Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Can you feel it? There is a palpable dread that the ruling class, which owns financial and industrial capital, will continue to invest in destroying the Earth System. One example is the half-dozen biggest American banks: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance that the UN had supported since 2021, aiming to reach net-zero carbon emissions in 2050. This choice of financial interests to double down on fossil fuels cooking the planet comes despite the scientific consensus that increasing carbon emissions heralds a future of more droughts, floods, hurricanes, storms, and wildfires. The opposite impulse is sustainable development, a model of civilization based on cooperation, not competition, which has a history that author, editor, and professor John Bellamy Foster tackles in The Dialectics of Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2024).
Dialectics is the study of change. From that concept flows the view that humanity is a part of—not apart from—the process of change within Nature. This concept of change and thinking around it before, during and after Marx is what Bellamy Foster unpacks with his comprehensive study of ecology and capitalism. To this end, The Dialectics of Ecology is 10 chapters with 73 pages of notes and an index. The author writes to reveal the history of thinking and writing around dialectics and ecology to connect humanity, sustainably, with the Earth System.
Its main foe is the system of capitalism, a relative blip on the historical record, yet one that is radically altering the conditions for life on Earth. The author unpacks radical critiques of the system’s ecological dynamics. A main theme in Belamy Foster’s writing is Marx’s theory of a metabolic rift between people and the Earth System under capitalism. In other words, metabolism, social and universal, is how humans, via labor and their use of nature, produce and reproduce the world. What the process means, ecologically speaking, since the emergence of capitalism, divides human development between rural and urban populations, for starters. Bellamy Foster considers the thinkers and writers who expanded Marx’s vision of the ecological problems that arise under the dynamics of this system. 
Thus we read in Bellamy Foster’s book about the habitability crisis of the Earth System for humanity. Here, Marx’s theory of political economy, class relations, in sum, connects with his and subsequent theorists’ conception of ecology. To this end, Bellamy Foster develops Marx’s threefold conception of capitalism’s ecological contradictions. Additionally, Frederick Engels’ writings on dialectics and nature occupy a major part of Bellamy Foster’s book.
Freedom to develop sustainably through social struggles is a key idea. This is a necessity, not a luxury. That is a radical critique that comes into sharper focus as Bellamy Foster reviews, comprehensively, the roots and branches of ecological socialism. Epicurean materialism is a key part of this intellectual tradition and informs the stark choices in our immediate future. The author also reviews British socialist thinking and writing a century ago, scientists contributing to an ecological critique.
Marx and Engels’ critique of Enlightenment humanism extended to a broad view of science and reason as the pathways to understanding, holistically, people’s comprehension of and interaction with nature. Ending capitalism before it ends human civilization is a binary for the Earth System, emerging into sharper focus in Bellamy Foster’s ecosocialist genealogy. His longest chapter in the book under review is Socialism and Ecological Survival. In it, Bellamy Foster reviews the writing and thinking, among others, of author Rachel Carson and scientist Barry Commoner.
Against this backdrop, an historic rupture is the Anthropocene Epoch of human-caused ecological damage. Salient points of departure are the U.S. use of atomic weapons against Japan to end WW II and, since then, increased fossil fuel-driven extraction driving an expansion of commodity production. Military conflict is a driving force of environmental devastation, as Bellamy Foster writes, presciently, of its ties to the U.S.-Ukraine proxy war against Russia. Similar ties apply between war and the ecology to Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, U.S.-funded and guided. This has been and remains a bipartisan pact.
Solutions to a systemic reliance on war and waste in the core capitalist countries figure in Bellamy Foster’s book. One is his discussion of Cooperation Jackson, a network of cooperatives, based in Mississipi. On that note of people’s problem-solving, the author turns to the role of central planning in socialism and capitalism. Bellamy Foster considers the strengths and weaknesses of the marketplace as a panacea for economic problems, reviewing 20th-century examples. They range from central planning during the Bolshevik Revolution to the U.S. in World War 2, and the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. Oh, and let us not forget wage and price controls under U.S. President Nixon to fight inflation, a general rise in prices, for 90 days in 1970.
It is up to humanity to push the political establishment away from business as usual, or the grow or die imperative of capitalist corporations to maximize profits and expand market share. “If organized civilization is to survive,” Bellamy Foster writes, “planned degrowth or deaccumulation and a shift to sustainable human development are now unavoidable in the wealthiest countries, whose per capita ecological footprints are non-sustainable on a planetary basis.” There is no backup Earth for humans to inhabit.
