Forum introduction: Decolonising green Marxism: Capitalism,decolonialism and radical environmental politics

The COVID-19 crisis began after this forum was written. Yet, it has highlighted, in an extreme way, how humans, nature and global capitalism are each deeply interconnected. This speaks to an ongoing debate within radical environmental politics, which focuses on the question of nature, and the degree to which humans are separate from, and/or part of the natural world. Much of this debate is reflected in the disagreement between John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore, over the way and the extent to which we can conceptualise capitalism as a process that systematically produces ecological destruction (see especially Foster 2016; Moore 2017). This debate raises important questions regarding the way in which Marxism (including Green, or eco-Marxism) is susceptible to charges of Euro-centrism. The aim of this forum is to contribute to this debate, providing opportunities through which to develop and clarify what a decolonised eco-Marxism might look like.

A key aspect in the debate between Foster and Moore is over the question of how to conceptualise the effect of capitalism upon, or in, nature. For Foster, who has perhaps done most to develop a Marxist approach to climate change, especially through a popularisation of the concept of ‘metabolic rift’, we need a dialectical Marxist approach to capitalism. This, the argument goes, is the only means by which to understand climate change, and (perhaps most importantly) to consider the possibility that climate change can be tackled through system-wide socio-economic change. This rests especially upon the concept of ‘metabolic rift’ (Foster 2016).

The concept of metabolic rift as developed by Foster is derived from Marx’s reading of Justus von Liebig and the latter’s work on soil chemistry (on which, see Saito 2017). Here, the impetus created by capitalism, to pursue an unrestricted drive for profitable production, was always destined to unsettle the natural requirements of the land, creating an intensity of production that would degrade the productivity of soil. Put simply, capitalism as a socio-economic system driven by the need for profitable expansion, and without consideration for broader human or ecological needs, could only be expected to produce ecological damage, as the environment that forms the basis for capitalist social relations of production is systematically ignored and degraded. As Saito (2017) describes, in his discussion of Marx’s commentary on the initial effects of capitalism upon land:

Large-scale agriculture exhausts the soil more and more extremely not just because its level of squandering is much higher due to the strong dependence on machinery and fertilizer but also because production is oriented to the maximum utilization of the free forces of nature for profit-making. (p. 172)

In this way, the concept of metabolic rift is comparable to that of alienation. Alienation is the process whereby the worker is estranged from the very wealth that she has created. Likewise, the metabolic rift is a process whereby natural cycles are disrupted by a production rationale that undermines the basis for its own reproduction (Charbonnier 2012).

This conceptualisation of capitalism has been challenged by Jason W Moore. For Moore, there is something problematic about an approach which views capitalism as having degraded Nature. In particular, Moore claims, this begs the question – what is Nature? And what is capitalism? And, most importantly, why is capitalism not a part of Nature? Moore (2017), therefore, rejects this separation – nature and society – preferring instead to refer to ‘society-in-nature’ (p. 286). This, Moore contends, is an important analytical move, precisely because it is not possible to separate nature and society; humans are part of nature, and any attempt to distinguish between the two is problematic and brings with it a degree of analytical violence. Instead, capitalism should be understood as ‘an evolving totality of capital, power and nature’ (Moore 2017: 288).

One consequence of a position which maintains the nature–society distinction, claims Moore, is (at best) a blindness towards the question of how nature and society have been artificially distinguished within modern thought, or (more harmful) a conscious reproduction of the silencing upon which such a distinction rests. The modern construction of ‘Humanity’ was built, in part, through the violent exclusion of ‘most humans – women, peoples of colour, and many others – who were expelled from Humanity with an uppercase “H”’ (Moore 2017: 289). Modernity distinguishes between those (barbarian) humans who are part of Nature, and those (civilised) humans who are outside of Nature. This is a historically produced mode of thought, with clear implications regarding the way in which indigenous, the colonised, slaves, people of colour, and women are all potentially conceptualised. For such approaches, capitalism happens to nature, which is itself considered an inanimate and passive recipient of an expanding wave of capitalist exploitation. Likewise, non-Human humans – those who are indigenous, women, and people of colour – are equally passive victims of the forward march of the expansion of capitalist ‘civilisation’. Agency, importance and the possibility of change are all, therefore, located within capitalist society, leaving those, more ‘Natural’, or ‘uncivilised’, humans with little role to play.

This debate has resulted in an entrenchment of positions more than it has a meeting of minds. For Foster, to reject a dialectical approach towards the nature–society distinction is, at the same time, to reject the possibility that we might understand capitalism as a process of ecological catastrophe, and, therefore, one worthy of change: ‘the issue of the human alienation of nature in a commodified society vanishes’ (Foster 2016: 14). In contrast, for Moore, to perpetuate the nature–society distinction is to reproduce a ‘violent abstraction’ which systematically silences and excludes those humans who exist outside of ‘civilisation’: capitalism is something which happens to nature, including the ‘natural’ part of the human world, in the colonised periphery. Extending the critique developed by Aníbal Quijano, this, therefore, represents a further erasure of alternative indigenous conceptions of humans and their relationship with nature (see French 2014).

Other contributors to the debate have also tended to back one side or the other, with little sign of a synthesis or resolution. For instance, in his scathing critique of Moore’s ‘society-in-nature’ formulation, Andreas Malm (2018) posits that, ‘What the analytical advantages consist of, beyond a new terminology, is initially unclear’ (p.179). The shift from ‘society’ and ‘nature’, to ‘society-in-nature’, he claims, is essentially semantic. Indeed, when it comes to actual analysis, for Malm (2018), those adopting an approach such as Moore’s are forced to re-introduce the use of distinct concepts that were initially discarded: ‘Moore himself seems forced to employ the foul conjunction in phrases such as “human and extra-human nature”, “the soil and the worker”, perhaps because a language of permanent in-hyphenation would be unreadable’ (p. 179). And in doing so, moreover, Malm (2018) claims that such scholars are also forced to re-introduce the Marxist, or historical materialist, analysis that they also initially rejected: ‘When it comes down to saying something concrete about what capitalism actually does to (or in) the web of life, the explanatory model of historical materialism slips through cracks in the jargon’ (p.181).

Likewise, but on the other side of the debate, Alexander Stoner develops a critique broadly sympathetic to the position set out by Moore. Thus, for Stoner (2014): ‘Foster’s theory of metabolic rift risks reducing the complexity of nature-society dynamics to a static, rigidified, and anachronistic form of scientific dialectics’ (p. 626). While Stoner advocates what he terms ‘critical Marxism’, drawing on Lukacs, Adorno and, most centrally, Postone, still the key claim that he advances is that we need to consider nature and society as inseparable (Stoner 2014: 635). Similarly, Cassegård (2017) views Western Marxism, and especially, the work of the Frankfurt School, and Adorno in particular, as able to offer an account that avoids the dualism of nature and society as presented by Foster.

The debate between those who do and those who do not accept the nature–society division might appear, therefore, to have run its course. At least, in the sense that there seems to be little room for agreement between the two positions. Rather than synthesis or reconciliation, instead, we see a pressure to choose one side of the debate or the other.

In setting up this forum, we remain broadly sympathetic to the Marxist account as articulated by John Bellamy Foster. In particular, we are sympathetic to the notion that there needs to be a distinction between the subject of humanity and the object of nature, if we are to get to a point where the former is able to resolve the problems that it is creating for the latter. We agree, however, that the charge of Euro-centrism developed by Moore is one that needs to be taken seriously. The agency of humanity cannot be reduced to those Humans at the core of capitalist society; and we welcome the appeal, and highlight the need, to explicitly decolonise eco-Marxism to make most visible the agency of humans within those contexts lying outside the realm of capitalism and its core.

The urgency of a decolonised eco-Marxism, we claim, is widely evident. Indeed, the capacity to conceptualise environmental and ecological concerns is itself unavoidably bound up with a consideration of core-periphery relations. Core nations historically relied upon key resources across the Atlantic to replenish their exhausted soils. Latin America’s greatest economic ‘advantage’ has often been considered its capacity to export its nature, thus reinforcing a colonial prejudice according to which the global South provides an inexhaustible source of raw materials to be used by the North (Chartier & Löwy 2013); witness, for instance, the guano trade between Great Britain and South America in the 19th century (Clark & Foster 2012). This colonial extraction of resources brought with it new scientific discourses shaped by the encounter between colonisers and the tropics. Ecology as a concept can be considered a cultural by-product of this extraction; its conception fraught with prejudices and biases. For Grove (2018), ‘[t]he first concerns regarding the environment and the critique of the impact of Western economic forces, particularly upon the tropics, appeared as the corollary of both the mental and material colonial history and in contradiction with it’ (p.85, translated by the authors). The core’s encounter with the periphery already relegated local knowledge to that of a subaltern position during colonial times (Grove 2018). In contrast, knowledge generated in core nations has been elevated to the status of universal truth; despite ample evidence of major breakthroughs achieved by local populations with respect to a sound strategy for managing their natural surroundings.

Similar tendencies can also be witnessed with regard to social struggles within the colonised periphery. Periphery-based theoretical categories, albeit oftentimes inspired by core developments, have their own merits to offer when critically analysing contemporary conflicts across the South (Escobar 2016; Fals Borda 2015; Parra-Romero 2016). Contemporary land-related conflicts across the Americas, for instance, have seen open-pit mining operations, land grabs, monoculture expansion, and peasant resistance actions, all of which suggests the existence of a multi-layered culturally constructed struggle that spans issues of class, colonialism, gender and nature (Chartier & Löwy 2013).

Of course, it is not only eco-Marxism that needs to take seriously the project of decolonialism. This is an issue for Marxism-in-general. As Ciccariello-Maher (2017) makes clear, the task of decolonising Marxism is not a straightforward process. It requires a move outside of the usual cannon of Marxist thought. For many, Marxism starts with a conception of capitalism as something which emerged in England and from there spread outwards (Wood 2002). As a number of commentators have highlighted, however, such an approach serves to (wrongly) omit actors, events, processes and pressures that exist on the supposed ‘outside’ of capitalism (Anievas & Nişancıoğlu 2015). In the same way, eco-Marxism demands the attention of the move towards decolonisation.

More is needed, in short, to decolonise Green, or eco-Marxism.

This forum is an attempt to move towards this goal. In doing so, we asked the contributors to consider and explore the question of decolonising Green Marxism. In what way can we draw on work with roots in the Global South, or on the ‘periphery’ of global capitalism, in our attempt to consider the ecologically destructive effects of capitalism. How, if at all, can this be reconciled with a Marxist theory of global capitalism? How do we conceptualise global capitalism and its ecological destruction without reifying the society–nature distinction, and especially, without reproducing Eurocentric conceptions of humanity and agency? How can we consider a post-capitalist political project that is at once against colonialism and its legacies, and able to conceptualise capitalism as an ecologically destructive socio-economic system? It is to these questions that we invited the contributing authors to respond.

Finally, one obstacle to decolonialism within the university system is the dominance of English language, which acts to privilege access to the conversation to those with first-language English. In an attempt to tackle this, this forum is jointly published in English (Capital and Class) and Spanish (Eutopia).

As the forum highlights, the challenge of decolonising Green Marxism is not straightforward. The contributors do not necessarily agree on the form which a decolonised Green Marxism takes, although they do agree that such an intellectual project is necessary.

In his contribution, José Pablo Prado Córdova discusses attempts by the Centre of Conservation Studies in Guatemala to question existing approaches to conservation, and to identify alternatives. As Prado Córdova describes, this represents an attempt to move ‘from a conserving-from-people approach to a conserving-for-people rationale’. In doing so, he sets out a series of ‘decolonial twists’ which can inform an anti-capitalist approach to conservation, in which indigenous traditions, knowledge and lives are privileged rather than discarded or silenced. As the article shows, some of these principles have been actualised in the case of the San José Buena Vista nature reserve in Guatemala, providing an opportunity through which to explore the concrete manifestation of such a human-based conservation paradigm.

In her contribution to the forum, Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo addresses what she terms ‘the extractivist offensive’ that has systematically degraded human and non-human life, as a condition for the reproduction of global capitalism, and which is responsible for today’s ecological crisis. This has intensified across Latin America over the last two decades. As such, any critique of the political economy of capitalism must also contain a critique of this ongoing process of primitive accumulation which is both central to the ecological crisis, and drives the perpetuation of the patriarchal and colonial/neo-colonial relations that constitute global capitalism. As Navarro Trujillo makes clear, this requires us to draw upon a number of important critiques that have been levelled at ‘orthodox Marxism’. As such, we need to adopt an ecological thinking that understands the nature of ecological interdependence and is able to conceptualise the separation that constitutes global capitalism.

Finally, Yulia Yurchenko engages with the debate regarding the use of the concept, metabolic rift. As she makes clear, this requires that we extend the focus of our critique, beyond that of (only) capitalism. While the elimination of capitalist relations is necessary, it is not sufficient. Instead, we need to tackle a broader ‘malfunctioning of the human-human/human-nature relationships’. In doing so, Yurchenko addresses what she considers to be a misreading of dialectical thought which underpins the Foster–Moore debate within Green Marxism. In contrast, we are implored to move towards a form of ‘noospheric thinking’, which is present in indigenous communities and cognisant of the need to co-exist sustainably with non-human species and their habitats. This means a rejection of the fetishised, quantified and undialectical forms of knowledge that are key to contemporary mainstream science. But it also means a rejection of the notion that capitalism is the only productive system (and therefore, the only system capable of ecological harm); and of the view that the global system can be neatly divided between a (dominant) North and a (dominated) South. Here, Yurchenko draws on the thought of Evald Ilyenkov to advance a dialectical approach to ecological knowledge; and Viktor Vasilievich Petrashov to consider noocenology, or ‘a science of restoration, regeneration of ecosystems’. Thus, we are asked to decolonise the epistemologies upon which we base our knowledge, as part of a process whereby we move from our present biosphere, and move instead towards a noosphere.

The task of overcoming the metabolic rift that (in part) constitutes global capitalism is both overwhelming and achievable. It requires that we reconsider the knowledge that we have about the world and the means by which we transform the world as well as the colonialism and neo-colonialism that (sometimes implicitly) inform that praxis. We hope that the present forum makes a (initial) contribution to those ongoing efforts to decolonise this re-thinking of radical environmentalist thought: to decolonise Green Marxism, as part of a wider project, which is to transcend capitalism and its many destructive tendencies.