ORGANIZATION & ENVIRONMENT Wallis / SPECIES / December QUESTIONS 2000

Dialogues and Debates

SPECIES QUESTIONS (GATTUNGSFRAGEN) Humanity and Nature from Marx to Shiva

VICTOR WALLIS Berklee College of Music This article examines key moments in the historical interface between issues of social class and issues of humanity’s impact on the rest of the natural world. The author argues that Marx has been unfairly characterized as downplaying the importance of nature. In fact, Marx’s work provides a grounding for the present-day view that the struggles against class domination and against abuse of the natural environment, far from being in contention with one another, are mutually dependent.

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he relationship of species questions to class questions lies at the core of the Marxian project. It was Marx who, in his 1844 manuscripts, articulated for the first time a link between capitalist subjection of the worker and denial of the worker’s basic humanity. The nexus between humanity and nature which Marx defined at that time was to remain a central, albeit often unacknowledged, theme of his subsequent work. It figures importantly in the underlying framework of Capital, namely, in the relationship of use-value to exchange-value. A proper appreciation of Marx’s arguments on these matters undercuts later reductionist/productivist caricatures of his thought. At the same time, it provides the basis for a clear response to the environmental contradictions posed by late-20th-century capitalist development. I. The scope of Gattungsfragen is set by Marx in his 1844 manuscripts. Here, he defines man, in contradistinction to other animals, as a species-being (GattungsAuthor’s Note: This is the original text (with added subtitle) of an article first published in German translation in the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (HKWM) [Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism], Vol. 4 (1999) (reprinted with permission from the publisher of HKWM). Following HKWM practice, all Marx-Engels references are to German editions of their collected works (MEW or MEGA); in the present version, I have added references to the English edition (CW). I am grateful to the editor of the HKWM, Wolfgang F. Haug, for encouraging me to write the article and for permitting its republication here. I would also like to thank Rolf Czeskleba-Dupont for helpful comments on an earlier draft. It should be noted that the German word Gattung does not correspond exactly to the biological concept of species, for which the word Spezies is used (e.g., by Engels in Dialectics of Nature). Gattung connotes a broader category. It was used in this sense by Marx and was reapplied, in German debates of the mid-1980s, to the question of the survival of the human race, which, in the then-prominent perspective of Mikhail Gorbachev, appeared to supersede any possible concern for “class questions.” (In the German text of this article, the editors added an introductory paragraph alluding to these debates.) Except where otherwise noted, I have used the term man in the sense of the gender-neutral German term Mensch (the term used by Marx in the passages cited). I regret that the English language does not have an equivalent term of equal simplicity. In the context of the present article, in which the terms species, human, and humanity are already used a good deal, any attempt to replace man completely with other constructions would tend to garble the exposition. Organization & Environment, Vol. 13 No. 4, December 2000 500-507 © 2000 INKRIT

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wesen), that is, as a being who “has conscious life-activity” (MEGA, vol. 1.2, p. 369; CW, vol. 3, p. 276), or, more precisely, whose life activity entails a conscious interplay between his own choices and the structures (cumulated choices) established by other members of his species. Capitalist relations result in estrangement (Entfremdung), which entails the denial of the worker’s species-being, as a consequence of which the worker “only feels himself freely active in his animal functions . . . and in his human functions [i.e., work] no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal” (MEGA, vol. 1.2, p. 367; CW, vol. 3, p. 274f). This politically central argument emerges from a more general approach that sees the human species (Gattung) as both part of and separate from the rest of the natural world. Significantly, Marx’s initial description of the impact of capital is tied to his formulation of a view of human/natural relations that transcends any particular historical epoch. However much Marx would later focus on historically specific, class-related questions, he never forgets that these represent just one dimension of a larger reality (Ollman, 1993, p. 55ff). The reality that exists outside of class relations constitutes the framework within which the impact of those relations can be understood, and in which the need for ending them can be acted upon. It is in this sense that the domain of class struggle is situated, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, not in human society as such, but in “hitherto existing” society (MEW, vol. 4, p. 462; CW, vol. 6, p. 482). For humanity to progress from the condition of class struggle to one in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (MEW, vol. 4, p. 482; CW, vol. 6, p. 506), certain changes will therefore have to take place not only within the human species, but also in its relations to the rest of nature. It is the task of defining these changes that constitutes the ultimate subject matter of Marx’s Gattungsfragen. The period since Marx’s first formulation of these questions, however, has witnessed a dramatic expansion in the sphere of their practical applications. The overall trajectory of Gattungsfragen may thus be observed through the following stages: (a) Marx’s original discussion of the basis on which human estrangement would be overcome; (b) Marx’s later treatment of capital in its dual exploitative relationship to the worker and to nature; (c) the eventual unfolding of an ecological crisis which would be interpreted by bourgeois ideology as the reflection of an inherent conflict between humanity and rest of the natural world; and finally (d) the effort of capital to simultaneously extend its hegemony and escape its contradictions by manipulating and appropriating life-forms at the microbiological level. II. Marx’s basic response to estrangement, whether between man and man or between man and nature, is implicit in his account of its origin. What was imposed by capital will have to be removed by liberation from capital. As retreat to earlier forms of social relations is impossible, advance to a higher form becomes necessary. It is thus in the context of his discussion of man’s species-being (Gattungswesen) that Marx engages in his earliest reflections on communism, the need for which he sees as flowing directly from a fundamental striving of human nature. Given the dual aspect of humanity’s link to the rest of nature (as being part of it while yet acting upon it), it is significant that Marx identifies the nodal issue—the point of convergence between human-to-human and human-to-nature ties—with the question of the relationship of man to woman (Mann/Weib). In this tie

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(Gattungsverhältnis), as he puts it, “man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man” (Mensch/Mensch) (MEGA, vol. 1.2, p. 388; CW, vol. 3, p. 295). By taking any given historical expression of this tie as the measure of “man’s whole level of development” (MEGA, vol. 1.2, p. 388; CW, vol. 3, p. 296), Marx is again stressing an aspect of human life that on one hand is prior to class, but that on the other hand is inescapably bound up with every form that class relations—or their transcendence—might take. A similar observation applies to Marx’s later discussions of value in relation to nature. The dual character of value rests on the distinction (in Capital, vol. 1, ch. 1) between a form that is inherently independent of social organization (namely, use-value) and one that is specifically tied to capitalist relations (i.e., exchange-value). Most of Marx’s analysis focused on the latter form, which he consequently referred to simply as “value.” This usage, however, has never ceased to be taken as a pretext for misinterpretation, most commonly in the form of assertions that Marx, in failing to attribute value to the natural world, showed himself to be unconcerned with its degradation. In his own time, the seemingly free availability of natural goods led to overblown statements, for example, in the Social Democratic Party’s Gotha program (1875), as to the wealth-generating capacity of labor, a notion that Marx swiftly undercut in the opening sentences of his Critique of that program by affirming that “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values . . . as is labor. . . .” (MEW, vol. 19, p. 15; CW, vol. 24, p. 81; emphasis in original). From the standpoint of Gattungsfragen, the discussion in Capital extends Marx’s earlier treatment of the labor process as the defining activity of the human species. Thus, “Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man . . . confronts the materials of nature as [himself] a force of nature.” As the worker “acts upon external nature and changes it,” he “simultaneously changes his own nature” (MEW, vol. 23, p. 192; CW, vol. 35, p. 187). The labor process, as here described, is quite independent of any relation to capital. Its defining trait, in this capital-free framework, is precisely the distinctively human capacity to prefigure conceptually that which will then be realized (verwirklicht) physically (MEW, vol. 23, p. 193; CW, vol. 35, p. 188). As capital subsequently strips the worker of this capacity—and hence of his or her species-being—so also does it sweep away, by the same token, all restraints to its own plundering of the natural world. Hence Marx’s characterization of capitalist agriculture as robbing not only the worker but also the soil (MEW, vol. 23, p. 529; CW, vol. 35, p. 507). The fundamental threat to the natural world thus emanates not from the human species as such but rather from the drive to accumulate, which makes man and nature its twin victims. III. Although the natural world affects the existence of humanity as a whole, the converse statement would be misleading, inasmuch as humanity in its entirety does not affect the natural world in a uniform manner. At any given moment, the world’s differing levels of energy consumption reflect the respective histories of each region up to that point. The distinctive historical stages likewise have their counterparts in the distinctive incursions made, at each stage, upon the natural world. Capitalism, by breaking up a mode of existence that rested largely on the production of use-values, introduced an economic calculus that fosters, among other things, limitless waste. Marx reflects on this, for example, when he discusses the utilization of “excretions of production” of capitalist industry. After giving a number of exam-

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ples of practices that today would be called “recycling,” he contrasts this approach unfavorably with one that would, from the outset, reduce the excretions to a minimum (MEW, vol. 25, p. 112; CW, vol. 37, p. 104). Bourgeois environmentalism has made a continuous practice of evading this option. To do so, it has shifted the responsibility for environmental degradation away from capital and onto the shoulders of humanity as a whole. The whole human species (Gattung) thus emerges, in this perspective, not just as a victim of the ecological crisis but also as its author. The primary agents of this supposed species-behavior are isolated individuals and families acting as consumers or as procreators. As consumers (suitably programmed), they “demand” ever-higher levels of goods and services; as procreators, their intentionality and objectives may vary, but their practice, except in those rare cases where strict official guidelines have been imposed, is shaped overwhelmingly by purely private criteria, whose effects have pointed mostly toward expansion. From such expansion—of both wants and numbers—has arisen an acute crisis in the earth’s carrying capacity. The response of bourgeois environmentalism oscillates between on one hand, Malthusian warnings about overpopulation and, on the other, a search for technological solutions to scarcity (e.g., industrial recycling, devices to raise agricultural productivity). The latter, in turn, rely heavily on market incentives (Wallis, 1997c, p. 113ff). In response, Marxist and progressive environmentalism tries continually to highlight the structural/institutional basis for wasteful production and consumption. Barry Commoner, for example, has criticized the tendency to blame “consumer choice” for such ecologically adverse measures as the conversions from reusable to disposable containers, from natural to synthetic fabrics, and from conventional to nuclear power–generation (Commoner, 1990). Even recognizing that such changeovers may be stimulated (if not initiated) by consumer-price differentials, their longer-range costs and injuries to humans vitiate any contention that their promotion reflected some drive inherent to the human species. More immediately, the enormous regional variations in per capita levels of resource-utilization (even between zones with similar indices of well-being) confirm the potential of human society to reduce its toll on the natural world. Such a reduction, however, would presuppose a sharp separation of species-interest from capitalist/productivist imperatives. Up to now, this distinction has failed to gain wide currency. On the contrary, bourgeois ideology, in the form of the commercial mass media, has been largely successful in conflating consumer desires with basic human need. To challenge this conflation is to call into question every dimension of socially organized production (Wallis, 1997a). It thus raises the most fundamental questions of what defines human society and therefore of what constitutes human species-identity. In Marx’s understanding, man’s species-interest would come to prevail conjointly with the culmination of working-class struggle (i.e., through the creation of a classless society). The need for this outcome was derived by Marx, as we have seen, from a consideration of the generic human being as constituted prior to any class definition. Marx’s entire class analysis took the resulting insight as its foundation and retained it as an underlying principle. The notion of species questions as being opposed to class questions, rather than as constituting the grounding for (or the culmination of) such questions, could only emerge on the basis of a crude flattening of Marx’s approach. Such reductionism has been a routine aspect of bourgeois thought, as the bourgeoisie has always tried to present its own interests as being those of the entire society. The Soviet regime was unable to transcend this perspective. It began by one-sidedly rejecting the bour-

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geois approach and affirming the primacy of class interests. Although the precise Soviet interpretation of “class interest” would evolve, what was decisive for its unidimensionality was the regime’s initial suppression of workers’ self-management (see Wallis, 1997b, p. 240). When at length, under Gorbachev, certain forms of democratic participation were revived, the pursuit of a universal interest naturally seemed to require the abandonment of any kind of class outlook. For the preservation of the human species, it would now be “more correct,” on this view, simply “to step over the things that divide us” (Gorbachev, 1988, p. 125; see also Haug, 1989, p. 81f). The self-defeating implications of such an approach would soon become evident, however, as capital’s global expansion continued unimpeded. What had begun, therefore, as a plea for species-wide unity ended up as capitulation to the most favored class. IV. Even as the overexploitation of nature begins to show the gravest consequences in the form of increasingly severe climate-related disasters (Davis, 1998, p. 63ff), the tendency of capital is to extend ever further its agenda of appropriating natural processes. The illusory character of such appropriation was already sharply expressed by Engels when he pointed out that each supposed conquest of nature “takes its revenge on us” (Dialectics of Nature, MEGA, vol. 1.26, p. 550; CW, vol. 25, p. 460f); for as control is gained within a limited sphere, the broader conditions for predictability (e.g., in agriculture) are undermined. Thus, irrigation systems hasten desertification, forest-removal ultimately reduces cropland by causing flooding, and climate-controlled environments add to global warming. Much as the capitalist cycle repeats itself, however, so does each stage in the illusory appropriation of nature. The more man “tames” natural processes, the more they spin out of control, provoking new and more aggressive taming measures with increasingly disastrous outcomes. Thus, diverse ecosystems are indiscriminately broken up; species-equilibria are disrupted; “pest”-species multiply; synthetic poisons are applied; new strains of the pests evolve, requiring stronger poisons with increasingly severe side effects, and so on. The outcome threatens the well-being of many species, notably including that of humanity itself. At an advanced stage of this taming cycle appears the practice of crossing speciesboundaries, that is, using genetic manipulation to alter the traits of a given species in such a way as to make it resistant to the effects of the cycle’s earlier stages. Thus, one of the most common applications of biotechnology is the creation of plant species with particular immunities. The alleged purpose is, typically, to counteract the effect of a given herbicide. The immediate result is an economic one: to create a captive market for the herbicide (i.e., farmers compelled to grow a plant strain on which no other herbicide can be used). The uncalculated side effects, however, include the propagation of the particular immunity (via natural processes) to other plant species, thereby generating new varieties of “super-weeds” with enhanced immunities (Altieri, 1998, p. 67; Rifkin, 1998, p. 82f). Man’s appropriation of nature and nature’s defiance of such appropriation thus appear to advance simultaneously. On one hand, the farmer, even if still a landowner, is increasingly drawn into a vertical integration of the agricultural sector, in which the inputs to every stage of the growing process—whether of crops or of livestock—must be obtained from the same monopolistic firm (Heffernan, 1998, p. 53ff). On the other hand, this extreme level of control unleashes its side effects chaotically in every direction. The physical effects include soil depletion, water

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pollution, and an array of degenerative processes affecting wildlife as well as livestock and consumers as well as farmworkers (Altieri, 1998, p. 65; Rampton & Stauber, 1997). The social effects are all those implied by the imposition of a modern form of debt peonage, notably, decaying rural communities incapable of supplying their own needs and with populations prone to various forms of anomic behavior (typically fascist and/or religious-fundamentalist). The dynamic in question operates on a global scale, as transnational food, chemical, and pharmaceutical corporations attempt to take legal possession of any naturally occurring substance—or communally evolved treatment thereof—whose controlled distribution might be lucrative. They do this by subjecting the desired substance to genetic manipulation, on the basis of which they claim—and obtain patents to establish—an “intellectual property right” to the substance (or the process). They then invoke the authority of international law as grounds to prosecute any indigenous community that might attempt to use the patented item (e.g., a seed or a plant) in traditional ways (Shiva, 1997). The patenting process has in some instances been extended to cover particular cells of the human body, which means that any medical use of such cells (regardless of whose body supplied them) has been made conditional on the payment of a fee to the patent holder (Rifkin, 1998, p. 61f; Shulman, 1999, p. 33ff). Moreover, patents of this sort no longer even presuppose any genetic alteration of the cells in question; merely to have isolated the cells is sufficient. Advocates of this practice defend it in terms of medical advances but fail to consider the implications of the power that it confers upon the patent-holding entities. At issue is the privatization of generic human body parts, as a result of which control over a given type of cell, tissue, or organ can become subject to market transactions. The particular persons whose bodies are made available for such procedures are to that extent absorbed into a matrix comparable to the slave market, the sex market, or the child-labor market. The victims are in all cases drawn from among those who have fallen below the essential conditions of a minimally human species-existence. Although the commodification of labor-power, the estrangement of labor, and the assault on man’s species-being pertain to the entire working class, Marx was well aware of the differentiation of conditions within the working class. He could thus call attention to those women in 19th-century England who were “still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus-population is below all calculation” (MEW, vol. 23, p. 415f; CW, vol. 35, p. 397). Capital thus found use in the most primitive of ways for those very sectors of the population that had been rendered “superfluous” by the most advanced machinery. In a similar way, the biotechnology of the late 20th century threatens to transmute hierarchies of class and empire into biologically distinct communities, in which those with the necessary resources will attain formidable physical resistance and longevity, while the excluded sectors, increasingly deprived of all bases of sustenance, will sink to previously unimagined depths of misery, from which they will again become available for uses incompatible with their humanity. V. Marx was the first to see the rule of capital as a threat to human species-existence. Beyond his philosophical discussion of Entfremdung, he later documented the extreme physical degeneration of workers drawn into the factory system (MEW,

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vol. 23, pp. 260, 285; CW, vol. 35, pp. 253, 275). The many improvements that were subsequently gained through workers’ struggles have not altered the underlying dynamic. In part, the centers of misery have shifted away from the industrial core; in part, the health-destroying impact has spread from the immediate environment of the factory to the larger environment of the earth’s ecosystem; and in part, with the aid of new technologies (informational as well as genetic), the difference in levels of power-resources available to ruling and subject classes has been carried to unprecedented heights. The dynamic affecting the natural as well as the social world is thus one in which, as anticipated in the Communist Manifesto, the response of the bourgeoisie to each emerging crisis only paves the way for “more extensive and more destructive crises” (MEW, vol. 4, p. 468; CW, vol. 6, p. 490). Marx’s approach to the humanity/nature relation, by establishing the context for his treatment of the social relations of production, equips us to understand the global crisis as it appears at the dawn of the 21st century. The newly felt dangers seen to be presented by the natural world represent the accumulated costs of the devastation imposed upon it by capital. Any large-scale alleviation of these dangers will require a correspondingly vast shift in the system of social relations. The core Gattungsfrage, namely the question of human survival, will thus remain inextricably linked to the resolution of the class question. REFERENCES Altieri, M. A. (1998). Ecological impacts of industrial agriculture. Monthly Review, 50(3), 60-71. Commoner, B. (1990). Making peace with the planet. New York: Pantheon. CW. (1975-). Collected works of Marx and Engels. New York: International Publishers. Davis, M. (1998). El Niño and year one. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 9(3), 61-73. Foster, J. B. (1998). The Communist Manifesto and the environment. In L. Panitch & C. Leys (Eds.), Socialist Register (pp. 169-189). London: Merlin. Gorbachev, M. (1988). Perestroika: New thinking for our country and the world. New York: Harper & Row. Haila, Y., & Levins, R. (1992). Humanity and nature: Ecology, science and society. London: Pluto. Haug, W. F. (1989). Gorbatschow: Versuch über den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken [Gorbachev: Toward an understanding of the context of his thought]. Hamburg, Germany: Argument. Heffernan, W. D. (1998). Agriculture and monopoly capital. Monthly Review, 50(3), 46-59. King, J. (1998). The biotechnology revolution: Self-replicating factories and the ownership of life forms. In J. Davis, T. Hirschl, & M. Stack (Eds.), Cutting edge: Technology, information, capitalism and social revolution (pp. 145-156). London: Verso. Levins, R., & Lewontin, R. C. (1985). The dialectical biologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lewontin, R. C. (1998). The maturing of capitalist agriculture: Farmer as proletarian. Monthly Review, 50(3), 72-84. Lewontin, R. C., Rose, S., & Kamin, L. J. (1984). Not in our genes: Biology, ideology, and human nature. New York: Pantheon. MEGA. (1975-). Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe [Complete Works]. Berlin, Germany: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus. MEW. (1957-). Marx-Engels Werke [Works]. Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus. Ollman, B. (1993). Dialectical investigations. New York: Routledge. Parsons, H. L. (Ed.). (1977). Marx and Engels on ecology. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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Rampton, S., & Stauber, J. (1997). Mad cow U.S.A.: Could the nightmare happen here? Monroe, MA: Common Courage. Rifkin, J. (1998). The biotech century: Harnessing the gene and remaking the world. New York: Putnam. Shiva, V. (1997). Biopiracy: The plunder of nature and knowledge. Boston: South End. Shiva, V., & Moser, I. (Eds.). (1995). Biopolitics: A feminist and ecological reader on biotechnology. London: Zed Books. Shulman, S. (1999). Owning the future. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Wallis, V. (1997a). Ecological socialism and human needs. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 8(4), 47-56. Wallis, V. (1997b). Elektrifizierung [Electrification]. In Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus [Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism] (Vol. 3). Hamburg, Germany: Argument. Wallis, V. (1997c). Lester Brown, the Worldwatch Institute, and the dilemmas of technocratic revolution. Organization & Environment, 10(2), 109-125.