The product of contemporary ecosocialist debates, The Dialectics of Ecology builds on earlier works by Foster, including Marx’s Ecology (2000) and The Return of Nature (2020), aimed at the development of a dialectical naturalism and the formation of a path to sustainable human development.
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.
Excerpts
Today, this ecological rift in the metabolism of society and nature can be seen as having reached an Earth System level, creating what scientists have called an “anthropogenic rift” in the biogeochemical cycles of the entire planet, resulting in what Frederick Engels referred to metaphorically as the “revenge” of nature. In the classical historical-materialist perspective, this contradiction can only be resolved by reconciling humanity and nature. Such a reconciliation requires overcoming not simply the alienation of nature, but the self-alienation of humanity itself, manifested most fully in today’s destructive, commodified society. What is necessary in such an analysis is recognition from the start of the “corporeal” nature of human existence itself, which is tied to production. Hence, if a “new universal history of the human” is necessary in our time, it is here, within the historical-materialist tradition, that the necessary materialist, dialectical, and ecological method is to be found. For Marx, “Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history.” However, human history is never detached from “the universal metabolism of nature,” of which the social metabolism based in the labor and production process is an emergent part.
The Author
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written many books including The Robbery of Nature (with Brett Clark) and The Return of Nature, which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.