In Part 2, John Bellamy Foster debunks the misconception that socialism and materialism had no role in the development of ecological analysis. His research shows that socialist transformation involves the transformation of human relations with nature, and that the modern ecological movement grew out of Marx’s analysis of the dialectics of society and nature. And there again, the Epicurean strand carries right through.
July 23, 2026 / Produced by Lynn Fries / GPEnewsdocs
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER ON “BREAKING THE BONDS OF FATE” – This is Part 2 of a 4 Part Series. Link for Part 1 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, and for the series Playlist here. ( Note: Links to Part 3 & 4 and the series Playlist will activate on publish date. Coming soon.)
TRANSCRIPT
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: The work by Engels in ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ is fundamental work…He was moving from what we call external nature to human beings in the analysis. And so he has this fundamental analysis of the part played by labor… He argued that human beings, and it was in line with Marx, Engels argued that human beings essentially created themselves.
We’re introducing things into nature, into the world that are synthetic. That species haven’t been able to adapt to, that aren’t the product of this long evolutionary process… And they introduce all kinds of toxicity – bioaccumulation, biomagnification – and so on. And this is what Rachel Carson was about…When she talked about evolution in the 1960s, she was connecting ‘the theory of the origin of life’ that Haldane and Oparin had introduced to evolution and to ecological crisis and to the notion of the biosphere, the earth system. The biosphere didn’t really become an acceptable term in the United States – because it was associated with the Soviet Union – until 1970. But she was presenting all of this and saying: This is all connected. This is how life comes about. This is what we’re destroying. And she was using the analysis of people like Haldane and Bernal – although not referring to them directly – in order to make her point.
LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.
That opening short was on ‘The Return of Nature’ and a quick preview what’s coming up in this segment. This is Part 2 of a 4-part series with John Bellamy Foster unpacking a trilogy – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’.
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prolific author, co-author and editor. As well as today’s featured books and many more, he has authored ‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene’, ‘The Dialectics of Ecology’ and co-authored ‘The Robbery of Nature’ and ‘The Ecological Rift’. His book ‘The Return of Nature’ won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.
In Part 1 Bellamy Foster gave an overview of the trilogy and commented on the first book, ‘Marx’s Ecology’. The focus of this segment is on the second book ‘The Return of Nature’. On this book the question first tabled was: Why did Bellamy Foster write ‘The Return of Nature’ and how does it follow on from ‘Marx’s Ecology’?
We go now to Part 2 of this series as Bellamy Foster responds to that question.
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: So in terms of ‘The Return of Nature’ , which is subtitled ‘Socialism and Ecology’, the question was what happened after Marx developed this ecological analysis? And I sort of prefigured that in the epilogue to ‘Marx’s Ecology’ but I had not dealt with it fully. And it was a response in a way and there was a need to connect things up. It was a response to the criticisms that originally came out of the book.
They said: Well, Marx’s ecology is irrelevant because no other thinkers were influenced by any of this. Later on, there were no socialists or ecological thinkers who followed this track or developed in line with this in any way. Then they also said: Well, Marx lived in a time where there were no PCBs and no nuclear weapons and so no nuclear radiation, no climate change. So how could his analysis be any use to us today?
So I wrote ‘The Return of Nature’ to continue the story. Originally, I actually wanted to go back to the foundations and do the book on Epicurus. But it was a more immediate problem to connect this analysis up to the environmental movement, to explain how socialism and materialism had played a role in the development, a fundamental role, maybe the crucial role in the development of ecological analysis.
And that was difficult because there had not been anything written on the subject. Helena Sheehan had done a book on ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Science’ that dealt with some of the big figures of British science. And that was a great help. But she hadn’t addressed the ecological problem.
This then was a crucial endeavor that I could not rely on secondary works for. There just wasn’t anything written. And so I had to do archival work. Which took a long time because I was busy with other things. And getting away to visit the library in Britain, for example or an archive in Britain, that just wasn’t always very easy and archives in the United States. So the project went on and on.
The story became very elaborate because so much did happen in that century. Marx died in 1883 and I basically brought the story up to the 1980s. So that’s a whole century that had to be covered.
The basic approach was this ecological materialism. One of the interesting things that became more and more apparent is that the Epicurean strand carries right through.
FRIES: We are going to be looking into your argument that socialism and materialism played a crucial role in the development of ecological analysis. And so, the development of ecological concepts – like the concept of ecosystem – and many other breakthroughs in the ecological movement.
Given its basic approach, ecological materialism, as explained in the book <quote>:
“This is a story that concerns art as well as science – the two principal means of ascertaining our sensuous relation to the world as a whole. It is the synthesis of the scientific and aesthetic critiques of capitalism that constitutes the basis of the modern ecological critique, leading to the pivotal notion of sustainable human development.”
“The major socialist (and social-democratic) thinkers that constitute the focus of this book were all politically and socially active in developing a critical-materialist view rooted in ecology and dialectics that extended to science and/or art.”
This book discusses the history of leading roles played by these British figures as strands of an interconnected tradition. And so a lineage of influences running from Marx through his contemporaries Lankester, Morris, and Engels; from Lankester to Tansley and Wells; from Engels to Bernal, Haldane, Needham, Hogben, and Levy; and from Morris and Engels to Caudwell. Leading classicists like Benjamin Farrington also figure in this history. From there, the modern ecological movement comes into the story with leading roles played Steven Rose in the UK and Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in the US.
And as you say: “One of the startling aspects of this history was the way it traced an Epicurean as well as a Marxist thread running through the entire development of ecological materialism.”
We can only dip into a fraction of all this. So, let’s discuss some of the scientific figures central to the story starting with E. Ray Lankester and Frederick Engels both of whom attended Marx’s funeral. And as you say, after Marx’s death, it was Engels who provided the most direct connection between Marxism and science.
Since Lankester is discussed in Part 1 of the book and Engels later in Part 2, let’s follow that order.
BELLAMY-FOSTER: The book begins with a discussion of E. Ray Lankester who was the leading biologist in England in the generation after Darwin and Huxley. And he was actually Darwin and Huxley’s protégé. Lankester was also a close friend of Karl Marx. Lankester’s father, Edwin Lankester was a medical doctor and scientist who’d been involved in discovering the causes of cholera and was a materialist. Lankester then had that background and became the protégé of Darwin and Huxley and late in his life, a close friend of Marx. Late in Marx’s life not late in Lankester’s life, he was still a young man.
Lankester was the first to introduce the term ecology into English. In the sense of, I mean he supervised the translation of one of Haeckel’s works. Which used the word ecology. He had worked with Haeckel in Germany, Ernst Haeckel. But Lankester also used the word bionomics. The whole idea was whether you used the word ecology in those days or you used bionomics it referred to what Darwin had called the ‘economy of nature’. So they were trying to get at the economy of nature and its relation to human society as well.
Lankester was the leading, probably the greatest ecological thinker of his time, environmental thinker. He wrote extensively on species extinction. He was also a pioneer in epidemiology, in disease from parasites. And dealt with the African sleeping sickness and argued that epidemics were primarily human caused. They weren’t simply natural. They were human caused.
He was a strong critic of capitalism but he is also the leading scientist – biologist – in England of his day. So, he is a phenomenal figure. He wrote about the human destruction of the environment all over the earth.
And he also had a very ecological perspective. He argued that you had to understand the relations between species in terms of the habitat. You had to because you had to be able to look at the nutrient cycling and so on. This is something that was related to Marx’s metabolic rift.
Marx’s metabolic rift was the notion (we didn’t really talk about it in terms of Marx and nature or not fully) that there’s a soil nutrient cycle. This is what Liebig was talking about. That in modern society – in capitalism, industrial capitalism – the basic soil nutrients,like nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium, are removed from the soil and sent to the new industrial centers in the food and fiber. And then this ends up being pollution in the city rather than being returned to the earth.
That’s sort of the structure of ecological crisis that Marx talked about in terms of metabolic rift. But it also helps us understand ecological crises in general, other kinds of similar rifts. So this created the problem of fertilizers. They had to build artificial fertilizers, synthetic fertilizers. They had to take guano from Peru to fertilize English fields to combat the destruction of the soil, the degradation of the soil and loss of soil fertility.
So nutrient cycling became a very big issue. And it was very fundamental to ecological thinking. Lankester built this into his notion of bionomics. His father had worked on aquariums. Lankester created a marine laboratory in England. Because you couldn’t look very well in those days at how animals interacted in the natural habitat, especially not in England. But you could look at marine systems. You could create a marine laboratory and begin to understand about nutrient cycling. So he was looking at this. And how in the disruptions that took place, he argued, we were destroying the fish stock and we were depleting the ocean.
One interesting thing is that Lankester’s student was Arthur Tansley (Lankester was a socialist of a Fabian type). Arthur Tansley became the leading British botanist, the leading British ecologist, actually, plant ecologist. It was Tansley in 1935 who introduced the notion of ecosystems. Fundamentally based on the analysis of metabolism, nutrient cycling and this sort of understanding of the interrelationship within nature. He also dealt with human destructiveness in that context.
He used the scientific systems theory of Hyman Levy, Marxist, mathematician and scientist in Britain to develop his ecosystem analysis. But this all came out of this sort of materialist tradition. There is sort of a lineage here and it is more complex than what I’m saying but Marx’s analysis clearly influenced Lankester. Lankester had read Marx’s ‘Capital’. And Tansley – who was also Fabian style socialist materialist who basically grew up in the working men’s college in England – carried some of this analysis further attacking idealist and racist views of ecology. So there’s all of that.
FRIES: To wrap up on E. Ray Lankester, as noted earlier, Lankester attended the funeral of Marx in 1883. It is also of note that Lankester attended Darwin’s funeral in 1882. To draw from the book:
“In his own person and intellect, he symbolized a continuing, complex critical-historical relation between socialist and Darwinian thought, and between the materialist conception of history and the materialist conception of nature that was to play a major role in British science for half a century or more, and which marked the emergence of modern ecological materialism.”
Turning now to a discussion on Engels, Part 2 of the book, Engels’s Ecology delves into Engels’s little known ecological world-view and his analysis of the dialectics of society and nature. This includes chapters featuring Engels’ work on – The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class, The Dialectics of Nature and The Ecology of Human Labor and Social Reproduction, respectively.
The chapter on The Dialectics of Nature includes a famous example of how Engels had gone further with Marx’s materialism and its relation to nature. To cite ‘Marx’s Ecology’ <quote>:
“[…] Marx sought to provide a natural-historical basis, linked to Darwin, for his own general theory of the role of labor (which was of course related to the development of tool making) in the development of human society. Engels was to develop this analysis even further in his path-breaking essay ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from the Ape to Man’ (written in 1876, first published posthumously in 1896).”
Comment on that essay by Engels.
BELLAMY FOSTER: The work by Engels in ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man‘ is fundamental work. ‘The Part Played by Labour’ was part of his ‘Dialectics of Nature’ – his unfinished work ‘The Dialectics of Nature’ – and it was the last part of what was finished. But it was supposed to come near the end of the book because he was moving from what we call external nature to human beings in the analysis. And so he has this fundamental analysis of the part played by labor.
He argued that human beings, and it was in line with Marx, Engels argued that human beings essentially created themselves. Evolutionary-wise, if you wanted to understand the development of the human mind, for example, you recognize that our ape-like ancestors came down from trees and had upright carriage and that freed up the hands. He argued, Engels said that it was tool making.
A lot of modern anthropology supports this. In fact, it’s the main line that tool making – it was actually laboring to survive – to try to make the earliest tools to meet subsistence needs. I mean, the earliest flaked stone implements, I think were used to get into carcasses so they could eat meat. That is what the anthropological data says. But they developed tools to have an extension of their organs and to be able to transform nature.
The ancient Greeks had said that the word organs both referred to parts of your body and to tools because they thought of the organs as the tools of the body. The idea is that human beings were able to extend their physical beings by making tools and then transform their relation to nature.
Engels said that you would find that the hands developed before the brain. Well, there was the Piltdown hoax in England about that time or after that fooled everybody for about 40 years. There was a hoax. They put an ape jaw with a human brain or something. Because there was this notion in idealist circles which dominated English thought that the brain came first, that human beings were defined by the brain. So the brain came first before other changes.
But there were all these anthropological discoveries in Africa – the Australopithecines – that showed exactly what Engels said. You know, it was related. Darwin had a similar view. And Ernst Haeckel in Germany had a similar view but Engels had developed it further. And it showed that the Australopithecines had more developed hands with ape-like brains. Exactly what is suggested, so that the hands develop first.
And it’s by interacting with nature that human beings, and obviously they did it socially, human beings are social animals and as they made tools and interacted with nature the language develops in tandem with that. And with that, there’s an evolutionary pressure to the development of bigger brains.
Stephen Jay Gould said Engels’s analysis in ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ was the leading work. I mean all thought on humanity’s evolution is about kind of ‘gene-brain coevolution’, ‘gene-culture coevolution’. And Stephen Jay Gould said that Engels represented the most developed theory of human evolution in the 19th century. And it was largely because this materialist perspective that said: Yeah, the mind didn’t just lead things. We evolved and our brains evolved our language by interacting with nature in fundamentally new and more intensive ways and more universal ways than animals could.
I don’t know how much Engels’ analysis directly influenced scientific development. But I think that others who knew Engels and knew German like E. Ray Lankester, who was a close friend of Marx and the protégé of Darwin and Huxley, developed a similar argument much later and I think he may have been influenced in that by Engels.
At any rate, that’s the basic way we understand human evolution. Now there are attempts to kind of reverse it. But the idea that “the tool make the man”, to quote a famous book, is really fundamental in anthropology.
So, Marx had said: Look, he had read Darwin’s ‘Origin’. And in ‘Capital’, he mentioned: Look, if we want to understand the anthropology of human beings, we have to look at their tools, at the tools, right? We’re not looking so much for bones. If we want to understand the development of human beings, it’s not so much the bones as in other species and the evolution of the physical anatomy, that’s important. What’s important is the evolution of tool making.
FRIES: So, Engels died in 1895. Lankester died in 1929. Talk next about the 1930s generation of British scientists. Who were some of the major figures in British science? And what had sparked their interest in the materialist view of science and for some an intense interest Engels’s ‘The Dialectics of Nature’ more than a half century after it was written?
BELLAMY FOSTER: There were British scientists and Marxist scientists like J.B.S. Haldane who was one of the principle developers of the modern synthesis on evolution. He was one of Britain’s great biologists, pioneered in so many different areas. Joseph Needham, who was the leading British biologist and theorist of evolution and emergence and ended up being the world’s greatest Sinologist in his time and expert on China and science and technology in China. J.D. Bernal, the crystallographer physicist and Hyman Levy; Lancelot Hogben is another figure who is very important in this.
They were all influenced by Marxism and materialism. And they were all kind of bringing together Marx and Darwin. And a critical aspect of this was opposition to ecological racism and idealism in South Africa that had developed with Jan Smuts, General Smuts in South Africa and his followers like John Phillips. So part of this was also attacking ecological racism and genetic theories of race. Hogben and Haldane played leading roles in attacking the notion of eugenics and a race gene.
All of these thinkers were involved in a materialist view. A lot of them were connected to the Communist Party at that time but they didn’t follow the Stalinist track.
What happened and what really brought together these scientists was that in 1931 in The Second International Congress on Science and Technology in Britain, a big event occurred, what was kind of a historic event. There was a plane that flew in from Russia. Which was stunning at the time because intercontinental flights were barely known. Bukharin stepped out along with a half a dozen Soviet scientists to visit this conference.
And leading British scientists on the Left – like Needham and I think Bernal, Hogben, Haldane wasn’t there at the time but most of these scientists were there at that meeting. They heard a whole different view of science. British science had had a very idealist framework and they heard a materialist approach.
Boris Hessen introduced a materialist interpretation of Newton and a critique of 17th century mechanism that was dialectical in nature. Nobody had ever heard anything like this before.
Bukharin talked about human beings and the biosphere and Marxism as integrated with the environment.
Nikolai Vavilov was the leading geneticist in Russia. I mean Russia was the leading ecological center in the world at the time due to the Russian revolution mostly. And Vavilov, with his assistant, had located the centers of germ plasm, the original centers of germ plasm all over the world using historical materialist methods. They located the origins of germ plasm. Which are still called the ‘Vavilov areas’. They theorized that if you wanted to find the original genes of contemporary plants -the origins, the genetic base with all of its diversity – you found the earliest areas of cultivation by human beings. So, they mapped all of that. Nobody had ever thought of that before.
There was another physicist who did a critique of vitalism. Which was very important. Vitalism is an attempt to say: well, you got material foundations but above that there’s something epiphenomenal. Something extra that we can’t explain in material terms that explains the mind or spirit or something else. He did a critique of vitalism on the basis of an emergent materialism.
So all of this and more was really fundamental. A whole lot, you know, a group of British scientists turned to Marxism under that and explored Engels’s ‘Dialectics of Nature’.
FRIES: In The Return of Engels, Chapter 9 of the book, you discuss new radical ideas on science and philosophy that were presented by Soviet scientists from the then revolutionary USSR at the time of this International Congress in 1931. And go on to make the point <quote>:
“Ironically it was in Britain rather than the USSR that the critical ideas of the Soviet delegates to the 1931 International Congress in London were to exert a major continuing influence.”
“Among the British socialist scientists, leading roles in developing what was commonly referred to in line with Soviet philosophy as “dialectical materialism,” were taken by Bernal, Haldane and Needham.” With respect to the attempt to connect materialist natural science and the dialectical process: “they drew almost all their inspiration with respect to the application of dialectics to the material world from Engels’s four later works, written in the 1870s and ’80s – ‘Anti-Dühring’; ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State’; ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’; and, after its publication in German in 1925 and in English in 1940, ‘The Dialectics of Nature’.”
As further discussed in ‘The Return of Nature’ <to quote>:
“For Engels, the relation between ‘freedom and necessity’ had first been correctly understood by G. W. F. Hegel. As Engels was to express it, ‘Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws’, and hence the conquest of nature, ‘but in the knowledge of these laws, and the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends’, which, however, must remain within nature’s laws as a whole. It was this that fed into Engels’s critique of capitalism’s transgression of nature’s laws and the resulting ecological destruction.”
So, talk now about the issue of the ‘dialectics of nature’ in Marxism.
BELLAMY FOSTER: One of the differences between ‘The Return of Nature’ and ‘Marx’s Ecology’ is that in ‘Marx’s Ecology’ I talked about Marx’s materialism. I didn’t talk about the ‘dialectics of nature’ because the ‘dialectics of nature’ is very controversial in Marxism. And I thought that if I brought that in too much – I did mention it – but if I brought in the ‘dialectics of nature’ in relation to Marx, people would just focus on that. And they wouldn’t understand or recognize Marx’s materialism and its relation to ecology. So I sort of left that aside because Engels had gone further with it. Though I left it aside until the next book, implicit throughout ‘Marx’s Ecology’ was Marx’s dialectical as opposed to mechanistic materialism.
But for Western Marxism, the ‘dialectics of nature’ was very controversial. When I went to my first critical theory course at the graduate level in York University in Toronto, I sat down and the instructor said: the first principle of critical theory is that there is no ‘dialectics of nature’.
In fact, Western Marxism had defined itself that way as rejecting any kind of ‘dialectics of nature’ in opposition particularly to Soviet Marxism. But you couldn’t use dialectical processes; you couldn’t think of nature in term in dialectical terms.
Then that sort of gave nature over to positivism, to rigid mechanical deterministic views. So Marxists basically abandoned science and abandoned any treatment of nature. So when the environmental movement came along, Western Marxism had disarmed itself. The Western Marxist philosophical tradition couldn’t really say anything meaningful because they didn’t have any ‘dialectics of nature’.
While other thinkers who had come out of this tradition that I’m talking about like Barry Commoner in the United States came out of this same Marxist scientific tradition (he had studied Engels’s ‘Dialectics of Nature’ and nature in Bernal and Haldane and this was an influence) and he recognized Marx’s ecological contributions. But the Western Marxist philosophers in the Western Marxist tradition basically couldn’t talk about it at all. The couldn’t get themselves to be positivists. But they’d already rejected a dialectical approach to nature. So basically, they had abstained from any analysis in that area.
So, they also rejected all the Marxist scientists in Britain. I was shocked when I read one of the major works on Marxism in Britain. And somebody said – I don’t think it was Bottomore – but anyway they said that the British had not contributed anything to Marxism of significance. I was completely thrown by that. Because by that you were saying that all these Marxist scientists, all these scientists – that talked about the relationship between nature and human freedom, that talked about the ‘dialectics of nature’ – they didn’t even rank as Marxist thinkers. Even though they were among the most influential thinkers in their time period and the most influential scientists in their time.
How could that be? But it was a very strict dividing line.
If you think of all these thinkers like Bernal and Haldane and Needham and Hogben and Hyman Levy and so on – they all referred to Epicurus. They all referred to the Epicurean materialism. So did Tansley, who quoted Lucretius in his famous article introducing the concept of ecosystem. Or he referred to Lucretius.
These thinkers all saw materialism as coming through this long tradition from Epicurus to Marx. And they tied this to ‘emergentism’ particularly, Needham. Needham, who is the great Sinologist as well tied Epicureanism to Daoism. Not that they had any direct contact from each other but they rose in similar historical periods and similar historical conditions, analogous. What we call the ‘Axial Age’.
And they represented in Needham’s terms and Samir Amin’s terms – the awakening of human self-consciousness – the notion that human beings were the self-mediating beings of nature as Marx always insisted. So, there were parallels and these thinkers understood that, emphasized that. But they’ve been largely ignored.
And also the greatest thinkers connected to these scientists were figures in the classics like Benjamin Farrington and George Thomson [have been largely ignored]. They were the leading classicists of ancient society in their time. And they were experts particularly on Epicureanism, both Farrington and Thomson. And they explored this. Farrington explored the relationship of Epicurus to Marx and Bacon. He introduced Marx’s doctoral dissertation to Hogben and these other thinkers. And so they were all part of this discussion.
But it completely disappeared from understanding in Marxism.
But you have a train of Marxist thinkers. Another one was Christopher Caudwell who was both a literary critic and a philosopher of science who was phenomenal in understanding this overall synthesis. He died at 29 in the Spanish Civil War but after producing a whole series of works very quickly. And he was part of this too. He knew the classics and he knew the science and he put a lot of this together.
So these thinkers, and there are others, they influenced later thinkers like Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould in the United States and Barry Commoner. Levins and Lewontin and Gould all refer back to their education in Engels, his ‘Dialectics of Nature’; Bernal and Haldane and so on.
So this tradition carried over into the United States, also visible in England with people like Steven Rose. This was a Marxist tradition and it was attached to the organization – Science for the People. But most Marxists in the social sciences completely ignored this.
There’s an aesthetic strand also in ‘The Return of Nature’ where I focus on William Morris too. Who wasn’t influenced so much by the scientific aspects of this but was deeply influenced by Marx and made all sorts of ecological connections himself and Morris influenced Hogben. So there are complicated strands of materialist, scientific and cultural analysis that was very ecological.
These names even though they were so famous worldwide were hardly known to scholars of Marxism in the social sciences.
In fact, are still disowned because some of them were close to the Communist party in England. But they were close to the Bukharin element. Bukharin remember had come into England on the plane with Vavilov and others and Boris Hessen. Most of them were executed. Most of them were the victims of Stalin’s purge. Stalin basically executed the ecologists. But these were the figures that the British Marxists were connected to. So they kind of carried forward that tradition and not that kind of degenerate tradition that came out of Stalin.
FRIES: Can you just recap the chronology of Stalin’s purge of those Soviet scientists?
BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. It was in the mid-thirties that Stalin really exercised power. And there was the Lysenko period where they politicized science in a very dangerous way. And a lot of scientists were executed. Bukharin was executed. Hessen was executed. Some of them were purged and died in prison. I think maybe Vavilov died in prison. But they all…they died in the purge, most of the leading figures in this.
This put the British Marxists in a peculiar position. They still tried to retain for quite a while a relation to the Soviet Union. But they were really part of this tradition of Russian science in the 1920s and early 1930s that was really revolutionary and ecological. And they carried forward in that tradition and out of Engels and Marx. They generally distanced themselves as much as they could from the Stalinist element. Not all of them broke completely with the Communist Party or at least not in the beginning. I think eventually all of them broke, one way or another. Bernal was a leader of a world peace movement [World Peace Council] that was grounded in the Soviet Union against nuclear weapons. So he really retained a relationship.
But what makes them unique is that they went forward with this kind of classical Marxist view and this revolutionary ecological materialist view. And so they in a sense were a continuation of some of the things that were going on early on in Russia. So Haldane is considered to be one of the discoverers along with Oparin- they’re the co-discoverers – Oparin in the Soviet Union and Haldane in Britain – of the materialist conception of the origin of life that has been so influential.
So, they carried that forward. That’s what makes them so interesting. But they were all victims of the Cold War. Since they were so prominent, they were targeted. So that was defeated for a while. But it reproduced in the United States with people like Levins and Lewontin who arose in the 1960s who had been influenced by all of this work. And they really restarted this kind of Marxist scientific perspective.
FRIES: In the history uncovered in ‘The Return of Nature’, this brings us to the period when the influence of this revolutionary ecological materialist view reasserts itself with the rise of the modern environmental movement. An era in which the influence of this tradition of rigorous ecological analysis and the necessary connection between materialism and dialectics, gets absorbed and carried forward. In discussing how this played out in the US, the book examines leading roles played by figures like Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, and Richard Lewontin.
Talk next about some of those major figures in the US ecological movement. Let’s start with comments on Barry Commoner and his Four Informal Laws of Ecology. I am thinking here more specifically of his law that ‘nature knows best’.
BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. One of his four laws is ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Which actually paraphrases almost exactly something that Engel’s says in ‘The Dialectics of Nature’ or ‘Anti-Dühring’ (I can’t remember which) – ‘nothing comes from nothing’. ‘Nothing being destroyed turns into nothing’. That is a basis of Greek materialism. Epicurus said that.
But the one that you refer to ‘nature knows best’ sounds strange to a lot of people. They think: Oh, well, that’s just, some sort of spiritual belief in nature. But that’s not what Commoner was saying. What he was saying is that most of what we have used in production – materials that we’ve used in production – up until the 1950s were products of millions of years; hundreds of millions of years, maybe billions of years of evolution. Materials that are at hand to us were products of geological time, many millions of years.
He is talking about what happened in the 1950s. I talk about this in ‘The Vulnerable Planet’. It’s the introduction of the ‘Synthetic Age’. And that’s connected to what we nowadays call the ‘Great Acceleration’ that created the Anthropocene. But in the 1950s partly coming out of the Second World War, we had two new fundamental technologies.
One was nuclear technology and the beginning of the ecological movement in the 1950s. It really dates back to the 1950s for people like Barry Commoner and Rachel Carson because she was a product of that. There was above ground nuclear testing and all the radionuclides. So this was endangering the population of the Earth. But nuclear radiation was a new thing, a new phenomenon. It was created by human beings as a result of the Second World War and then carried forward in the Cold War.
And the other thing was the rise of the petrochemical industry, the new synthetic chemicals, organic chemistry. Of course, organic chemistry goes back but this massive creation of chemical multinationals and huge scale chemical production where they’re creating all these synthetic chemicals. I mean, now there are – I keep losing track of the numbers – but I think it’s like a hundred thousand synthetic chemicals we’ve created. In Commoner’s day it was less; but all of these things, plastics and now we’re worried about micro-plastics.
But Commoner is looking at the ecological destruction, and it was a result to a large extent of radiation and this new chemistry polluting everything. And CFCs emerged in that period. And they threatened the ozone layer and so on.
So, it’s the rise of ‘the Synthetic Age’.
So when he said – ‘nature knows best’ – what he meant is we can trust much more in what nature created over millions of years. First of all, species have been able to adapt to those. But we’re making changes. We’re introducing things into nature and into the world that are synthetic, that species haven’t been able to adapt to. That aren’t a product of this long evolutionary process. And that they introduce all kinds of toxicity, – bioaccumulation, biomagnification – and so on.
And this is what Rachel Carson was about. She saw these processes of biomagnification and bioaccumulation. Which we first discovered in relation to radiation. And she was influenced by scientists on the left, on this. She first saw it in that way. Then she realized: Well, this applies to pesticides, to all these toxics too, they biomagnify and bioaccumulate and end up in human tissues.
She traced this to a system – an extreme profit system. That profit had become God and she directly opposed herself to that.
But she’s a product of the same tradition.
She saw these processes of biomagnification and bioaccumulation. Which we first discovered in relation to radiation and she was influenced by scientists on the left, on this – she first saw it in that way. Then she realized: Well, this applies to pesticides, to all these toxics too, they biomagnify and bioaccumulate and end up in human tissues.
She traced this to a system – an extreme profit system. That profit had become God and she directly opposed herself to that.
But she’s a product of the same tradition. When she talked about evolution in the 1960s she was connecting ‘the theory of the origin of life’ that Haldane and Oparin had introduced to evolution and to ecological crisis and to the notion of the biosphere, the earth system. The biosphere didn’t really become an acceptable term in the United States – because it was associated with the Soviet Union – until 1970.
But she was presenting all of this and saying: This is all connected. This is how life comes about. This is what we’re destroying. And she was using the analysis of people like Haldane and Bernal – although not referring to them directly – in order to make her point, which was extraordinarily powerful.
That’s when the word ‘ecology’ really became a popular term in English, based on that speech, that particular speech to a women’s group. And I think it was fundamental but the wisdom that she was providing there was basically ignored. People didn’t understand it or try to understand it. And we are where we are now.
FRIES: The word ‘ecology’, as you commented earlier was first introduced into English by E. Ray Lankester and the concepts of ecosystem and human ecology were introduced by Lankester’s students – Tansley and Wells. Drawing their inspiration from Engels, we spoke of how Bernal, Haldane and Needham brought dialectics to twentieth century natural science.
Bernal came to a central figure in the first great ecological movement of the post Second-World War period, the movement against above-ground nuclear testing. And Bernal’s influential book, ‘The Social Function of Science’, was foundational work in what became known as the Social Relations of Science movement. And from there, the idea of the social responsibility of science was then taken up by activists, under the banner – Science for the People.
In the history of the development of ecological materialism, in ‘The Return Of Nature’ the key figures you focus on in the US environmental movement were natural scientists, who as you say had absorbed the work of an earlier generation of UK scientists.
The Marxist thread and so dialectical way of thinking running through Barry Commoner’s law that ‘everything is connected to everything else’ is quite explicit. As you noted, it almost exactly paraphrases something said by Engels.
Comment more on this dialectical way of thinking. For example, as you point out in ‘Marx’s Ecology’ <quote>:
“Life (organisms) and the physical world, as Rachel Carson was wont to emphasize, do not exist in isolated compartments. Rather there is an extraordinary unity between organisms and the environment. A dialectical approach forces us to recognize that organisms in general do not simply adapt to their environment; they also affect that environment in various ways and by affecting it change it. The relationship is therefore a reciprocal one.”
BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. For example, Levins and Lewontin in ‘The Dialectical Biologist’, they have a chapter on organisms as subject and object. In the traditional adaptationist mode that came out of Darwin – and I don’t know how much Darwin is actually to blame for this there’s controversy over that but – he’s usually read in a kind of an adaptationist way so that species adapt to their environment. But in the dialectical frame, Levins and Lewontin argue that species change their environment as well as simply adapting to it.
And the environment of one species can be another species’ and much more than that. Maybe a deer will have a wolf in its ecosystem as part of its environment. So it’s a complicated development where you can’t approach it in a one-sided way.
In dialectics, we often talk about contradiction. And contradiction, as Bertell Ollman once said, is best understood as the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation.
But the thing is that in a kind of a dialectical frame you look for contradictions, material contradictions that are a result of change and opposing forces and development. And you try to understand, in that way, the possibilities in terms of change and movement.
So it’s all about change, movement, transformation and the fact that everything is really a relation. We don’t have things that are just separate from each other, like billiard balls. What we exist in is a complex of relations. So, we have to learn to think about things in that way.
Lukács tried to come up with a different approach to the ‘dialectics of nature’ that he thought was closer to Marx and rooted in the notion of labor metabolism. But at any rate, in the 1920s, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci also sort of backed off from the notion of the dialectics of nature. And then Merleau-Ponty – in I don’t know it was 1940s – defined western Marxism as the abandonment of the ‘dialectics of nature’ and then that sort of spread through the Western Marxist philosophical tradition.
So they didn’t reject dialectics. They thought dialectics only applies to society because with society you have the subject-object relation. You have human beings relating to objects and relating to each other where there’s interaction and not a contemplative approach to the objective world. They say this dialectic depends on the identical subject-object. So there can’t be any dialectics of nature where human beings aren’t present, right? You can’t look at how things happen in nature in dialectical terms.
But the British scientists actually argued you could. And they made all sorts of scientific discoveries based on that form of thinking. Levins and Lewontin, their ‘The Dialectical Biologist‘ is a work in that tradition. As well as Lewontin’s ‘Triple Helix’ [‘Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and the Environment’] that says: look, to understand evolution, you have to look at all three. You have to look at genes, organisms, and the environment – our ecosystem- all three to understand evolution. You can’t do it on the basis of any one of those.
It’s the whole dialectical relation that was so key to them. So this was very productive in science, particularly in the life sciences and within this Marxist tradition. And a lot of contemporary scientific views are essentially dialectical. They don’t use that language.
But the Western Marxist philosophical tradition backed off from that because they argued dialects could not apply to nature. Then nature becomes irrelevant to Marxism. But a Marxism that doesn’t have a relationship to nature is itself irrelevant.
FRIES: You talked how the rejection of the ‘dialectics of nature’ in the Western Marxist philosophical tradition created a divide in Marxism. Talk next about another divisive issue. Critics of Marx, charge that Marx was a pro-technological Promethean. Could you give some background on that?
BELLAMY FOSTER: If you go back to the Greek myth, if you go back to Aeschylus – Aeschylus’s ‘Prometheus Bound’ – which Marx read in the original Greek every year he was so fond of it. It’s really a story about enlightenment and revolution. Prometheus brought fire to humanity. And that stood – in the original Greek myth – not for technology or big engines or industrialism. It stood for enlightenment. It stood for light; being able to see. And it was understood that way for thousands of years. Like Voltaire came out with the term Enlightenment based on Lucretius’s statements about Epicurus in this sense.
You asked me earlier about – and maybe I didn’t answer – how Epicurus represented a shift away from speculative philosophy. He represented to some extent the introduction of the philosophy of science. A materialist philosophy and since that was seen as interfering with speculative philosophy, it was not seen by Hegel as fully philosophical. It was more tied to materialism and empiricism and science. So they made that division.
But this is what Marx meant when he said Epicurus was the Enlightenment figure of antiquity.
The Promethean myth for thousands of years was understood as a kind of revolutionary focus on enlightenment. In Aeschylus, Prometheus is bound in chains and he is still defiant of the Gods, resisting Zeus, and fighting on the behalf of humanity. For Marx, this defiance even in chains was a revolutionary story.
The term ‘Promethean’ is nowadays used primarily to refer to an extreme productivism, an extreme technologism. Somebody who thinks that production should forever expand at the accelerated ways and so on. It’s associated with the industrial revolution sometimes. But this was kind of an artificial creation. And it is drawn on the Greek myth very loosely.
This notion of ‘prometheanism’ in these terms started during the Cold War. When quite a few thinkers who were Cold War thinkers – mainly sort of coming out of the Left like Robert Tucker and a whole lot of others Daniel Bell – started using the term ‘Promethean’ to criticize Marx and Marxism and to claim that Marx was an extreme productivist.
It’s a weird thing. So there are all these discussions and Anthony Giddens I think introduced the Promethean criticism into Marx and ecology. He said that Marx was a Promethean industrialist and so on. And that he had only contempt for nature.
And so there was all this literature that said: Well, Marx was Promethean – and still today – or that he was an eco-modernist in today’s sense. That he believed industrialism would solve the ecological problem. The term Promethean was thrown around in that sense.
Originally, it was an attack on Marx to characterize him as productivist and oriented towards Big Industry and technologism as opposed to being a humanist. Then it switched and it got to be a criticism of Marx: He’s Promethean. He’s not an ecologist.
The whole thing is totally absurd, really. So, I wrote saying Marx wasn’t ‘Promethean’.
It’s very clear that Marx was opposed to any such views of mechanistic ‘prometheanism’.
FRIES: Comment next on a critique of the notion of progress itself, more specifically, an ecological critique. Among the discussions about this in the book you refer to US scientist Stephen Jay Gould. You say <quote>:
“Gould’s intellectual corpus was full of dialectical accounts of the evolution of organisms in relation to the environment, considering numerous factors, including structural change and the pathways they generated, and contingent historical developments. It was contingency that destroyed all teleological accounts and made evolution a historical phenomenon.”
“Gould’s singular contribution to ecological analysis was his critique of the crude concept of progress – a critique that pervaded all of his thought and was a product of his dialectical-evolutionary view. The most serious fallacy associated with Western norms, he argued was ‘the idea of progress, the idea that we can see ourselves as predictably and properly on top of this biological heap’, and that evolution can be depicted ‘as moving upward from single-celled creatures predictably toward the eventual appearance of some self-conscious form, like human beings’. Far from advancing human progress as an inherent teleological trait, he pointed to the fact that ‘no other species has ever had the capacity to destroy itself and drag large parts of the earth down with it’. In this respect, he fancifully suggested that humanity should make a sustainability pact with our planet to live and let live: the problem lay entirely on the side of humanity and its defective notions of progress.”
Comment on the regressive conception of progress.
BELLAMY FOSTER: All ecological thinking has been very skeptical of the notion of progress. And it goes way back. The notion of progress is often seen as like the ‘Whig view’ of history. That everything that modernizes gets continually better. ‘Modernization’ is sort of a seen as a teleological process that’s brought on by capitalism that always creates progressive results.
But ecological thinking has always been opposed to that. Lankester wrote a work on degeneration. Which Marx really liked. Marx tried to help get it published in Russian. Lankester was studying parasites and he was studying how evolution is not necessarily progressive. It isn’t necessarily about improvement. Obviously, it can be de-evolution in some cases, a degeneration, higher life forms can deteriorate, can give way to lower life forms, right?
So he was talking about this. And Marx at various places like in a speech he gave in England criticized the notion of progress. Not that we don’t want to improve but any notion of inevitable or automatic progress.
Materialism is really and certainly Marx’s materialism is an open-ended view. So, this is very important. And in terms of all of these thinkers criticize any simple concept of progress. That doesn’t mean that we can’t improve things; we can’t get to a better place. But as Epicurus says, “It’s up to us”. It doesn’t happen in any deterministic way. We have to make it happen.
There’s nothing to suggest today that capitalism automatically leads to progress. In fact, I once wrote an article called ‘The Accumulation of Catastrophe’. Because as we develop, especially under capitalism, there are all sorts of gains but we’re expanding the potential for catastrophe at the same time.
And we have to understand that. We can’t see it as just progress. When Donald Trump says he’s going to increase military spending by 50% next year, no doubt it’ll result in modernization of the military and maybe new technology. But there’s no way to call that progress in any uncritical way.
FRIES: In the closing paragraph of ‘The Return of Nature’ you write <quote>:
“Two millennia after Lucretius’s ‘De rerum natura’, Rachel Carson in ‘Silent Spring’ evoked the killing off of birds by noxious fumes and effluvia as the symbol of a new, more lethal age of destruction brought on by ‘the gods of profit and production’. What we must dethrone today is the idol of capital itself, the concentrated power of class-based avarice, which now imperils the ecology of the earth. It is this that constitutes the entire meaning of freedom as necessity and the return of nature in our time.”
Comment on this kind of popular writing by Rachel Carson and other scientists in that tradition.
BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah, one of the things think about her writing ‘Silent Spring’. Think about Barry Commoner writing ‘The Closing Circle’. Think of some of Levins’s and Lewontin’s writings. Or Gould, you know, he’s such a famous writer of essays on nature. Think about the popular writings of Haldane and Bernal and Hogben. All these scientific figures entered into popular writing in a big way.
They wrote for the public. They devoted most of their efforts – even when they were making scientific advances – they mostly wrote for the general public. Because they believed that science and meaningful change comes from the bottom. They wanted to reach people and get them involved in materialist thinking and science and their own relation to the world so that they could play a role in human praxis to change and transform the world. So they were not like other scientists who were abstract.
Rachel Carson, and you just pointed out in that quote, was inviting the creation of environmental movement. Her book was meant to create environmental movement, to alert people. I mean, it starts off with the parable of “silent spring”. A parable where you go outside and there are no bird songs anymore. There are no birds whatsoever. It reminds me of Lucretius where he talks about the same thing “the loss of birds”. It’s a metaphor for what could happen for the disappearance of so much of external nature.
FRIES: Like Rachel Carson, Lucretius was writing for the public. As a student of Epicurus, Lucretius’s popular writing focused on Epicurus’s materialist philosophy. In commenting on Epicurean materialism you wrote <to quote>:
“In its materialism and its ethics, that is its emphasis on freedom, equality and justice, if not exactly in its praxis of self-sufficiency and ‘ataraxia’, Epicureanism had prefigured modern socialism. As Marx wrote in his ‘Seventh Epicurean Notebook’ – using a metaphor that was later to become increasingly important to him, drawn from Hegel and William Shakespeare – what was revealed in the study of Epicurus was the ‘silent, persevering mole of real philosophical knowledge’ struggling to emerge to take ‘its place in history’. In Epicurus, the mole represented the emergence of materialism for the first time as a social doctrine, one in which the individual human being was both a material being and a social being, and therefore needed to struggle to be free.”
This wraps up our look into ‘The Return of Nature’, which extends the lineage discussed in ‘Marx’s Ecology’—from Epicurus (3rd c. BCE) through Marx (19th c.) up to the modern environmental movement. And in doing so, shows how socialism, as a social doctrine emerging from materialism, was crucial in the development of ecological analysis.
That quote about Epicureanism prefiguring modern socialism comes from ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus & Marx’, published in 2025. As we turn now to this last book in the trilogy, let’s start with the title itself. What does ‘breaking the bonds of fate’ actually refer to?
LYNN FRIES: John Bellamy Foster’s response to that question and more follows in Part 3. We are going to break here. This has been Part 2 of a 4- part series with John Bellamy Foster on a trilogy: ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’ and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. Many thanks to guest John Bellamy Foster. And thank you for joining us.
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GUEST BIO
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. A leading scholar in political economy and environmental sociology, he is author of the trilogy Marx’s Ecology (2000), The Return of Nature (2020), and Breaking the Bonds of Fate (2025), and editor of Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay (2025). Among numerous other works, he is also author of The Dialectics of Ecology (2024), Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022), and The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (2014).
