John Bellamy Foster and Guo Jianren: Why a Great Ecological Civilization Can Emerge in Socialist China
John Bellamy Foster is an internationally renowned eco-Marxist theorist, currently serving as the editor-in-chief of the famous American leftist journal Monthly Review and as a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. His early studies spanned science, philosophy, history, journalism, political economy, and political theory; he earned his PhD from York University in Toronto, Canada, in 1984. Foster’s doctoral dissertation was revised and expanded into the title The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxist Political Economy, published by Monthly Review Press in 1986. In 1979, Foster published a long-form essay, "The United States and Monopoly Capital: The Issue of Excess Capacity," which laid the foundation for his collaboration with Paul Sweezy (1910–2004) and thereby launched his scholarly career. Using Marxist political economy as his research program, Foster has focused on the historical and theoretical study of capitalism's economic, political, and ecological contradictions. He has produced a vast quantity of books and essays and is world-renowned as a major eco-Marxist theorist and environmental sociologist.
His representative works include Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (with Fred Magdoff, 2009), The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010), The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxist Political Economy (2014), Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (with Paul Burkett, 2016), Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce (2017), The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2019), The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift (with Brett Clark, 2019), and Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (2022). Many of these works have been translated and published in Chinese. Within the Chinese Marxist academic community and the intellectual circles of ecological environmental protection, Foster is regarded as an eco-Marxist scholar. Foster’s ecological materialism and theory of metabolic rift are well known to relevant domestic academic circles, and his influence in international Marxist academia and environmental sociology is increasingly prominent. Foster’s eco-Marxist thought is the theoretical extension and logical outcome of his adherence to a Marxist political economy research program as applied to the relationship between society and nature.
The overarching claims of Foster’s writings in recent years are: (1) In the 1950s, what geologists call the Holocene epoch on the geological time scale ended, and the Anthropocene began. Human activity is now the primary geological force affecting the entire planet; this immense geological force originates from the globalized system of capital accumulation. Over past centuries, and particularly the most recent century, this system of capital accumulation has extensively and freely plundered nature through commodity production, causing an anthropogenic rift in the Earth’s ecosystem and thereby bringing a severe crisis of survival to the world’s population. (2) Human civilization is at a great turning point. Future human civilization should both coexist in peace with the Earth—no longer creating irreversible rifts—and satisfy the freedom of development for every person and every species; this is ecological civilization. The large-scale private ownership of capitalism inherently excludes this brand of ecological civilization; capitalism is the common and fundamental cause of social alienation, individual alienation, the alienation of nature, and the alienation of the relationship between humanity and nature. Realizing ecological civilization requires a long-term ecological revolution, which must unify the people’s pursuit of social justice with the requirements for ecologically sustainable development.
This interview mainly revolves around the lecture Foster delivered at the invitation of the Sanshenggu Cobb Eco-Academy, titled "Ecological Civilization and Ecological Revolution: An Eco-Marxist Perspective." In the lecture and interview, Foster emphasizes: ecological civilization construction in today's world must move toward socialism; Chinese ecological civilization construction—which synthesizes socialism with Chinese characteristics, eco-Marxism, and the essence of traditional Chinese culture—possesses a comprehensive, profound, and feasible roadmap for ecological transition and can achieve outstanding results in practice; at this critical juncture for the survival of the Earth and humanity, the "environmental proletariat" of the whole world needs to unite, as the environmental proletariat is the most fundamental and primary subject of the ecological revolution for the true realization of ecological civilization; the sublation of the existing capitalist system through ecological revolution is the only choice for realizing ecological civilization; and from the perspective of global ecological governance, within the development of socialism, the role China plays on the stage of ecological civilization construction can be regarded as the greatest gift offered to the world. The content of the interview is shared below.
Guo Jianren: Professor Foster, my sincere thanks for accepting this interview! This is my first time interviewing you, and as far as I know, it is also the first time you have accepted an interview with an eco-Marxist researcher from Mainland China. I am deeply honored, especially as a researcher who has studied your many works for a long time. In 2004, I introduced your eco-Marxist thought to the Chinese Marxist academic community somewhat systematically in the form of a doctoral dissertation. Over the past twenty years, eco-Marxist researchers in Mainland China have studied your thought more deeply and systematically; your eco-Marxist ideas have gained wider recognition, research, and dissemination. Thank you for the contribution your eco-Marxist thought has made to Chinese eco-Marxist research! At the same time, thank you for giving the lecture "Ecological Civilization and Ecological Revolution: An Eco-Marxist Perspective" at the invitation of the Sanshenggu Cobb Eco-Academy! Our interview will mainly revolve around the theme of your lecture.
Your lecture unfolds from both historical and realistic levels, centered on the dialectical relationship between ecological civilization, eco-Marxism, and ecological revolution. You argued for the importance of ecosocialism or eco-Marxism to the concept of ecological civilization, pointing out that in non-socialist countries, people can only discuss ecological civilization in an abstract and hollow way. You explicitly opposed and refuted cultural theorist Jeremy Lent’s analysis of the concept of Chinese ecological civilization. Lent examines the concept of Chinese ecological civilization solely from the perspective of traditional Chinese culture, severing the link between the concept of Chinese ecological civilization and the socialist system and Marxist intellectual tradition, while setting traditional Chinese culture in opposition to socialism and Marxism. Lent’s analysis is seriously inconsistent with the developmental history and practical reality of the concept of Chinese ecological civilization.
In contrast, your analysis leads to a question we are very concerned with: based on your method of ecological materialism—developed on the foundation of historical materialism and dialectical materialism—how should one incorporate intellectual and cultural elements outside the Marxist tradition (such as natural science research results, the essence of traditional Chinese culture, or certain ideas from A.N. Whitehead’s organic philosophy) into the theoretical innovation and research of eco-Marxism and Chinese ecological civilization? This is an urgent theoretical question that Chinese eco-Marxism currently needs to answer. Under the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization, China’s ecological civilization practice is changing with each passing day; new practices require the continuous development of relevant theories to achieve the coordinated progress of theory and practice.
Foster: Thank you for your praise of my work! Your first question is quite daunting: how do we explore together the relationship between Marxism (especially eco-Marxism) and the natural sciences, Whitehead’s process philosophy and organic philosophy, and traditional Chinese culture? How can these theoretical forms and practices collaborate to jointly promote ecological civilization construction in contemporary China? Won't this bring us irreconcilable conflicts? Indeed, considerable inconsistencies and even conflicts exist between these theoretical forms, but I am immediately reminded of Joseph Needham, a member of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. Needham’s thought and research career show me that a synthesis is possible between these theoretical forms. Needham was: (1) a pioneer of biochemistry and the history of science; (2) a Marxist theorist (he promoted our understanding of the dialectical relationship between nature and society); (3) an advocate of ecological materialism; (4) an admirer of Whitehead’s process philosophy; (5) the most outstanding Western expert (Sinologist) of his time studying Chinese science and culture; (6) an advocate of traditional Chinese culture, especially the traditional Chinese cultural view of ecology—he called himself an "honorary Taoist" [1]. From a certain eclectic perspective, within Needham, all the intellectual traditions you mentioned have already been unified.
Needham believed that Chinese science had long displayed "a philosophy of organic nature... very similar to the philosophy that modern science has had to adopt after discarding the mechanical materialism that prevailed for three centuries." For Needham, Marx’s dialectical view was most important for creating a brand-new contemporary view of ecology. However, it is also necessary for a brand-new ecological view to draw lessons from Whitehead’s process philosophy and traditional Chinese thought. He explained that Taoism did not deny the necessity of taking action (toward nature), but rather insisted that "no action should be taken that goes against nature" [2]. Therefore, Needham advocated a dialectical ecological materialism that absorbed many intellectual resources, all of which were anti-capitalist. I discussed these ideas of Needham’s in my book The Return of Nature. Needham reminded people that Marxism is not limited to the social sciences; the natural sciences are its "second foundation." In fact, the dialectical view inherent in Marxism does not allow for an absolute distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences.
Just as Needham maintained, Chinese culture has deep ecological roots. It is precisely socialism with Chinese characteristics and eco-Marxism that have placed the concept of ecological civilization on China’s agenda today in a way that the capitalist system itself completely lacks. Without taking socialist production as the program, it is impossible to truly construct an ecological civilization system. Xi Jinping spoke of "global ecological civilization construction" (October 18, 2017). The core point of my lecture this time is that the ecological civilization required by the world today must move toward socialism. In the same speech, Xi Jinping spoke further of a "socialist ecological civilization" that inherentlys contains a "new pattern of modernization featuring the harmonious development of humanity and nature." Here, he clearly pointed out that unless "global ecological civilization construction" is simultaneously a socialist movement, it will be difficult to truly realize—just as the cruel lessons of the Anthropocene era, which began around 1950, have already shown. It is precisely this painful experience that tells us we must find a completely different path.
Guo Jianren: In your speech, you took your own country, the United States of America, as an example to analyze the measures for governing the ecological environment under the Green New Deal within the Western democratic political system, noting their incompleteness and unfeasibility. Furthermore, you have gained insight into the positive roles played by factors and methods such as socialist orientation, the retention of partial economic planning capabilities, state direction, collective values, and the mobilization of urban and rural masses in the process of building ecological civilization in China. These practices you observed are precisely the concrete manifestations and expressions of China's "Five-Sphere Integrated Plan" [3] in the construction of ecological civilization. In your lecture, you also examined the correlation between political forces, the logic of capital, and changes in the lifestyles of the populace. In 2014, you released a new edition of The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxist Political Economy, which you originally published in the 1980s; your research on monopoly capital is equally profound. From the perspective of political reform, could you briefly elaborate for us the general mechanism between politico-economic logic and the construction of ecological civilization, or share more of your findings on this topic with the Chinese eco-Marxist academic community?
Foster: The core question of my speech was: why can a project with such profound historical significance as ecological civilization arise in China? Conversely, why does this creative concept of ecological civilization—especially regarding the scale it should achieve—hardly ever appear in public discourse or even in the topics of the Left in the United States, Europe, or most of the rest of the world? Although the idea of a Green New Deal was indeed proposed by progressives in the West, this concept is usually viewed simply as Green Keynesianism or Green Corporatism. That is to say, it is regarded as a narrow economic plan, completely consistent with capitalism, aimed merely at promoting green jobs. The concept of the Green New Deal is a far cry from China’s ecological civilization aspirations. The goal of China’s ecological civilization is to promote the development of the entire culture, profound politico-economic and environmental changes, and the formation of a more sustainable relationship between humanity and nature in this process. Furthermore, while China has already taken action to implement its radical vision of ecological civilization—formulating national plans and establishing rules and regulations—the Western concept of the Green New Deal has not advanced in any concrete form. For the West, the Green New Deal is merely a slogan without any real political support within the capitalist system; it is spoken of by progressive forces and then rejected by the powers that be.
The current Democratic administration in Washington and its Republican opponents have both rejected even a nominal Green New Deal program. Joe Biden ran for office partly to oppose the progressive Green New Deal proposed by some Democrats. He promised corporations and the wealthy that "nothing would fundamentally change." All of this is incomparable to the importance China attaches to ecological civilization, which China regards as a core task of socialist construction. Like other countries, China certainly faces many ecological contradictions. However, China has a roadmap for ecological transition, whereas the imperialist core of the capitalist system does not.
It is correct to treat the differences between different politico-economic systems as an object of study and to link these differences to the theory of monopoly capitalism. Those countries regarded by Samir Amin as constituting the "Triad"—the United States/Canada, Western Europe, and Japan—are the center countries of monopoly capitalism. Current capitalism is in an era where giant corporations hold monpoly positions; these giant corporations combine vertically and horizontally, mostly in the form of conglomerates, forming transnational corporations that bestride the world and dominate the entire global supply chain. The theory of monopoly capitalism originated in the works of Rudolf Hilferding and V.I. Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century and was subsequently advanced by many thinkers, as revealed by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in their most famous work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. Monopoly capital theory reminds people that monopoly capitalism can effectively prohibit genuine price competition; although this is closely related to indirect collusion between large firms, these firms still compete on low costs and in areas such as sales (marketing), the result of which is the continuous expansion of the gross profit margins of monopoly firms.
Monopoly capitalism tends to trigger high unemployment/underemployment, low utilization of productive forces, and stagnation of accumulation, which in turn leads to a trend of low growth. This is closely related to the over-accumulation of productive capacity, which is linked to the demand and concentration of surplus at the top of society. The excessive concentration of wealth and income among the top strata of society becomes an obstacle to capital accumulation itself. Therefore, the factors triggering social crisis trends lie not on the side of the production of economic surplus (surplus value) but on the side of its absorption, which is often completed through investment and consumption. This set of structural conditions creates functional waste throughout the entire monopoly capitalist system. The result is that, on the one hand, to keep the economy running, it is necessary to intensify wasteful modes of consumption and (material) use; on the other hand, the most basic needs of the majority of the population (food, healthcare, and housing) cannot be met or are severely deficient, and military spending becomes a major component of this wasteful economy. In recent decades, the continuous growth of unproductive expenditures has pushed the economy toward large-scale financialization—or rather, the expansion of speculative debt is accelerating, not merely cyclically, but on a more or less permanent basis, which will lead to financial bubbles and a growing tendency toward financial crises. In this situation, the state is forced to continuously bail out capital at the expense of spending on the rest of society.
The famous conservative economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter once defended monopoly capital, calling it the embodiment of "creative destruction." However, what we see today is the creative destruction of the environment worldwide, extending to the Earth itself. Such a destructive system of capitalist development leaves no room for the vision of ecological civilization, even in the eyes of some of the most left-wing critics, because this requires—to borrow the words of the Communist Manifesto—"a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large." From an ecological perspective, such a reconstruction is possible. Waste, irrationality, destruction, and the loss of human potential all indicate that within the social network constructed by the various components of capitalism, the various capacities of human society itself are being abused or sidelined. To build a society oriented toward human needs and development, which values use-value and protects the environment, certainly requires a transition to socialism.
Guo Jianren: In your speech, you emphasized the importance of Marx’s three concepts of "the universal metabolism of nature," "social metabolism," and the "metabolic rift" for the development of eco-Marxism, and pointed out that these three concepts are a "trinity." Can these concepts be seen as a further development of the metabolic rift theory you systematically elaborated in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, published in 2000? China’s urbanization process is still ongoing, which partly means the trend of population concentration from rural areas to cities will continue. In China, rural revitalization has been elevated to an important strategic position, and rural revitalization requires a certain level of population as a necessary condition. Furthermore, classical Marxist writers such as Marx and Lenin tended to believe that population dispersion is more conducive to the balanced development of economy and society and to reducing the plunder of the land. You touched upon all of these in your speech. Combining your analysis of Marx’s three concepts of "the universal metabolism of nature," "social metabolism," and the "metabolic rift," can you offer some constructive theoretical suggestions on the relationship between China’s urbanization construction, rural revitalization, and ecological civilization practice?
Foster: When I wrote Marx’s Ecology, I emphasized Marx’s concepts of social metabolism and metabolic rift. Although I had always presupposed that a concept of the universal metabolism of nature lay behind Marx’s concepts of social metabolism and metabolic rift, I did not explicitly elaborate on it. This was partly because the view of the universal metabolism of nature is not as prominent in Capital. It was not until I carefully studied Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1861–1863 and saw that Marx explicitly elaborated on the "universal metabolism of nature" in this manuscript that I recognized the full dimensions of Marx’s metabolic analysis. This does not conflict at all with the explanation in Marx’s Ecology; on the contrary, it makes Marx's dialectical analysis of ecological contradictions and the related metabolic rift clearer and more powerful. In the article "Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature" in the December 2013 issue of Monthly Review, I believe I developed this new understanding for the first time. Subsequently, in collaboration with Bret Clark, I conducted a more in-depth study of this in the article "Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology," published in the October 2016 issue of Monthly Review. In that paper, to clarify the various dialectical relationships, we combined Marx’s dialectic of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and the metabolic rift with István Mészáros’s analysis of the "conceptual framework of Marx’s theory of alienation" in his book Marx’s Theory of Alienation. This led to a more unified understanding of the dialectical research Marx conducted in the field of metabolic analysis, and it became the core concept of my new book, Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution.
I believe there is indeed a relationship between ecological dialectics and the dual issues of urbanization and rural revitalization in China. You are correct that Marx, Engels, and Lenin tended to emphasize the necessity of dispersing the population into rural areas. Viewed in this context, the planning of China’s accelerated urban development has already triggered a variety of ecological problems. Does hyper-urbanization have the potential to widen China’s metabolic rift? This is a question I have asked myself. A related issue is the extensive reliance of economic production in export-oriented regions on migrant workers—for example, the question of how to manage the separation between urban and rural areas that this induces. Although I am encouraged by the Chinese Rural Reconstruction Movement and the recent rural revitalization [4] programs, I still do not have a definitive answer. One extraordinary achievement of the Chinese Revolution remains preserved to this day, though it is not widely understood in the West: despite the dismantling of collective agriculture and the earlier commune structures, land in China is still collectively owned by the rural population. In this sense, decollectivization did not evolve into full privatization. Agriculture is still largely organized by rural communities. In recent years, China has pivoted back toward Marxist political economy. With only 7% of the world's arable land, China manages to feed 20% of the world's population. In the decade from 2003 to 2013, China’s grain output increased by 50%. Between 2013 and 2019, the number of towns in China with supply and marketing cooperatives—aimed at improving resource distribution and ownership in rural areas—increased from 50% to 95%. Recently, China eliminated extreme poverty, which was primarily concentrated in rural areas across the country. In the urban sector, the CPC under the leadership of Xi Jinping has been calling for the construction of more eco-cities. These developments reflect a (full) recognition of the dialectics of this field, which have long been part of Marxist theory. However, these contradictions persist and immense efforts must be made to overcome them, as seen in the many current environmental pollution prevention and control actions being carried out in China’s rural areas. But this appears to constitute a symbiotic relationship with the priorities of society itself, providing hope for achieving greater progress.
Guo Jianren: In the section of your lecture titled "Revolutionary Ecosocialism and the Future," you mentioned that without an environmental proletariat, true eco-communism cannot be realized, because ecological civilization, eco-Marxism, and ecological revolution, along with the economic proletariat, are not enough. You elaborated on this in your 2022 book Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Destruction or Ecological Revolution. In this interview, could you provide some more specific explanations regarding the environmental proletariat for Chinese readers? For example, what are the characteristics of the environmental proletariat? What are the similarities and differences between the environmental proletariat and the economic proletariat? In what sense is the environmental proletariat the most basic and primary subject of the ecological revolution for realizing eco-communism?
Foster: The reason for proposing the concept of the environmental proletariat is partly as a corrective to the specific understanding of the concept of the proletariat that we have held historically and in existing Marxist theory, while also providing a way to grasp the various historical conditions emerging in the 21st century. Where economism [5] plagues socialist thought, including Marxist theory, is that it not only reduces the importance of political and cultural conditions but also simplifies material conditions to the few aspects of economy, industry, and technology that characterize capitalism. In an economistic context, the concept of the proletariat is reduced to the industrial proletariat or the industrial working class, and is often limited to the urban population. However, Marx and Engels themselves had a broader concept of the proletariat that was not restricted to the role of factory workers. Nor did they understand material conditions in narrow economic terms; rather, they included a much wider range of environmental conditions related to the worker.
This broader concept of the proletariat is most prominent in Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, which examines the proletariat primarily in terms of environmental conditions, focusing on various conditions related to epidemics, including the spread of disease, urban pollution, housing, injuries, mortality rates of various classes, and so on. Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England against the backdrop of the radical Chartist movement and following what were known in Britain at the time as the famous "Plug Plot Riots." From the perspective of the workers' living environment and epidemics, Engels wrote of "social murder" committed against the working class, referring to the workers' considerably low life expectancy and the refusal of capitalist society to improve the conditions leading to it.
For many years, socialist circles have viewed the working class almost exclusively in terms of labor actions; by contrast, the concept of the environmental (not just economic) proletariat—which already exists in classical historical materialism in a broader sense—can point to a wider reality, one in which class consciousness, and especially revolutionary class consciousness, grows. The concept of the environmental proletariat also involves the issue of the social reproduction of workers within the domestic sphere. Furthermore, starting from the perspective of the environmental proletariat, we can understand the alliance between the peasantry and the working class—including proletarianized agricultural laborers and landless workers—throughout the world, especially in the Global South. Contrary to false rumors, Marx and Engels were not anti-peasant, but wrote extensively in support of peasant class struggles. Of particular note is that the great socialist revolutions in Russia, China, and elsewhere all involved a proletarian-peasant alliance. If we wish to view these events from a cultural perspective, as we do here from an eco-materialist perspective, we can draw on the cultural materialist views proposed by Raymond Williams and others.
At present, as the global ecological crisis increasingly becomes the dominant factor controlling material conditions, an environmental proletariat (and, in the broadest sense, an ecological peasantry) will inevitably emerge, and is in fact emerging. Today, the "wretched of the earth" are struggling for better material, environmental, and economic conditions (where economic conditions are affected by changing environmental conditions, which are themselves indirect products of global capital accumulation). These shifts in conditions are occurring in such a way that they are intertwined; in the living conditions of the working class, it is generally impossible to clearly distinguish the economic aspects from the environmental factors within the material conditions. If food shortages occur, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between economic causes and environmental causes, and the same applies to the analysis of the causes of water scarcity. But it is important to recognize that these deteriorating material conditions are caused by the capitalist social order, which prevents attempts to improve these material conditions and advances social murder. The struggle against these material-environmental conditions will inevitably help to unify and strengthen the power of the working class as a whole—a phenomenon we can see all over the world, especially in Latin America. In some countries there, despite contradictions and complexities, traditional socialist struggles based in the working class are uniting with the local struggles of indigenous peoples. These steadily advancing alliances are precisely ecosocialist alliances.
Guo Jianren: The construction of China’s ecological civilization is a vital component of global ecological governance and an important constructive force in the inevitable transition of human civilization after the earth entered the Anthropocene. Could you share with Chinese readers your views on the relationship between China’s construction of an ecological civilization and global ecological governance, as well as the relationship between China’s construction of an ecological civilization and the great transformation of human civilization? Sincerely thank you once again!
Foster: As I have already pointed out, my lecture focused on this question: although the idea of ecological civilization has become a real force in China, it hardly exists elsewhere in the world, with the exception of a few other socialist countries. Interestingly, the concept of ecological civilization not only first appeared in the Soviet Union in the 1980s—a post-revolutionary society with many significant contradictions of its own—but also, as the Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Kati Chukhrov skillfully demonstrated in her book Practicing the Good, it inspired a specific social consciousness in Soviet society that was far more progressive than similar social consciousness in Western capitalism of the same period. The key point here is that ecological civilization, here undoubtedly adopting its advanced Chinese form, requires a socialist movement to achieve real progress. However, the opposite is also true—the efforts made to build an ecological civilization will necessarily provide additional momentum for the socialist movement. From the perspective of global ecological governance, the role played by China on the stage of ecological civilization construction during its socialist development can be seen as the greatest gift offered to the world.