Towards earthly social theory

Reading Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro’s Ecology, Soils, and the Left brings to mind an image of Marx at the British Museum poring over the latest on agricultural chemistry as he worked on the chapter on ground rent. In a letter to Engels he wrote, “I have been going to the Museum in the day-time and writing at night. I had to plough through the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, in particular Liebig and Schönbein, which is more important for this matter than all the economists put together, as well as the enormous amount of material that the French have produced since I last dealt with this point” (Marx, 1987a: 227). Marx held Liebig in high regard and Liebig’s work informed Marx’s analysis of the effects of large-scale industry on soil fertility (Marx, 1976: 636). As much as Marx recognized the “immortal merits” of Liebig and other agro-chemists, however, he was also critical of their bourgeois shortsightedness that prevented them from recognizing the social conclusions of their own work. Nevertheless, Marx kept up with the new literature and debates in agricultural chemistry as he worked on what would become the third volume of Capital. He repeatedly urged Engels to inquire with their friend Carl Schorlemmer, professor of organic chemistry at Manchester and member of the First International, about current debates on fertilizers and soil exhaustion and pestered him to send the “latest and best” books on the subject (Marx, 1987b). He insisted, “We must keep a close watch on the recent and very latest in agriculture” (Marx, 1987c).

Marx’s enthusiasm for the best and very latest in the natural sciences is not pervasive among social theorists today, including Marxists and other leftist theorists who have devoted a good part of their scholarship to the study of socio-environmental questions. This is the obverse of a lack of engagement in the physical sciences with radical social theory. Engel-Di Mauro’s book is an ambitious attempt to transcend this dual obliviousness by constructing a thorough critique of soil science and leftist social theory, demonstrating the theoretical shortcomings and political sterility that arise from this mutual lack of engagement, and sketching the lineaments of an “eco-social approach” to the study of soil degradation. It is a timely intervention in current debates concerning more-than-human geography and social theory more generally, and a contribution to a growing appeal for a self-reflective, politically engaged physical geography. It is therefore quite apposite that this symposium is included in a special issue on critical physical geography.

Whereas Marx’s interest in soil was to bolster his analysis of capitalist social relations, Engel-Di Mauro’s study of soil involves a critical understanding of the biophysical processes involved in soil formation and degradation themselves as the basis of understanding their social determinedness and the part that soils and soil science play in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The fundamental premise of Engel-Di Mauro’s eco-social approach is the ontological priority and relative independence of biophysical processes from social processes, and their irreducibility to social relations. Unlike Marx, and most other social scientists, therefore, Engel-Di Mauro does not construct his critique entirely in the library, but takes his toolkit—with theoretical, political, and technical tools—to the field and the lab. Ecology, Soils, and the Left is the result of years of scholarly research, but also fieldwork and activism that deploys scientific knowledge directly in the political field (e.g. work with urban farmers). Engel-Di Mauro’s critique of soil science, as well as his critique of capitalism from the standpoint of soil degradation, is not only theoretical, but also practical—a critique that rests on politically engaged scientific practice and that has as one of its objectives the development of scientifically informed political practice.

Ecology, Soils, and the Left is a two-pronged endeavor which seeks to ground anti-capitalist social theorizing in the study of biophysical processes and, more specifically, to underline the importance of soils to human and non-human life. It is an attempt to give the worldwide problem of soil degradation—a catastrophe that is poorly understood and theorized by both soil scientists and leftist social theorists—the status it deserves alongside environmental catastrophes such as deforestation and global warming. Engel-Di Mauro states from the outset that without soils we die, so we cannot afford the luxury of remaining ignorant of soil degradation, and the ecological processes and social relations that produce soil degradation and dictate which soils are deemed degraded. And as we cannot exist without soils, our theories of the social causes and effects of soil degradation cannot free themselves from the study of soils: “studying soils, not only society, is fundamental to explaining soil degradation…To comprehend and explain people–environment relations, the study of processes happening without direct or even indirect human intervention is as important as the study of social relations” (Engel-Di Mauro, 2014: 168–169). Yet, Engel-Di Mauro (2014: 61–62) also maintains that the study of soil degradation must entail the study of social relations and not only the study of soils.

Thus, on one level, Engel-Di Mauro goes beyond a simple call to incorporate the analysis of biophysical processes into the critique of capitalism, and emphasizes the importance of making the analysis of those processes one of the essential starting points of research on human–environment relations. This is not crude empiricism, for Engel-Di Mauro’s eco-social approach posits a “multi-process ontology” (2014: 165–166), which nevertheless insists on recognizing ecological processes that exist independently of us and on which our existence depends. For Engel-Di Mauro the social world is part of the biophysical world and, although knowledge of the biophysical is always political, and its production is entangled with relations of power, it is irreducible to an understanding of the political, as much as biophysical processes and relations themselves are irreducible to (effects of) social relations. Thus the methodological comparison of the eco-social approach to Marx’s Capital (2014: 164) is not convincing and somewhat misleading. Marx begins (the presentation of) his critique with the dissection of the commodity, the elementary form of wealth in capitalist society that is the product of socially determined labor, hence a historical form; the eco-social approach, in contrast, posits as its starting point soil as biophysical process existing prior to, and independently of human social practices. A more appropriate reference, therefore, would be to Marx and Engels’s (1970: 42) materialist conception of history outlined in The German Ideology, according to which “the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history” is “the production of material life itself.” Indeed, the eco-social approach can be understood as an extension of the materialist conception of history into the study of the very matter that forms the “earthly basis” of history, quite literally.

On another level, Engel-Di Mauro underlines the political importance of soils specifically, hence the necessity of understanding soils as living physical, biological, and chemical systems as a premise for understanding the problem of soil degradation. Here Engel-Di Mauro directs his criticism at both soil scientists and leftist social theorists. Soil science, he argues, is imbued with colonial imaginaries, racism, and capitalist imperatives of productivity and profitability associated especially with large-scale agriculture. The very methods and ways that soil types, soil qualities, and soil degradation are understood—and the technocratic solutions they dictate—are permeated with relations of power that reproduce the inequalities of capitalism and colonialism. In this respect, Engel-Di Mauro’s critique of conventional notions of soil degradation and conservation, as well as his insistence on soil degradation as a social problem while recognizing its occurrence regardless of human agency, is a development of Piers Blaikie’s (1985; also Blaikie and Brookfield 1987) seminal work on the political economy of soil erosion, whose influence is evident throughout Ecology, Soils, and the Left.

Engel-Di Mauro, however, does not confine his critique to bourgeois soil science and conservation policies. He deploys the science to criticize leftists’ failure to understand the biology, physics, and chemistry of soils, and the consequent failure to recognize soil degradation as a calamity on par with global warming. Leftist approaches to soil degradation, insofar as they continue to ignore or miscomprehend the science of soils, adopt unwittingly bourgeois, even Malthusian, views on the subject and participate in the reproduction of the limitations of bourgeois soil science and the capitalist ideology that imbues it. As I shall argue shortly, this, for Engel-Di Mauro, does not simply mean incorporating more science into the social critique of capitalism—Engel-Di Mauro’s project calls for leftists to engage in the production of scientific knowledge, in the practice of soil science, in the same breath that he invites soil scientists to become radical theorists.

One of the strengths of Ecology, Soils, and the Left is that it is an internal critique of soil science that does not shy away from engaging soil science and appraising it on its own terms. This distinguishes Engel-Di Mauro’s endeavor from science and technology studies, and much of contemporary political ecology, in that it is not content to describe the practice of science, but goes further to evaluate scientific practice in terms of its assumptions, categories, methods, and consequences. Most importantly, Engel-Di Mauro engages in the practice of an alternative soil science, in terms of its methods and objectives. Despite occasional references to his own work, however, concrete demonstrations of alternative soil science are unfortunately omitted from the book, which foregrounds its polemical character. This aligns the eco-social approach outlined in Ecology, Soils, and the Left with the work of critical physical geographers who are also not content with taking science as the object of observation, but conduct scientific research in their attempt to integrate certain strains of human geography with particular fields of the biophysical sciences. This is, however, where the eco-social approach differs from critical physical geography. Engel-Di Mauro’s book is not a call to integrate, or synthesize, physical and human geography, or soil science and social theory, but an ambitious attempt to transcend both. It is a step towards creating a self-reflective, politically committed (soil) science that is simultaneously a radical social theory. What it calls for, without stating it bluntly, is nothing short of the creation of a new species of eco-social theorists versed in conducting natural science research and fieldwork and equipped with the theoretical tools to analyze and transcend capitalist social relations. The anti-capitalist left, Engel-Di Mauro (2014: 163) contends, “has been long on critique but short on developing alternative ways of understanding and explaining biophysical processes, especially soils.” This could be achieved by better-informed social theory that incorporates scientific knowledge in the critique of social relations with the material environment. But the more challenging task is the development of social theory that supersedes bourgeois (soil) science and becomes capable of producing an alternative, radical and politically committed (soil) science. It is premature, and somewhat unfair, to judge the potential success of such a project since it would entail a radical transformation of the production of knowledge and the sites of the production of knowledge. Where Engel-Di Mauro’s endeavor succeeds is in laying the ground for thinking about the possibility of an earthly social theory and alternative scientific practices, and in underlining the catastrophic consequences involved in failing to do so.