Marxism and critical theory's response to social ecology

While Marx may be criticised for under-theorising certain forms of domination, it might be argued that Bookchin underestimates the utility of the

Marxian method and the value of its dialectical approach. Since the focus is on domination, Bookchin criticises Marxism and other grand narratives which overlooked the threat posed to all life on the planet by modes of domination. Domination is the problem, not alienation, as Marx conceived it. However, the relevance of Marx may continue to lie in his understanding of the relationship between modes of production and relations of production.

Despite the changes in capitalism since Marx’s time, and the failure of socialism during the 20th century, Marx’s ideas may still provide insights into how we ought to conceive of ecological relations, as part of the modes of production/relations of production dialectic. Taylor is important in extending Heidegger’s critique of Marx to understand the interconnectedness between entities in the natural environment. Marx, after all, developed a dialectical method demonstrating how humanity’s creative labour power is constrained by social processes that limit emancipatory politics. This throws the ball back into Bookchin’s court, because it is not clear whether a simple focus on domination is sufficient to understand the processes whereby labour power is commodified when compared with Marx’s work.

From a Marxist perspective, Bookchin’s focus on domination does not adequately consider the social dilemmas that the natural environment poses for humanity (Harvey, 1986). While his argument that small-scale communities create less damage needs further elaboration, there is also a need to further explore the resilient characteristics of capitalism which persist in causing wasteful consumption. Alan Rudy and Andrew Light, in particular, are advocates of a critical environmental politics which relies on the Marxian heritage. They reject simple explanations of capitalism in terms of domination and attempt to explain the processes which perpetuate incessant demand and consumerism in modern societies. At a practical level, critical environmental theory involves strategies to resist the increasing corporatisation of social and environmental relationships. While social ecology exposes modernity’s modes of domination, it does not explain how environmental problems result from a complex set of forces which include, but extend beyond, the fact that power influences market outcomes. Ecological problems are not caused by the anonymity of the market, but inter alia by capitalism’s tendency to commodify significant relationships. Bookchin’s ‘social ecology’ does not relate ‘social labour’ to the means by which communities organise their daily activities and modes of re-production. Therefore, he is wrong to argue that ‘capitalism is not a social phenomenon but an economic one’.

Bookchin emphasises the limitations of the market but does not explain how capitalism alienates workers from their labour power (Ibid). Nor does Bookchin consider the communitarian and interpretivist strategy which Taylor emphasises as a response to ecological problems in modern communities. Taylor proposes the transcendence of older tyrannical orders and hierarchical societies - the search is to create social relationships within communities that allow people to understand their place in the world. This involves exploring the limitations implicit within traditional political approaches which assume that humanity can control the world. Rather than control the natural environment, the ecological perspective offered by in-terpretivists searches for new narrative structures that reveal to people the options and possibilities available to them. On this view, social ecology must also engage the patterns of meaning within societies and how these forces impact on the processes of social change.

Bookchin’s social ecology prioritises individual self-realisation, but this approach can fail to explore the social processes which limit workers and citizens reaching their full potential. Critics contend that Bookchin homogenises the category of ‘Nature’ and does not consider adequately how Nature is ‘an unparalleled field of difference’ that poses dilemmas for human freedom. Interpretivists contend that the natural environment invites us to consider the meaning of the term ‘Nature’ and how we relate to it. For Taylor, the natural environment is a source of the self that can motivate and re-enchant our being-in-the-world.

A further limitation of Bookchin’s social ecology is that it gives undue stress to the power of regional autonomy and the systemic relationships between people and the natural environment (Bookchin, 1994, pp. 125-140). One wonders, however, how anarchical Social Ecologists would determine the point where a human community has expanded beyond its environmental threshold? Moreover, how can communities reduce the size of their cities? Notwithstanding its limitations, social ecology may be supplemented by an exploration into the social forces which give rise to patterns of hierarchy and domination. Taylor is useful in this regard because of his engagement with Marx’s totalising dialectical method. He extends the dialectical method in an ontic direction to consider and extend Marx’s supposition that history progresses through discrete stages towards the good society. For example, Anderson (1974) extended this argument to the Asian region and showed that it is Marx’s method which is important to understanding how communities evolve. Bookchin’s (1987, 1991) analysis

Deep Ecology and interpretation 235 can be extended to differentiate between societies and assumes that his solutions are applicable to all communities irrespective of their stage of development and could profit by considering Anderson’s careful analysis of the differences in social environments.

While Marx may be criticised for under-theorising certain forms of domination, it might be argued that Bookchin underestimates the utility of the Marxian method and the value of its dialectical approach. Since the focus is on domination, Bookchin criticises Marxism and other grand narratives which overlook the threat that modes of domination pose to all life on the planet. Domination is the problem not alienation as Marx conceived it. However, the relevance of Marx may continue to lie in his understanding of the relationship between modes of production and relations of production. Despite the changes in capitalism since Marx’s time, and rhe failure of socialism during the 20th century, Marx’s ideas may still provide insights into how we ought to conceive of ecological relations, as part of the modes of production/relations of production dialectic.

Marx, after all, developed a dialectical method demonstrating how humanity’s creative labour power is constrained by social processes which limit emancipatory politics. This throws the ball back into Bookchin’s court, because it is not clear whether a simple focus on domination is sufficient to understand the processes whereby labour power is commodified when compared with Marx’s work. Contrary to Bookchin, Marx’s dialectical approach is not simply economic analysis. His dialectic is concerned with how contradictory social relations are reflected in different spheres of society and how they may change. Marx’s focus is on social relationships, as described in his famous statement of method in the ‘Introduction’ to the Grnndrisse:

The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital etc. These latter in turn pre-suppose exchange, division of labour, prices etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception (Vorstellung) of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts (Begriff), from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.

(Marx, 1973, p. 100)

Marx’s dialectical method, therefore, breaks down the various elements of society and reassembles them showing the ‘rich totality of manydeterminations and relations’ (Ibid). Thus, a commodity is not a thing but the product of relationships. Changing relationships alter the Nature of the commodity. The value of the Marxian method is that it analyses a particular in the light of a totality. A simple stress on domination will not do that and ignores Marx’s emphasise in the Grundrisse that the self is dependent on and belongs to a greater whole. It is for these reasons that Marx emphasised the movement of human history as a progressive dialectic that is reflected in the movement from ‘clan and then to different communal forms of organisation in pursuing only their self-interest’. Marx may not easily be dismissed, even though other parts of his work might be used to justify domination over the natural environment.

Marx’s approach to alienation, moreover, is not one which reduces the phenomenon simply to a product of capitalism (Marx, 1970). Nor, does he suggest that all social and environmental problems will be solved when capitalism is superseded by communism. Marx notoriously offered no blueprint for communism; that, in his view, would be ‘utopian’. He simply said that in a communist society freedom would be achieved as ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all’. Lukács (1971) once argued that the value of Marxism lies not in its prediction but in its method. Though Marx was not particularly ecologically sensitive, his method can be extended to matters at the heart of ecological concern. Marx could well be interpreted as developing a method that explores social arrangements where workers might reach their full potential. This might involve understanding the importance, which the natural environment has for people’s lives. From a Marxist perspective, Bookchin’s focus on domination does not adequately consider the social causes and dilemmas that the natural environment poses for humanity (Harvey, 1986, p. 183). While his argument that small-scale communities create less damage needs further elaboration, there is also a need to explore further the resilient characteristics of capitalism which persist in causing wasteful consumption and duplication.

More fundamentally, Taylor’s hermeneutic perspective has purchase on these problems as it attempts to create political and interpretivist space within modern communities to engage with environmental suppositions concerning the determination of value. For example, Taylor’s work on people’s strong-evaluations creates a need for public space to engage with environmental perspectives and recommendations such that only small-scale and decentralised communities are capable of relating effectively with the land. For interpreters, such as Taylor, however, democratic communities will not automatically ‘mirror Nature’ and require a process of change that involves exploring political arrangements about how these values are to be implemented. In teasing out differences between anthropocentric and deep/Deep ecology some tentative steps towards political reconciliation can be advanced in moderating adverse ecological damage.