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| Anthropocentriam vs. Ecocentrism |
Editor's Note: This essay was first published in June 2022 in Farsi in the socialist website نقد اقتصاد سیاسی ("Critique of Political Economy)" edited by Parviz Sedaghat in Tehran, Iran. The free translation from Farsi into English is mine.
* * *
Hollywood
capitalized on simmering concerns about the existential crises facing humanity
with the film " Don't Look Up " (2021). The summary of the movie is
as follows. Two scientists discovered that a comet is on a collision course
with Earth in the next six months. This collision could cause mass extinction on
the planet. When they go to the government and the mass media, they see the
indifference of the authorities and ordinary people. Attempts to destroy the
comet in time with a nuclear missile fail and the comet collides with the Earth,
causing a mass extinction. However, the President of the United States and a
select group of 2,000 people manages to escape in a rocket that was launched
before the comet hit. After a journey of 22,740 years, they land on a green
planet and end their cryogenic sleep. They exit the spaceship praising their
new habitable world. But the president is suddenly killed by a bird-like hunter
and others are surrounded by a group of them.
This
film was welcomed by many liberal and left-leaning audiences as a way to draw
attention to the existential crises that humanity is currently facing -
catastrophic climate change, the Sixth extinction, ongoing pandemics and
nuclear holocaust.
However,
the film revolves around a natural disaster, but all current existential crises
are anthropogenic (human-caused) and are rooted in our social system, the
anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. Unlike the movie, where the
comet can be destroyed by a nuclear missile, a technological solution managed
by the military and scientific staff and the capitalist state, the actual
existential threats facing humanity cannot be solved by mere technologies,
technocrats and bureaucrats, and the capitalist state. It will require an ecological
socialism through self-organization and self-activity of billions of working
people.
In
this essay, I will critically outline the salient features of 19th and 20th
century socialisms before I outline what I believe to be the salient features
of 21st century ecological. I will conclude the essay with the need to develop
a new materialism in which all beings have agency, a new theory of history with
a new set of historical actors, and a new vision of post-capitalist society.
Part 1. Socialism of the nineteenth
century
Historical
materialism and its application to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production
provides Marx with his theory of human liberation from alienation. The common
mistaken view is that Marx’s theory focuses liberation of the working class
from capitalist exploitation ignores that in Marx alienation is ontologically
and historically prior and more fundamental than exploitation. To exploit the
others, they (human or non-human) must first be alienated, to become the
"other," the object rather than the subject. As Marx argues, "Human
emotions, thoughts, etc., are not merely anthropological phenomena in the [more
limited sense of the word] but are truly ontological affirmations of existence [nature]
(Marx, 1844).”
However,
when getting rid of alienation became Marx's philosophical and theoretical
starting point, a historical answer was required. As MészMezsarosáros
(1970: p. 36) explains:
“If man has become ‘alienated,’ he
must have been alienated from something, as a result of certain causes - the
interaction of events and conditions in relation to man as the subject of this
alienation - which manifest themselves in a historical framework. Similarly, ‘escape
from alienation’ is an inherently historical concept that embodies the
successful realization of a process that leads to a qualitatively different
state of affairs.”
Marx's vision of socialism free association of direct producers; as an abundant society that eliminates material needs, where individual’s freedom is a condition for freedom of all required a completely unalienated society without commodities, money, wage labor, and the state, all of which are considered forms of alienation, exploitation, and oppression.
I
follow the suggestions of Mendel (1971; chapter 11) and Mézsáros
(1970) to outline the salient features of Marx's theory of socialism. I begin
with Marx's turn from philosophy to the critique of political economy in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This led to Marx's definitive
break with Young Hegelians and the materialism of Feuerbach in Theses on
Feuerbach (1845) and The German Ideology (1845-1846), the latter was
written in collaboration with Engels and outlined their theory of history,
historical materialism. Subsequently, Marx applied the methodology of
historical materialism to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production.
The first volume of Capital was published in 1867, and after his death, Engels
edited the second volume (1885) and the third volume (1894); and Karl Kautsky
edited the three-volume Theories of Surplus Value (written in 1863 and edited
and published in 1905-1910). Engels (1883) considered historical materialism
and theory of surplus value to be Marx's key intellectual contributions. At the
same time he emphasized that Marx was first and above all a revolutionary
socialist. Marx himself recounts parts of his intellectual development in his
"Preface" to the A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859). I take this standard reading as the basis for the
discussion of Marxian theory in this essay.
Historical
materialism
Class
struggle as motor force in historiography and the idea of progressive stages
in the historical development of society were present in intellectual history
of Europe before Marx and Engels. The concept of class struggle goes back at
least to the time of Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744). The idea of
developmental stages in history dates to at least the 18th century. Ronald
(1976/2010) quotes Efimovich Desnistky , a former student of Adam Smith in
1761, who described the four stages of historical evolution in a 1781
university lecture in Moscow. He described them as hunting and gathering,
pastoralism, agriculture and commerce. (Meek, 1976/2010: p. 5). Desnistky then
goes on to state: “This origin and upward course of human society is common
among all primitive people. According to these four conditions of the people,
we must deduce their history, government, laws and customs and measure their
various successes in sciences and arts. (quoted by Meek, ibid.) Meek attributes
the first written discussions about the theory of four stages to Montesquieu
(1689-1755), Smith (1723-1790), and Turgot (1727-1781).
Graeber
and Wengro (2021: pp. 60-61) have argued that Turgut developed the theory of
stages of social development because of Native American influence on European
thought. They detail the influence of Wengrow people in the New French Canada
on French colonists in the 17th century and, through them and directly on
native travelers to Europe, on European culture and society at the time,
particularly the European intellectual development in particular the
Enlightenment. In fact, they argue that Smith borrowed the theory of stages of
history from Turgot.
Thus,
the basic ideas for the historical materialism of Marx and Engels were present
in the writings of the authors they studied closely in previous decades. Their contribution
lies in combining these ideas into a superior theory of history. Charles Darwin
developed his theory of evolution by natural selection in a similar way.
In
building the theory of historical materialism, Marx and Engels relied on a kind
of materialist ontology of human nature that distinguished them from the
dominant liberal-bourgeois idealist idea of human nature: "Human nature
is not an abstraction that is placed inside each individual. In reality, this
essence is nothing but the sum of social relations (Marx, 1845, the sixth
thesis). They also defined their materialism by privileging "social
humanity" and focusing on collective class actors as opposed to individual
actors in history: "The scene of old materialism is civil society, while
the new view [of materialism] is human society or social humanity (Ibid: the
tenth thesis).” According to Mézsáros (1970: p. 39) "a very important point
is whether ... the question of ‘human nature’ is measured within an implicitly
or explicitly ‘egalitarian’ explanatory framework."
It must be remembered that Marx and Engels' knowledge of history was limited to the published historiography available at the time, which covered about 3,000 years (see endnote 1).
“This mode of production must not
be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the
individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a
definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore,
coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they
produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions
determining their production (Marx and Engels, 1945).”
Thus,
historical materialism was deliberately anthropocentric because it focused on
the evolution of human society in abstraction from nature and was based on what
Marx and Engels knew about history, which was at most 3,000 years old. Today we know that humanity (Homo
sapiens) is at least 300 thousand years old. In fact, our history is
actually rooted in the human species (Homo genus) which arose more than
2.8 million years ago (fire was controlled and used by Homo eractus
about one million years ago.
The
theory of the proletariat as a universal class
Nor
was it Marx and Engels who first discovered the revolutionary potential of the
proletariat. As Hal Draper (1971) points out: " When Marx and Engels were
crystallizing their views on this subject, the revolutionary potentialities of
the proletariat were already being recognized here and there.” Draper points to Robert Owen and Saint-Simon
theories of socialism.
What
was new in Marx's theory of the proletariat was the idea that the proletariat
is not a mere object, a "class in itself," but that it can become a
"class for itself" in its struggle with the bourgeoisie. Marx argued
that when the proletariat comes to power, it will act as the universal class
destroying the rule of capital and all vestiges of class society (all based on
alienation) in a transition period leading to a classless and non-aliened
society, i.e. socialism. Therefore, the concept of self-organization and
self-mobilization of the working class became the cornerstone of Marx's theory
of socialism.
In
the “Rules and Administrative Regulations of the International Workingmen’s
Association” (First International) Marx (1864) provided the most concise
version of this view as : “That the emancipation of the working classes must be
conquered by the working classes themselves; that, the struggle for the
emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges
and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class
rule.”
The
idea of the proletariat as a "universal class" for the liberation
of humanity appears in Marx's "Introduction" A Contribution to the Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Marx 1843) in a philosophical context. In the
same text, Marx himself admits that "The proletariat is beginning to
appear in Germany as a result of the rising industrial movement.” However, he
continues:
“In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy (Marx, 1843).” (see endnote 2)
It
took decades for the proletariat to become a social force in Germany. German
reunification took place 28 years later in 1871, and it was still decades away to
create an industrial working class through.
There
are theoretical and empirical tensions in Marx's theory of the proletariat. At
the theoretical level, the principle of the right to self-determination implies
the ability to generalize from practical struggles; that is, the development of
a revolutionary theory to overcome capitalism and transition to socialism by
the self-organized and self-mobilizing proletariat. On July 1,1874, Engels
mentions this issue in his "Appendix to the Preface" to the Peasants'
War in Germany (1850). He argued that German workers enjoyed two important
advantages compared to the rest of Europe.
“First, they belong to the most
theoretical people in Europe; Second, they have retained that theoretical tact
that the so-called "educated" people of Germany have completely lost.
Without German philosophy, especially Hegel's philosophy, German scientific
socialism (the only existing scientific socialism) would never have come into
existence. Without theoretical tact, scientific socialism would never have
become the flesh and blood of the workers.
“The second advantage is that,
chronologically, the Germans were the last to enter the labor movement. In the
same way that German theoretical socialism never forgets that it rests on the
shoulders of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, a trio who, in spite of their
utopianism and fanciful ideas, were among the most wonderful minds of all
history, and whose genius foresaw many things that proved to be true. Now
scientifically proven, the German practical labor movement must never forget
that it grew on the shoulders of the movements of England and France, benefited
from their experience gained at a heavy price, and was therefore in a position
to recover from their mistakes. which were inevitable in their time, to avoid.
Without the trade unions of England and the political struggles of the French
workers before the German labor movement, without the powerful impetus of the
Paris Commune, where would we be now (England, 1874) ?”
In
short, Engels here argues in favor of a highly developed "scientific"
theory of socialism that combines philosophy, socialist theory, and labor and
socialist history. However, Engels does not discuss how this "theory of
scientific socialism" will develop over time and how will it be preserved
and shared among the generations.
I
will return to this question when I discuss Lenin's vanguard party theory.
The
second tension in the Marxist theory of the proletariat is the rise of the
labor aristocracy. Marx and Engels, who spent the latter part of their lives in
England, wrote about the emergence of an English labor aristocracy that
complicated their theory of the proletariat and socialist revolution (Nayeri
2005; Draper 1978, pp. 105-110). In a letter to Karl Liebknecht, Marx wrote:
“The English working class had been
gradually more and more deeply demoralized by the period of corruption since
1848 and had at last got to the point when they were nothing more than the tail
of the great Liberal Party, i.e., henchmen of the capitalists. Their direction
had gone completely into the hands of the corrupt trade union leaders and
professional agitators (Marx, February 11, 1878).”
Engels,
who lived longer, wrote more widely about this. In the 1892 Preface to the
German edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845),
he wrote of
"[T]echnical workers,
carpenters, plumbers, and builders" whose conditions had improved
dramatically in the last four decades.
“They form an aristocracy among the
working class who have managed to carve out a relatively comfortable position
for themselves and accept it as an end. They are exemplary workers ... and
indeed very pleasant people today, for any sensible capitalist in particular
and for the whole class of capitalists in general.
“The truth is: during the period of
British industrial monopoly, the working class shared in some of its benefits.
These benefits were distributed among them very unequally; The privileged
minority pocketed more, but even the masses of workers also took at least a
temporary share from time to time. That is why there has been no news of
socialism in England since the death of Owenism (England, 1892).”
Clearly,
the Marxist theory of the proletariat as a universal revolutionary class needed
further development. The matter became more serious because of the lack of
Marx's key early writings related to alienation and the Grundrisse. These were
first published in 1939-1941. (see endnote 3) However, other
important developments played a role in the theories of socialism that followed
which significantly deviated from Marx's.
With
the emergence of labor aristocracy in the capitalist industrial countries provided
the basis for the emergence of social democratic reformism. Marx's theory about
the capitalist mode of production (the labor theory of value or the "law
of value") was replace with Hilferding’s finance/monopoly capital giving
more power to the corporation and the state who presumably dominated the market;
Lenin revised Marx's theory of the proletariat with his vanguard party theory,
and with the degeneration of the October 1917 socialist revolution in Russia in
the 1920s led to the rise of Stalinism. As a result, the world revolution was
diverted from the centers of industrial capitalism to the mainly agrarian cultural
countries on the periphery of world economy where the peasantry, not the
proletariat, was the key social class. The revolutions of the twentieth century
were essentially revolutions of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples. Those
that its leaderships fell in the hands of the Stalinist parties claimed
socialism as their goal and replicated the Soviet Union model under Joseph
Stalin.
The
rise of Marxism as a “scientific" doctrine
Karl
Kautsky, who was the prominent theoretician of the German Social Democratic
Party, in his conflict with Bernstein's reformism accused him of violating the
principles of "Marxism." In 1882, Engels had criticized the use of
the word "Marxism," noting that Marx himself, when discussing Paul
Lafargue, a self-proclaimed "Marxist," objected to the terminology
saying that if Lafargue's views were Marxist "one thing is certain and
that is that I am not a Marxist (Haupt et al., 2010).”
However,
the label of Marxism was applied to key trends in twentieth-century socialism:
social democracy, Stalinism, and Trotskyism. The claim that the teachings of
Marx and Engels were scientific originated with Engels and especially with his
popular pamphlet, Socialism: Scientific and Utopian. Engels initially
used the term "scientific" because their vision of socialism was
derived from their historical materialism, not as a utopia (although, as I will
argue, this vision is also utopian (Engels 1880). I have shown (Nayeri 2021)
that historical materialism can be considered scientific in the light of Thomas
Kuhn’s Structure of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) because it
caused a fundamental change in the basic concepts and empirical procedures of
historiography. Roy Bhaskar (1979; 1994) has argued that Marx 's Capital can be
considered scientific according to the findings of scientific realism. However,
Engels' claim is not based on such arguments in philosophy of science or
philosophy of social sciences. His claim was purely ideological, as it remains
to this day. As the teachings of Marx and Engels became a
"scientific" doctrine, a fundamental change occurred in relation to
the agency of the proletariat in the theory of socialist revolution and the
relationship between the socialist movement and the labor movement. The
proletariat became the mass that the vanguard parties had to lead. The parties
themselves, in tun, have been supposed
to be led by a leadership who is supposed to know the accepted doctrine well. A
division of labor occurred within these parties between the leadership and the
rank and file, as the leaders were assumed to be the holders and interpreters
of the scared doctrine who dealt with the "big issues." The rank and
file were responsible for the day-to-day tasks of the party. It is no wonder that cults of personality
often develop in such centralized parties.
Reformism
of the Second International
The
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP) was the largest party in the Second
International and the most influential in the labor movement. Unfortunately, as
Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev documented in The Social Roots of
Opportunism (1916), the SDP also turned out to be the party of the labor
aristocracy. After reviewing the official statistics of SDP, he wrote:
“According to our calculation,
4,000 functionaries occupy at least 12,000 – if not more – important party and
trade union functions. Every more or less efficient functionary takes care
simultaneously of two to three and often even more offices. He is at the same
time a Reichstag deputy and an editor, a member of the Landtag and a party
secretary, the president of a trade union, an editor, a cooperative
functionary, a city councilman, etc. Thus all power in the party and trade
unions accumulates in the hands of this upper 4,000. (The salaries accumulate,
too. Many of the officials of the labor movement receive 10,000 marks and over
per year.) The whole business depends upon them. They hold in their hands the
whole powerful apparatus of the press, of the organization of the mutual aid
societies, the entire electoral apparatus, etc. (Zinoviev, 1916).”
Finance
Capital
The
change in the social composition of the German SPD leadership coincided with a
fundamental revision of Marx's theory about the capitalist mode of production.
In his highly influential book Finance Capital (1910), Rudolf Hilferding
argued that Marx's labor theory of value (the "law of value") was
rendered obsolete by the rise of finance capital or monopoly capitalism. He
presented a systematic analysis of the changing nature of capitalist development
in the 19th century, especially in Germany. The analysis of competition is the
main objective of the third section entitled "Financial Capital and the
Limits of Free Competition". Hilferding reaches the logical conclusion of
his critique that Marx's labor theory of value no longer works:
“Classical economics conceives
price as the expression of the anarchic character of social production, and the
price level as depending upon the social productivity of labour. But the
objective law of price can operate only through competition. If monopolistic
combinations abolish competition, they eliminate at the same time the only
means through which an objective law of price can actually prevail. Price
ceases to be an objectively determined magnitude and becomes an accounting
exercise for those who decide what it shall be by fiat, a presupposition
instead of a result, subjective rather than objective, something arbitrary and
accidental rather than a necessity which is independent of the will and
consciousness of the parties concerned. It seems that the monopolistic combine,
while it confirms Marx's theory of concentration, at the same time tends to
undermine his theory of value (Hilferding 2010).”
What
will replace the laws of motion of Marx's capitalist system in financial
capital? Hilferding believed that the amalgamation of the public cartel with
the capitalist state would lead to "organized capitalism." He argued
in defense of the reformist path of social democracy:
“Organized capitalism means
replacing free competition with the social principle of planned production. The
task of the current generation of social democrats is to call for government
assistance to transform this economy under the organization and direction of
the capitalists into an economy under the direction of the democratic state.
(Hilferding quoted by Green (1990, p. 203).”
That
is, socialism was redefined as state socialism, and the class character of the
state was determined by the party in power! That is, if socialists came to
power through elections they could use the state apparatus to achieve
"socialist" goals. Social democratic policies eventually contributed
to the development of capitalist welfare states in Western Europe.
The history of socialist theorizing of capitalism after Hilferding is marked by a split between a small minority who believe that Marx's theory of competition still operated and his labor theory of value is still valid, and an influential majority, including the parties of the Second International, Third International and Fourth International, who believed in the emergence of a type of monopoly capitalism. Some in the second category have openly claimed that Marx's law of value no longer applies, most of them have backed away from this very important conclusion of their theory. (see endnote 4)
In the 1970s, Marxist economists rediscovered that Marx's theory of free competition was fundamentally different from the neoclassical theory of "perfect competition" that a long line of Marxist theorists, from Hilferding to Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy (1966) believed to be identical. One of the pioneers of this rediscovery, Anwar Sheikh, spent four decades transforming U.S. national accounts categories into Marxian ones to provide a Marxist empirical study of U.S. economic performance based on the law of value (Sheikh and Tanak 2010; Sheikh , 2016) from the Marxist point of view. Theories of finance capital and monopoly capitalism that came after, including the theories of Bukharin and Lenin, were based on a serious misunderstanding of Marx's theory and led to important theoretical and political mistakes, including the theories of dependency and support for the "national bourgeoisie" of the latecomers to the global capitalist market. (Nayeri August 2018, 1991/2023B Chapters 1, 3, 4).
Lenin's
vanguard party theory
Lenin
in "What should be done?" (1902) cites Engels' July 1, 1874,
"Appendix to the Preface" to The Peasants' War in Germany
(1850), cited above, to argue for building a party based on proletarian
democratic centralism. Claiming that no revolutionary movement can exist
without a revolutionary theory, Lenin continued to argue:
“We have said that there could not
have been Social-Democratic consciousness among
the workers. It would have to be
brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the
working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade
union consciousness… The
theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical,
and economic theories elaborated by
educated representatives of the propertied classes,
by intellectuals. By their social
status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx
and Engels, themselves belonged to
the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in
Russia, the theoretical doctrine of
Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of
the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the
development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. In the
period under discussion, the middle nineties, this doctrine not only
represented the completely formulated program of the Emancipation of Labour
group, but had already won over to its side the majority of the revolutionary
youth in Russia.” (ibid.)
There
are three key points about Lenin's vanguard party theory. First, it is a clear
break from Marx's own (given that Marx and Engels did not have the opportunity
to revise their theory of the proletariat as a universal class in light of the
rise of the labor aristocracy in Britain and elsewhere).
Second,
the Bolshevik Party played an important role in the Russian revolutions
However, as China Mieville (2017; for review, see Nayeri December 2017)
brilliantly recounts the events from February to October, focusing on the role
played by the soviets, the mutually reinforcing interaction of the
self-organized and self-mobilization Russian proletariat with the Bolshevik
Party resulted in the first workers’ state in history. The centrality of the
role played by self-organized and self-mobilizing Soviets was recognized in
Lenin's April Theses (April 1917) and the Bolsheviks' adoption of the slogan
"All power to the soviets" in May (Lih July 2017). Lenin argued in The
State and Revolution (August–September 1917) that the Soviets formed the
backbone of a workers' state. However, the tension in Lenin's own mind is
revealed in the full title of the pamphlet, which is The State and Revolution
and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution. In Lenin's mind it is the party that sets the
task for the class, even though basing himself on Marx’s teaching that the Soviets
should form the future workers' state!
Thirdly,
the Bolshevik Party as conceived by Lenin did not last for more than 20 years
and turned into its opposite, a Stalinist party. Since then, no party like
Lenin's party has been created. The problem of elevating the party to the top
of the power structure during the transition period from capitalism to
socialism was undermined by the rising Stalinist bureaucracy. As the
self-organized and self-mobilizing organs of working people's power declined
and disbanded after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918, the hoped-for
revolutions in Europe failed, and the young Soviet Republic faced the
destruction of much of its productive capacity, bureaucracy began to
proliferate. Bureaucracy began to grow within society, the state and the party.
In 1922-1923, suffering from a stroke, Lenin waged a political struggle against
the policies of the growing bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin (Lenin, 2010). In his The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the
Soviet Union and Where Is It going?” Trotsky (1936) wrote:
“The present doctrine that
Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of epoch decline. In reality the
history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed,
how could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of
overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious
iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual
conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations? The
farsightedness of the Bolshevik leadership often made it possible to soften
conflicts and shorten the duration of factional struggle, but no more than
that. The Central Committee relied upon this seething democratic support. From
this it derived the audacity to make decisions and give orders. The obvious
correctness of the leadership at all critical stages gave it that high
authority which is the priceless moral capital of centralism (Trotsky 1936).”
He
added:
“The very center of Lenin's
attention and that of his colleagues was occupied by a continual concern to
protect the Bolshevik ranks from the vices of those in power. However, the
extraordinary closeness and at times actual merging of the party with the state
apparatus had already in those first years done indubitable harm to the freedom
and elasticity of the party regime. Democracy had been narrowed in proportion
as difficulties increased. In the beginning, the party had wished and hoped to
preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets. The
civil war introduced stern amendments into this calculation. The opposition
parties were forbidden one after the other. This measure, obviously in conflict
with the spirit of Soviet democracy, the leaders of Bolshevism regarded not as
a principle, but as an episodic act of self-defense (ibid.).”
Trotsky
explained how these temporary anti-democratic decisions were used by Stalin as
the leader of the rising bureaucratic caste as “Leninism” as a compliment to
his “theory” of socialism in one country. “Together with the theory of
socialism in one country, there was put into circulation by the bureaucracy a
theory that in Bolshevism the Central Committee is everything and the party
nothing. This second theory was in any case realized with more success than the
first (ibid.)”
Thus,
the parties of the Communist International became bureaucratic hierarchies and
wherever Stalinists came to power they created one-party states that kept the
political life of the country under its control.
Thus,
Lenin's vanguard party lasted only about two decades before turning into its
opposite. In the hundred years since its destruction, there has never been
another revolutionary socialist party like it.
Trotsky's
characterization of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state was a major error.
Although he admitted that "for all its pretensions, the view of the
workers' state as expressed by Marx, Engels and Lenin, and the actual state now
headed by Stalin, are worlds apart," Trotsky who argued Stalinism was counterrevolutionary
through and through and that “the Soviet state has acquired a
totalitarian-bureaucratic character.” Still. he insisted that the Soviet Union
remained a workers’ state, albeit degenerated. His reasoning: the state was
based on the nationalized social means of production, monopoly of foreign
trade, and central planning! In other words, the fact that the proletariat was
not in power did not change that character of the state! “The final physiognomy
of the workers' state ought to be determined by the changing relations between
its bourgeois and socialist tendencies.’”
Basing
itself on this theoretical confusion, the Fourth International mistakenly
recognized a number of other states led by Stalinist parties after the Second
World War as workers' states albeit “deformed.” In Eastern Europe at the end of
World War II in countries occupied by the Red Army, the economy and society
were restructured along similar lines to the Soviet Union. In North Korea,
China and Vietnam, Stalinist parties came to power after a nationalist struggle
against internal reaction and imperialism.
In
Cuba, Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement, inspired by the Cuban and Latin
American anti-imperialist and nationalist-democratic movements, came to power
in 1959. Castro's leadership in carrying out agrarian reforms and standing up
to US imperialism went to the Soviet bloc for new economic and diplomatic
relations. In a speech on April 16, 1961, the day before the Bay of Pigs attack,
Fidel Castro announced socialism as the goal of the Cuban revolution. As I will
argue later, Cuba also became dominated by a
Stalinist Party largely because Castro mistook the Stalinist Popular
Socialist Party as representing “Marxism-Leninism” in Cuba and established the
Communist Party accordingly, modeled after it.
Nationalist-democratic
revolutionary wars in Yugoslavia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba drew their
support mainly from the peasantry. All these new states have been ruled by
their respective “communist Party” in which there is not party democracy and no
socialist democracy for the popular masses.
Therefore,
the socialist history of the 20th century was mainly written by the social
democratic and Stalinist mass parties. Together they destroyed all
revolutionary and pre-revolutionary positions in Western Europe and failed to
unite their forces to prevent the rise of fascism in Germany.
Part 3. Socialism of the Twentieth
First Century
Before
outlining the salient features of socialism for the 21st century, let me return
to the explosion of man-made ecological crises in the recent decades with which
this essay began. If, as I have argued (Nayeri May 2017; October 2018; March
2020; March 2022), these ecological crises, including those that pose
existential threats to humanity, are rooted in anthropocentric industrial
capitalist civilization. Thus, to resolve them we must transcend the existing
civilization in the direction of an ecocentric socialist future.
The
Anthropocene
More
than two hundred sixty years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
in England in 1760, the expansion of capitalist industrialization, especially
after the Second World War, has brought us the Anthropocene (The Age of
Humans). Scientists have argued, and Earth system scientists now agree, that
the Holocene, the geologic epoch that began 11,700 years ago, has given
way to the Anthropocene. Stratigraphers who study the precise
demarcation and depositional timeline of rock layers agree. While the Holocene
was characterized by a climate that supported the emergence and expansion of
agricultural-based civilizations, the Anthropocene has brought us global
crises that, if left unchecked, will destroy most life on planet Earth,
including humanity.
Let
me mention just one source about the mounting ecological crises. The Stockholm
Resilience Center published a study on the planetary crisis (Rackström et al.
2009) which was updated (Steffen et al., 2015) identified nine Earth System
Boundaries ("thresholds of safe operational space for human societies).
Climate change and the "integrity of the biosphere" (the Sixth
extinction) are set as the main boundaries "because they both cause
changes in other things and are affected by those changes." The nine boundaries
are:
1.
Climate changes
2.
Changes in biosphere integrity (i.e. the Sixth extinction)
3.
Destruction of stratospheric ozone layer
4.
Ocean acidification
5.
Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
6.
Land system change (e.g, deforestation)
7.
Scarcity of fresh water
8.
Aerosol loading of the atmosphere (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that
affect the weather and living organisms)
9.
Introducing new entities (such as organic pollutants, radioactive substances,
nanomaterials, and microplastics).
The
Great Acceleration (2015), a report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere
Program concludes:
“Global change does not operate in
isolation but rather interacts with an almost bewildering array of natural
variability modes, and, also with other human-driven effects at many scales.
Especially important are those cases where interacting stresses cause a
threshold to be crossed and a rapid change in state or functioning to occur.
.”
This
paper cites data on exponential human population growth, urbanization, real GDP
growth, foreign direct investment, primary energy consumption, large dams, air
travel and tourism, water consumption, paper production, fertilizer
consumption, transportation, telecommunications, emissions. Carbon dioxide,
methane, nitrogen dioxide, surface temperature, stratospheric ozone, marine
fisheries, ocean acidification, coastal nitrogen, shrimp aquaculture, tropical
forest loss, land cultivation, and destruction of the Earth's biosphere since
1750 or since data for It shows that they were collected for the first time.
Clearly, these trends, if left uncheckedto their own devices, point to future
ecological collapse.
Ecocentric
Socialism
Ecological
existential threats immediately suggest that the socialism of the 21st century
must be ecological. As I have discussed above, Marx and Engels consciously set
aside humanity's interaction with and dependence on nature in their
construction of historical materialism to focus attention on class struggle and
the role of the proletariat in socialist revolution. Thus, they wrote in The
German Ideology:
“Of course, here we cannot deal
with the actual physical nature of man, nor with the natural conditions in
which he finds himself - that is, geological, hydrographic, climatic
conditions, etc. Writing history should always start from these natural
foundations and their changes in the course of history through the actions of
humans. (emphasis is mine).”
With
the development of the environmentalist movement in response to these crises,
some socialist thinkers and currents provided a response. Some of them have
added environmentalist planks to their political platform. Others have now call
themselves ecological socialists (ecosocialists) to indicate their interest and
attention to ecological issues. Fewer have gone so far as to formulate
ecological socialist theories to explicitly incorporate nature into socialist
theorizing, often using an interpretation of Marx's work (e.g. O'Connor1998;
Kovel 2002; Foster 2002; Foster, Clarke and York2010; Lowy 2015; Moore 2015).
Socialist
and ecological socialist theories deliberately focus on "capitalism"
and the latter focuses on tendencies in "capitalism" that cause
environmental degradation and lead to ecological crises. Most of them have
argued that Marx's theory needs modifications to deal with ecological crises.
Citing Marx's ecological insights (Burkett 1999; Foster, 2000) in his
discussion of 'metabolic rift' Foster et al . have claimed that Marx's theory
is inherently ecological. However, despite their different interpretations of
Marx and theoretical differences all these authors ultimately argue that
capitalist accumulation (growth) is responsible for ecological crises, and some
explicitly accept some form of "natural limits to growth" as the
solution to the crisis.
What
remains outside the scope of their investigation is any theoretical and
analytical consideration of the anti-ecological tendencies of all human
civilizations many of which suffered ecological crises starting with the
Sumerian civilization (1900-4500 BC). They also ignore how Marx and Engels
deliberately formulated historical materialism as a theory of society abstracting
from nature and their explicit view is that to adequately discuss human
history, one must develop a theory that is conscious of the interaction of
society and nature and the ultimate dependence of man. Marx’s theory of the
capitalist mode of production and socialism avoids an explicit theory of
humanity embedded in nature.
Therefore,
the socialist theories of the 19th and 20th centuries that I have examined
above and most of the ecological socialist theories of the 21st century are
essentially theories of society, because nature remains outside their
theoretical framework. When nature is considered, it is usually objectified and
passive. Humans remain the only agency in history. Moreover, the problem of
anthropocentrism, which I have argued is a manifestation of alienation from
nature, is largely ignored as key to environmental ethics (Nayeri July 2021). A
recent exception is Jason W. Moore (2015) who tried unsuccessfully to revise
Marx's theory about history and "capitalism" to give agency to
non-human nature (Nayeri 2016).
Since
2009, I have developed what I have called Ecocentric Socialism (for a recent
discussion of this, see Nayeri 2023A, 2021): a theory of socialism that builds on Marx
and Engels' own proposition that human history cannot be understood in isolation
from nature. In fact, we are a part of nature and depended on it for our
existence and well-being. What follows are distinctive features of Ecocentric
Socialism in contrast to Marx's theory of socialism. This is a work in progress
and will benefit from critical contributions. The socialism of the 21st
century, if it ever comes, will be conceived and built by billions of working
people themselves.
Theory
of history: It is
necessary to formulate a new theory of history which is not based on the
materialism of the 19th century but based on the materialism that gives agency
to all beings. Such a theory must be based on animistic ecological materialism.
(see endnote 5) From the ontological point of view, human nature will no longer be limited to
the set of social relations formed by the dominant mode as in Marx but as the
set of social-ecological relations that are formed based on the dynamic
interrelationship of four processes: 1)
the transhistorical process in which organic substances arose out of mineral
substances resulting in the simplest life forms about 3.7 billion years ago;
(2) recognition and appreciation of humanity in its continuity with the
evolution of life on planet Earth and especially our kinship with other
animals; (3) the evolution of our species, Homo sapiens , which arose about
300,000 years ago from the lineage that began with the rise of the Homo genus,
which first appeared more than 2.8 million years ago; and (4) the process
specific to the effects of the mode of production (similar to Marx's theory yet
completely different at the same time).
A
Historical Theory of Alienation:
Although there is explanation of the origin of alienation in human society in
Marxian theory beyond Marx's writings on capitalist forms of alienation, alienation
is explained by Ecocentric Socialism beginning with early farmers who alienated
other species through domestication to dominate and exploit them
systematically. The farm became the first artificial ecosystem and the farmer
not only managed the farm but protected it from the wildness of the surrounding
nature. Thus, arose alienation from nature as the source of exploitation of
nature for material gain. This process began about 12,000 years ago and has
been unfolding ever since. It took the early farmers thousands of years to turn
a systematic economic surplus. However, once that happened so did social
differentiation causing social forms of alienation. That is the source of
private property, nuclear family, and the state.
The
question of agency:
Instead of class struggle in Marxian theory as the motor force of history, Ecocentric
Socialism starts from agency for all beings in their ecological interrelation;
Including the ecological interaction of animate and inanimate nature that have
shaped ecosystems and the earth as a living planet since the origin of life. Accepting
class struggle in class society as a source of historical change, Ecocentric
Socialism also pays attention to non-class forms of struggles inside and
outside civilization, including the struggle for the rights of the Earth and
non-human beings in shaping human history. Therefore, the class relations and
class struggle that Marx and Engels put at the center of their theoretical and
practical concerns are complemented by non-class struggles against the
subjugation of nature and different strata of people. Some of these struggles,
such as the struggle for equality regardless of gender, race, sexual
orientation and national origin, should be considered necessary to consolidate
the unity of the working people. Others are existential struggles, such as the
struggle to stop and reverse the climate crisis, the ongoing Sixth extinction,
and the threat of nuclear war. However, other struggles, such as the fight for
animal liberation or the rights of nature and its constituent elements,
contribute not only to the well-being of humans but also to the process of de-alienation
and ultimately human emancipation. In brief, Ecocentric Socialism will aim to
dismantle all forms of power relations. In this way, the tension between the
infrastructure and the superstructure in Marx's theory is resolved by elevating
the “superstructure” to the same level as the “infrastructure” and their
continuous interaction as the main drivers of social change.
Analytical
categories: The
key analytical categories are ecological-social forces of production and
destruction, eco-social relations of production and domination and the
dialectical interaction of “infrastructure” and “superstructure,” which are constitute
a complex interdependent matrix of relationships that give agency to all
beings. Above all, it is clearly recognized that the forces of production are
often also the forces of destruction. Thus, the question of development of the
forces of production, which is central to dominant interpretations of
historical materialism, is avoided, as is the idea of progress in the Enlightenment
that links the good life to ever-expanding technologies and the culture of
having.
The
goal: the
fundamental goal of Ecocentric Socialism, like in Marxian socialism, is to
liberate humanity from alienation and its consequences including oppression and
exploitation. However, contrary to Marx's theory that equates human liberation
with freedom from the laws of nature (e.g., Engels, 1880) and a technologically
advanced affluent society based on ever-increasing division (Nayeri June 2018),
Ecocentric Socialism entails a process of humanity's retreat from the current
culture of having in favor of a culture of being. The cultural of having is
based on acquiring material possessions as much as possible. In Ecocentric
Socialism the process aims at reducing humanity's ecological footprint and at
the same time produce a different matrix of necessities for human well-being
and development compatible with voluntary simplicity. This process is urgently
needed many in the Global North. However, in the Global South and certain
groups in the Global North whose basic needs are not being met, it will be
necessary to redistribute existing wealth among them. At the same time, generation
of wealth will be stopped and through women's empowerment and democratic family
planning, the human population will be reduced dramatically over several
generations so that our collective ecological footprint across all ecosystems
becomes negligible. An emancipated humanity will not produce waste. Ecocentric
Socialist societies will be based on democratic stationary state localized
economies with low production and low technology consistent with human
development.
Environmental
ethics: While
Marxian socialism and 20th century socialisms and 21st century ecological
socialisms are all anthropocentric and have no intrinsic environmental ethics,
ecological socialism is based on the understanding that anthropocentrism is the
pillar of civilization based on alienation from nature and social alienation. To
overcome anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization, we must strive for
ecocentrism and against anthropocentrism. Thus, Ecocentric Socialism will be a
combination of social and cultural revolution by billions of human beings. However,
ecocentrism is not just an intellectual point of view, but a true love for
nature and for life on planet Earth: to save the world, we must love the world.
Program and Strategy: The programmatic platform of Ecocentric Socialism may differ in detail from country to country. But the general framework will be the same throughout the world. I have outlined such a program for the United States elsewhere (see Nayeri Oct. 2018, section on “Ecocentric Socialism”). Ecocentric Socialism also draws on the experiences of a century and a half of world revolution, particularly in Russia and Cuba. For example, the experience of the Bolshevik Party in helping to develop mass consciousness in an anti-capitalist and socialist direction as codified in Trotsky's Transition Program (1938), the founding document of the Fourth International. Likewise, the Cuban Revolution has provided valuable lessons (Nayeri July 2017, section titled “Lessons from the Cuban Revolution”). Most important is Ernesto Che Guevara's theoretical and political contributions (Nayeri May 1, 2024).
Feasibility: It is a challenging question to end
this this discussion with the question of the feasibility of socialism in
general and Ecocentric Socialism in particular in the 21st century. As I have
shown, Marxian socialism has had internal and empirical contradictions.
Marx's
vision was very briefly realized in the preliminary phase of the Russian
revolutions of 1917 with the formation of self-organizing and self-mobilizing Soviets
and the establishment of the first workers' state in history.
Filmer
(1995; for discussion, see Harman2002) in a comprehensive study estimated that
2.474 billion people participated in the global non-domestic labor force in the
mid-1990s. Of these, about one-fifth, i.e. 379 million people, worked in
industry, 800 million in services and 1.074 million in agriculture. Therefore,
there is objectively a much larger proletariat around the world to strive for
and uphold socialism. Of course, as I have argued the agencies for Ecocentric
Socialism are significantly different and more diverse, and include segments of
the population such as women, youth, indigenous peoples, nature lovers, and so
on. However, although these classes and groups are now very large, they are
still, in Marx's terms, "a class in itself." What is needed is the
radicalization of the masses worldwide to challenge key aspects of the
anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization. No one knows how and when
such radicalizations will occur. And if such a thing happens, how harmonious
will it be among the different strata of social factors that will enable an
Ecocentric Socialist revolution. We still need to develop a theory of how the
vanguard of such a movement should be organized not to become an elite force,
but to enable further development of the revolution. Finally, the current world
political situation is characterized by inter-imperialist rivalry, as seen in
the Ukraine war, which threatens humanity with World War III and nuclear
annihilation. Also, with the extreme marginalization of socialist and
ecological socialist, labor and green organizations, there has been no mass
antiwar protest. The ecological/green movement has been coopted into the
framework of capitalist electoral politics discussing how to live with these
calamities in place of overcoming the system that produces them. At the same
time, ecological existential crises have limited the window of opportunity for
humanity to act as a single entity to resolve these crises (Nayeri March 2022).
The
future of humanity and most of life on planet Earth is at risk.
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1.Engels in a footnote to the 1888 English edition and
the 1890 German edition of The Communist
Manifesto wrote: “That is, all written
history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing
previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von
Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg
Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic
races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be,
or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to
Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid
bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1881) crowning
discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With
the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be
differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted
to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and
the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886.”
2. It must be noted that with the passage of time,
Marx’s focus on human emancipation was replaced with emancipation of the
proletariat in the socialist movement which because more or less the movement
to improve the lot of the working people by substituting various other social
forces and in the best case to bring proletariat to power. Marx’s focus on
socialism as the society that does away with alienation has been quietly
forgotten.
3. "It is true that Mehring reprinted some of Marx's early published works in 1902 ... but the more important writings remained unknown. And anyway, by that time all the first generation of Marxist commentators and followers - including Kautsky, Plekhanov, Bernstein and Labriola [63] - had already formed their ideas. Therefore, the Marxism of the Second International was formed almost in total neglect of the difficult and complex process that Marx had gone through in the years 1843-1845 when he formulated historical materialism for the first time.” From Lucio Coletti’s “Introduction” to "Karl Marx, Early Writings," Penguin Books, 1972.
4. By replacing Marx's labor theory of value with the
neoclassical theory of price, Baran and Sweezy developed a coherent theory of
capitalist monopoly: "[T]he general theory of price for an economy
dominated by such [oligopolistic] firms is the traditional monopoly price
theory of classical and neoclassical economics." (Baran and Sweezy, 1966,
p. 59). However, they were mistaken in their understanding of Marx’s theory of
competition, hence his labor theory of value. For a full discussion and empirical
evidence of the relevance of Marx's law of value to the US economy, see Anwar
Sheikh, 2016.
5. Foster and Burkett (2017, p. 79) inspired by Maurice Mandelbaum, define the
materialism of the 19th century "of which Marx and Engels were among the
greatest representatives," as: "There is an independent world; The
human mind does not exist as an entity distinct from the human body; And there
is no God (or any other non-human being) whose mode of existence is not like
that of material entities.” It is clear
that this view of materialism leave aside nature and focus on humanity and
society to the exclusion of the animated nature.
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