Why Marx would have been a denier

02 December 2009

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Make no mistake, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have given short shrift to global warming and environmentalism in some of their most colourful prose.

Make no mistake, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have given short shrift to global warming and environmentalism in some of their most colourful prose. As Sherlock Holmes explained to the Scotland Yard detective, there is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. But the dog did nothing. ‘That,’ Holmes replied, ‘was the curious incident.’

Who heard the Marxist bark? In the history of global warming, that dog was classical Marxism, a Promethean doctrine that argued for the strengthening of man’s power over nature. It is hard to conceive of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union being a party to global carbon emissions treaties on ideological grounds, let alone during a strategic race to bury the West.

Scratch a green, and not too deep you’ll find the argument that humans are the cause of the planet’s woes — an idea which can be traced back to the English economist Thomas Malthus and his 1798 essay on population which earned him enduring fame, and for Marxists, notoriety. In it, Malthus argued that whereas the means of subsistence grow arithmetically, the human population tended to expand geometrically; war, famine, pestilence and other disasters bringing the diverging line of population growth back to the subsistence line.

Marx and Engels would have none of it. In an 1865 letter, Marx called the essay a ‘libel against the human race’. Twenty years earlier, Engels described it as the most open declaration of war by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. If modern environmentalists preaching restraint and vegetarianism can sound sanctimonious, Marx was there first.

Most of what he called the population theory teachers were Protestant parsons. Malthus himself was a rare celibate parson in what Marx called the English State Church, where most had taken the injunction to be fruitful and multiply to ‘a really unbecoming extent’.

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Snowman

December 3rd, 2009 2:41pm Report this comment

well now, I recall with nostalgic embarrassment being told that the Marxism inspired societal constructs were ‘commanding the rains and the winds’. A fat lot of good did it do either for the people who were fed this pap, or for the survival of the regimes themselves.

Nature has, and will continue to trump any attempts by us to manipulate it, be it by Marxist zealots one way, or environmentally fanatical ecochondriacs the other. Adaptation to the nature’s overwhelming powers has been and will remain the surest way of survival.

Roger Raven

December 9th, 2009 10:25am Report this comment

Rupert Darwell’s self-serving half-truths by definition misrepresent the issue.

“During the Cold War, the communist bloc had no interest in the environmental questions that were moving up the agenda of the West”, yet he then writes that “Of the 152 international experts selected ahead of the UN Stockholm conference in 1972, … six [were] from the Soviet Union. It is a representative measure of Rupert Darwell's attitude to the facts that he equates six with zero.

Given the enormous resistance to action on climate change being put up by the climate change denialists and the vested interests, and the gross shortcomings of such schemes as are being put to conferences such as Kyoto and Copenhagen, Rupert and others would seem grossly hypocritical to portray the institutional indifference to environmental issues in the Comecon countries as being unique to state socialist systems.

Allow me to quote some headlines from a number of issues of the monthly periodical “Soviet Union”: “The Aral Sea: Problems and Solutions” (No. 3, 1989), “Ecological Security of the Planet” (front cover, No. 3, 1990), “The Cost of Free Water” (No. 8 1989), “Ecology Sounds the Alarm” (No.5 1986), “A Procurator Turns Into An Ecologist” (No. 12 1989).

Capitalist restoration has done nothing good for repair of the ecology - or indeed delivered almost any other real and lasting social benefit - in the former Comecon countries. But it has allowed for the much greater dumping of Western Europe’s waste there. Similarly, the pollution once emanating from European and American industry has not been erased, but transferred to China and other parts of Asia.

To quote a Hungarian university student in 1996, “"In the 1950s there was the belief that there simply weren't nature conservation problems in socialist countries because natural resources were being harnessed for the benefit of the workers. Today, nature conservation is seen as an obstacle holding back development and marketisation. It's this vadkapitalista (or "wild capitalist") perspective that we are up against."”

Product packaging in state socialist countries was minimal, meaning that while it didn’t favour slick marketing techniques, it was easily re-usable and re-cyclable. Not today’s packaging!

Thus, Western lobbyists can give us arrogant lectures on the ecological virtues of capitalism in the West because although pollution remains an essential part of consumerism, its relative invisibility to ordinary Westerners allows that inconvenient truth to be conveniently hidden.

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