Ecology and Socialism

I.

According to a recent pamphlet the only reaction socialists have ever had to green issues is to jump on the bandwaggon of popular concern for the environment for our own ends. This article is the first of our two-part reply.

There is a yawning chasm between a politics of ecology and that of all major traditions of socialist theory and practice. This is the case both at the level of values — anthropocentrism versus an Earth-centred ethics — and of policy — especially limits-to-growth versus expansionism.

So writes Sandy Irvine in a recent polemical pamphlet Red Sails in the Sunset - An Ecopolitical critique of the Socialist Inheritance. Published by the Campaign for Political Ecology, a conservative-minded group that has broken away from the Green Party on the grounds that it has become too left-wing by advocating social improvements that the Earth can't afford. Irvine is also editor of a magazine called Real World, a title chosen to convey that all those who think in terms of improving people's standard of living, whether by reform or by revolution, are hopeless Utopians because the Earth can't sustain this; in the real world only sacrifices, cuts and belt-tightening are on the agenda.

Socialism and Socialism

Irvine has his definition of socialism: "what was said and done by the majority of those who have called themselves socialists ". That's a possible definition, but in that case we're not socialists since in Britain the majority of those who have called themselves socialists have been supporters and members either of the Labour Party or of the Communist Party and the various Trotskyist groups. For these people socialism has meant state ownership (nationalisation) and/or state intervention, what we would call state capitalism, and it is essentially against these policies as a way of solving the current ecological crisis that Irvine is arguing. Since we have never advocated or supported nationalisation and state control we would appear not to be involved. However, Irvine specifically lumps us in with the rest of them since "for a taste of British socialist politics" he specifically recommends people to read the Socialist Standard — we can agree with that of course — alongside, among others, Socialist Worker, Militant, New Left Review, Marxism Today (a bit difficult, since it no longer exists) and Living Marxism. He also mentions that he once debated against us.

Naturally, we object to being lumped in with these advocates of state capitalism, but Irvine attempts to deal with this objection in advance by saying that "there always will be, of course, those whose response to any criticism of socialist theory or practice, is the mantra 'but that's not true socialism '. At this point, words become meaningless ".

We do indeed say "but that's not true socialism" since, in our view, socialism does have a definite logical and historical meaning. But this doesn't mean that words become meaningless. The word "socialism" rather becomes meaningless if everyone who calls themself a socialist is accepted as being a socialist. Irvine doesn't quite go that far, but only argues that socialism is whatever a majority of those call themselves socialists have stood for. But he can't have it both ways: he can't include us in his criticism of socialism when we are not part of that majority.

Maybe the definition of socialism we adhere to has become (thanks largely to the 70-year period of rule of Leninist State capitalism in Russia) a minority one, but up until the first world war it was probably the majority view: that socialism is a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, where the state and government over people will give way to democratic self-administration and where the money-market-profit economy, will give way to production solely and directly to satisfy human needs without buying and selling. They certainly had differences about how to get there but this was what Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, William Morris, Bebel, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and even Lenin and Stalin (before 1917) and Keir Hardie (some of the time) meant by the term.

Irvine is mistaken in another of his references to us. One of his points is that those who call themselves socialists have had three types of reaction to the issue of environmental destruction: (1) disinterest (continuing to shout "the right to work", "no cuts", and "kick out the Tories"); (2) opportunistic exploitation (jumping on the bandwagon started by the Greens) and (3) denunciation of environmentalists (for being Not-In-My-Backyarders and people with a comfortable standard of living who urge poorer people not to increase their consumption, etc.).

To illustrate the second type of reaction he writes in a footnote:

"After the success of the Greens in the 1989 Euroelections, there was a sudden flurry of meetings up and down the country with titles like 'Environmental Crisis —the Socialist Answer'. I took part in one such debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain in Newcastle at that time."

The facts are otherwise. The debate took place on 1 June 1987, the title was "Green Revolution or Socialist Revolution?", and we had our own candidate standing against, among others, the Green Party in Newcastle in the 1989 Euro-elections. In any event, someone who, like Irvine, was a Trotskyist in the 1960s and 70s (as he himself reveals) and a Green in the 1980s and 90s is not in any position to lecture others about swaying with the wind or following the herd.

Who's a bandwagonner?

Long before environmentalism began to become a big issue in the 1960s, members of the Socialist Party had been aware of the problems of pollution. One reason for this is that we are materialists and recognise that humans are material beings who depend entirely for their survival on what they get from their material environment, particularly food. Without being so simplist as those 19th century German materialists who declared "man ist wass man isst", ("one is what one eats") and who attempted to explain human behaviour in terms of what people ate — of course, it is social factors that are the most important ones involved in human behaviour — many Socialist Party members realised that what you ate was bound to have some effect on your health, and so were concerned about the chemical pollution of food. Many became vegetarians or food reformers of one kind or another. One (Horace Jarvis) wrote a book Food Faking Exposed that was published in 1958.

When the writings on ecology of the American anarcho-communist (and another ex-Trotskyist) Murray Bookchin became easily available in Britain in the late 1960s, we immediately recognised the importance of what he was saying. He then wrote under the name ofLewis Herber (we had already noticed his article "The Problem of Chemicals in Food" that appeared in 1952 in the Contemporary Issues, a magazine produced by some former German Trotskyists who had come to reject Leninism). Two of his articles, "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" and "Towards A Liberatory Technology", both written in 1965 (but not published in Britain until 1966 and 1967 respectively) circulated amongst Socialist Party members with the second being commented on favourably (both are included in Bookchin's book Post-Scarcity Anarchism).

Here was someone who was expressing much of what we thought ourselves about the matter. That not only was pollution and environmental destruction caused by the profit system but also that it was the science of ecology that explained the processes by which pollution and environmental destruction resulted from releasing waste substances into the rest of nature at a rate and in amounts that it could not cope with; that science and technology, far from causing the problem, provided the knowledge and techniques that could be used to solve it given the right social framework; and, last but not least, that this framework was a less centralised society that produced to meet human needs not for profit, which could only be done in a stateless, moneyless communist society. Naturally, Bookchin being an anarchist, we had major disagreements with how he envisaged the establishment of such a society. (He wrote another article, criticising the vanguardists, called "ListenMarxist!", but which should have been called "Listen Leninist!". Our reply, "Listen Anarchist!", appeared in the March 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard.)

In June 1971 we published an article "Ecology: the First Decade" which ended:

Why does pollution occur? A small amount is due to ignorance or miscalculation. A small amount is unavoidable given present technology and population. But the immense majority is due to the economic network. People pollute because it is in their economic interests to do so.

It is sometimes claimed, though, that the problem arises from a wrong attitude to nature. This has some truth, though it will not do as a complete explanation. The attitude to nature, and the economic system, are interlinked. The present growth of ecological awareness is full of hope, for it encourages a mentality which considers total processes rather than isolated fragments.

So, if we jumped on any bandwagon (which we didn't), it would have to have been at the very latest towards the end of the 1960s — well before the Ecology Party (now the Green Party) was formed in 1973 and at a time when Irvine himself was going around shouting "no cuts" and "kick out the Tories" and even "Labour to power on a socialist programme."

Ecology is a science — the study of the inter-relations between living organisms and between them and their non-living environment — and, as we pointed out in the 1971 quote above, one that emphasises treating the subject matter as a whole and recognising the interdependence and
interconnectedness of the various parts as well as the fact of continuous change. This approach is in fact the best approach for all fields of scientific study. It is known to socialists as the dialectical approach and, as ecology happens to emphasise this more than some other sciences, this was an additional reason as to why it appealed to socialists when knowledge about ecology became more widespread in the 1960s.

But ecology is a science and not a political doctrine. This was why the original name of the Green Party — the Ecology Party — was absurd. They might just as validly, and only slightly less ridiculously, have called themselves the Chemistry Party or the Biology Party. It was also rather arrogant, in claiming that the science of ecology gave exclusive backing to their policies, which after all were only reformist policies to be applied within the profit system (more anti-pollution laws and investment, and other legislative and tax changes).

II.

As a science — the study of the inter-relationships between living organisms and between them and their non-living environment, ecology has no particular political or ethical lesson to teach. Its essential role is to explain and predict. It is true that implications for human behaviour can be drawn from its findings. Humans are living organisms and as such are part of particular ecological systems and of the whole biosphere; so human behaviour does have ecological implications. In fact ecology as a science has identified particular forms of human behaviour (without going into their causes, which fall outside its field of study) as the major disturbing force upsetting ecological balances, the result of which is pollution and environmental destruction.

The implication that can be drawn from this is that, if pollution and environmental destruction are to be minimised then human behaviour — human productive activity, to be precise — must change, in such a way that what humans take from nature, the amount and the pace at which we do so, as well as the way we use these substances and dispose of them after use, should be done in such a way as to leave the rest of nature in a position to go on supplying and reabsorbing them.

It's a tall order, but it is also a very general statement that leaves open the question of what specifically should be done. It can't be otherwise since ecology as a science is concerned with analysing the effects of particular forms of human behaviour on ecosystems without going into what causes those forms of behaviour. That is a matter for other fields of scientific research, such as sociology and economics.

Here Socialists have their point of view and people like Irvine theirs. We say that the ecologically-unbalanced behaviour that humans at present engage in is due to the socio-economic system under which we live, namely the profit system, or capitalism. He attributes it to something else: human greed or permissiveness or a wrong attitude to nature or an unreasonable desire to have too many children. We call for a change of social system. He calls for "changes to human values and lifestyles", without a change of social system. (Actually, it's not quite as simple as this, as the predominant values in society tend to reflect the needs of the socio-economic system, so a change of system will involve a change of values too.) But ecology has nothing to say on this particular argument. Which is why Irvine's appeal to it to back his view is as invalid as would be an appeal to it by us to back our view.

Socialism is human-centred

Irvine goes further and, again accuses Socialists of a human-centred approach as opposed to an Earth-centred one which he claims derives from ecology:

Socialist theory has been deeply embedded in a thoroughly cornucopian and human-centred view of life. It has never got to grip with the realities of 'limits-to-growth ', believing instead in the existence of Aladdin's Lamp which, if rubbed by the right people, can release a cornucopia of goods and services. Indeed, in some classic socialist texts, notably RobertTressell 's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, it is suggested that under socialism, people would simply take whatever they wanted from gigantic warehouses. Amongst the radical groups that blossomed in the wake of the May '68 events in France, a popular slogan was: 'What do we want? Everything! When do we want it? Now!' The Marxist tradition has been little different promising an open cheque marked 'to each according to his needs'.

We plead guilty to this charge of being human-centred We do have a human-centred approach: we want a socialist society primarily because it will be good for human beings. It will also be good for the biosphere but, then, what is good for the biosphere is also good for humans. Oddly, since it is a human-centred argument, Irvine also makes this last point, arguing that unless humans take into account the good of the biosphere things will be bad for them too ("the Earth must come first for, without the planet's life-sustaining eco¬systems, all human aspirations and goals are doomed").

We have indeed spoken of socialism in terms of abundance, less so today perhaps than in the past. Irvine — influenced no doubt by the falsehood taught by conventional economics that human wants are "infinite" — interprets this as meaning that socialism will be a society of ever increasing personal consumption, of people coming to consume more and more food, to take more and more holidays, and to acquire more and more material goods.

If humans wants were "infinite" then this would be the result of a society based on free access and geared to meeting human needs, but human wants are socially-determined and limited. Humans can only consume so much food, for instance, and only seek to accumulate more and more material goods in a society of economic insecurity like capitalism. In a society, such as socialism would be, where people could be sure that what they required to satisfy their needs would always be available in the "warehouses" then we would soon settle down to only taking what we needed and no more.

This is all we meant by talking of socialism as a "society of abundance": that enough food, clothing and other material goods can be produced to allow every man, woman and child in society to satisfy their likely material needs. It was not a reference to some orgy of consumption, but simply to the fact that it is technically possible to produce (more than) enough to satisfy everyone's material needs, thanks, we might add, to industrialisation. Despite Irvine's claim to the contrary, industrial processes of production are not in themselves the cause of pollution and environmental destruction; it is their application under capitalism in the pursuit by seperate, competing firms and states of relatively short-term monetary profit that
is the cause.

Increased consumption

Meeting everybody's likely material needs will indeed involve in many cases an increase in what people consume. This will certainly be the case for the one-in-five of the population of Britain who need state handouts to bring them up to the poverty line; it will also be the case for about the same number who live without state handouts not far above the poverty line; and it will obviously be the case for the millions and millions of people in the so-called Third World who are suffering from horrendous problems of starvation, disease and housing.

So, yes, Socialism will involve increases in personal consumption for three-quarters or more of the world's population. Impossible, says Irvine, this would exceed the Earth's carrying capacity and make environmental destruction even worse. Not necessarily so, we reply.

Irvine's mistake is to confuse consumption per head with what individuals actually consume. To arrive at a figure for consumption per head, what the statisticians do is to take total electricity or oil consumption or whatever and then divide it by the total population. But this doesn't give a figure for what people consume as, in addition to personal it includes what industry, the government and the military consume. It a grossly misleading to equate consumption per head with personal consumption since it ignores the fact that consumption per head can be reduced without reducing personal consumption and that this is in fact compatible with an increase in personal consumption.

This in effect is what Socialists (real Socialists that is) propose: to eliminate the waste of capitalism, not just of arms and armies but of all the overhead costs involved in buying and selling. It has been estimated that, at the very least, half of the workforce are engaged in such socially-useless, non-productive activity (some estimates go higher). In a socialist society all this waste will be eliminated, so drastically reducing consumption per head.

This will allow room for the personal consumption of those who need it to be increased to a decent level. Diverting resources to do this — and ensuring that every human on the planet does have a decent standard of living will be the primary, initial aim of socialism — will put up consumption per head again, but to nowhere near the level now obtaining under capitalism.

When socialism reaches cruising speed, after clearing up the mess inherited from capitalism, then both consumption and production can be expected to level off and something approaching a "steady-state economy" reached. In a society geared to meeting human needs, once those needs are being met there is no need to go on producing more.

It is true that this assumes that population levels will stabilise too. This is a reasonable assumption, and is already beginning to happen, even under capitalism, in the most developed capitalist parts of the world of Europe, North America and now Japan. Population growth is a feature ofthe poorer parts of the world, suggesting a link between it and poverty and the insecurity that goes with it (the more children you have the more chance there is of someone to care for you in your old age). If this is so, the way to end population growth is to eliminate poverty and economic insecurity, which in practice can only be done by socialism.

Irvine vigorously disagrees with this analysis. But he himself has no answer to the problem since he is against increasing personal consumption levels as in his view this would overload the Earth's carrying capacity. But, unless the personal consumption of the people in the poorer parts of the world is increased, then population growth there won't slow down. If you reject socialism all that is left is to envisage either compulsory sterilisation or letting starvation, disease and wars take their course (as Malthus advocated).

Socialists emphatically reject such an anti-human approach. If that's what an "Earth-centred ethics" teaches then we want nothing to do with it. We'll stick to our human-centred approach, which embraces the view that the balanced functioning of the biosphere is something that humans should try to achieve since, as part ofthe biosphere, it is in our interest that it should function properly. There is in fact no antagonism between the interest of humanity and the interest of the biosphere.

In adopting an anti-humanist stand (Irvine calls it "post-humanism"; it used to be called misanthropy) people like him are in fact doing damage to the cause of finding a solution to the current ecological crisis. They are undermining any good work they might be doing in drawing people's attention to the need for a sustainable relationship between humans and the rest ofthe biosphere. They put people off and they give ecology a bad name. And they impede the growth of the understanding of what social and economic changes are needed to create the framework in which the mess can be cleaned up and a sustainable balance with the rest of nature created.

ADAM BUICK. Socialist Standard, January and February 1996

Socialism and Ecology

In America, and to a certain extent in Britain, the movement of those concerned about the environment has become infested by people who want to turn ecology from a naturalistic science into a religion with a "spiritual" message. Where they are not supporters of conventional religion, they want us to believe that nature is peopled by wood sprites and other spirits headed by a goddess — Mother Earth, or Gaia — who we should worship under the auspices of witches and priestesses, or some such manifest nonsense. On a more philosophical level this takes the form of a doctrine called "deep ecology" according to which human beings and flies are of equal significance and which sees the human species in itself as a disturbing feature to the biosphere which, until we mend our ways, nature is quite justified in taking steps to eliminate (through famines and ecological disasters).

Murray Bookchin is one of those in the ecological movement who are fighting against this resurgence of anti-rationalism and anti-humanism which he calls the "counter-Enlightenment" (it extends beyond the Green movement, of course, as in the growth of astrology, belief in UFOs and the like). He points out in his latest book Remaking Society (Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1989) that human beings are both a part and a product of nature; that, despite what the "deep ecologists" say about flies, humans do have a unique significance in nature since they are the only life-form capable of reflective thought and so of conscious intervention to change the environment. It is absurd to regard human intervention in nature as some outside disturbing force, since humans are precisely that part of nature which has evolved that consciously intervenes in the rest of nature; it is our nature to do so. It is quite true that at the present time the form human intervention in (the rest of) nature takes is upsetting natural balances and cycles, but the point is that humans, unlike other life—forms, are capable of changing their behaviour.

If humans have a "place" in nature, says Bookchin, it can only be to consciously intervene not just to meet their needs but also to ensure nature's balanced functioning; in this sense the human species is the brain and voice of nature, nature become self-conscious. But to fulfil this role humans must change the social system which mediates their intervention in nature. Bookchin is explicit enough on what this change must be: a change from capitalism, in both its corporate enterprise form in the West and its bureaucratic form in the East, to a "community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs":

The earth can no longer be owned; it must be shared. Its fruits, including those produced by technology and labour, can no longer be expropriated by the few; they must be rendered available to all on the basis of need. Power, no less than material things, must be freed from the control of the elites; it must be redistributed in a form that renders its use participatory.

This, of course, is instantly recognisable to us as the world society of common ownership, democratic control and production geared to meeting needs that we call "world socialism". Bookchin himself does not use this term, preferring to speak of this as being the application of what he calls "social ecology". He is in fact an anarchist in the anarcho-communist tradition of Kropotkin, and in other of his works has accepted the term "communism" to describe the alternative to capitalism. But what is important is the content, not the label, and it is heartening to know that, whatever our disagreements about how to get from here to there, there is a group of people in the Green movement in America putting forward the same solution as us.

Indeed, some of the things Bookchin says mirror the criticism we have made of the Green Party in this country:

To substitute words like industrial society for capitalism can thus be misleading . . . To speak of an 'industrial society' without clear reference to the new social relations introduced by capitalism, namely wage labour and a dispossessed proletariat, often willfully endows technology with mystical powers and a degree of autonomy that it does not really have. It also creates the highly misleading notion that society can live with a market economy that is 'green', 'ecological', or 'moral', even under conditions of wage labour, exchange, competition and the like. This misuse of language imputes to technology — much of which may be very useful socially and ecologically — what should really be directed against a very distinct body of social relationships, namely, capitalistic ones.

Disagreement with Marx

Such disagreements as exist between Bookchin and us arise from the fact that we are in the Marxist whereas he is in the anarchist tradition. In this book Bookchin takes up an explicitly anti-Marx stand, arguing against the materialist conception of history on the grounds that Marx was wrong to say that a free society only became possible with the development of the productive forces under capitalism: on the contrary, says Bookchin. a democratic society of common ownership could have been established at a number of key turning points in history. Since we are now where we are, and both sides are agreed that the solution to world problems lies in the immediate establishment of a society of common ownership, democratic participation and production for needs, this can be seen as a rather academic dispute After all. whether or not a communistic society could have been established at the end of the feudal era (but wasn't) had sufficient humans opted for this does not affect what we should do now.

This brings us to Bookchm's other disagreement with Marx, in fact not just with Marx but also with those in the anarchist tradition such as the anarcho-syndicalists who continue to look to the class struggle of the workers as the driving force for the establishment of a society of common ownership. "The working class", writes Bookchin. "has become a largely devitalized force for basic social change, not to mention revolution". Here, Bookchin is using the term working class in the limited sense of factory workers and it is true that there is nothing special about factory workers compared with other workers (office workers, service workers) that means that it is the pursuit of their particular interests as factory workers that will be the driving force for the establishment of common ownership. If common ownership is a working class issue, it is an issue for the working class as a whole: all those who are dependent for a living on selling their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary, irrespective of whether they work in a factory or an office or a school or a shop or whatever.

This is the sense in which we use the term and we stil! think it makes sense to see the struggle for common ownership as a class struggle. To say that productive resources should not be subject to private property rights is to say that they should be taken away from those who currently hold them as their exclusive property. The struggle to establish common ownership is thus a struggle by the rest of society (in effect, the working class in its proper, broad sense) against the monopolising minority (the capitalist class). This is not to say that, in this struggle, those we in the Socialist Party call the working class are merely pursuing their own narrowly economic interests; at the same time they are pursuing the general interest of the whole of humanity.

Limits to Capitalism

At one time it was widely believed amongst social revolutionaries that the change¬over to common ownership would be sparked off by some economic crisis that would push workers to overthrow capitalism just in order to get their basic material needs satisfied. Some in the Marxist tradition (though not us) even believed that capitalism would eventually break down economically, leaving workers no choice but to establish common ownership.

Experience has shown these beliefs to have been misplaced. So what will spark off the change-over? Bookchin suggests that the limits to capitalism are "external" rather than "internal":

For generations, radical theorists opined about the 'inner limits' of the capitalist system, the 'internal' mechanisms within its operation as an economy that would yield its self-destruction... In the face of vast biogeochemical dislocations that have opened vast holes in the earth's ozone layer and increased the temperature of the planet by the 'greenhouse effect', these limits are now clearly ecological. Whatever may be the destiny of capitalism as a system that has 'internal limits economically, we can emphatically say that it has external limits ecologically.

This (rather than stale arguments about the materialist conception of history) is the sort of thing that those who want a world of common ownership and democratic participation should be discussing. We ourselves have long reached the conclusion that capitalism has no "internal" limits (our classic pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse appeared in 1932): unfortunately, from a purely economic view, capitalism could continue indefinitely. Such limits as it might have as an economic and social system have therefore to be "external".

Bookchin's hypothesis that these limits are ecological is attractive (we have in fact discussed it amongst ourselves), but there are other candidates, in particular the nature of human beings as rational and socially co-operative animals. (Can capitalism reduce us indefinitely to isolated competing atoms when it is our nature as a species to co-operate to survive? Can capitalism indefinitely prevent us as life-forms capable of reflective thought from seeing that, as a matter of objective fact, common ownership and democratic control is the only framework within which contemporary problems can be solved?).

Whether we disagree with Bookchin's hypothesis here or not, it is clear that he is on the same wavelength as us. This is not a discussion between supporters and opponents of socialism but a discussion amongst people who are agreed that the way forward for humanity lies in the establishment of a world of common ownership, democratic participation and production to meet needs.

ALB. Socialist Standard, March 1990

Capitalism, socialism and ecology

In 1871 a German biologist, Ernst Haeckel, coined the word "ecology". It derives from the Greek word "Oikos" meaning "house" or "habitat" and can be defined as the study of relationships between organisms and their environment or natural habitat.

Ecology is closely related to the subject oL economics, the latter springing from the same root means literally ""the management of a household". However, the significance of this association is not simply a matter of etymological interest. Undoubtedly this is what Sunderlal Bahunga, a prominent figure in the Indian Chipko movement, had in mind when he replied to a reporter who had asked him how he could resolve the conflict between ecology and economic development. His answer was succinct and to the point: for him there was no such conflict since ecology was in fact just "long-term economics".

And yet if we look at the world around us today we cannot fail to notice the extent to which nature is being ravaged in the name of short-term economic gain. It is all too clear that the prevailing economic system of capitalist competition is quite incapable of seriously taking into account the long-term considerations with which ecology is vitally concerned. Only where the system's immediate objective of profit maximisation is threatened does it become expedient to act upon such considerations. Some might say that this does not really matter when all is said and done. The technological conquest of nature, they suggest, has somehow enabled man to become independent of it. In Small is Beautiful E.F. Schumacher quotes a representative voice from this school of thought, that of Eugene Rabinowitch, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

The only animals whose disappearance may threaten the biological viability of man on earth are the bacteria normally inhabiting our bodies. For the rest, there is no evidence that mankind could not survive even as the only species on earth! If economical ways could be developed for synthesising food from inorganic materials - which is likely to happen sooner or later - man will even be able to become independent of plants on which he now depends as sources of his food.
But whatever the technical merits (or otherwise) of such a claim, for the forseeable future it is safe to assume that mankind will continue to rely heavily on agriculture - that is to say, on the natural processes harnessed by agriculture - for its food.

The charge of "technological triumphalism" is one that has sometimes been levelled at Marxism. Yet it was Engels who produced one of the most cogent rebuttals of precisely this point of view, when addressing himself to the question of man's relationship with nature:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquests over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first. The people who in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivatable land, never dreamed that they were laying the basis for the present devastated condition of those countries, by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture . . .

Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to know and correctly apply its laws. ("The part played by labour in the transition from Ape to Man" Dialectics of Nature, 1940, pp.291-2).

As an apology for an ecological perspective this could hardly be bettered. But before examining what such a perspective entails for harnessing nature for the production of food, let us look briefly at the view that it is the pressure of population as such that has caused the environment to deteriorate.

MALTHUS AND NEO-MALTHUS: BOTH WRONG

In 1798 the Rev Thomas Malthus publishd the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population in which he outlined his "law of population":

Assuming then, my postulate as granted, I say that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.

According to Malthus, since population cannot be sustained beyond a level that the means of subsistence can provide for, it is held in check, though the way in which it is held in check is rather more complicated than in the case of plants and animals. Here he suggested that social attitudes might play a role as a "preventive" check inasmuch as people might feel compelled by economic circumstances to exercise restraint in reproduction. Whether they would exercise restraint, Malthus doubted, though he placed greater importance on this in subsequent editions of his Essay. But in so doing, he contradicted the broad thrust of his argument, embodying as it did, a strong belief in biological determinism.

Beyond prevention, "positive checks" in the form of war, famine and disease work to ensure that the population is "kept to its necessary level". In other words, argued Malthus, the sheer pressure of population growth as it comes up against the limits of subsistence "constantly tends to subject the lower classes of society to distress and prevent any great melioration of their condition". He suggested that if this were more widely understood, the "lower classes" might come to accept their poverty with greater forbearance and "less irritation at the government and the higher classes of society".

Malthus' theory was effectively demolished by the developments that came after him. The population of Britain grew rapidly but the productive forces grew even more so as the Industrial Revolution unfolded. What made possible this rapid population growth was the decline in mortality as a result in the long-term rise in general living standards, particularly in the form of improved diet and sanitation. Moreover as the death rate declined so the birth rate began to fall, eventually causing population growth itself to slow down.

However, whilst population growth was "checked" this occured well within the Malthusian limits of bare subsistence. Indeed far from it being a case of the stork relentlessly following the plough, the gap between the two has considerably widened in historial terms with the stork lagging well behind, thus exploding the Malthusian dogma that the "indefinitely greater" power of reproduction would reduce any such gap to the merest sliver. The fact that the population of Britain is several times larger today than it was when Malthus was alive only highlights all the more, the tremendous growth of the forces of production that has occurred since then - something which Malthus' grim fatalism could not anticipate.

But whilst such growth is undeniable, equally undeniable is the fact that it has been accompanied by an increasing disruption of the "balance of nature". Though mankind is not the only species to modify nature for its own purposes the sheer scale of its impact makes it unique and, according to some, poses the threat of irreversibly undermining nature's capacity to provide food for mankind in the future. Technological progress may well have pushed back the Malthusian limits to the point of irrelevance but, goes the argument, the evironmental consequences of such progress are such that those limits threaten to close in again like a noose around mankind's neck.
In this rather more sophisticated form, Malthusian ideas have acquired a certain plausibility. Nevertheless, this neo-Malthusian model has in common with its famous forerunner a major weakness inasmuch as it consistently overlooks the social context in which it makes its gloomy prognoses. According to Colin Tudge in The Famine Business:

Many societies in the past - in sixteenth century England or fourth century Rome — have believed that their societies had outgrown their resources. In truth they had merely come against the limitations of their agricultural techniques - or, more accurately, against the limitations of the policies that those techniques subserved. To some extent the present world situation is similar. We have not exceeded physical capacity but have merely begun to expose the flaws in policies not designed to feed all the people.

FOOD CHAINS AND BIOTIC PYRAMIDS

In nature, the various plant and animal organisms are intricately interlinked by relationships of mutual dependence on one another and their physical environment. These living communities together with the environmental conditions in which they occur, constitute an ecosystem. This can be a single drop of water containing myriads of micro-organisms or, at the other extreme, the total envelope of life around the earth, the global ecosystem or biosphere. Necessarily, every ecosystem tends towards a "steady state" of dynamic balance which means that by altering any one part of it every other part is thereby affected, a new equilibrium being reached through a complex network of inter-locking cycles through which energy and nutrients flow.

In the process of evolution life on earth was built in a series of layers or "trophic levels" which together form the "biotic pyramid". At the base of this pyramid are organisms called "autotrophs". Autotrophs "fix" minerals from rock and nitrogen from the air to form a nutrient reservoir that is greatly enlarged by the decomposition of organic material returned to the soil. These nutrients are absorbed through the roots of plants with the aid of water. Green plants trap less than 1 per cent of the sun's energy falling on the earth and use it to build energy-rich compounds in a process called photosynthesis. Some of these compounds are combined with nutrients from the soil to form other, more complex compounds such as protein. The total amount of chemical energy stored in plants far exceeds human nutritional requirements and could theoretically support a population 280 times greater^ttan the present one. However, the great bulk of plant matter is unsuitable for human consumption. Autotrophs and plants are respectively known as primary and secondary food producers. Above them come the various levels of food consumers.

The primary consumers or herbivores eat plants and are in turn eaten by carnivores or secondary consumers. These may be eaten by other carnivores or tertiary consumers and so on. Thus food is passed from one trophic level to the next along a food chain.

It is worth noting however that as we move up a food chain, only a small fraction of the energy input at one level, as represented by the food consumed by an organism, is made available to the next level when that organism is itself consumed. The remainder of this energy is "lost" in maintaining the organism's existence. In other words, for a certain mass of organisms to survive at one level there must be a substantially larger mass of organisms at the level beneath it; hence the idea of a biotic pyramid. The total mass of organisms that an ecosystem can support is called the "biomass" which is determined by a combination of environmental factors such as climate and soil that impinge most crucially at the level of food producers.

The implications of this telescoping of the food supply along a food chain are potentially significant. One might suppose that mankind could increase its food supply by changing its dietary habits, by eating less meat and more grain, for example. Altogether some 650 million tonnes of grain representing a third of the world's output are currently fed to livestock each year. But on average, every 7 calories of grain fed to livestock produces only 1 calorie of animal product, beef production being the least efficient form of conversion. On the other hand, it could also be argued that the production of animal products for human consumption is justified insofar as animals are able to transform otherwise inedible or unutilised plants and grasses into valuable food for humans.

In reality, however, food chains such as that connecting cereals, cattle and man present only part of the picture of an ecosystem. To begin with, nutrient flows are not linear and ever-ascending as the concept of a biotic pyramid might suggest. Rather, such flows can be described as cyclical. The waste products of organisms and, on their death, their bodies are broken down by other organisms known as decomposers that are similarly arranged in layers that form, as it were, an inverted pyramid. This decaying organic material called humus is progressively broken down into simple elements that are once again taken up through the roots of plants as was earlier pointed out. In this way nutrients are continuously recycled within the ecosystem.

Furthermore, as we saw in the case of the food chain connecting cereals, cattle and man, some species - in this instance, man - may have a highly diverse or changeable diet that entails consuming food from several different levels within the biotic pyramid. Such species are, in other words, omnivorous. More realistically, nature can be said to support not so much a host of separate food chains as a complex web of relationships through which checks are applied on the population of a species whereby its outer limits are determined by the population size of other species that constitute its food supply.

THE RISKS OF AGRICULTURE

Agriculture is essentially a process by which the stored energy of photosynthesis is appropriated by man. This has meant in the first place, the selection and cultivation of certain crops at the expense of other species and secondly, the development of these cultivated varieties with a view to increasing their yield. According to Norman Myers:

Mankind has used around 3000 plants for food during the course of history. Yet Earth contains at least another 75,000 edible plants. Only about 150 have ever been cultivated on a large scale, and fewer than 20 now produce 90 per cent of our food. We are using the same limited number of plant species that have served mankind for millenia. (Guardian, 3 February 1983).

In nature, an ecosystem tends to develop successionally, that is, from a simple "pioneer" stage towards the maximum complexity that the physical conditions of a particular area can accommodate. The final stage in this process of "ecological succession" is called the "climax community". This contains a highly diverse range of species whose populations fluctuate little over time. A climax community is, in other words, a relatively stable and balanced ecosystem.
With the introduction of agriculture the tendency is for an ecosystem to shift backwards along the line of ecological succession as many natural forms of vegetation are replaced by a few cultivated varieties. Thus, generally speaking, agriculture has had a destabilising impact on the environment by reducing its complexity and hence its capacity to adapt to ecological disturbances. Up to a point this is unavoidable. There is bound to be a degree of tension between the needs of agriculture and the maintenance of environmental integrity. Inasmuch as food is an absolute necessity for mankind there can be no question as to which of these ought to take priority over the other. What can be questioned, however, is the foolish belief that the production of food can take place without regard to the environmental consequences of this for ultimately the harmonisation of agriculture with nature, the achievement of a workable compromise between them, is vital to the maintenance of a productive and lasting agriculture itself.

The reduction in the complexity of an ecosystem amounts to a severe rupture of the intricate food web that sustains a diverse community of plants and animals. As a result more and more species begin to disappear from the ecosystem. However, as this happens other species begin to
expand to fill the ecological niche opened up for them, to emerge as pests able to exploit the simplified landscape around them. Weeds, for example, compete with crops for nutrients in the soil. But in some cases the too efficient removal of weeds can prove counter-productive in that herbivorous insects can be driven to feed on the crop itself as the only available food supply. Thus what began as a problem of too many weeds can end up as a problem of pest infestation. This interplay of ecological factors is apparent at the top end of a food chain as well. In Sierra Leone, for example, farmers discovered that their crops were being increasingly damaged by small vervet monkeys whose numbers had swelled considerably. On investigation it was found that the reason for this was the decline in the population of leopards whose habitat was being destroyed by the clearance of forests for agriculture. In short, the self-regulating function of the ecosystem was beginning to break down and to veer towards greater instability.
On a global basis this alteration in the natural balance is taking place on a massive and unprecedented scale:

According to the results of an investigation published by the University of Hamburg in December 1975, 50,000 species will be eradicated or seriously threatened in the coming twenty-five years. At the other end of the scale 240 species of insects, including mites and ticks, are increasing at an alarming rate. (W. Van Dieren and M.G.W. Hummelinck, Nature's Price, 1979, p.4).

The conventional response to the growth of pests has been to attack them with chemical pesticides. These can bring about rapid and dramatic improvements in the available food supply in the short-term by cutting losses both on land and in storage. In a single year - in 1973 - the value of crop loss due to pests amounted to a staggering $75 billion. Clearly the selective use of chemical pesticides on a world basis in a socialist society could help in the transformation of hunger into a thing of the past.

But pesticides have their drawbacks too. In particular, they tend to decimate the predators of pests more effectively than the pests themselves. The reason for this lies in the fact that the herbivorous insects that eat crops are more numerous than the carnivorous insects that prey upon them, being at a lower level in the biotic pyramid. This being the case there is a greater likelihood of genetic variation among such insects that would lead them to acquire resistance to a pesticide.

Furthermore, there is a tendency for pesticides like DDT which remain toxic over long periods to become more and more concentrated as it is passed up the food chain. Because of this, "DDT is banned in most industrialised countries but its overall use is still increasing and the
effects are spread globally by wind and water" (S. Croall and W. Rankin, Ecology for Beginners, 1981, p.59). Thus, as is so often the case in capitalism, legislative attempts to overcome a particular problem are undermined by the competitive pressure that drives others to perpetrate that problem which cannot by its very nature be contained within boundaries of the nation state.

In the long run biological methods of pest control such as the introduction into an environment of the traditional - or novel -predators of pests, is very often the soundest approach. But once again the competitive thrust of capitalism, ever attentive to the opportunity for short-term gain, militates against the wisdom of an ecological perspective:

The results of biological control may take some years to show whereas an insecticide acts immediately. Control has to be applied over a whole region (preferably an island) rather than just one farm . . . And it may not be too cynical to suggest that there is less commercial interest in biological than in chemical control because it is, in ideal cases, done once and for all rather than every year. (N.W. Pirie, Food Resources, Conventional and Novel, 1967, p.71).

THE KEY ROLE OF NITROGEN

In the 19th century the agricultural chemist, Justus Von Liebig, formulated his famous "law of the minimum" which states that plant growth is limited by the availability of whatever nutrient is scarcest. There are 16 basic elements that are absolutely essential to the growth of plants and can be divided into 3 groups. The first consists of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen which are derived from air and water. Nitrogen, Potassium and Calcium form another group called the major plant nutrients in that they are required in large quantities whilst the remaining ten elements make up the final group, the minor nutrients. These basic elements can be combined in different ways to form a vast number of compounds which in turn are used to build even more complex molecules such as protein as we earlier saw.

The most common limiting factor in agriculture is nitrogen, a crucial constituent of protein. Though most of the earth's atmosphere consists of nitrogen it is of no use to plants in this form; it has to be "fixed" - that is, combined with other elements - in the form of compounds such as nitrate, that can be absorbed through the roots of plants.

There are several sources from which plants obtain a supply of fixed nitrogen. A certain amount of it derives from atmospheric fixation as a result of lightning but the great bulk of it is produced by biological and, to an increasing extent, industrial fixation processes.

As far as the process of biological fixation is concerned, two broad sets of micro-organisms in the soil make nitrogen available to plants. The first set are the nitrogen-fixing micro-organisms that form part of the population of autotrophs. Some of these micro-organisms such as the blue-green algae are "free-living", whilst others live in symbiotic association with the roots of leguminous plants and certain tropical grasses. The significance of this latter group of nitrogen-fixing micro¬organisms is that by planting the sort of crops with which they are associated the fertility of the soil can be enhanced rather than depleted as is normally the case.

At the opposite end of the nutrient cycle are a second set of micro¬organisms that make nitrogen available to plants. These are called nitrifying bacteria in that they convert the amino acids that make up the protein in decomposing humus (which is, in fact, the major source of nitrogen in the soil) into nitrate. An important characteristic of nitrifying bacteria is that they are aerobic, that is, they must have oxygen in order to live. Moreover the concentration of nitrates they release into the soil water is very low so that the plants themselves have to expend energy to pull in these nitrates - a process that requires plant roots have access to oxygen as well. To ensure enough oxygen is available the soil must be sufficiently porous to let in air and in this respect, humus plays a vital role by maintaining soil structure. Furthermore, a good soil structure allows rainwater to penetrate deeper into the soil where it can be better retained.

A final and increasingly significant source of fixed nitrogen is artificial fertiliser, a by-product of oil-refining technology.

Nitrogen is, of course, also removed from the soil in a number of ways. The activities of nitrifying bacteria are offset by those of other bacteria called denitrifying bacteria which convert nitrate into nitrogen gas, some of which may be utilised by nitrogen fixing bacteria, some of which escapes into the atmosphere. Denitrifying bacteria are anaerobic, however, that is, they can only function in the absence of oxygen. In other words, the poorer the soil structure, the greater the loss of nitrogen from it. This once again underlines the importance of humus to the soil.
Furthermore nitrates being soluble in water can be lost by leaching, by being brought up to the surface and washed away by rain. This is particularly a problem in the humid Tropics where the luxuriant vegetation belies the poor fertility of the soil in which it grows. Because of the high temperatures, humus decomposes very rapidly whilst the heavy rainfall can cause serious leaching. Tropical plants have adapted to these conditions in that they are able to absorb nutrients rapidly whilst at the same time providing a canopy of leaves that protects the soil from the elements. The destruction of tropical forests soon leads to a loss of fertility which imposes severe constraints on the type of agriculture that can be practised in these areas.

The most obvious way in which nitrogen is removed from the soil is of course the harvesting of crops. To make good this loss of nitrogen, human and animal wastes can be returned to the soil but the tendency of capitalist agriculture has been to dispense with this practice. Marx, who had studied the work of Von Liebig, Schonbein and other agricultural chemists was strongly critical of this tendency which, he argued, sprang from the dynamic thrust of capitalist development:

Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing pre-ponderance of town population on the one hand, concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. (Capital, Vol 1, FLPH, p.505).

But Marx, of course, was writing at a time when artificial fertilisers were unknown. At that time most of the land in Europe was fertilised with sodium nitrate which was to be found in large natural deposits on the coast of Chile, though organic feritiliser such as guano was also used to . some extent. However, by the turn of the century, these deposits appeared to be reaching exhaustion and it became imperative that alternative sources of fertiliser should be found. This was the stimulus that led to the discovery of a technique for manufacturing fertiliser, known as the Haber Bosch process, by which most of the nitrogen-based fertilisers are produced today.

SOIL EROSION AND THE PROFIT MOTIVE

Nevertheless, the impact of artificial fertilisers has by no means been an entirely unmixed blessing. The steady increase in yields, fuelled in part by the soaring use of these fertilisers as a substitute for organic fertilisers, has served to obscure the long-term decline in soil structure and to blunt efforts to halt this. Lester Brown and Edward Wolf in a report on Soil Erosion: Quiet Crisis in the World Economy published by the Worldwatch Institute in 1984 pointed to:

the severity of soil erosion and its implications for future agricultural production worldwide. Between 1977 and 1982, 1.7 billion tonnes of soil were lost each year in the US; 44 per cent of American farmland is now losing soil faster than it is being replaced, mainly by it being washed and blown away. Crop monoculture is largely to blame, and productivity has been maintained only by massive doses of fertilisers which have so far succeeded in masking the enormity of the losses (from summary of report in Guardian, 9 May 1985).

According to a report to the American Congress, an estimated $1,200 million worth of fertilisers would have been needed in 1978 simply to replace the nutrients lost through soil erosion in that year (The Ecologist, July/Aug/Sept 1980). Moreover as soil structure deteriorates with the loss of humus so the application of chemical fertilisers becomes less efficient, more and more of it being lost through leaching and run-off leading to serious pollution of waterways. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the application of such fertilisers is subject to the law of diminishing returns. US agriculture, for example, has to use 5 times as much fertiliser today as it did in 1947 to produce the same amount of crop. (S. Croall and W. Rankin, Ecology for Beginners, p.55). Such long-term costs of chemically-fertilised agriculture have recently prompted some interest in certain aspects of organic farming. Not that this is likely to bring about any significant shift in farming methods under present conditions of capitalism, however. For a study carried out by the US Department of Agriculture in 1981 found that, whilst organic farms were 2.5 times more productive per unit of energy consumed than conventional farms, they were also less profitable. This was "largely due to the rotation system under which as much as 60 per cent of the land must be planted with nitrogen-fixing legumes at any one
time". (New Scientist, 19 March 1983). Furthermore, they are likely to incur higher labour costs in that more labour is involved in such tasks as the hauling and spreading of compost or manure or in handweeding in the case of certain crops. For the individual farmer under competitive
pressure to maximise his return on the resources at his disposal - be it land or labour - it is difficult indeed to adopt more ecologically prudent methods of farming where this demands a degree of resistance to such pressure.

Marx writing in 1867, had already commented on the destructive impact of profit-motivated agriculture on the environment:

Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combination together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer. (Capital, Vol I, pp.506-7).

In 1948 Marx's warning was echoed by William Vogt, Chief of the Conservation Section of the Pan-American Union:

One of the most ruinous limiting factors is the capitalistic system - and this is one of the gravest criticisms that can be leveled against it. The methods of free competition and the application of the profit motive have been disastrous to the land . . .
Throughout virtually the entire world, land is not used to produce the crop best adapted to it on a permanent basis but to produce as much cash as possible, as cheaply as possible, and as quickly as possible - the same system exalted by the manufacturer, (quoted in J.A. Barnett, The Human Species, 1971, p.208).

Since then the situation has deteriorated alarmingly. It is quite true that output has grown substantially in the meantime. In the period 1960-80, for example, whilst world population increased by 48 per cent, total cereal production rose by no less than 75 per cent (though a greater proportion of it was diverted into livestock feed than ever before). But, as Lester Brown and Edward Wolf put it in their Worldwatch Institute report on soil erosion, this impressive growth in production has been achieved by a process of more or less "mining" the soil, "converting a renewable resource into a non-renewable one". Almost everywhere, the land is being impoverished; its fertility flushed down the world's rivers, borne away by its winds or simply buried under an expanding carpet of concrete. In all some 25 billion tonnes of fertile topsoil are lost each year throughout the world because of excessive erosion associated mainly with agriculture.

SOCIALISM AND ECOLOGY

How might socialist society approach the problem of maintaining soil fertility? Firstly, with regard to chemical fertilisers, there are today enormous regional disparities in the use of such fertilisers. Built into this pattern is a tremendous waste of agricultural potential:
A ton of fertiliser applied in a previously unfertilized area (i.e. most of the underdeveloped world) can produce up to ten extra tons of grain, whereas an extra ton spread in the developed world will not produce more than a maximum of three extra tons because of the law of diminishing returns. While one ton more of fertiliser matters only marginally to those countries that already have the best yields, it matters vitally to those who are still far from self-sufficient in food production. (S. George, How the Other Half Dies, 1980, p.302).

In other words, even without any increase in the global use of chemical fertilisers, food production could be significantly expanded were such a resource to be more rationally distributed. In socialist society, free of the constraints of the marketplace, it would of course be entirely feasible to allocate resources in such a way as to ensure their most productive use. Underpinning this freedom would be the unity of common purpose, a unity forged in the basic structure of a society in which all had free and equal access to the wealth that society produced.

Secondly, socialist society would obviously want to halt and reverse the long-term decline in soil fertility by improving the humus content of the soil. Not only would this make for the more efficient absorption of chemical fertilisers but would help contain further topsoil loss as a result of erosion. Whilst this would involve more labour intensive work which would require a larger agricultural workforce it should be borne in mind that one of the greatest productive advantages of socialism over capitalism is that it would release a tremendous amount of labour for socially productive work. At least half of the workforce today are engaged in activities that, although vital to the operation of a modern capitalist economy would have no purpose in a society where production was directly and solely geared to the satisfaction of human needs.

Thirdly, and most importantly, as a society freed from the profit motive and competitive pressures "to produce as much cash as possible, as cheaply as possible, and as quickly as possible", socialism will be able to adopt agricultural methods which achieve a working compromise with nature (for, as explained, all agriculture unavoidably upsets the pre¬existing ecosystem to a greater or lesser extent) respecting the long-term considerations which ecological science teaches are vitally important.

Robin Cox. World Socialist Nr. 4, Winter 1985-6

further reading
Ecology and Socialism SPGB pamphlet 1990 (.pdf)
Marx's ecology in historical perspective by John Bellamy Foster