Residents of J.P. Napar who suffered devastation from the Union Carbide disaster at Bhopal
Ecology, Gaia and Socialism
As with art, one can find a subjective beauty in science - the pushing forward of the frontiers of human experience and knowledge. As marxists we should not feel guilty about expressing such seemingly sentimental opinions. It is not anti-marxist claptrap to marvel at the complexities of life.
Indeed, we would do better to have a deeper understanding of the role that science and culture play in an advanced capitalist economy and how this changes in time. After all, the essence of revolutionary marxism is that it is the science of making revolutions that can ultimately free the world of all oppression - a communist world.
What made comrades like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxembourg. Kollontai and Trotsky such outstanding leaders of the working class was precisely that they were such thorough practitioners of scientific socialism. They used the lessons of history and creatively applied them to new objective situations in the class struggle. They understood that the historic task of the world's working class was to liberate all humankind.
Today we face our own new objective situations in the class struggle. We see the
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by Sam Inman political revolutions unfolding in the degenerated and deformed workers' states. The death agony of stalinism throws revolutionary marxists a challenge comparable to previous momentous periods in human history.
In Britain we see a deepening crisis of the bourgeois state. The political crisis of the Tories and heightening social crisis in British society are only symptoms of the profound economic crisis that is its material base. We are also faced with a profound crisis of leadership in the working class. There are many more examples internationally of the deepening crisis of international capitalism: revolutionary marxists must meet "the challenge' and provide the leadership necessary to make the change from capitalism to socialism. Times like these can greatly enhance marxist theory. But only if we leam the lessons of our own history, the history of Trotskyism, can we use them to build successful social and now political) revolutions.
One sympton of the crisis of global capitalism is the world ecological crisis. OFcourse, ecological problems are nothing new. What makes them so important now is the material depth of the crisis, the huge challenge this presents to global capital and the strengthening of the radical petty bourgeois parties that have arisen in response to this. The current situation throws us yet another challenge - how do we develop an ecological dimension to our programme?
We cannot study the world's ecological crisis without taking a brief look at the science of ecology itself, which - compared to that of natural history - is relatively new. It was born in the exciting period of biology, just after Darwin, but really took off this century. Now, as with other scientific disciplines, is undergoing great flux. Indeed many ecologists and evolutionary biologists maintain that within the field the present academic crisis could well result in a new synthesis of evolutionary theory that could have an impact as great as Darwinian theory had last century.
We should remember the impact that the Origin of the Species had on the thinking of Marx and Engels, but also how the ruling class has used Darwinian notions of competition, struggle for survival and survival of the fittest' to justify and legitimise ruling class projects by applying these concepts to the realm of human economic, social and political relations. Indeed the marxist evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, argues in his book The Pandas Thunb that Darwin may
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A moment of gas - a llfetime of pain. Victim of Bhopal disaster. well have cribbed his ideas from the laissez.faire political economist Adam Smith.
Evolutionary theory has been well documented as playing an important, even vital role in the maintenance of political, social and ideological hegemony in capitalist society. However, evolutionary science and ecology are intimately related, the former only really being the study of the world's biosphere over longer periods of time. Evolutionary science is the scientific study of the history of life. It is in this context that the importance of the Gaia hypothesis emerges.
First proposed in 1972 by Jim Lovelock (an ex-NASA scientist) the Gaia hypothesis maintains that: life at an early stage of its evolution acquired the capacity to control the global environment to suit its needs and that capacity has persisted and is still in active use. In this view the sum total of species is more than just a catalogue, "The biosphere' like other associations in biology is an entity with properties greater than the simple sum of its parts".
In 1974 Lovelock collaborated with the Canadian microbiologist Lyn Marqulis, in a more detailed exposition. In their words the hypothesis is 'the notion of the biosphere as an adaptive control system to maintain the earth in homeostasis".
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The evidence presented is quite convincing. The relative abundance of different gases in the earth's atmosphere is completely anomalous in comparison with the atmospheres of other lifeless planets. The atmos pheres of the latter are not far from chemical equilibrium, while earth's atmosphere is very different. The particularly anomolous gases on earth are methane, oxygen, nitrogen, nitrous oxide and ammonia. The simultaneous presence of highly oxidising and highly reducing gases clearly violates the laws of equilibrium chemistry, and not least the second law of thermo-dynamics.
Now either the latter is wrong, or something responsible for maintaining this anomoly. Lovelock and Marqulis argued that it was the biosphere (i.e. life) that was responsible for this regulation. The circumstantial evidence is also quite strong. Life has been present on the planet for about 3.5 billion years. During this time the sun has increased its output by at least 30 per cent. Yet, despite this, the mean temperature of the planet has varied very little.
What about glaciations then? It's well known that we can be eurocentric at times, but it is useful to remember that 70 per cent of the earth's land mass lies between latitudes 45° North and 45° South (or between Milan and Christchurch, New Zealand roughly). Between these latitudes exists the biologically productive 'core" of the earth and the glaciations appear to have had little effect here.
What is certain is that at no point during this time did the oceans freeze or the mean temperature exceed 50 degrees centigrade. This temperature regulation could be acheived via biological changing of atmospheric composition and/or possibly by changing the reflectivity of the earth's surface (the albedo). Lovelock later produced a model, the daisywheel model, to show how -without foresight - the biosphere could produce such regulation.
Deep Ecologists' such as Edward Goldsmith have championed the Gaia hypothesis, and have used it to justify their misanthropic and anti-working class politics. However, it has actually touched a raw nerve in the arena of evolutionary biology, because without doubt there were holes in contemporary mainstream thinking about the nature of the evolutionary process. Goldsmith, for example is somewhat of a neo-Lamarkian (a completely outmoded theory of evolution). The most progressive elements are critical supporters of neo-Darwinsim like Gould and Nils Eldredge who argue against the gradualist school in favour of a (revolutionary!) "punctuated' model.
With recent devleopments in the study of non-equilibrium systems (such as the biosphere) in the form of the science of chaos -the walls of determinism are begining to crumble. Indeed one can see many parallels between the science of chaos and dialectical materialism.
Of course the crunch comes when you bring humanity into the picture. Obviously for marxists, marked a qualitative change in the history of life on earth. In our struggle to overcome the limitations of nature, shown in the history of human society - the history of class struggle - advanced capitalism has alienated us from our own nature - the struggle to consciously control our own labour. The Deep Ecologists see no difference between us and an amoeba. That is why their politics are essentially reactionary. They elevate Gaia to the level of a new god. The achievement of world socialism with ecologically sound economic planning would essentially mean that humanity replaced "Gaia' as an outmoded regulator of the whole biosphere, and result in a progressive mature "science of ecology': essential if we are to clean up the ecological nightmare that capitalism and stalinism have bequeathed us.
Biology has always been used by the capitalist ruling class to legitimise its continuation. That is why it is vitally important that we recognise the question of ecology as a class issue, and an intemational class issue
Page 28 SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 25, June 1990