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Historical Materialism #11
Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy
This book undertakes the first general assessment of ecological economics from a Marxist point of view, and shows how Marxist political economy can make a substantial contribution to ecological economics. The analysis is developed in terms of four basic (1) nature and economic value; (2) the treatment of nature as capital; (3) the significance of the entropy law for economic systems; (4) the concept of sustainable development. In each case, it is shown that Marxism can help ecological economics fulfill its commitments to multi-disciplinarity, methodological pluralism, and historical openness. In this way, a foundation is constructed for a substantive dialogue between Marxists and ecological economists.
Paul Burkett, Ph.D. (1984) in Economics, Syracuse University, is Professor of Economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. His publications on Marxism and ecology include Marx and A Red and Green Perspective (St. Martin's Press, 1999) and many articles in scholarly journals.
Paul Burkett, Ph.D. (1984) in Economics, Syracuse University, is Professor of Economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. His publications on Marxism and ecology include Marx and A Red and Green Perspective (St. Martin's Press, 1999) and many articles in scholarly journals.
358 pages, Paperback
First published March 23, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 25, 2020
This is a challenging read particularly if you have not studied economics but it worth the work. It has made me think much more deeply about natural capital, entropy and how we must live in a world of finite resources when capitalism has been buried. It also shows how Karl Marx's thinking about human beings and nature that capitalism split us from was revolutionary and brilliantly based on the latest scientific research available at the time.
February 26, 2014
Unlike many academic Marxists Burkett doesn't simply suggest that Marxism's strength is just its analysis of capitalism, he also argues that the centrality of class struggle is of primary importance. In particular Burkett looks forward to a revolutionary over-throw of capitalism. His final chapters demonstrate the way that, in Marx's words,
"socialised men, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature."
My complete review: http://resolutereader.blogspot.co.uk/...
"socialised men, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature."
My complete review: http://resolutereader.blogspot.co.uk/...
October 31, 2023
I took up the debate on ecology and entropy after Stuart Jordan’s contribution in Solidarity 672
Thermodynamics is integral to modern science. Devised before atomic theory or relativity, it remains consistent with both, has wide-ranging practical and theoretical uses, and has been applied far beyond its initial domain; from quantum refrigerators to black holes and beyond.
Many are tempted to try to wield fundamental and universal scientific laws in service of a particular social theory; to draw a straight line from a seemingly simple physical fact to argued conclusions about complex social and economic systems. But such attempts are often simplistic, and frequently either make mistakes along the way, or else are so general as to offer little insight.
In the 1970s, ecological writers were often preoccupied with scarce resources running out, “peak oil”, and the like, consequently favouring population control and slow-downs of extraction. In that context, Georgescu-Roegen attempted from 1971 to derive ecological economic conclusions from the first two laws of thermodynamics. His arguments, however, get the basic science wrong.
The first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form.
Entropy is a measure of the amount of energy in a system which is available to do work (the higher the entropy, the less energy available to do work). The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of an isolated system never decreases. Two dyes that spontaneously mix will not then spontaneously separate again. Heat flows from a hotter body to a colder body, but never spontaneously the reverse. A heat engine can generate work — such as movement or electricity — if it has a heat source and a cold sink. But if the heat source and cold sink reach the same temperature, no more work can be extracted, no matter how hot they both are. So entropy is also, equivalently, a measure of the disorder in a system (the more disorder, the higher the entropy).
The apparent ecological significance of these laws is quite straightforward. In an isolated system you can’t get something for nothing; and you can’t even break even. As Georgescu-Roegen put it in 1975, “the Entropy Law is the taproot of economic scarcity”. This simple explanation even offers a simple measure of ecological degradation, entropy.
One problem with this approach is that the earth as a whole is not an isolated system. The sun continuously pumps in huge amounts of energy. Indeed, too much of that energy remaining within the earth system brings us the catastrophes of global warming. (Taking a wider picture, the sun will, eventually, run out of fuel and die, but very far in the future, and regardless of human use of solar energy.)
With an external energy source, local entropy can be reversed. If you plug in a refrigerator, heat flows from cold to hot. With an external input of energy, batteries can be recharged, engines can carry on running, and spontaneous mixes can be separated.
Life maintains and expands a highly-ordered (low-entropy) form using, primarily, the sun’s energy.
To apply his theory of the taproot of economic scarcity to the open system that is the earth, Georgescu-Roegen made a distinction where none exists. He treats the entropy of energy and the entropy of matter as distinct and separable. Huge amounts of energy flow into and out from the earth’s system, but comparatively little matter does (asteroids come in, and hydrogen and helium escape the atmosphere, but on human timescales these aren’t that significant). As such, low-entropy matter is scarce, even though energy isn’t.
But energy can be used to create “lower-energy matter”. Plants, using the sun’s energy, are lower entropy than the water and carbon dioxide (and trace soil minerals) that they use to grow. The oxygen they release is lower entropy than the carbon dioxide they take in. A refined and purified material is often lower entropy than the impure ore it was made from.
Reportedly realising that this distinction was a dead-end, that he’d misunderstood the physics, Georgescu-Roegen attempted a new approach, formulating a “fourth law” of thermodynamics. Considering a system which is closed to materials, but not to energy, and building on the inevitability of some friction, corrosion, and decomposition, this law states that “available matter continuously and irrevocably dissipates, thus becoming unavailable”, and therefore “complete recycling is impossible”.
This law does not hold up theoretically, and indeed there are counter examples in nature. Available matter dissipates, but can eventually be recycled. There are theoretical as well as practical constraints, although much less strict than stated by Georgescu-Roegen. It is not possible to have everything in active use simultaneously. That is, for complete recycling it is necessary to have a significant stockpile of inactive, high-entropy materials at any one time, to which “waste” is added, and from which new active and low-entropy materials are created. We can see such stockpiles in nature: there is much inactive carbon and nitrogen in the soil, the ocean, the atmosphere, and sediments, for example — all part of carbon and nitrogen cycles.
There are very real and serious practical issues with waste and with recycling. In the future, scarcity of usable resources (themselves a result of increasing gravitational entropy) and even of energy generated may loom larger.
But the harm of waste and byproducts is not them being high-entropy. Some low-entropy waste is environmentally harmful. Some high-entropy waste is not particularly harmful. CO2 waste from burning fossil fuels is harmful because it increases the greenhouse effect, not because CO2 is high-entropy. Methane is lower entropy than carbon dioxide, but amuch more potent greenhouse gas. Fossil fuels should be left in the ground, but not because they are scarce low-entropy materials. We’d be better off as regards global warming if they were scarcer!
The entropy of solid radioactive uranium — a scarce resource — is lower than that of water vapour, but most of us are more concerned by radioactive waste than steam.
Georgescu-Roegen’s bad science and “entropy pessimism” led to generic generalisations: use less, exist less, do less. Better science leads to more precise and accurate recognitions of the necessary constraints.
Paul Burkett in Marxism and Ecological Economics (chapter five), outlines Georgescu-Roegen’s argument and defends its core thrust against criticisms. Burkett seeks to bring a “Marxist”, “class”, or “dialectical” “perspective” to economic and social implications of the argument. But no amount of “Marxist” spin can make bad science good.
• Another response, from Paul Vernadsky, is linked
———————————————————————
It lost one star for bad science, and another for engaging repetitively with academic discussions which I don't think are so important.
Misc. quotes and nuggets (mostly for myself, I disagree with some)
“High rates of profit and accumulation (in terms of values or prices) usually indicate a high
throughput of materials and energy: that is, in a closed system, high rates of entropy increase.”
— Not true as a universal absolute. But as a generality, yes. Although not in a closed system.
Two kinds of capitalist crises linked to scarce resources and waste. 1) demand outstripping supply, causing capitalist economic impacts, etc. — fuel/energy costs, food costs 2) general degradation of environment.
Expanded more elsewhere in book. Gap between resource requirements for (short term) capitalist production, and those of sustainable human development. Can’t fully destroy, but is limited.
An actual although trivial use of entropy law: full reversal not so easy, comes at larger cost. Emissions can’t put away so easily.
Critique of crude energy reductionism is good - but should apply to enropy also.
Capitalism doesn't factor in nature. Indeed (trivial).
Net more stuff processed. Yes. Although not absolute in every case, eg services.
Not absolute.
Capitalism can do some clean up and profit from it but limited.
Skipped Ch 7 and 8. Ch 9...
Positive vision of good life? Need to change culturally etc
Terrain of struggle
Conflate discussion of laws with the social analysis
More on this, also critical https://workersliberty.org/blogs/paul...
Thermodynamics is integral to modern science. Devised before atomic theory or relativity, it remains consistent with both, has wide-ranging practical and theoretical uses, and has been applied far beyond its initial domain; from quantum refrigerators to black holes and beyond.
Many are tempted to try to wield fundamental and universal scientific laws in service of a particular social theory; to draw a straight line from a seemingly simple physical fact to argued conclusions about complex social and economic systems. But such attempts are often simplistic, and frequently either make mistakes along the way, or else are so general as to offer little insight.
In the 1970s, ecological writers were often preoccupied with scarce resources running out, “peak oil”, and the like, consequently favouring population control and slow-downs of extraction. In that context, Georgescu-Roegen attempted from 1971 to derive ecological economic conclusions from the first two laws of thermodynamics. His arguments, however, get the basic science wrong.
The first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form.
Entropy is a measure of the amount of energy in a system which is available to do work (the higher the entropy, the less energy available to do work). The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of an isolated system never decreases. Two dyes that spontaneously mix will not then spontaneously separate again. Heat flows from a hotter body to a colder body, but never spontaneously the reverse. A heat engine can generate work — such as movement or electricity — if it has a heat source and a cold sink. But if the heat source and cold sink reach the same temperature, no more work can be extracted, no matter how hot they both are. So entropy is also, equivalently, a measure of the disorder in a system (the more disorder, the higher the entropy).
The apparent ecological significance of these laws is quite straightforward. In an isolated system you can’t get something for nothing; and you can’t even break even. As Georgescu-Roegen put it in 1975, “the Entropy Law is the taproot of economic scarcity”. This simple explanation even offers a simple measure of ecological degradation, entropy.
One problem with this approach is that the earth as a whole is not an isolated system. The sun continuously pumps in huge amounts of energy. Indeed, too much of that energy remaining within the earth system brings us the catastrophes of global warming. (Taking a wider picture, the sun will, eventually, run out of fuel and die, but very far in the future, and regardless of human use of solar energy.)
With an external energy source, local entropy can be reversed. If you plug in a refrigerator, heat flows from cold to hot. With an external input of energy, batteries can be recharged, engines can carry on running, and spontaneous mixes can be separated.
Life maintains and expands a highly-ordered (low-entropy) form using, primarily, the sun’s energy.
To apply his theory of the taproot of economic scarcity to the open system that is the earth, Georgescu-Roegen made a distinction where none exists. He treats the entropy of energy and the entropy of matter as distinct and separable. Huge amounts of energy flow into and out from the earth’s system, but comparatively little matter does (asteroids come in, and hydrogen and helium escape the atmosphere, but on human timescales these aren’t that significant). As such, low-entropy matter is scarce, even though energy isn’t.
But energy can be used to create “lower-energy matter”. Plants, using the sun’s energy, are lower entropy than the water and carbon dioxide (and trace soil minerals) that they use to grow. The oxygen they release is lower entropy than the carbon dioxide they take in. A refined and purified material is often lower entropy than the impure ore it was made from.
Reportedly realising that this distinction was a dead-end, that he’d misunderstood the physics, Georgescu-Roegen attempted a new approach, formulating a “fourth law” of thermodynamics. Considering a system which is closed to materials, but not to energy, and building on the inevitability of some friction, corrosion, and decomposition, this law states that “available matter continuously and irrevocably dissipates, thus becoming unavailable”, and therefore “complete recycling is impossible”.
This law does not hold up theoretically, and indeed there are counter examples in nature. Available matter dissipates, but can eventually be recycled. There are theoretical as well as practical constraints, although much less strict than stated by Georgescu-Roegen. It is not possible to have everything in active use simultaneously. That is, for complete recycling it is necessary to have a significant stockpile of inactive, high-entropy materials at any one time, to which “waste” is added, and from which new active and low-entropy materials are created. We can see such stockpiles in nature: there is much inactive carbon and nitrogen in the soil, the ocean, the atmosphere, and sediments, for example — all part of carbon and nitrogen cycles.
There are very real and serious practical issues with waste and with recycling. In the future, scarcity of usable resources (themselves a result of increasing gravitational entropy) and even of energy generated may loom larger.
But the harm of waste and byproducts is not them being high-entropy. Some low-entropy waste is environmentally harmful. Some high-entropy waste is not particularly harmful. CO2 waste from burning fossil fuels is harmful because it increases the greenhouse effect, not because CO2 is high-entropy. Methane is lower entropy than carbon dioxide, but amuch more potent greenhouse gas. Fossil fuels should be left in the ground, but not because they are scarce low-entropy materials. We’d be better off as regards global warming if they were scarcer!
The entropy of solid radioactive uranium — a scarce resource — is lower than that of water vapour, but most of us are more concerned by radioactive waste than steam.
Georgescu-Roegen’s bad science and “entropy pessimism” led to generic generalisations: use less, exist less, do less. Better science leads to more precise and accurate recognitions of the necessary constraints.
Paul Burkett in Marxism and Ecological Economics (chapter five), outlines Georgescu-Roegen’s argument and defends its core thrust against criticisms. Burkett seeks to bring a “Marxist”, “class”, or “dialectical” “perspective” to economic and social implications of the argument. But no amount of “Marxist” spin can make bad science good.
• Another response, from Paul Vernadsky, is linked
———————————————————————
It lost one star for bad science, and another for engaging repetitively with academic discussions which I don't think are so important.
Misc. quotes and nuggets (mostly for myself, I disagree with some)
“High rates of profit and accumulation (in terms of values or prices) usually indicate a high
throughput of materials and energy: that is, in a closed system, high rates of entropy increase.”
— Not true as a universal absolute. But as a generality, yes. Although not in a closed system.
Two kinds of capitalist crises linked to scarce resources and waste. 1) demand outstripping supply, causing capitalist economic impacts, etc. — fuel/energy costs, food costs 2) general degradation of environment.
Expanded more elsewhere in book. Gap between resource requirements for (short term) capitalist production, and those of sustainable human development. Can’t fully destroy, but is limited.
An actual although trivial use of entropy law: full reversal not so easy, comes at larger cost. Emissions can’t put away so easily.
Critique of crude energy reductionism is good - but should apply to enropy also.
Capitalism doesn't factor in nature. Indeed (trivial).
The anti-ecological character of capitalist production should not be identified with a simple maximisation of matter-energy throughput. Capitalism has its own rules governing waste
and recycling. Competition among firms penalises any ‘above normal’ throughput by not
recognising the labour time objectified in it as socially necessary, value-creating labour.
Individual enterprises also have a motive to reduce matter-energy waste to sub-normal levels in order to enjoy lower unit costs and thus surplus profits and/or rising market shares. This incentive encompasses the development of more efficient and profitable methods of recycling the matter-energy byproducts of production.
Although capitalism’s competitive allocation in its own way limits matter-energy waste and promotes recycling, it does so within a general tendency toward the conversion of matter
and energy into commodities on an ever greater scale
Net more stuff processed. Yes. Although not absolute in every case, eg services.
That the system’s allocation and scale mechanisms are both objectively antiecological helps explain why market-driven recycling and waste-management have themselves produced a ‘fresh expenditure of energy and materials’, thus becoming ‘a constitutive part of the problem’.129
While ecological economists blame materialistic and consumerist values for the system’s production and disposal of ever greater quantities of antiecological goods and services, the firms selling them know that they (and the wants they satisfy) are produced for one reason and one reason only: the competitive pursuit of profit. The notion that the capitalist economy can operate with a quota on its total use of low-entropy matter-energy is a pipedream.
Any market economy in which production is motivated by profit must rely on growth, since money-making only makes sense if the amount of money made is greater than the amount of money advanced.
Not absolute.
t is important to distinguish two kinds of environmental crises stemming from capitalism’s use and abuse of ever greater quantities of low-entropy matter-energy. The first type involves crises of capital accumulation, as the demand for materials (including energy sources) periodically outstrips supplies – leading to rising costs, falling profits, and even physical disruptions of production due to the non-availability of essential raw and auxiliary materials. Such materials-supply disturbances reflect an inner tension between the value-creating and material dimensions of capitalist production. With booms in production driven by competitive monetary accumulation, materials shortages become inevitable, especially when the production of these materials, dependent as it often is on specific natural conditions and/or large fixed investments, cannot be rapidly increased over short periods of time. This applies especially to agricultural and mineral products. Such shortages are hastened by labour productivity growth, which increases the demand for low-entropy matter-energy per dollar of money capital invested.131
Materials-supply disturbances tend to be periodic and do not, in and of themselves, pose a serious threat to the reproduction of the system. As long as sufficient low-entropy matter-energy is available to reproduce exploitable labour-power (and to objectify its labour in vendible commodities), capital can continue to accumulate on the basis of a degraded environment. Indeed, the production of goods and services designed to manage and cope with environmental degradation can itself be a profitable area of capital investment. Witness the rapid growth of the waste management and pollution control industries, or the massive profits earned on the newfangled pharmaceuticals peddled to asthmatics suffering from
urban air pollution. Global warming adds to the market for air conditioners.
Capitalism’s ability to survive and even prosper on its own money-making terms despite its degradation of nature directly defines a second kind of environmental crisis: the crisis in the quality of natural wealth as a condition of human development. Unlike materials-supply disturbances, this crisis is permanent and ever intensifying. And it cannot be resolved, or even temporarily softened, without a direct infringement on private profit and competition in favour of human-social needs as the main priority behind the organisation of production. The crisis in the natural conditions of human development implicates the fundamentally anti-ecological characteristics of wage-labour and market valuation. To effectively limit entropic degradation would require an economy not shaped by money and monetary prices, one not based on the goal of ever growing capital values. This necessarily involves non-market systems of egalitarian user rights and responsibilities that respect the communal character of natural wealth as a condition of human development within and across generations.
Capitalism can do some clean up and profit from it but limited.
Skipped Ch 7 and 8. Ch 9...
The reason why Perelman lapses into a simple environmental breakdown model is that his category of resource reproduction costs does not distinguish the resource requirements of capitalist production from the requirements of sustainable human development. Formally speaking, all that capitalism requires from the environment are conditions consistent with the reproduction of exploitable labour-power and the objectification of abstract labour in commodities. It does not require any reproduction of natural resources in their extant state, unless and insofar as such a reproduction is itself a requirement for the minimal conditions just mentioned. Indeed, the reproduction costs generated by capitalism – and this includes the imperfect substitution of new products and previously unexploited resources for depleted and degraded resources – provide many opportunities for profitable investment and production
Once we recognise that waste disposal and treatment may be profitable activities, then a key question becomes what kinds of pollution control (and of environmentally policies more broadly) are likely to be supported by capitalists and workers, respectively.
At the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism, as Foster has demonstrated, is the metabolic rift between society and nature produced by the alienation of workers from the conditions of production and the development of these conditions as means of capital accumulation.131 The combined simplification and degradation of labour and nature, mentioned earlier in this chapter, is a primary mechanism of this rift. Another mechanism is the division of labour between urban manufacturing industry and industrialised agriculture, which disrupts the circulation of matter and energy required for a healthy and sustainable metabolic reproduction of human-natural eco-systems.132 Nowadays the production and disposal of bio-nondegradeables, and biospheric disruptions such as the ozone and global warming problems, must be added to the growing list of metabolic rift mechanisms.133
Positive vision of good life? Need to change culturally etc
In all these ways, class relations may affect the resilience of common property in the face of external pressures. This is not just a theoretical issue: by clarifying the conditions needed to sustain common-property management, class analysis can assist the struggle against resource privatisation and marketisation.
Terrain of struggle
the virtual non-recognition – even among many Marxists – of the vision of all-round human development that lies at the heart of Marx and Engels’s communism. Debates over the ‘economics of socialism’ have instead concentrated on questions of information, incentives, and efficiency in resource allocation.75 This focus on ‘socialist calculation’ has displaced the concern with communism as a form of sustainable human development.76
For Marx and Engels, the overriding imperative of communism is the free development of individual human beings as social individuals. They insist that ‘the association of individuals . . . puts the conditions of the free development and movement of individuals under their control – conditions which were previously left to chance and had acquired an independent existence over against the separate individuals’.77 Communism’s ‘all-round realisation of the individual’ presumes that ‘the impact of the world which stimulates the real development of the abilities of the individual is under the control of individuals themselves’.78 And, instead of opportunities for individual development being obtained mainly at the expense of others, as in class societies, the future ‘community’ will provide ‘each individual [with] the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the community’.79 In short, Marx and Engels foresee communism as ‘an association, in which the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all’.
All of this suggests that a ‘sustainable society’ cannot rely on recycling alone, but must also reduce its reliance on matter-energy throughput while shifting its production toward ‘materials that yield wastes that can be tolerated at a finite level in the environment’.88 Ayres thus emphasises the need for a ‘dematerialization’ of production through a movement toward services combined with greater ‘re-use, renovation, recovery and recycling’.89 On this basis, he rejects Georgescu-Roegen’s hypothesis that the ‘economic system is . . . doomed to “run down” as the low entropy material resources on earth are dissipated and become unavailable’.
Conflate discussion of laws with the social analysis
More on this, also critical https://workersliberty.org/blogs/paul...
October 18, 2022
It looks like Bellamy's Foster 'Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature' is the basis of all texts that speak about marxism and ecologism.
Only the 5th chapter is worth reading (it debunks the entropy critique to marxism), but aside from that, better read Bellamy Foster (with political caution) for a better understanding of the relationship between ecology and Marx.
Only the 5th chapter is worth reading (it debunks the entropy critique to marxism), but aside from that, better read Bellamy Foster (with political caution) for a better understanding of the relationship between ecology and Marx.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews