Volume 57, Number 5
Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development
Paul Burkett
The well known ecological economist Herman Daly, for example, argues that for Marx, the “materialistic determinist, economic growth is crucial in order to provide the overwhelming material abundance that is the objective condition for the emergence of the new socialist man. Environmental limits on growth would contradict ‘historical necessity’....” The problem, says environmental political theorist Robyn Eckersley, is that “Marx fully endorsed the ‘civilizing’ and technical accomplishments of the capitalist forces of production and thoroughly absorbed the Victorian faith in scientific and technological progress as the means by which humans could outsmart and conquer nature.” Evidently Marx “consistently saw human freedom as inversely related to humanity’s dependence on nature.” Environmental culturalist Victor Ferkiss asserts that “Marx and Engels and their modern followers” shared a “virtual worship of modern technology,” which explains why “they joined liberals in refusing to criticize the basic technological constitution of modern society.” Another environmental political scientist, K. J. Walker, claims that Marx’s vision of communist production does not recognize any actual or potential “shortage of natural resources,” the “implicit assumption” being “that natural resources are effectively limitless.” Environmental philosopher Val Routley describes Marx’s vision of communism as an anti-ecological “automated paradise” of energy-intensive and “environmentally damaging” production and consumption, one which “appears to derive from nature-domination assumption.”3
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Marx’s vision thus involves a “reconversion of capital into the property of producers, although no longer as the private property of the individual producers, but rather as the property of associated producers, as outright social property.” Communist property is collective precisely insofar as “the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers” as a whole, not of particular individuals or sub-groups of individuals. As Engels puts it: “The ‘working people’ remain the collective owners of the houses, factories and instruments of labour, and will hardly permit their use...by individuals or associations without compensation for the cost.” The collective planning and administration of social production requires that not only the means of production but also the distribution of the total product be subject to explicit social control. With associated production, “it is possible to assure each person ‘the full proceeds of his labour’...only if is extended to purport not that each individual worker becomes the possessor of ‘the full proceeds of his labour,’ but that the whole of society, consisting entirely of workers, becomes the possessor of the total product of their labour, which product it partly distributes among its members for consumption, partly uses for replacing and increasing its means of production, and partly stores up as a reserve fund for production and consumption.” The latter two “deductions from the...proceeds of labour are an economic necessity”; they represent “forms of surplus-labour and surplus-product...which are common to all social modes of production.” Further deductions are required for “general costs of administration,” for “the communal satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc.,” and for “funds for those unable to work.” Only then “do we come to...that part of the means of consumption which is divided among the individual producers of the co-operative society.”10
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The most basic way in which Marx’s communism promotes individual human development is by protecting the individual’s right to a share in the total product (net of the above-mentioned deductions) for her or his private consumption. The Manifesto is unambiguous on this point: “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.” In this sense, Engels observes, “social ownership extends to the land and the other means of production, and private ownership to the products, that is, the articles of production.” An equivalent description of the “community of free individuals” is given in volume 1 of Capital: “The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members of society as means of subsistence.”14
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A. Managing the Commons Communally
That communist society might have a strong commitment to protect and improve natural conditions appears surprising, given the conventional wisdom that Marx presumed “natural resources” to be “inexhaustible,” and thus saw no need for “an environment-preserving, ecologically conscious, employment-sharing socialism.” Marx evidently assumed that “scarce resources (oil, fish, iron ore, stockings, or whatever)...would not be scarce” under communism. The conventional wisdom further argues that Marx’s “faith in the ability of an improved mode of production to eradicate scarcity indefinitely” means that his communist vision provides “no basis for recognizing any interest in the liberation of nature” from anti-ecological “human domination.” Marx’s technological optimism—his “faith in the creative dialectic”—is said to rule out any concern about the possibility that “modern technology interacting with the earth’s physical environment might imbalance the whole basis of modern industrial civilization.”31
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1005burkett.htm
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