Ecological Rationality and Capitalism

Today I am going to speak about the relation between ecological science and a Marxist analysis of contemporary capitalism. Many of you know the important paper by Heidi Hartmann entitled Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. Borrowing from her, my presentation might well have as its subtitle: Harlequin Romance of Marxism and Ecology. By this I mean to refer not just to the books that made Toronto famous, which apparently now sell at a rate of one every six seconds, worldwide. I'm also alluding to the colors of traditional harlequin suit: a patchwork of red and green. The combination is certainly striking, but only a colorblind jester could claim that it represents a harmonious integration. And like a harlequin suit, the red of Marxism and the green of ecology are often patched together. They form alliances, more or less uneasy, based on a common opposition to what modern capitalism is doing to nature and humanity. But there is always a tension between them. Marxists suspect the tendency of ecologists to make nature their supreme value, supposedly above questions of class, while Greens criticize the left for accepting the productivist assumptions of modern industrialism and seeing humanity as more important than the planet it lives on. The couple have dated off and on for quite a while, but they haven't yet reached the point of living together. My object today is to show how both Marxism and ecology could benefit from more serious cohabitation. I'll do this using two examples, both taken from agricultural ecology: organic farming in North America and peasant agriculture in Costa Rica. The perhaps ironic moral of my comments is that Marxists could get along better with ecology if they stopped viewing it as objective, unbiased science. Or, to use a phrase which expresses my view of the long debate about scientific socialism and the Laws of Motion of society

Biology · Capitalism · Geography · Political science · Rationality · Sociology · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Ecology