Fugitive Politics

The Struggle for Ecological Sanity

Carl Boggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000461473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Comunismo, poscomunismo y socialismo

Fugitive Politics explores the intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical change and the unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis, a dialectic has rarely been addressed in academia.

Across eight chapters, Carl Boggs explores how systemic change may be achieved within the current system, while detailing attempts at achieving change within nation-states. Boggs states that any notion of revolution seems fanciful in the current climate, contending that controlling elites have concentrated their hold on corporate power along three self-serving fronts: technology (Big Tech) and the surveillance order, militarism and the warfare state, and intensification of globalized power. Combined with this Boggs cites the fundamental absence of revolutionary counter-forces, arguing that after decades of subservice relevant, allied to the rise of identity politics and social movements, the Marxist theoretical legacy is now exhausted and will not provide an exit from the crisis. Boggs concludes that the only possibility for fundamental change will come from an open style of politics, in the Jacobin tradition, operating within the overall structures of the current democratic state.

Written for both an academic and a general readership, in the U.S. and beyond, Fugitive Politics will be of vital importance to those studying political theory, political philosophy, political history, Marxism and Marxist theory, authoritarian politics, ecology, environmental politics, and climate politics.

1

Marxism and Early Capitalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197461-2

Any exploration of modern radical politics ought to inevitably begin with the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, though precursors (especially utopian socialists and anarchists) were in abundance. The ascendancy of classical Marxism during the era of early capitalism would, by the start of the twentieth century, eventually take several paths – the “orthodoxy” of Karl Kautsky, the reformism of Eduard Bernstein, the Bolshevism of V. I. Lenin, the mass spontaneism of Rosa Luxemburg along with the council communism of Anton Pannekoek and others. For classical Marxism, the historical expanse was essentially that of market-based capitalism, a focus that by the 1890s was also Kautsky’s. That framework evolved as an alternative to not only liberal capitalism but to anarchism and Jacobinism, the latter referring to the leftist seizure of state power in the absence of well-developed popular mobilization.

Marxism in these diverse expressions would emerge as the most far-reaching project of social change in modern history, its powerful legacy still visible on the intellectual if not political terrain of Europe and elsewhere. For Marx at least, this theoretical breakthrough involved a unique synthesis of philosophy and politics, materialism and idealism, culminating in what could be defined as a “philosophy of praxis” (anticipating Antonio Gramsci’s later elaboration). As such, early Marxism contributed not only a deep analysis of capitalism but a vision of historical transformation engaging different realms of human life: economics, politics, culture, even psychology. A systematic body of thought, classical Marxism would aspire toward scientific status, one reflection of an Enlightenment rationality that shaped the Zeitgeist of the period. These unifying characteristics would, however, never prevent the tradition from splintering into disparate paths – a motif central to arguments presented in the following pages (and chapters).

As the first coherent framework of revolutionary change, Marxism furnishes a point of departure for addressing the many challenges of capitalist modernity and, by extension, the contemporary ecological crisis. How far that theory might take us along the path of actually reversing that crisis is a problem taken up throughout this book – a problem likely related to the very survival of planetary life. More than anything, Marxism in its early formulations did envision a unification of theory and practice, history and action. Whatever its flaws and limits, the Marxist tradition would deeply influence a wide range of movements, trade unions, political parties, even governments across more than a century. Later tendencies – Leninism, social democracy, anarchism, popular movements –would in some ways transcend classical Marxism while retaining some of its basic tenets and insights. Yet as Marxism expanded its reach during the twentieth century, its distance from actual political formations would in certain ways widen. Here the tense, uneasy, conflicted relationship between Marxism and ecology fits a common pattern: a theory grounded in early capitalist development loses its resonance within the modern world of global capitalism. Still, well more than a century after the deaths of Marx and Engels, the legacy persists as a source of critical analysis and political vision.

At the present juncture, the Marxism we have inherited faces two interwoven challenges: the world it initially theorized has been extensively transformed, while as a theory of revolutionary change it has bequeathed few political successes, especially within conditions of advanced capitalism. On this point Ron Aronson comments:

[Marxism] is not simply a description of a given social reality or an idea of a better social reality, but a theoretical and practical guide of the transformation of the one [capitalism] into the other [socialism]. Its claims to validity are dependent on the realization of the entire process and project. Thus, if after a reasonable length of time, socialism has nowhere been achieved, if world-historical trends are moving away from, rather than toward, socialism, these claims can only undermine Marxism’s claims to be true.¹

Nonetheless, the continuing intellectual vitality of Marxism – along with its presumed relevance to ecological thought – remains fully worth engaging as a theoretical vantage point, though hardly as a scientific body of knowledge.

Even contemporary Marxists acknowledge the irreversible changes occurring not only within capitalism itself but within the world system more generally. Those changes have thoroughly altered class and power relations everywhere, not to mention the character of human-nature development. In fact very little has unfolded as anticipated by classical Marxism, in part owing to the enduring consequences of capitalist rationalization starting in the 1890s and, later, the ongoing process of globalization. Of course many nations have reached stupendous levels of growth, productivity, and affluence, at a time of capitalist stabilization and decline of working-class opposition. Nowhere has proletarian misery and alienation – much less class solidarity – been translated into broad political success, while nominally socialist groups and parties have become uniformly deradicalized across the world landscape.

Marxism and Ecology

There is nowadays a significant body of social theory that lays out coherent arguments for an ecological Marxism – more precisely, for an ecosocialist Marx. In many societies we have seen a convergence of theories around socialism and ecology, first visible in Western political discourse during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when leading figures if the West German Greens (Rudolf Bahro, Rainer Trampert, Thomas Ebermann) were laying the foundations of a “red-green” politics. That would be roughly one century after Marx completed his final work. Later ecological thinkers would further refine (and redefine) the outlook, among them Barry Commoner, James O’Connor, Murray Bookchin, Andre Gorz, and Joel Kovel. It would not be until the late 1990s and into the new century, however, that leftists around the journal Monthly Review (notably Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster, Fred Magdoff) would begin to formulate the compelling image of an “ecological Marx.” The most recent, perhaps most ambitious, of these projects is Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, an effort to reconstruct Marx’s thought from the vantage point of the modern ecological crisis.

Was the great Marx, who died in 1883, indeed something of an ecological radical – a theorist for whom, as Saito argues, natural relations were fundamental to understanding capitalist development? Saito’s aim was to arrive at a new reading of Marx’s writings based on previously unpublished “scientific notebooks” written toward the end of Marx’s life. From this and related materials, Saito concludes that familiar views of Marx’s productivism and Promethean attitude toward nature (meaning unrestrained economic growth) are misplaced. Accordingly, these myths should give way to a more enlightened view of Marx derived from broader appreciation of his writings. It follows, moreover, that classical Marxism as a whole deserves extensive re-reading, consistent with Marx’s own supposed ecological turn beginning in the late 1860s.

Could Saito’s rather careful exploration of Marx’s writings signify a major step toward retrieving the long-obscured contributions of an ecological theorist – the first ecosocialist? Equally worth asking, did the theoretical paradigm fashioned by Marx and collaborator Engels manage to advance the kind of scientific materialism (said to be congruent with an ecological outlook) that would later be associated with the Monthly Review authors?

If Marx and Engels were indeed the first ecosocialists of record, that achievement – whatever its scientific imprimatur – would have been miraculous given the generally limited interest in matters environmental during the nineteenth century. Such intellectual pursuits would have encountered serious barriers, not least being a Zeitgeist of almost religious faith in Enlightenment values of maximum economic and technological growth, especially in the European context. They would need to have been extraordinarily prescient. Ecosocialism even today is among the more peripheral tendencies, addressing deep origins of the modern crisis while seeking to avoid earlier (productivist, statist) traditions aligned with Communism and social democracy. As Michael Lowy writes, such politics “aims not only to transform the relations of production, the productive apparatus, and the dominant consumption patterns but to create a new way of life, breaking with the foundations of the modern Western capitalist/industrial civilization.”² Lowy himself was rather skeptical that the Marxist classics were adequate to this task.

Failure to reverse the crisis will, in Lowy’s view, leave the planet vulnerable to imminent descent into catastrophe. “In sum,” he argues, “the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt. It has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism exposes its underlying weakness. It is, in the language of ecology, profoundly unsustainable, and must be changed fundamentally, nay replaced, if there is to be a future worth living.”³ This same point was more recently, and more vigorously, set forth by David Wallace-Wells, in The Uninhabitable Earth, where he suggests that managers of industrial society are presently on a “kamikaze mission” of endless material growth.⁴

Obsessive growth ensures not only worsening crisis but, in all probability, ultimate planetary collapse. Wallace-Wells, among more recent critics, has sounded the alarm:

In that world … the oceans would eventually swell two hundred feet higher, flooding what are now two-thirds of the world’s major cities; hardly any land on the planet would be capable of efficiently producing any of the food we now eat … probably about a third of the planet would be made unlivable by direct heat; and what are today literally unprecedented and unlivable droughts and heat waves would be the quotidian condition of whatever human life was able to endure.⁵

Writing in Fossil Capital, Andreas Malm comments: “The point of too late is coming closer by the day … The tradition of the dead is breathing down the necks of the living, leaving them with two choices: smash their way out of business-as-usual … or succumb to an accumulated, unbearable destiny.”⁶ A pressing issue we confront here is whether nineteenth-century Marxism, however theoretically refurbished, can be enlisted for purposes of overcoming the crisis – or can at least significantly contribute to such ends.

In Search of an Ecological Marx

Saito’s book has been widely heralded as something of a theoretical breakthrough in the study of Marxist classics, having won the esteemed Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2017. Kevin Anderson describes Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (on the back cover) as “a new interpretation of Marx, one that is timely given the economic and ecological crises of contemporary capitalism.” For his audacious efforts Saito relies heavily not only on Marx’s early writings but on previously unpublished materials, including many entries of his “scientific notebooks” where, nearing the 1870s, Marx fixed increasing attention on the natural sciences.

After meticulous study of these materials, Saito concludes that ecology must now be seen as not merely important but central to Marx’s theoretical interests as he navigated beyond the more important writings spanning the 1840s to 1860s. This interpretation clashes with the prevailing view of Marx based on the Communist Manifesto and other sources, where he assumed “unlimited economic and...