For Marxist

’s, The Problems Facing Humanity Arise Not From Nature, But From Society. Discuss Essay, Research Paper

We are constantly bombarded with visual images of the problems facing humanity every day in the news, from overpopulation and famine to AIDS and the greenhouse effect, and more often than not these are presented to us as ‘natural’ occurrences. In fact, concern for the environment has reached such a fever pitch that a Green political party has emerged to gather these ‘aware’ votes. But how ‘aware’ are they. Marxists would have us believe that the problems facing humanity derive solely from society and that any denial of this is a result of our conditioning within the capitalist system. In this essay I aim to examine this Marxist interpretation of the situation mankind finds himself in via the use of several case studies and a comparison with the Green movement. The emergence of a ‘Green’ political party that promises to focus most of its attention on environmental issues is symbolic of a recent shift in society’s attitude that can be partly attributed to the efforts of organisations such as Friends of the Earth. For many years these organisations have run campaigns with titles like “Help the Earth fight back”, that are aimed at increasing society’s awareness of environmental issues; highlighting the ecological problems acid rain, the greenhouse effect and nuclear power etcetera, will cause in the future. They claim that “[mankind] knows enough to reverse [some of] the [environmental] damage, and to manage the Earth’s astonishing wealth more fairly and sustainably. But the political will to bring about such a transformation is still lacking” (Friends of the Earth, date unknown). The Green’s have attempted to offer society this will. Formed approximately twenty years ago the majority of Greens are deterministically ecocentric, believing that man is part of the global ecosystem and subject to ‘natural’ limits (on population and economic growth). Their ecological stance emerged as a result of dissatisfaction with the existing anthropocentric world view that “license[s] the human species to exploit the rest of nature as if from above and outside it” (Capra and Spretnak, 1984, ppxxiv). Rather than this exploitative relationship the ecocentric perspective prefers to stress mankind’s need to re-relate with nature via the adoption of an anti-industrial (and therefore anti-capitalist) ideology and a return to a more rudimentary way-of-life. This formal political ‘policy’ is the manifestation of the Green’s primary concern, that “modern technology is out of control, threatening the balance between human society and the natural world” (Richards, 1989). This extremist perspective does however, have its flaws. The first problem is that the Green’s utopian vision of a return to a pre-industrial society would result in them being unable to launch an effective global response to some of the global threats that face humanity, since the technological expertise which would have inevitably developed and solved the problems would not be pursued. As Frank Richards (1989) says in an article for Living Marxism, “the experience of history is that every advance creates new problems but that it also creates the means of solving them”, a fact the Green’s do not seem to put much emphasis on. From a similar Marxist viewpoint, the Green’s want of an economic status-quo would result in the relationship between the proletariat and bourgeoisie also remaining static, preventing the liberation of the ‘prole’ via the contradictions inherent in capitalist society, and the death of any ‘potential’ for a socialist state. Although this may well prevent further industrial output and pollution in the short-term, Marxists would argue that the motivating power of capital (linked to our conditioning in a capitalistic mode of production) would result in a return to the existing pattern of production, and hence pollution, in the long-term. As far as the Marxist would be concerned this attempt to solve the environmental problems via the manipulation of the superstructure, rather than the political reform (not regress as the Green’s would have us believe) of the base, is a half-hearted attempt, doomed to failure. So, if a Marxist critique of the Green’s can reduce their political credibility, what do they themselves have to offer in terms of an analysis of the current threats to humanity. Marxist’s believe that before you can understand any change (political, economic, environmental etc.), you first need to understand the processes that keep society reproducing; these processes are the material processes of production and distribution of food, goods and services (Matley, 1966). They see this productive activity as a way of obtaining a means of subsistence through interacting with nature via the labouring activities of men, and that through this labour both man and nature change; “in the process of struggle against nature, man not only changes the character of nature, but also himself, by acquiring new qualities, habits and experience” (Matley, 1966). The theoretical reasoning behind this assumption, that man and nature change in unison, is that the transformation of nature allows “an expanded reproduction of productive forces” (Corbridge, 1986) over time, which enables society to exist at a higher level, in both demographic and materialistic terms. With society and nature developing as a result of man’s labour, it follows that man mu