relented and impeded by the resistance of vested interests and class egotisms.” This is precisely why communism’s human developmental conditions will be generated in large part by the revolutionary struggle itself—both in the taking of political power by the working class and in the subsequent struggle to transform material and social conditions. As Marx and Engels put it, communist “appropriation...can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, which are required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat moreover rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.”63

By now it should be clear why Marx argued that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” The struggle for human development ultimately requires “the abolition of all class rule,” and the working class is the only group capable of undertaking such a project. The self-emancipatory nature of communism also explains why Marx’s vision does not take the form of a detailed blueprint à la the utopian socialists. As Alan Shandro observes, any such blueprint would only foreclose political debates, conflicts, and strategies developed by the working class itself “understood as a unity in diversity, as a political community.” Marx and Engels’s attempts to envision communism’s basic principles should be seen not as a “master plan” but “as means of organising the workers’ movement and structuring and guiding debate in and around it.” Although their projections need to be constantly updated in light of developments in capitalist and post-revolutionary societies, their basic approach is still relevant today.64

The demand for more equitable and sustainable forms of human development is central to the growing worldwide rebellion against elite economic institutions—transnational corporations, the IMF, World Bank, NAFTA, WTO, and so on. But this movement needs a vision that conceives the various institutions and policies under protest as elements of one class-exploitative system: capitalism. And it needs a framework for the debate, reconciliation, and realization of alternative pathways and strategies for negating the power of capital over the conditions of human development: that framework is communism. The classical Marxist vision of communism as de-alienation of production in service of human development still has much to contribute to this needed framework.

Notes

  1. Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); “Socialism: Alternative Views and Models,” symposium in Science & Society 56, no. 4 (Spring 1992); “Building Socialism Theoretically: Alternatives to Capitalism and the Invisible Hand,” symposium in Science & Society 66, no. 1 (Spring 2002); Ernesto Che Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” in Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate, ed. Bertram Silverman (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 337, 350.
  2. For prior discussions of Marx’s vision of communism, see Paresh Chattopadhyay, “Socialism: Utopian and Feasible,” Monthly Review 37, no. 10 (March 1986); Bertell Ollman, “Marx’s Vision of Communism,” in Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich (Boston: South End Press, 1979).
  3. Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics, 2nd ed. (London: Earthscan, 1992), 196; Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 80; Victor Ferkiss, Nature, Technology, and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 110; K. J. Walker, “Ecological Limits and Marxian Thought,” Politics 14, no. 1 (May 1979), 35–6; Val Routley, “On Karl Marx as an Environmental Hero,” Environmental Ethics 3, no. 3 (Fall 1981), 242. For additional references to ecological criticisms of Marx’s communism, see John Bellamy Foster, “Marx and the Environment,” Monthly Review 47, no. 3 (July–August 1995), 108–9; Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 147–8, 223.
  4. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944); Thomas E. Weisskopf, “Marxian Crisis Theory and the Contradictions of Late Twentieth-Century Capitalism,” Rethinking Marxism 4, no. 4 (Winter 1991); Blair Sandler, “Grow or Die: Marxist Theories of Capitalism and the Environment,” Rethinking Marxism 7, no. 2 (Summer 1994); Andriana Vlachou, “Nature and Value Theory,” Science & Society 66, no. 2 (Summer 2002).
  5. Paul Auerbach and Peter Skott, “Capitalist Trends and Socialist Priorities,” Science & Society 57, no. 2 (Summer 1993), 195.
  6. Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 39; Theories of Surplus Value, part 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 271–2; Theories of Surplus Value, part 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 580 (emphasis in original).
  7. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 221 (emphasis in original); Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, part 3, 525; “Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich, March 8, 1881,” in Collected Works, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 362 (emphasis in original).
  8. Marx, Capital, vol. I (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 762; “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, Conclusion,” in Collected Works, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, vol. 34 (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 109 (emphasis in original); Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 97.
  9. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,’ in Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), 47. See also Marx, Capital, 3:437–40; “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, Conclusion,” 108.
  10. Marx, Capital, 3:437, 876; Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers, 1966), 7–8, 11; Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), 28, 94. See also Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, part 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 107; Capital, 1:530 and 2:819, 847.
  11. Marx, Capital, 1:763; “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, Conclusion,” 109 (emphases in original); “The Civil War in France,” in On the Paris Commune, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), 75.
  12. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 86–9, 309.
  13. Marx, Capital, 1:488; Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 53.
  14. Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 49; Engels, Anti-Dühring, 144; Marx, Capital, 1:78.
  15. Marx, Capital, 1:78; Critique of the Gotha Programme, 8, 10.
  16. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 220–2.
  17. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 10; Engels, Anti-Dühring, 221 (emphasis in original); Marx, Capital, 3:876. See also Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 566.
  18. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 7–8.
  19. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 20, 22; Capital, 1:488, 490; “The Civil War in France,” 162.
  20. Marx, Capital, 1:530 and 2:819–20; Theories of Surplus Value, part 3, 257 (emphases in original); Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 708.
  21. Marx, Capital, 1:530; “The Civil War in France,” 75; Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 309.
  22. Marx, Grundrisse, 190, 706; Theories of Surplus Value, part 2, 117–8 (emphasis in original); Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 96, 465.
  23. Marx, Capital, 2:358; Engels, Anti-Dühring, 221.
  24. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 84–5.
  25. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 85 (emphasis in original); Theories of Surplus Value, part 3, 129; Critique of the Gotha Programme, 8 (emphasis in original).
  26. Marx, Grundrisse, 159, 171–2 (emphases in original).
  27. Marx, Grundrisse, 158 (emphases in original).
  28. Marx, Grundrisse,, 264; Capital, 1:94. See also Engels, Anti-Dühring, 337–8.
  29. Marx, Capital, 1:78–80; “The Civil War in France,” 76.
  30. Marx, Grundrisse, 162; Engels, Anti-Dühring, 167; Marx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association,” in The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (New York: Random House, 1974), 80; “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” in Collected Works, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 24:519; “The Civil War in France,” 130, 153.
  31. Alec Nove, “Socialism,” in The New Palgrave: Problems of the Planned Economy, ed. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman (New York: Norton, 1990), 230, 237; Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 15–6; Geoffrey Carpenter, “Redefining Scarcity: Marxism and Ecology Reconciled,” Democracy & Nature 3, no. 3 (1997), 140; Andrew McLaughlin, “Ecology, Capitalism, and Socialism,” Socialism and Democracy, no. 10 (Spring–Summer 1990), 95; Lewis S. Feuer, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis Feuer (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1989), xii.
  32. Marx, Capital, 1:507; Critique of the Gotha Programme, 5–6; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 103; Engels, Anti-Dühring, 151.
  33. Marx, Capital, 3:776.
  34. Marx, Capital, 617, 812 (emphases added).
  35. H. Scott Gordon, “The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery,” Journal of Political Economy 62, no. 2 (April 1954); Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 1968); S. V. Ciriacy-Wantrup and Richard C. Bishop, “‘Common Property’ as a Concept in Natural Resource Policy,” Natural Resources Journal 15, no. 4 (October 1975); James A. Swaney, “Common Property, Reciprocity, and Community,” Journal of Economic Issues 24, no. 2 (June 1990); Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Usher, “Aboriginal Property Systems in Land and Resources,” in Green On Red: Evolving Ecological Socialism, ed. Jesse Vorst, Ross Dobson, and Ron Fletcher (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 1993); Burkett, Marx and Nature, 246–8; Robert Biel, The New Imperialism (London: Zed Books, 2000), 15–8, 98–101.
  36. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 45–6, 71; Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 183; Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 137.
  37. Marx, Capital, 3:820; Engels, Anti-Dühring, 309.
  38. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 7; Capital, 2:177, 469.
  39. Marx, Capital, 2:469; “Notes on Wagner,” in Texts on Method, ed. Terrell Carver (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1975), 188; Theories of Surplus Value, part 3, 357–8.
  40. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 125–6.
  41. Routley, “On Karl Marx as an Environmental Hero,” 242; Walker, “Ecological Limits and Marxian Thought,” 242–3.
  42. Marx, Capital, 3:820; Theories of Surplus Value, part 3, 257; Grundrisse, 712.
  43. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 143 (emphasis in original).
  44. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 34. See also Ollman, “Marx’s Vision of Communism,” 76.
  45. Marx, Grundrisse, 542 , 612 (emphasis in original).
  46. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971), 155; Routley, “On Karl Marx as an Environmental Hero,” 243 (emphasis in original).
  47. Marx, Grundrisse, 527; “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, Third Chapter,” in Collected Works, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, vol. 30 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 40 (emphasis in original); David Pepper, Eco-Socialism (London: Routledge, 1993), 64.
  48. Marx, Capital, 1:177, 183–4, 202 (emphases added); “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, Third Chapter,” 63; Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 46. For details on Marx’s dialectical conception of human labor and nature, see Burkett, chapters 2–4 in Marx and Nature; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, “The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature,” Organization & Environment 13, no. 4 (December 2000).
  49. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 10; Engels, Anti-Dühring, 309.
  50. Capital, 3:250, 819 (emphasis in original); Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 273.
  51. Ernest Mandel, Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy (London: Verso, 1992), 205–7 (emphasis in original); Howard J. Sherman, “The Economics of Pure Communism,” Review of Radical Political Economics 2, no. 4 (Winter 1970).
  52. Marx, Grundrisse, 287; Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 53.
  53. Marx, Grundrisse, 172–3, 708; Marx to Engels, January 8, 1868, in Selected Correspondence, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 187; Marx, Capital, 1:71 and 3:264.
  54. Marx, Capital, 3:187.
  55. Engels, Anti-Dühring, 323–4 (emphasis in original); The Housing Question, 92; Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 72; Marx, Capital, 1:505–6.
  56. Marx, Capital, 1:530. For further discussion of socialist planning, technology, and ecological efficiency, see Victor Wallis, “Socialism, Ecology, and Democracy: Toward A Strategy of Conversion,” Monthly Review 44, no. 2 (June 1992); “Technology, Ecology, and Socialist Renewal,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 12, no. 1 (March 2004).
  57. Marx, Grundrisse, 159; Capital, 3:259; Theories of Surplus Value, part 3, 422–3.
  58. Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits,” New Left Review, no. 178 (November/December 1989), 74, 77; Nove, “Socialism,” 230.
  59. Marx, Capital, 3:819; Theories of Surplus Value, part 2, 118.
  60. Marx, Grundrisse, 158, 409–10, 488, 542 (emphases in original); Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 50. Toward the end of his life Marx reconsidered his earlier stance on the relative backwardness of pre-capitalist communal relations as supporters of human development, and argued that the traditional Russian commune could—if assisted by a European socialist revolution—make a direct transition to socialism. See The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974); “Drafts of the Letter to Vera Zasulich”; Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); Franklin Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois,” http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/marx_iroquois.html.
  61. Marx, “Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, Conclusion,” 29; Theories of Surplus Value, part 1, 391–2 (emphases in original); Capital, 1:505 and 3:813; Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 185; Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 141–77. See also Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, “Metabolism, Energy and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinsky Myth,” Theory and Society, forthcoming, 2006.
  62. Marx, Capital, 3:250, 258, 264 (emphasis in original); “The Civil War in France,” 76, 157; Roy Morrison, Ecological Democracy (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 188.
  63. Marx, “The Civil War in France,” 157; Marx and Engels,The German Ideology, 97.
  64. Marx, “Provisional Rules,” in The First International and After, 82; Alan Shandro, “Karl Marx as a Conservative Thinker,” Historical Materialism, no. 6 (Summer 2000), 21–3; Bertell Ollman, “The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now),” Monthly Review 57, no. 3 (July–August 2005); Michael A. Lebowitz, “Building Socialism in the 21st Century,” http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/lebowitz280705.html.

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