3640. The Law of Value in Relation to Self-Management and Investment in the Economy of the Workers’ States

By Ernest Mandel, World Outlook, 1963

The Cuban magazine Nueva Industria – Revista Economica, organ of the Ministry of Industry, published two polemical articles in issue No.? (October 1963) of great interest, one written by Ernesto Che Guevara and the other by Commandante Alberto Mora, Minister of Foreign Trade. This polemic testifies to the vitality of the Cuban Revolution in the field of Marxist theory, too. It deals with a number of questions of the utmost importance in the construction of a socialist economy: role of the law of value in the economy during the epoch of transition; autonomy of enterprises and self-management; investments through the budget or by means of self-investment, etc. Involved in these issues is the problem of the ideal model for the economy in the epoch of transition from an underdeveloped country, a problem of absorbing interest to the Bolsheviks during the 1923-1928 period and which arose again, even if on a rather low theoretical level, in Yugoslavia, Poland and even in the Soviet Union in recent years.

The Law of Value in the Economy During the Epoch of Transition

The question of the “application” of the theory of value in the planned and socialized economy of the epoch of transition has been subjected to the worst confusion, mainly because Stalin, in his last work, posed it in a both gross and simplistic way: “Does the law of value exist (sic) and does it apply in our country? … Yes, it exists there and it applies there.” This is an evident truism. To the extent that exchange occurs, commodity production survives, and exchange is thereby objectively governed by the law of value. The latter cannot disappear until commodity production withers away; that is, with the production of an abundance of goods and services.

But this does not answer the concrete question around which turns the fundamental discussion begun in 1924-25 between Preobrazhensky and Bukharin which has continued to develop, with ups and downs, among Marxist economists and theoreticians up to now: to what exact degree and in what sphere does the law of value apply in the economy during the epoch of transition?

Stalin himself, while muddying the problem, had to admit a fact which the Khrushchevist economists are nevertheless beginning to draw into question; namely, that in the “socialist” economy, the law of labour-value cannot be the regulator of production, that is, cannot determine investments.

In developed capitalist economy, the law of value determines production through the play of the rate of profit. Capital flows toward the sectors where the rate of profit is above the average and production increases there. Capital recedes from the sectors where the rate of profit is below the average, and production decreases there (at least relatively). When the means of production are nationalized, so that there is neither a market for capital nor its free entry and withdrawal, nor even the formation of an average rate of profit with which the rate of each particular branch can be compared, clearly there is no longer a possibility for the “law of value” to be directly the “regulator of production.”

If, in an underdeveloped country which has carried out its socialist revolution, the “law of value” were to regulate investments, there would flow preferentially toward the sectors where profitability is the highest in relation to prices on the world market. But it is precisely because these prices determine a concentration of investments in the production of raw materials that these countries are underdeveloped. To escape from underdevelopment, to industrialize the country, means to deliberately orient investments toward the sectors that are least “profitable” for the time-being according to the criterion of the long-term economic and social development of the country as a whole. When it is said that the monopoly of foreign trade is indispensable for industrializing the under-developed countries, this means precisely that it cannot be accomplished until these countries are able to “pull the teeth” of the law of value.

But perhaps this qualification applies only to the “law of value on the world market”? Cannot the law of value at least alter investments on the national scale, once world prices are left aside? This is wrong again. The industrialization of an underdeveloped country cannot be carried out rapidly and harmoniously except by deliberately violating the law of value. [1]

In an underdeveloped country, and precisely because of its underdevelopment, agriculture tends from the beginning to be more “profitable” than industry, handicrafts and small industry more “profitable” than big industry, light industry more “profitable” than heavy industry, the private sector more “profitable” than the nationalized sector. To channel investments according to the “law of value,” that is, according to the law of supply and demand of commodities produced by different branches of the economy, would imply developing monoculture for the export trade by priority; it would imply preferential construction of small shops for the local market rather than steel plants for the national market. The construction of comfortable lodgings for the petty-bourgeois or bureaucratic layers (an investment corresponding to “effective demand”) would have priority over the construction of low-cost homes for the people which clearly must be subsidized. In short, all the economic and social evils of underdevelopment would be reproduced despite the victory of the revolution.

In reality, the decisive meaning of this victory, of the nationalization of the means of industrial production, of credit, of the transportation system and foreign trade (together with the monopoly of the latter), is precisely to create the conditions for a process of industrialization that escapes from the logic of the law of value. Economic, social and political priorities, consciously and democratically chosen, take the lead over the law of value in order to lay out the successive stages of industrialization. Priority is placed not on immediate maximum returns, but on the suppression of rural unemployment, the reduction of technological backwardness, the suppression of the foreign grip on the national economy, the guarantee of the rapid social and cultural rise of the masses of workers and poor peasants, the rapid suppression of epidemics and endemic diseases, etc., etc.

That is why the industrialization of the workers states follows a different road from that of the capitalist countries where industries are built beginning with the sectors that will most easily satisfy “effective demand.”

To violate the law of value is one thing; to disregard it is something else again. The economy of a workers state can disregard the law of value only at the price of losses to the economy which could be avoided, of useless sacrifices imposed on the masses, as we shall later demonstrate.

What does this mean? In the first place, that the whole economy must be carried on within the framework of a strict calculation of the real costs of production. These costs will not determine investments; these will not automatically go toward “the least costly” projects. But to know the costs means to know the exact amount of subsidies which the collectivity grants the sectors which it has decided to develop by priority. In the second place, that it is necessary to have a stable yardstick for these calculations; without stable money, no rigorous planning. In the third place, that all sectors where economic or social priorities do not dictate any preference are to be actually guided by the “law of value,” (for example, different crops aiming at the domestic market). In the fourth place, so longs as the means of consumption remain commodities, and aside from the commodities and services deliberately subsidized or distributed free by the state (pharmaceutical products, school and training materials, books, etc.), the preferences of the consumers will freely operate on the market the law of supply and demand will affect prices, and the plan will adapt its projected investments to these oscillations (within the limits of what is available in finances, equipment, raw materials, etc.).

In the light of these initial remarks, we can consider the importance of the two problems raised in the Guevara-Mora polemic: What is value? Are means of production commodities in the transitional epoch? Mora affirms that value is not essentially abstract human labour; that it is “a relation existing between the limited disposable resources and the growing needs of man” (p.15). Still better: he holds that value is a “category created by man under certain conditions and for certain (!) ends” (p.15).

It is clear that we are faced here with a subjective deformation of the Marxist concept of labour-value, of which Marx specified the essence to be abstract human labour. It is not by chance that Mora refers to the “neo-Marxist” Soviet economists [2], who have been attacked, in the USSR itself, and rightly so, as wanting to introduce surreptitiously the marginal theory of value. His conception, according to which the “law of value is the economic criterion for regulating production” in the epoch of transition (p.17) – while he affirms that it is not the only regulator – necessarily involves the notion according to which “exchange of the means of production” occurs even when these are completely nationalized, that “sale of commodities” occurs even when these means of production pass from one nationalized enterprise to another, and that the “contradictions” between the state enterprises justify the assertion that a “change in ownership” occurs at the time of these exchanges (p.19). All these affirmations are contrary to the reality and to Marxist theory. On all these questions, Che Guevara is entirely right against Mora.

Mora states that if in investments, one leaves aside the law of value, one must “pay the price”; in doing this, you automatically limit the social resources available to satisfy other needs. This is true, and we, likewise, underline the necessity for strict calculation of production costs in all fields. But in limiting oneself to this economic truth, the social content of the epoch of transition is done away with; that is, in abstracting from the class struggle, Mora leaves out a whole important side of the problem.

In fact, it is impossible to operate in the economy of the epoch of transition – any more than in any other economy containing different social classes – with aggregates like “social revenue,” “social costs,” “social price of investments,” without at the same time posing the question: “Who is to pay this price to whom?

The society of the epoch of the transition to capitalism to socialism is not homogeneous. In conducting an appropriate policy of investments, of prices, wages, foreign trade, etc., the workers state can act in such a way that the social benefits of priority investments (numerical reinforcement of the working class; elevation of its standard of living, skill, culture and consciousness; reinforcement of its leading role in the state and economy; accentuation of its participation in political life, etc., etc.) are paid economically by other social classes; the residue of the former owning classes; imperialism; the small commercial entrepreneurs and independent peasants. In an expanding economy, this economic price, paid particularly by the merchants, artisans and independent peasants can moreover be accompanied by a rise in their standard of living, on condition that this rise is less than it would have been in the framework of the “free play of the law of value” (thanks, for example, to a progressive income tax). [3]

The Law of Value and Foreign Trade

All the preceding evidently constitutes only a general framework for replying to the specific problems which the question of economic calculation and the orientation of investments raises in each particular workers state. Here, Mora is right when he stresses (p.18) that in a small country like Cuba, which depends strictly on foreign trade for the current functioning of its industry (spare parts and raw materials) and for the equipment of its new enterprises, the necessity for rigorous economic calculation is imposed with all the more reason than in a big, largely autarchic country like the Soviet Union.

Exports are made according to prices on the world market. So that these exports will not constitute a constant drain on the national economy (they must be met in any case in order to keep industry and industrialization going through imports), it is necessary that the production costs of exported goods should as a whole be below the prices obtained on the world market. It is necessary to fix the objective on progressively suppressing all exports at a loss, so that exports are not only a means supplying the national economy but, in addition, an important source of accumulation, a means of defraying part of the expense of industrialization – a part of the costs of not observing the law of value on the national market! – from abroad. The tendency for current prices of sugar to rise on the world market creates, moreover, a favorable framework for the success of such a policy. The progressive diversification of exports, to render the Cuban economy independent of future fluctuations of current sugar prices on the world market, must point to the selection of other export, products where production costs remain below the prices obtained abroad (that is, average prices on the world market).

But Mora mixes up the need to carry out all these calculations in the most strict way with the extension of the field of application of the law of value in the Cuban economy. The two phenomena are not identical; they can even be directly contradictory.

The law of value determines the exchange value of commodities according to the quantity of labour socially necessary to produce them. The concept of “socially necessary” labour is determined in turn by the average level of the productivity of labour in a country, and by the concept of the effective demand of society – which must never be confounded with human needs or social needs from an objective point of view. In an underdeveloped country like Cuba, all production of many industrial branches can correspond to an “effective demand,” that is, all labour in these branches can appear as “socially necessary,” despite a very low level of productivity. The reference to the law of value, far from thereby resolving the problem of rapid improvement in the productivity of labour, of the technological transformations which these industries must undergo, can only obscure it. Because the law of value will have a tendency to keep alive archaic enterprises, as long as the state of scarcity exists, from the moment there ceases to be free movement of capital and free imports of commodities which could stimulate competition with these enterprises.

Far from being a field of application of the law of value, the dependence of Cuba on foreign trade thus implies the necessity of economic calculation of comparative international costs, which could provide a choice of economic criteria, independently of any rigid “law.” The necessity to assure the country’s supply of spare parts and raw materials imposes a certain volume of exports, even if these are carried out at a loss. The necessity to maintain and develop the existing level of industries dependent on foreign supplies imposes searching, as quickly as possible, for profitable exports in relation to prices on the world market – even if this means switching investments toward branches that are already profitable in relation to the national market (branches that already sell their commodities at their exchange value). The possibility of exporting at a profit, of gaining supplementary resources from exports, of transforming trade into a constant source of socialist accumulation, will moreover permit just the liberation of the economy from the tyranny of the “law of value,” that is, will permit the development of new industries despite the fact that their production costs at the beginning will be higher than the prices of imported products, without lowering the standard of living or the rate of accumulation in the country. This is an aspect of the real dialectics of the dependence on foreign trade and the play of the law of value that is decidedly more complex than Comrade Mora thought!

The Law of Value and Autonomy of Decision at the Enterprise Level

In the debate which has raged in some of the workers states, the problem of the area of application of the law of value is intimately linked with the problem of autonomy of decision at the enterprise level in the field of investment. The Yugoslav authors have even formulated with regard to this a veritable new dogma which requires critical analysis: “Without the right of the self-management collectives to dispose of a considerable part of the social surplus product, no genuine self-management.” [4] This analysis must examine the problem from two aspects: economic efficiency (criteria for choosing one investment project rather than another), social and political efficiency (success in the struggle against the bureaucracy and bureaucratization).

The more backward a country is, the more conditions of almost universal scarcity rule not only in the means of production sector but also for much of the industrial means of consumption (at least for the great majority of the population), and the more detrimental the practice of self-investment is, the more detrimental is it to permit the self-management collectives to determine for themselves the projects for priority of productive investments.

It is evident in fact that under conditions of almost general scarcity of industrial commodities, almost all the investment projects can be economically profitable, no matter how gross the economic errors that are committed. Almost every profitable industrial or agricultural enterprise (providing funds for investment) is like an island in a sea of unsatisfied needs. The natural tendency of self-investment is therefore to attend to what is most pressing, both locally and in each sector.

In other words: if the self-management enterprises hold large funds for self-investment, they will have a tendency to orient their investments either toward the commodities which they lack the most (certain equipment goods; raw materials; auxiliary products; emergency sources of energy), or toward the commodities which their workers or the inhabitants of the area lack the most. Thus, criteria of local or sector interest are placed above national interests, not because the law of value is “denied,” but precisely because it is applied! This means, once more, to orient industrialization toward the “traditional road” which it followed in the historic framework of capitalism, in place of reorienting it according to the requirements of a nationally planned economy.

An attempt can be made to reconcile national planning requirements and allocating self-managed enterprises considerable funds for self-investment. The means chosen for this aim can be a levy-tax in behalf of national development funds and equalization funds for regional development. This is evidently a step in the right direction, but it does not at all resolve the problem.

Since an underdeveloped economy is characterized precisely by the fact that the enterprises of high productivity are still the exception and not the rule, it is sufficient to leave them a part of their net surplus product and the inequality of development between the industrialized localities and the non-industrialized localities, the inequality of development and of revenue between the archaic enterprises which enjoy only an average level of productivity and the enterprises technologically “up to date” will increase instead of diminishing. It is necessary, moreover, to insist on this fundamental idea of Marxism: any economic freedom, any “autonomy of decision” and any “spontaneity” increases the inequality so long as there exist side by side strong and feeble enterprises or individuals, rich and poor, favored and unfavored from the point of view of location, etc. This is the reason why, it should be noted in passing, that according to Marx the mechanism of the law of value leads to its own negation; competition inevitably ends in monopoly.

The economic logic of a planned economy therefore speaks completely in favor of productive investment by budgetary means at least for all the big enterprises. What must be left to the enterprises is an amortization fund sufficiently large to permit modernization of equipment with each renewal of fixed equipment (gross investment). But all net investments should be made in accordance with the plan, in the branches and places chosen according to preferential criteria selected for the society and its economy as a whole. In this respect, too, the thesis of Comrade Guevara is correct.

The problem has been obscured, above all in the USSR, through associating it with the problem of heightening the material incentives in enterprises. Numerous Soviet economists have criticized the stimulants still employed today in the economy of the USSR to incite the enterprises (?) to carry out the plans. This criticism is in general pertinent. It has but to repeat what anti-Stalinist Marxists have said critically for many years. Yet, it is only necessary to examine closely the arguments of these economists to see that what is involved in reality is heightening of material incentives for the bureaucracy for whom the growth of revenues must in some way be the essential stimulus for the expansion of production in the enterprises.

This is where certain partisans of self-management, particularly in Yugoslavia, maintain that decentralization of the decisions on investment would be a powerful guarantee against bureaucratization. This thesis is based on a fallacy. The Yugoslavs are right in stressing that the power of the bureaucracy grows in relation to its freedom in disposing of the social surplus product. But the technicians and economists of the planning commission “dispose” of the surplus product only in the form of figures on paper; the real power of disposal is situated at the level of the enterprise. [5] The more that means other than consumption funds (distributed revenues and social investments) are left at the free disposal of the enterprises, the more is precisely bureaucratization stimulated, at least in a climate of generalized scarcity and poverty; also the greater the temptation becomes for corruption, theft, abuse of confidence, false entries – temptations that do not exist at the level of the planning commission, if only because of multiple checks. The concrete experience of Yugoslav “decentralization” has shown, moreover, that it is an enormous source of inequality and bureaucratization at the level of the enterprises.

But doesn’t the possibility of complete centralization of the means of investment at the state level create the danger of the economic policy as a whole favoring the bureaucracy, as was the case in Stalinist Russia? Obviously. But then the cause does not reside in the centralization itself; it lies in the absence of workers democracy on the national political level. [6] This means that a genuine guarantee against bureaucratization depends on workers management at the enterprise level and workers democracy at the state level. Without this combination, even the autonomy of the enterprises will eliminate none of the authoritarian, bureaucratic and (often) erroneous character of economic decisions made at the government level of the plan. With this combination, the centralization of investments – priorities being democratically established, for example through a national congress of workers councils – would not encourage bureaucratization, but, on the contrary, suppress one of its principle sources.

The Law of Value and Self-Management

“Heightening material incentives” in the enterprises cannot be a “stimulant” in the question of investments. But “heightening material incentives” in the self-management collectives can actually stimulate continual growth of production and productivity among the enterprises.

Certainly, under a regime of genuine socialist democracy, creative enthusiasm, the free development of all the capacities of invention and organization of the proletariat, constitute a powerful motor for the growth of production. But it would be a grave idealist and voluntarist error to suppose that in a in a climate of poverty – inevitable in an underdeveloped country immediately following the victory of the socialist revolution – this enthusiasm could last long without a sufficient material substructure.

The example of the Soviet Union, where the proletariat gave proof of an enthusiasm and spirit of self-sacrifice without parallel in the first years after the October Revolution, is instructive in this respect: a long period of deprivation ended inevitably in mounting passivity of the workers, daily material concerns taking precedence over attentiveness to meetings.

It is therefore imperative to link self-management to the possibility for the workers to immediately judge the success of each effort at increasing production by the elevation of their standard of living. The simplest and most transparent technique is that of distributing a part of the net revenue of the enterprise among the workers in the form of one or more months of bonus wages, the amount increasing or diminishing automatically with the level of revenue. The increasing collective material interest of the workers in the management of the enterprises moreover is superior to piece wages, inasmuch as it does not introduce division and conflicts in the workers’ collectivity, inasmuch as it corresponds better to contemporary technique, which place less and less importance on individual output and more and more importance on the rational organization of labour.

Self-management (and not mere workers control) seems to be the ideal model for organizing socialist enterprises. But it by no means hinders more or less unlimited competition among the enterprises, which flows from their autonomy in the domain of prices and investments. This autonomy cannot but reproduce a series of evils inherent to the capitalist regime: monopoly positions exploited in the formation of prices and revenues; efforts to defend these monopolies by “hiding” discoveries and technical improvements; waste and duplication in the field of investments; high cost or errors in decision, revealed a posteriori on the market (including the shutting down of enterprises); reappearance of unemployment, etc., etc. Useless and detrimental from the economic point of view, it by no means constitutes a sufficient guarantee against bureaucratization, as we have indicated above.

In this connection, the polemic of Lenin and Trotsky against the theses of the “Workers Opposition” is still completely valid. Marxism is not to be confused with the doctrine of anarcho-syndicalism. The genuine guarantee of workers power lies on the political level; it is on the state level that it must be established; any other solution is utopian; that is, unworkable in the long run and a source for the reappearance of a powerful bureaucracy.

For all these reasons, self-management does not at all imply wider recourse to the “law of value” in relation to centralized planning. [7] The fundamental data of the problem remain the same. It is necessary to carry out strict calculations of production costs to show in the case of each commodity whether its production has been subsidized or not. But nothing calls for the conclusion that prices must be “determined by the law of value,” that is, by the law of supply and demand. If such a conclusion still has some meaning with regard to the means of consumption, it is senseless for the means of production which, we repeat, are not commodities, at least in the great majority of cases. And even means of production which are still commodities – those produced by the private or co-operative sector for the delivery to the state, and which the state furnishes to private enterprises or co-operatives – cannot be “sold at their value” without encouraging under certain conditions private primitive accumulation at the expense of socialist accumulation. But, if the means of production are not sold “at their value,” the “value” of the means of consumption is itself profoundly modified.

Prices are, then, instruments of socialist planning and cannot be anything else in the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism. If you say instrument of planning you likewise say instrument for determining the distribution of the national revenue between consumption and investment, an instrument for determining the distribution of revenues among the different classes and layers of the nation. To leave the determination of this distribution to the “law of value,” is to leave it in the final analysis to the “laws of the market,” to the “law of supply and demand,” that is, to economic automatism. And economic automatism would rapidly take us back to an economy of the semi-colonial type.

But to say that prices cannot be determined by the law of value does not at all signify that they can be independent of the latter. Society can never distribute more values than it has created without progressively destroying its accumulated wealth and impoverishing itself increasingly in the absolute sense of the term. The total sum of prices must therefore be equal to the total sum of value of the commodities produced (granting that there has been no monetary depreciation). The distribution of certain products – in goods or vouchers – below their value (subsidies!) automatically signifies a distribution of other products above their value. Without strict calculation of production costs; without book-keeping aided by an objective criterion; without a kind of double entry system that faithfully registers, for each product, alongside the price fixed by the state, the real cost and the subsidy (or the tax) there is not only no possibility for genuine scientific planning, there is above all no stimulus for the fundamental economic dynamic of the epoch of transition – the dynamic that progressively elevates one new branch of industry after another to the point of rendering it “competitive” in relation to prices on the world market, up to the time socialism announces its next triumph when socialist industry as a whole operates with a productivity superior to that of the most advanced capitalist industry.

At the moment, the “law of value” could theoretically govern the dynamic of the workers state (or more exactly: the workers states as an international whole; because it appears excluded that this situation could be first obtained “in a single country”). But at the precise moment when it is on the point of triumphing, its reason for being disappears. The highest level of productivity attained under capitalism in all its branches cannot be surpassed without approaching such a level of abundance that commodity production withers away. In the workers state “law of value” cannot channel investments except to the precise degree that it withers away and to the degree that along with it all the economic categories, products of a relative scarcity of material resources, likewise wither away.

---

Notes

1. “Planned economy in the transitional period, while founded on the law of value, violates it nevertheless at every step and establishes relations among the different economic branches, and between industry and agriculture in the first place, on the basis of equal exchange. The state budget plays the role of a lever for forced accumulation and planned distribution. This role must be increased in accordance with the latest economic progress. Credit financing dominates relations between the coercive accumulation of the budget and the fluctuations of the market, insofar as the latter enter in… If the domestic Soviet market is ‘freed’ and the monopoly of foreign trade suppressed – exchange between the city and countryside will become much more equal, the accumulation of the village (I refer to the capitalist accumulation of the farmer, the ‘kulak’) will follow its course, and it will soon be seen that Marx’s formulas likewise apply to agriculture. Once on this road, Russia would rapidly become a colony that would serve as the base for the industrial development of other countries.” (Leon Trotsky: Stalin Theoretician. Available in French in Ecrits 1928-40, Tome I, p.106) [Available in English in different translations as Stalin as a Theoretician in Militant, 15 September-11 December 1930 and Stalin as a Theoretician in International Socialist Review, Fall 1956 & Winter 1957.]

2. Among others, Novochilov, Kantorovitch and Menchinov. This question underlies the famous debate on the possible use of profit as the sole criterion in carrying out the plan. In reality, these economists are the spokesmen of the economic bureaucracy, who demand increased rights for the directors of enterprises – particularly the right to freely dispose of a part of the “invisible funds” (fixed equipment).

3. From 1924 to 1927, the Stalinist faction violently accused the Left Opposition – Preobrazhensky in particular – with wanting “to increase the prices of industrial products.” Preobrazhensky had simply proposed that industrial products could be sold “above their value” to the village, which could have been tied in perfectly with a progressive lowering of the sales price in view of the rapid growth of the productivity of labour. But when the Stalinist faction made the turn to accelerated industrialization, it increased the prices of industrial consumers goods through extremely high indirect taxes. While in 1928, the tax on turnover was not above 17.9% of the real turnover of retail trade, it rose to 78.1% in 1932, and in 1936, the nominal turnover of this trade was 107 billion rubles, of which taxes accounted for 66 billion rubles and the real turnover only 41 billion! (L.H. Hubbard: Trade and Distribution in the Soviet Union)

4. Thus Milentiji Popovic, in an article entitled Self-management and Planning: “On the other hand, in the sector of expanded social reproduction, in perfecting the system of investment on the basis of the new relations, our results are less conclusive, although the first steps have been taken in this direction. The establishment of non-administrative relations, of economic relations, in this sphere, reverts quite simply to the establishment of credit-interest (!) relations, and to taking them as the basis ...

“One must first of all counteract the contradiction which arises from the fact that the resources servicing social reproduction are deducted exclusively through administrative measures (taxes, duties, contributions) thus leaving free the organization of labour without the latter on the other hand becoming the ‘proprietor;’ the organization of labour evolves, in fact, into a unique system of credit in which these resources are at one and the same time ‘theirs’ and ‘common’ (article 11) …

It is possible to avoid, on the other hand, having subjective and political considerations as the only ones to be taken into consideration at the time of the adoption of the decisions concerning investments. It goes without saying that this method cannot and must not ever be pushed to its final conclusion. But a system can be constructed in which the political decisions will bear on the general orientation of the political economy while the distribution of the means destined for investment is carried out in accordance with the credit mechanism, according to financial and material (!) criteria fixed with more or less precision. In operating in this way the process of expanded reproduction is likewise ‘depoliticalised.’ This ‘depoliticalization’ is not absolute. It must be carried out to the degree that bureaucratism must be deprived of its base in this sphere as in the others.” (My emphasis – E.M.). – Current Questions of Socialism, No.70, July-Sept. 1963, pp.67-68.

5. This obviously does not apply to cases where raw materials, equipment, goods and sometimes even means of consumption are centrally distributed, becoming veritable hotbeds for germinating corrupted bureaucrats.

6. “Only the co-ordination of three elements, state planning, the market and Soviet democracy, can assure correct guidance of the economy of the epoch of transition and assure, not the removal of the imbalances in a few years (this is utopian), but their diminution and by that the simplification of the bases of the dictatorship the proletariat until the time when new victories of the revolution will widen the arena of socialist planning and reconstruct its system.” (Leon Trotsky: The Soviet Economy in Danger. Available in French in Tome I of Ecrits 1928-1940, p.127). [In English, in a different translation, see The Soviet Economy in Danger in Militant, 12 November 1932-7 January 1933.]

7. Certain Yugoslav authors take quite correct positions in this respect. See, for example, Dr. Radivoj Uvalic: “While the open market can be widely utilized, it cannot be the sole or even the principle regulator of the socio-economic relations of a socialist country.” And again: “The importance of the planned guidance of economic development under the conditions of socialism lies first of all in the possibility that is offered of considering profitability from the point of view of the economy as a whole and not from the point of view of each particular unit of the economy… This is the case in all branches of high concentration of capital (?), such as the production of the means of production and raw materials, which could be never developed sufficiently on the basis of the accidental play of the market, with the rate of profit as the sole stimulate.” (In: Socialist Thought and Practice, No.6, pp.47 and 55) 

3154. Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

By John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, November 1, 2008

John Bellamy Foster

The transition from capitalism to socialism is the most difficult problem of socialist theory and practice. To add to this the question of ecology might, therefore, be seen as unnecessarily complicating an already intractable issue. I shall argue here, however, that the human relation to nature lies at the heart of the transition to socialism. An ecological perspective is pivotal to our understanding of capitalism’s limits, the failures of the early socialist experiments, and the overall struggle for egalitarian and sustainable human development.

My argument has three parts. First, it is crucial to understand the intimate connection between classical Marxism and ecological analysis. Far from being an anomaly for socialism, as we are often led to believe, ecology was an essential component of the socialist project from its inception—notwithstanding the numerous later shortcomings of Soviet-type societies in this respect. Second, the global ecological crisis that now confronts us is deeply rooted in the “world-alienating” logic of capital accumulation, traceable to the historical origins of capitalism as a system. Third, the transition from capitalism to socialism is a struggle for sustainable human development in which societies on the periphery of the capitalist world system have been leading the way.

Classical Marxism and Ecology

Research carried out over the last two decades has demonstrated that there was a powerful ecological perspective in classical Marxism. Just as a transformation of the human relation to the earth was, in Marx’s view, an essential presupposition for the transition from feudalism to capitalism, so the rational regulation of the metabolic relation to nature was understood as an essential presupposition for the transition from capitalism to socialism.1 Marx and Engels wrote extensively about ecological problems arising from capitalism and class society in general, and the need to transcend these under socialism. This included discussions of the nineteenth-century soil crisis, which led Marx to develop his theory of metabolic rift between nature and society. Basing his analysis on the work of the German chemist Justus von Liebig, he pointed to the fact that soil nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) were removed from the soil and shipped hundreds and thousands of miles to the cities where they ended up polluting the water and the air and contributing to the poor health of the workers. This break in the necessary metabolic cycle between nature and society demanded for Marx nothing less than the “restoration” of ecological sustainability for the sake of “successive generations.”2

In line with this, Marx and Engels raised the main ecological problems of human society: the division of town and country, soil depletion, industrial pollution, urban maldevelopment, the decline in health and crippling of workers, bad nutrition, toxicity, enclosures, rural poverty and isolation, deforestation, human-generated floods, desertification, water shortages, regional climate change, the exhaustion of natural resources (including coal), conservation of energy, entropy, the need to recycle the waste products of industry, the interconnection between species and their environments, historically conditioned problems of overpopulation, the causes of famine, and the issue of the rational employment of science and technology.

This ecological understanding arose from a deep materialist conception of nature that was an essential part of Marx’s underlying vision. “Man,” he wrote, “lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”3 Not only did Marx declare in direct opposition to capitalism that no individual owned the earth, he also argued that no nation or people owned the earth; that it belonged to successive generations and should be cared for in accordance with the principle of good household management.4

Other early Marxists followed suit, although not always consistently, in incorporating ecological concerns into their analyses and embodying a general materialist and dialectical conception of nature. William Morris, August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Nikolai Bukharin all drew on ecological insights from Marx. The Ukrainian socialist Sergei Podolinsky’s early attempt at developing an ecological economics was inspired to a considerable extent by the work of Marx and Engels. Lenin stressed the importance of recycling soil nutrients and supported both conservation and pioneering experiments in community ecology (the study of the interaction of populations within a specific natural environment). This led to the development in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s of probably the most advanced conception of ecological energetics or trophic dynamics (the basis of modern ecosystem analysis) in the world at the time. The same revolutionary-scientific climate produced V. I. Vernadsky’s theory of the biosphere, A. I. Oparin’s theory of the origin of life, and N. I. Vavilov’s discovery of the world centers of germplasm (the genetic sources of the world’s crop plants). In the West, and in Britain in particular, leading scientists influenced by Marxism in the 1930s, such as J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, Lancelot Hogben, and Joseph Needham, pioneered in exploring the dialectics of nature. It is even possible to argue that ecological science had its genesis almost entirely in the work of thinkers on the left (socialist, social democratic, and anarchist).5

Obviously not all major figures or all developments in the socialist tradition can be seen as ecological. Soviet Marxism succumbed to an extreme version of the productivism that characterized early twentieth-century modernity in general, leading to its own version of ecocide. With the rise of the Stalinist system the pioneering ecological developments in the Soviet Union were largely crushed (and some of the early ecologically oriented Marxists such as Bukharin and Vavilov were killed). Simultaneously, a deep antipathy to natural science emerging out of an extreme negation of positivism led to the abandonment of attempts to theorize the dialectics of nature in Western Marxism, seriously weakening its link to ecology—though the question of the domination of nature was raised by the Frankfurt School as part of its critique of science. If today socialism and ecology are once again understood as dialectically interconnected, it is due both to the evolution of the ecological contradictions of capitalism and the development of socialism’s own self-critique.

Capitalism’s World Alienation

The key to understanding capitalism’s relation to the environment is to examine its historical beginnings, i.e., the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This transition was enormously complex, occurring over centuries, and obviously cannot be fully addressed here. I shall focus on just a few factors. The bourgeoisie arose within the interstices of the feudal economy. As its name suggests, the bourgeoisie had its point of origin as a class primarily in the urban centers and mercantile trade. What was necessary, however, in order for bourgeois society to emerge fully as a system, was the revolutionary transformation of the feudal mode of production and its replacement by capitalist relations of production. Since feudalism was predominantly an agrarian system, this meant of course transformation of agrarian relations, i.e., the relation of workers to the land as a means of production.

Capitalism therefore required for its development a new relation to nature, one which severed the direct connection of labor to the means of production, i.e., the earth, along with the dissolution of all customary rights in relation to the commons. The locus classicus of the industrial revolution was Britain, where the removal of the workers from the land by means of expropriation took the form of the enclosure movement from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Under colonialism and imperialism an even more brutal transformation occurred on the outskirts or the external areas of the capitalist world economy. There all preexisting human productive relations to nature were torn asunder in what Marx called the “extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population”—the most violent expropriation in all of human history.6

The result was proletarianization within the center of the system as masses of workers were thrown out of work and moved to the city. There they were met by the capital being amassed through organized robbery, giving rise to what Marx called “modern industry.” Simultaneously, various forms of servitude and what we now call precarious work were imposed on the periphery, where social reproduction was always secondary to the most rapacious imperialist exploitation. The surplus forcibly extracted from the periphery fed industrialization at the center of the world economy.7

What made this new system work was the incessant accumulation of capital in one cycle after another, with each new phase of accumulation taking the last as its starting point. This meant ever more divided, more alienated human beings, together with a more globally destructive metabolism between humanity and nature. As Joseph Needham observed, the “conquest of Nature” under capitalism turned into “the conquest of man” the “technological instruments utilized in the dominance of Nature” produced “a qualitative transformation in the mechanisms of social domination.”8

There is no doubt that this dialectic of domination and destruction is now spiraling out of control on a planetary scale. Economically, overall inequality between the center and periphery nations of the world system is increasing together with the intensification of class inequality within each capitalist state. Ecologically, the world’s climate and the life-support systems of the entire earth are being transformed by a process of runaway global warming.9

In addressing this planetary environmental problem it is useful to turn to Hannah Arendt’s concept of “world alienation,” introduced fifty years ago in The Human Condition. “World alienation” for Arendt began with the “alienation from the earth” at the time of Columbus, Galileo, and Luther. Galileo trained his telescope on the heavens, thereby converting human beings into creatures of the cosmos, no longer simply earthly beings. Science seized on cosmic principles in order to obtain the “Archimedean point” with which to move the world, but at the cost of immeasurable world alienation. Human beings no longer apprehended the world immediately through the direct evidence of their five senses. The original unity of the human relation to the world exemplified by the Greek polis was lost.

Arendt noted that Marx was acutely aware of this world alienation from his earliest writings, pointing out that the world was “denatured” as all natural objects—the wood of the wood-user and the wood-seller—were converted into private property and the universal commodity form. Original or primitive accumulation, the alienation of human beings from the land, as Marx described it, became a crucial manifestation of world alienation. However, Marx, in Arendt’s view, chose to stress human self-alienation rooted in labor rather than world alienation. In contrast, “world alienation, and not [primarily] self-alienation as Marx thought,” she concluded, “has been the hallmark of the modern age.”

“The process of wealth accumulation, as we know it,” Arendt went on to observe, depended on expanding world alienation. It “is possible only if the world and the very worldliness of man are sacrificed.” This process of the accumulation of wealth in the modern age “enormously increased human power of destruction” so “that we are able to destroy all organic life on earth and shall probably be able one day to destroy even the earth itself.” Indeed, “Under modern conditions,” she explained, “not destruction but conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process, whose constant gain in speed is the only constancy left wherever it has taken hold.”10

Arendt had no final answers to the dire problem she raised. Despite tying world alienation to a system of destruction rooted in wealth accumulation, she identified it with the development of science, technology, and modernity rather than capitalism as such. World alienation in her view was the triumph of homo faber and animal laborans. In this tragic conception, her readers were called upon to look back to the lost unity of the Greek polis, rather than, as in Marx, toward a new society based on the restoration at a higher level of the human metabolism with nature. In the end world alienation for Arendt was a Greek tragedy raised to the level of the planet.

There is no doubt that the concrete manifestations of this world alienation are evident everywhere today. The latest scientific data indicate that global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels experienced a “sharp acceleration…in the early 2000s” with the growth rate reaching levels “greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios developed in the late 1990s.” Further, “the mean global atmospheric CO2 concentration” has been increasing “at a progressively faster rate each decade.” The most rapid acceleration in emissions has been in a handful of emergent industrializing countries such as China, but “no region” in the world is currently “decarbonizing its energy supply.” All ecosystems on earth are in decline, water shortages are on the rise, and energy resources are becoming more than ever the subject of global monopolies enforced by war.

The “man-made fingerprint of global warming” has been detected “on 10 different aspects of Earth’s environment: surface temperatures, humidity, water vapor over the oceans, barometric pressure, total precipitation, wildfires, change in species of plants and animals, water run-off, temperatures in the upper atmosphere, and heat content in the world’s oceans.” The cost now descending on the world if it doesn’t radically change course is a regression of civilization and life itself beyond comprehension: an economy and ecology of destruction that will finally reach its limits.11

Socialism and Sustainable Human Development

How are we to meet this challenge, arguably the greatest that human civilization has ever faced? A genuine answer to the ecological question, transcending Arendt’s tragic understanding of world alienation, requires a revolutionary conception of sustainable human development—one that addresses both human self-estrangement (the alienation of labor) and world alienation (the alienation of nature). It was Ernesto “Che” Guevara who most famously argued in his “Man and Socialism in Cuba” that the crucial issue in the building of socialism was not economic development but human development. This needs to be extended by recognizing, in line with Marx, that the real question is one of sustainable human development, explicitly addressing the human metabolism with nature through human labor.12

Too often the transition to socialism has been approached mechanistically as the mere expansion of the means of production, rather than in terms of the development of human social relations and needs. In the system that emerged in the Soviet Union the indispensable tool of planning was misdirected to production for production’s sake, losing sight of genuine human needs, and eventually gave rise to a new class structure. The detailed division of labor, introduced by capitalism, was retained under this system and extended in the interest of higher productivity. In this type of society, as Che critically observed, “the period of the building of socialism…is characterized by the extinction of the individual for the sake of the state.”13

The revolutionary character of Latin American socialism today derives its strength from an acute recognition of the negative (as well as some positive) lessons of the Soviet experience, partly through an understanding of the problem raised by Che: the need to develop socialist humanity. Further, the Bolivarian vision proclaimed by Chávez has its own deep roots of inspiration drawing on an older pre-Marxian socialism. Thus it was Simon Bolívar’s teacher Simón Rodríguez who wrote in 1847: “The division of labour in the production of goods only serves to brutalize the workforce. If to produce cheap and excellent nail scissors, we have to reduce the workers to machines, we would do better to cut our finger nails with our teeth.” Indeed, what we most admire today with regard to Bolívar’s own principles is his uncompromising insistence that equality is “the law of laws.”14

The same commitment to the egalitarian, universal development of humanity was fundamental to Marx. The evolution of the society of associated producers was to be synonymous with the positive transcendence of human alienation. The goal was a many-sided human development. Just as “all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature,” so “the cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history.” Socialism thus appears as the “complete emancipation of the senses,” of human sensuous capacities, and their wide-ranging development. “Communism, as fully developed naturalism,” Marx wrote, “equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism.”15

The contrast between this revolutionary, humanistic-naturalistic vision and today’s dominant mechanical-exploitative reality could not be starker. We find ourselves in a period of imperialist development that is potentially the most dangerous in all of history.16 There are two ways in which life on the planet as we know it can be destroyed—either instantaneously through global nuclear holocaust, or in a matter of a few generations by climate change and other manifestations of environmental destruction. Nuclear weapons continue to proliferate in an atmosphere of global insecurity promoted by the world’s greatest power. War is currently being waged in the Middle East over geopolitical control of the world’s oil at the same time that carbon emissions from fossil fuels and other forms of industrial production are generating global warming. Biofuels offered up today as a major alternative to pending world oil shortages are destined only to enlarge world hunger.17 Water resources are being monopolized by global corporations. Human needs are everywhere being denied: either in the form of extreme deprivation for a majority of the population of the world, or, in the richer countries, in the form of the most intensive self-estrangement conceivable, extending beyond production to a managed consumption, enforcing life-long dependence on alienating wage labor. More and more life is debased in a welter of artificial wants dissociated from genuine needs.

All of this is altering the ways in which we think about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Socialism has always been understood as a society aimed at reversing the relations of exploitation of capitalism and removing the manifold social evils to which these relations have given rise. This requires the abolition of private property in the means of production, a high degree of equality in all things, replacement of the blind forces of the market by planning by the associated producers in accordance with genuine social needs, and the elimination to whatever extent possible of invidious distinctions associated with the division of town and country, mental and manual labor, race divisions, gender divisions, etc. Yet, the root problem of socialism goes much deeper. The transition to socialism is possible only through a revolutionizing practice that revolutionizes human beings themselves.18 The only way to accomplish this is by altering our human metabolism with nature, along with our human-social relations, transcending both the alienation of nature and of humanity. Marx, like Hegel, was fond of quoting Terence’s famous statement “Nothing human is alien to me.” Now it is clear that we must deepen and extend this to: Nothing of this earth is alien to me.19

Mainstream environmentalists seek to solve ecological problems almost exclusively through three mechanical strategies: (1) technological bullets, (2) extending the market to all aspects of nature, and (3) creating what are intended as mere islands of preservation in a world of almost universal exploitation and destruction of natural habitats. In contrast, a minority of critical human ecologists have come to understand the need to change our fundamental social relations. Some of the best, most concerned ecologists, searching for concrete models of change, have thus come to focus on those states (or regions) that are both ecological and socialistic (in the sense of relying to a considerable extent on social planning rather than market forces) in orientation. Thus Cuba, Curitiba and Porto Alegre in Brazil, and Kerala in India, are singled out as the leading lights of ecological transformation by some of the most committed environmentalists, such as Bill McKibben, best known as the author of The End of Nature.20 More recently Venezuela has been using its surplus from oil to transform its society in the direction of sustainable human development, thereby laying the foundation for a greening of its production. Although there are contradictions to what has been called Venezuelan “petro socialism,” the fact that an oil-generated surplus is being dedicated to genuine social transformation rather than feeding into the proverbial “curse of oil” makes Venezuela unique.21

Of course there are powerful environmental movements within the center of the system as well to which we might look for hope. But severed from strong socialist movements and a revolutionary situation they have been constrained much more by a perceived need to adapt to the dominant accumulation system, thereby drastically undermining the ecological struggle. Hence, revolutionary strategies and movements with regard to ecology and society are world-historical forces at present largely in the periphery, in the weak links and breakaways from the capitalist system.

I can only point to a few essential aspects of this radical process of ecological change as manifested in areas of the global South. In Cuba the goal of human development that Che advanced is taking on a new form through what is widely regarded as “the greening of Cuba.” This is evident in the emergence of the most revolutionary experiment in agroecology on earth, and the related changes in health, science, and education. As McKibben states, “Cubans have created what may be the world’s largest working model of a semisustainable agriculture, one that relies far less than the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth….Cuba has thousands of organopónicos—urban gardens—more than two hundred in the Havana area alone.” Indeed, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report, “Cuba alone” in the entire world has achieved a high level of human development, with a human development index greater than 0.8, while also having a per capita ecological footprint below the world’s average.22

This ecological transformation is deeply rooted in the Cuban revolution rather than, as frequently said, simply a forced response in the Special Period following the fall of the Soviet Union. Already in the 1970s Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, one of the founders of Cuban ecology, had introduced arguments for “integral development, laying the groundwork”—as ecologist Richard Levins points out—for “harmonious development of the economy and social relations with nature.” This was followed by the gradual flowering of ecological thought in Cuba in the 1980s. The Special Period, Levins explains, simply allowed the “ecologists by conviction” who had emerged through the internal development of Cuban science and society to recruit the “ecologists by necessity,” turning many of them too into ecologists by conviction.23

Venezuela under Chávez has not only advanced revolutionary new social relations with the growth of Bolivarian circles, community councils, and increased worker control of factories, but has introduced some crucial initiatives with regard to what István Mészáros has called a new “socialist time accountancy” in the production and exchange of goods. In the new Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), the emphasis is on communal exchange, the exchange of activities rather than exchange values.24 Instead of allowing the market to establish the priorities of the entire economy, planning is being introduced to redistribute resources and capacities to those most in need and to the majority of the populace. The goal here is to address the most pressing individual and collective requirements of the society related in particular to physiological needs and hence raising directly the question of the human relation to nature. This is the absolute precondition of the creation of a sustainable society. In the countryside preliminary attempts have also been made to green Venezuelan agriculture.25

In Bolivia the rise of a socialist current (though embattled at present) embedded in the needs of indigenous peoples and the control of basic resources such as water and hydrocarbons offers hope of another kind of development. The cities of Curitiba and Porto Alegre in Brazil point to the possibility of more radical forms of management of urban space and transportation. Curitiba, in McKibbens’s words, “is as much an example for the sprawling, decaying cities of the first world as for the crowded, booming cities of the Third World.” Kerala in India has taught us that a poor state or region, if animated by genuine socialist planning, can go a long way toward unleashing human potentials in education, health care, and basic environmental conditions. In Kerala, McKibben observes, “the Left has embarked on a series of ‘new democratic initiatives’ that come as close as anything on the planet to actually incarnating ‘sustainable development.’”26

To be sure, these are mainly islands of hope at present. They constitute fragile new experiments in social relations and in the human metabolism with nature. They are still subject to the class and imperial war imposed from above by the larger system. The planet as a whole remains firmly in the grip of capital and its world alienation. Everywhere we see manifestations of a metabolic rift, now extended to the biospheric level.

It follows that there is little real prospect for the needed global ecological revolution unless these attempts to revolutionize social relations in the struggle for a just and sustainable society, now emerging in the periphery, are somehow mirrored in movements for ecological and social revolution in the advanced capitalist world. It is only through fundamental change at the center of the system, from which the pressure on the planet principally emanates, that there is any genuine possibility of avoiding ultimate ecological destruction.

For some this may seem to be an impossible goal. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that there is now an ecology as well as a political economy of revolutionary change. The emergence in our time of sustainable human development in various revolutionary interstices within the global periphery could mark the beginning of a universal revolt against both world alienation and human self-estrangement. Such a revolt if consistent could have only one objective: the creation of a society of associated producers rationally regulating their metabolic relation to nature, and doing so not only in accordance with their own needs but also those of future generations and life as a whole. Today the transition to socialism and the transition to an ecological society are one.

Notes

1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage, 1981), 959.
2. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 636–39, Capital, vol. 3, 754, 911, 948–49.
3. Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1974), 328. Documentation of Marx and Engels’s ecological concerns listed above can be found in the following works: Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); and Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, “Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy,” Theory & Society 35 (2006): 109–56. On the problem of local climate change as it was raised by Engels and Marx in their time (speculations on temperature changes due to deforestation) see Engels’s notes on Fraas in Marx and Engels, MEGA IV, 31 (Amsterdam: Akadamie Verlag, 1999), 512–15.
4. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 911.
5. On ecological insights of socialists after Marx see Foster, Marx’s Ecology, 236–54. On early Soviet ecology see also Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). On Podolinsky seek John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, “Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism,” Organization & Environment 17, no. 1 (March 2004): 32–60.
6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 471–79, and Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 915.
7. On precarious work see Fatma Ülkü Selçuk, “Dressing the Wound,” Monthly Review 57, no. 1 (May 2005): 37–44.
8. Joseph Needham, Moulds of Understanding (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976), 301.
9. Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); John Bellamy Foster, “The Imperialist World System,” Monthly Review, vol. 59, no. 1 (May 2007): 1–16.
10. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 248–73; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 1, 224–63.
11. Michael R. Raupach, et al., “Global and Regional Drivers of Accelerating CO2 Emissions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 24 (June 12, 2007): 10289, 10288; Associated Press, “Global Warming: It’s the Humidity,” October 10, 2007.
12. See Paul Burkett’s “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development,” Monthly Review 57, no. 5 (October 2005): 34–62.
13. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba”. Che was referring to bourgeois criticisms of socialist transition but it was clear that he saw this problem as an actual contradiction of early socialist experiments that had to be transcended. See also Michael Löwy, The Marxism of Che Guevara (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 59–73.
14. Rodríguez quoted in Richard Gott, In the Shadow of the Liberator (London: Verso, 2000), 116; Simón Bolívar, “Message to the Congress of Bolivia,” May 25, 1826, Selected Works (New York: The Colonial Press, 1951), vol. 2, 603.
15. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 146, and Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1974), 348, 353.
16. István Mészáros, Socialism or Barbarism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 23.
17. A powerful critique of biofuel production has been authored by Fidel Castro Ruiz in a series of reflections over the past years. See https://monthlyreview.org/castro/index.php.
18. See Paul M. Sweezy, “The Transition to Socialism,” in Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim, On the Transition to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 112, 115; Michael Lebowitz, Build it Now (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 13–14.
19. G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (London: Penguin, 1993), 51; Karl Marx, “Confessions,” in Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 140.
20. See Bill McKibben, Hope, Human and Wild (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1995), and Deep Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2007).
21. Michael A. Lebowitz, “An Alternative Worth Struggling For,” Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 20–21.
22. McKibben, Deep Economy, 73. See also Richard Levins, “How Cuba is Going Ecological,” in Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology Under the Influence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 343–64; Rebecca Clausen, “Healing the Rift: Metabolic Restoration in Cuban Agriculture,” Monthly Review 59, no. 1 (May 2007): 40–52; World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2006, http://assets.panda.org/downloads/living_planet_report.pdf, 19; Peter M. Rosset, “Cuba: A Successful Case Study of Sustainable Agriculture,” in Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds., Hungry for Profit (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), 203–14.
23. Levins, “How Cuba is Going Ecological,” 355–56 in Lewontin and Levins, Biology Under the Influence, 367.
24. Lebowitz, Build it Now, 107–09; On the theory of communal exchange that influenced Chávez see István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 758–60. On “socialist time accountancy” see Mészáros’s Crisis and Burden of Historical Time (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
25. David Raby, “The Greening of Venezuela,” Monthly Review 56, no. 5 (November 2004): 49–52.
26. McKibben, Hope, 62, 154.