There is no doubt that Marx's work is limited by his social conditions. Indeed, if his own thought is valid, it could scarcely be otherwise. He was a middle-class European intellectual. But not many middle-class European intellectuals called for the overthrow of empire or the emancipation of factory workers. Indeed, a great many colonial intellectuals did not. Besides, it seems a touch patronizing to suggest that the whole brave band of anticolonial leaders who took up Marx's ideas, from James Connolly to C. L. R. James, were simply the deluded victims of Western Enlightenment. That mighty campaign for freedom, reason and progress, which sprang from the heart of middle-class eighteenth-century Europe, was both an enthralling liberation from tyranny and a subtle form of despotism in itself; and it was Marx above all who made us aware of this contradiction. He defended the great bourgeois ideals of freedom, reason and progress, but wanted to know why they tended to betray themselves whenever they were put into practice. He was thus a critic of Enlightenment—but like all the most effective forms of critique, his was from the inside. He was both its firm apologist and ferocious antagonist.
Those who are in search of political emancipation cannot afford to be too choosy about the pedigree of those who extend a hand to them. Fidel Castro did not turn his back on socialist revolution because Marx was a German bourgeois. Asian and African radicals have been stubbornly indifferent to the fact that Trotsky was a Russian Jew. It is usually middle-class liberals who fret about "patronising'' working people by, say, lecturing to them about multiculturalism or William Morris. Working people themselves are generally free of such privileged neuroses, and are glad to receive whatever political support might seem useful. So it proved with those in the colonial world who first learnt about political freedom from Marx. Marx was indeed a European; but it was in Asia that his ideas first took root, and in the so-called Third World that they flourished most vigorously. Most so-called Marxist societies have been non-European. In any case, theories are never simply taken over and acted out by great masses of people; they are actively remade in the process. This, overwhelmingly, has been the story of Marxist anticolonialism.
Critics of Marx have sometimes noted a so-called Promethean strain in his work—a belief in Man's sovereignty over Nature, along with a faith in limitless human progress. There is indeed such a current in his writings, as one might expect from a nineteenth-century European intellectual. There was little concern with plastic bags and carbon emissions around i860. Besides, Nature sometimes needs to be subjugated. Unless we build a lot of seawalls pretty quickly, we are in danger of losing Bangladesh. Typhoid jabs are an exercise of human sovereignty over Nature. So are bridges and brain surgery. Milking cows and building cities mean harnessing Nature to our own ends. The idea that we should never seek to get the better of Nature is sentimental nonsense. Yet even if we do need to get the better of it from time to time, we can do so only by that sensitive attunement to its inner workings known as science.
Marx himself sees this sentimentalism (''a childish attitude to nature,'' as he calls it) as reflecting a superstitious stance to the natural world, in which we bow down before it as a superior power; and this mystified relation to our surroundings reappears in modern times as what he calls the fetishism of commodities. Once again, our lives are determined by alien powers, dead bits of matter which have been imbued with a tyrannical form of life. It is just that these natural powers are no longer wood sprites and water nymphs but the movement of commodities on the market, over which we have as little control as Odysseus did over the god of the sea. In this sense as in others, Marx's critique of capitalist economics is closely bound up with his concern for Nature.
As early as The German Ideology, Marx is to be found including geographical and climatic factors in social analysis. All historical analysis, he declares, ''must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.''12 He writes in Capital of "socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their material interchange with nature and bringing it under common control, instead of allowing it to rule them as a blind force.''13 ''Interchange'' rather than lordship, rational control rather than bullying dominion, is what is at stake. In any case, Marx's Prometheus (he was his favourite classical character) is less a bullish champion of technology than a political rebel. For Marx, as for Dante, Milton, Goethe, Blake, Beethoven and Byron, Prometheus represents revolution, creative energy and a revolt against the gods.14
The charge that Marx is just another Enlightenment rationalist out to plunder Nature in the name of Man is quite false. Few Victorian thinkers have so strikingly prefigured modern environmentalism. One modern-day commentator argues that Marx's work represents ''the most profound insight into the complex issues surrounding the mastery over nature to be found anywhere in 19 th century social thought or a fortiori in the contributions of earlier periods.''15 Even Marx's most loyal fans might find this claim a trifle overweening, though it contains a hefty kernel of truth. The young Engels was close to Marx's own ecological opinions when he wrote that ''to make the earth an object of huckstering—the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence—was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering.''16
That the earth is the first condition of our existence— that if you want a foundation to human affairs, you might do worse than look for it there—is Marx's own claim in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he insists that it is Nature, not labour or production taken in isolation, which lies at the root of human existence. The older Engels writes in his Dialectics of Nature that ''we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.''17 It is true that Engels also speaks in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific of humanity as the ''real, conscious lord of nature.'' It is also true that he blotted his environmental copybook a little as a keen member of a Cheshire hunt, but it is a tenet of Marx's materialism that nothing and nobody is perfect.
''Even a whole society,'' Marx comments, ''a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and like boni patres familias [good fathers of families] they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.''18 He is well aware of the conflict between the short-term capitalist exploitation of natural resources and longer-term sustainable production. Economic advance, he insists again and again, must occur without jeopardizing the natural, global conditions on which the welfare of future generations depends. There is not the slightest doubt that he would have been in the forefront of the environmentalist movement were he alive today. As a protoecologist, he speaks of capitalism as ''squandering the vitality of the soil'' and working to undermine a ''rational'' agriculture.
''The rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property,'' Marx writes in Capital, is ''an inalienable condition of the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.''19 Capitalist agriculture, he considers, flourishes only by sapping the ''original sources of all wealth . . . the soil and its labourers.'' As part of his critique of industrial capitalism, Marx discusses waste disposal, the destruction of forests, the pollution of rivers, environmental toxins and the quality of the air. Ecological sustainability, he considered, would play a vital role in a socialist agriculture.20
Behind this concern for Nature lies a philosophical vision. Marx is a naturalist and materialist for whom men and women are part of Nature, and forget their creatureliness at their peril. He even writes in Capital of Nature as the ''body'' of humanity, ''with which [it] must remain in constant interchange.'' The instruments of production, he comments, are ''extended bodily organs.'' The whole of civilisation, from senates to submarines, is simply an
extension of our bodily powers. Body and world, subject and object, should exist in delicate equipoise, so that our environment is as expressive of human meanings as a language. Marx calls the opposite of this "alienation," in which we can find no reflection of ourselves in a brute material world, and accordingly lose touch with our own most vital being.
When this reciprocity of self and Nature breaks down, we are left with the world of meaningless matter of capitalism, in which Nature is just pliable stuff to be cuffed into whatever shape we fancy. Civilisation becomes one vast cosmetic surgery. At the same time, the self is divorced from Nature, its own body and the bodies of others. Marx believes that even our physical senses have become ''commodified'' under capitalism, as the body, converted into a mere abstract instrument of production, is unable to savour its own sensuous life. Only through communism could we come to feel our own bodies again. Only then, he argues, can we move beyond a brutally instrumental reason and take delight in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the world. Indeed, his work is ''aesthetic'' through and through. He complains in the Grundrisse that Nature under capitalism has become purely an object of utility, and has ceased to be recognized as a ''power in itself.''
Through material production, humanity in Marx's view mediates, regulates and controls the ''metabolism'' between itself and Nature, in a two-way traffic which is far from some arrogant supremacy. And all this—Nature, labour, the suffering, productive body and its needs—constitutes for Marx the abiding infrastructure of human history. It is the narrative that runs through and beneath human cultures, leaving its inescapable impress on them all. As a ''metabolic'' exchange between humanity and Nature, labour is in Marx's opinion an ''eternal'' condition which does not alter. What alters—what makes natural beings historical—are the various ways we humans go to work upon Nature. Humanity produces its means of subsistence in different ways. This is natural, in the sense that it is necessary for the reproduction of the species. But it is also cultural or historical, involving as it does specific kinds of sovereignty, conflict and exploitation. There is no reason to suppose that accepting the ''eternal'' nature of labour will deceive us into believing that these social forms are eternal as well.
This ''everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence,'' as Marx calls it, can be contrasted with the postmodern repression of the natural, material body, which it seeks to dissolve into culture. The very word ''natural'' provokes a politically correct shudder. All attention to our common biology becomes the thought crime of ''biologism.'' Postmodernism is nervous of the unchanging, which it falsely imagines to be everywhere on the side of political reaction. So since the human body has altered little in the course of its evolution, postmodern thought can cope with it only as a ''cultural construct.'' No thinker, as it happens, was more conscious than Marx of how Nature and the body are socially mediated. And that mediation is primarily known as labour, which works Nature up into human meaning. Labour is a signifying activity. We never bump into a brute piece of matter. Rather, the material world always comes to us shot through with human significance, and even blankness is one such signifier. The novels of Thomas Hardy illustrate this condition to superb effect.
The history of human society, Marx believes, is part of natural history. This means among other things that sociality is built into the kind of animals we are. Social cooperation is necessary for our material survival, but it is also part of our self-fulfillment as a species. So if Nature is in some sense a social category, society is also a natural one. Postmodernists are to be found insisting on the former but suppressing the latter. For Marx, the relation between Nature and humanity is not symmetrical. In the end, as he notes in The German Ideology, Nature has the upper hand. For the individual, this is known as death. The Faustian dream of progress without limits in a material world magically responsive to our touch overlooks ''the priority of external nature.'' Today, this is known not as the Faustian dream but the American one. It is a vision which secretly detests the material because it blocks our path to the infinite. This is why the material world has either to be vanquished by force or dissolved into culture. Postmodernism and the pioneer spirit are sides of the same coin. Neither can accept that it is our limits that make us what we are, quite as much as that perpetual transgression of them we know as human history.
Human beings for Marx are part of Nature yet able to stand over against it; and this partial separation from Nature is itself part of their nature.21 The very technology with which we set to work on Nature is fashioned from it. But though Marx sees Nature and culture as forming a complex unity, he refuses to dissolve the one into the other. In his alarmingly precocious early work, he dreams of an ultimate unity between Nature and humanity; in his more mature years, he recognizes that there will always be a tension or nonidentity between the two, and one name for this conflict is labour. No doubt with a certain regret, he rejects the beautiful fantasy, almost as old as humanity itself, in which an all-bountiful Nature is courteously deferential to our desires:
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head.
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine.
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
(Andrew Marvell, ''The Garden'')
Marx believes in what he calls a ''humanisation of nature''; but Nature in his view will always remain somewhat recalcitrant to humankind, even if its resistance to our needs can be diminished. And this has its positive aspect, since surmounting obstacles is part of our creativity. A magical world would also be a tedious one. One day in the magic garden would probably be enough for Marvell to wish he was back in London.
Did Marx believe in a boundless expansion of human powers, in a way offensive to our own ecological principles? It is true that he sometimes underplays the natural limits on human development, partly because opponents like Thomas Malthus overplayed them. He acknowledges the boundaries
Nature set on history, but thinks we could still push them a long way. There is certainly a marked strain of what we might call technological optimism—even, at times, trium-phalism—in his work: a vision of the human race being borne on the back of unleashed forces of production into a brave new world. Some later Marxists (Trotsky was one of them) pushed this to a utopian extreme, foreseeing as they did a future stocked by heroes and geniuses.22 But there is also another Marx, as we have seen already, who insists that such development should be compatible with human dignity and welfare. It is capitalism that sees production as potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of Capital, "under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.''
Recognizing natural limits, as Ted Benton comments, is incompatible not with political emancipation but only with utopian versions of it.23 The world has the resources not for us all to live better and better, but for us all to live well. ''The promise of abundance,'' writes G. A. Cohen, ''is not an endless flow of goods, but a sufficiency produced with a minimum of unpleasant exertion.''24 What prevents this from happening is not Nature but politics. For Marx, as we have seen, socialism requires an expansion of the productive forces; but the task of expanding them falls not to socialism itself but to capitalism. Socialism rides on the back of that material wealth, rather than building it up. It was Stalin, not Marx, who saw socialism as a matter of developing the productive forces. Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us. The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
The two great threats to human survival that now confront us are military and environmental. They are likely to converge more and more in the future, as struggles over scarce resourc
es escalate into armed conflict. Over the years, communists have been among the most ardent advocates of peace, and the reason for this is ably summarized by Ellen Meiksins Wood. ''It seems to me axiomatic,'' she writes, ''that the expansionary, competitive and exploitative logic of capitalist accumulation in the context of the nation-state system must, in the longer or shorter term, be destabilizing, and that capitalism . . . is and will for the foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace.''25 If the peace movement is to grasp the root causes of global aggression, it cannot afford to ignore the nature of the beast that breeds it. And this means that it cannot afford to ignore the insights of Marxism.
The same goes for environmentalism. Wood argues that capitalism cannot avoid ecological devastation, given the antisocial nature of its drive to accumulate. The system may come to tolerate racial and gender equality, but it cannot by its nature achieve world peace or respect the material world. Capitalism, Wood comments, "may be able to accommodate some degree of ecological care, especially when the technology of environmental protection is itself profitably marketable. But the essential irrationality of the drive for capital accumulation, which subordinates everything to the requirements of the self-expansion of capital and so-called growth, is unavoidably hostile to ecological balance.''26 The old communist slogan ''Socialism or barbarism'' always seemed to some a touch too apocalyptic. As history lurches towards the prospect of nuclear warfare and environmental catastrophe, it is hard to see how it is less than the sober truth. If we do not act now, it seems that capitalism will be the death of us.
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