John Bellamy Foster’s latest collection of essays usefully critiques carbon markets and ecological commodification, but the emphasis on degrowth is unhelpful, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh

It is now twenty-five years since John Bellamy Foster ‘sought to retrieve Karl Marx’s materialist ecological critique’ (p.7) in his Marx’s Ecology and showed how capitalism is inherently destructive of the environment. Since then, Foster has been developing that project in works such as The Ecological Rift (2011, with Brett Clark and Richard York), The Return of Nature (2020), The Robbery of Nature (2020, with Brett Clark) and Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022). This latest collection of essays restates much of the argument in those previous works but also addresses recent developments both in the climate crisis and in debates about Marx and Engels’ thinking on ecology.

One important strand in climate policy over the last quarter of a century has been the development of carbon markets. Foster makes a clear case here that carbon pricing is part of the problem, not part of any sort of solution. It is in fact not even a credible way of reducing carbon emissions within capitalism. As Foster sets out, in neo-classical economics, natural resources are not accorded any value, but are simply inputs to be exploited, just as human labour is exploited. This both reflects and drives the assumption that natural resources will always be there for production to use, without that production having to take account of sustainability or ecological damage.

The problem with this view of the natural world has of course become painfully obvious. For ecological economists, the way to resolve this was to assign a value to ‘world ecosystem services’. The motivation for many of these economists was to draw attention to the damage being done to the environment by capitalist production, highlighting, as the Millenium Economic Assessment put it in 2005, the risk of ‘“running down of natural capital assets” and neglect of environmental services across the globe’ (p.120). The effect, however, was to drive the ‘accumulation and financialization of nature’ (p.121) which has been the trend of the last decade, both in carbon trading and in conservation initiatives.

It has been evident for some time that carbon markets do not serve to reduce carbon emissions. This environmental failure did not, however, stop the agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in 2021 to promote a world market in carbon offsets, and the accompanying Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, in which, Foster points out, funding for climate mitigation in developing countries will depend on the extent to which they will allow global capital into their internal markets. The result is to accelerate ‘the commodification of the commons, a new Great Expropriation, pointing to the destruction of the earth, involving vast land (and ocean) grabs, particularly in the Global South (p.125).

Commodification

As is often noted, just one hundred corporations are responsible for over 70% of global civilian (as opposed to military) carbon emissions, and these are frequently the same companies who are also profiting from the financialisation of nature. As Foster points out:

‘profits can be made on both sides of the ledger, by contributing to the creative destruction of nature as part of the accumulation of capital and by profitably investing so as to ensure a zero net loss in total human and natural assets. It would be an understatement to refer to this as a planetary level protection racket raised to the level of the capitalist economic system as a whole’ (p.126).

Far from being a benefit to the market and the environment, Foster makes clear that the financialisation of the natural world is a potential disaster for both. The pricing of ‘ecosystem services’ represents not real wealth but their increasing scarcity, and their use as the basis for capital accumulation represents a further step in the process which caused that scarcity in the first place. ‘The trajectory’, he argues, is therefore ‘toward a world of widening catastrophe capitalism marked by interconnected financial and ecological crises, based on the myth that nature can be transformed into a new speculative asset class’ (p.152).

The commodification of the natural world which carbon pricing represents is only possible because in capitalism we live in an alienated world, ‘where mind is seen as alienated from body, society from nature, part from whole, cause from effect, subject from object, and past from present’ (p.7). Against this, a Marxist understanding of the dialectical relationship between human society and the natural world remains of crucial importance. For Marx, Foster reminds us, the materialist perspective was always ecological. Human alienation from nature is the other side of the alienation of labour under capitalism. Thus, ‘the role of Marxian ecology in understanding our current environmental predicament is of crucial importance’ (p.85). Foster here is not only reasserting the importance of Marxist ecological thought against elements of Marxian theory which sought to minimise it, but also asserting the unity of Marx’s and Engels’ work on the natural world.

As he did in The Return of Nature, Foster emphasises here the interrelationship of Marx’s and Engels’ work on the natural world. He rejects Kohei Saito’s arguments from Marx in the Anthropocene, repeated in Slow Down, that Engels was opposed at least to elements of Marx’s ecology, was in some ways responsible for its neglect in some strands of Marxism, and, specifically, suppressed Marx’s ideas about natural metabolism in his editing of the third volume of Capital. Saito’s project appears to be to extract Marx from the Marxist tradition, in order to argue that at least in later life, he had become a degrowth communist. Against this, Foster presents a call for unity; accepting the unity of Marx’s and Engels’ thought on ecology and building unity on the left in climate politics.

Foster is clear that there is no basis for suggesting that Marx adopted degrowth communism at any point in his life. For Saito, the view that Marx was a degrowth communist forms an important plank of his argument that degrowth communism is the way forward for the world. Foster takes no such quasi-religious position. Marx and Engels were not prophets, but ‘it is the method of materialist dialectics that is Marx and Engels’s chief legacy to us today as we confront the twenty-first-century planetary emergency’. He comments that ‘however much one may think that “degrowth communism” is the solution to our present planetary predicament, there is no evidence that suggests that such an outlook was present in Marx’s work itself’ (p.9).

It is quickly apparent that the theoretical people who may believe that degrowth communism is the answer include Foster himself. The ‘strategy of degrowth in rich economies’ is, he believes, part of a ‘socialist project full of contradictions and hope’ (p.9) which is necessary in the face of the climate crisis. Degrowth here is not a strategy for ameliorating capitalism. Foster is critical of such degrowth-related proposals as universal basic income or shortened working weeks, on the basis that these ‘seek to adjust the parameters of capitalism rather than transcend them’ (p.270). What is needed is a system based not on capital accumulation but on ecological democratic planning.

The problem with degrowth

Foster’s work on Marx’s ecology has demonstrated how capitalism cannot help but destroy the environment, and that, as Marx and Engels argued, only a socialist society would be able to plan production sensibly and sustainably. Such a society would not be based on growth, not being capitalist, and would therefore not be reliant on growth for the promise of occasional, marginal improvements to services and standards of living for working people. This is clear, but what is less clear is the utility of degrowth communism as an aim to galvanise a revolutionary movement. There is also the question of how centring opposition to capitalism around degrowth specifically relates to struggles within capitalism against austerity, the cost-of-living crisis and for the defence of public services.

It is not that Foster is unaware of criticisms of degrowth as being a strategy for immiseration. Degrowth, he says, ‘is aimed not at austerity but at finding a “prosperous way down”’ (p.240). The problem though is that there is little here to suggest how fighting for this prosperous way down can be squared with fighting for things which will improve people’s lives now, whether that’s wage increases or improvements to the health service. This is not only a matter of social justice, but also of strategy. The suspicion that green measures, from low-traffic neighbourhoods to carbon pricing, are imposed on working-class people by elites who don’t care if they are (or in some versions, are aiming at) making their lives more difficult, has become part of a culture war which has only made the prospects of gaining any progress on climate goals more difficult.

The UK Labour government’s contrasting attitudes to new rail projects and to airport expansion shows how, in some quarters, it has become almost axiomatic that anything that is good for the environment can only be a burden to the economy, and conversely that something has to be bad for the environment if it is to be good for growth. In a macro sense, of course, there is something in this, in that capitalism is inherently environmentally destructive, but as the driver of a situation where we can only get investment in transport projects if they are catastrophic enough for the climate, it is hardly helpful.

It is difficult to see how fighting for degrowth as an immediate aim would not involve the working class in the West fighting for decreases in their own living standards, at least before a global socialist revolution. This is implicit in some of Foster’s comments. He says that the result of a degrowth strategy would be that ‘the lives of most people can be improved both economically and ecologically’ (p.244), but this is most people in the world, not necessarily most people in the West. The degrowth strategy ‘specifically targets the most opulent sectors of the world population’ (p.239), but this does not necessarily exclude the Western working class. Indeed, Foster comments that the US ‘has long cultivated an “imperial mode of living”’ (p.167), and although he acknowledges that this mainly benefits the ‘very top of society’ it would be difficult to read this as anything other than a judgement on Western society as a whole.

That this view of Western consumption, including Western working-class consumption, would be a problem for building the movement in the West is obvious, but it is clear that Foster does not in fact see much of a political role for the proletariat in Western countries. The overthrow of capitalism will depend, he argues, on ‘the emergence of a global environmental proletariat animated by a dialectical ecology and opposed to imperialism, extractivism, and class (and other) forms of exploitation, representing a new communal age of the earth’ (p.9). The definition of the environmental proletariat is not set out explicitly, but Foster does seem to be regarding it as existing primarily in the Global South. He comments for example that just as the profits from the expropriation of natural resources are highest in the Global South, ‘it is here too that an increasingly dispossessed environmental proletariat is most in evidence’ (p.155).

What do we do in the West?

While this proletariat carries out the struggle against capitalism, the place in it for the working class in the West would seem to be limited. Foster says that ‘there is no possibility that the ruling-class interests [in the West]… will somehow turn around and advocate a low-carbon, “simple, moderate, green” way of life or oppose excessive consumption and inequality’ (p.167). He sees no effective counter to this, given that the ‘main radical proposal in the West’ to deal with it, the Green New Deal, would leave growth and production unchanged. The only positive mentions here of working-class activity in the West are of utopian-socialist-like projects like Cooperation Jackson. This is a local co-op which, Foster reports, focuses on ‘removing as much land as possible from the “capitalist market” in order to “decommodify” it’ (p.236) and sets up urban farms and a grocery store. This is all very laudable, but in praising it as a ‘revolutionary, transformative project’ (p.235), Foster neglects to point out that controlling the means of production by buying them is to become part of the petty bourgeoisie, not a revolutionary.

If the role for the working class in the West is to keep our heads down and just focus on consuming as little as possible, then the global environmental proletariat can in Foster’s view take inspiration from ‘the struggle to create an ecological civilization, principally emanating from China’ (p.9). Foster takes the view, building on Joseph Needham’s thesis, that Chinese culture is particularly suited to an ecological stance because of ‘the traditional Chinese emphasis on the harmony of humanity and nature’ (p.184). Be that as it may, and it would be possible to argue that various writers in the Western canon have shown similar emphases, to argue from this that the modern Chinese state is likely to or is even trying to establish an ecological civilisation requires of course a further step, that it is not part of the inherently destructive capitalist system.

Foster’s analysis here gives considerable weight to various statements by Chinese President Xi Jinping, such as for example his declaration that China ‘“would encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption”’ (p.184). Foster argues that no Western politician could be imagined making similar statements, which seems to forget the extent to which at different times, Western politicians have found it expedient to talk up their ecological credentials. It is true that China has made significant investments in green energy, although projections early in 2024 that it would be the year in which Chinese carbon emissions peaked turned out not to be correct. Chinese strategy in this though has to be considered in its geo-political context, as does the way in which Xi positions China as a force for good in contrast to the US, as seen for example in the launch of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative in 2013. Foster here appears to take the pronouncements of China’s President at face value and as motivated only by the best of motives in a way that he would surely not do for any Western politician.

Despite the argument to the contrary here, China is a capitalist country, just as much as the US or the UK is. It is also imperialist. As Dragan Plavŝić argues, ‘China is an emergent imperialist power’ that is as dedicated to the brutally competitive logic of capitalism as the West. For this reason, our ally cannot be the Chinese state but the working class it exploits. Foster’s inability to recognise China’s imperialism means that he puts himself in the odd position of calling for a global anti-imperialist movement to support a major imperialist power, which is neither a coherent nor a defensible position.

Foster has long been an authority on the ecological case against capitalism. However, if we make belief in degrowth, or support for China, a condition of entry to the fight for an alternative, we will minimise the possibilities of building the fightback against our governments and will further entrench the culture war which the right has been able to use to cast green issues as a liberal conspiracy against the people. The struggle for socialism is a struggle for an answer to environmental catastrophe, but by insisting on an ascetic approach, or support for one imperialism against another, we will perpetuate those divisions which Foster rightly argues against.