Climate Change, Food Crises
& Socialist Reimaginings
By Carlo Fanelli

For the past 500-million years greenhouse gases (GHG) have fluctuated in a narrow band of between 260-280 parts per million (ppm) by volume. Today, however, they stand at over 385ppm, 30% higher than previous peaks in volume in interglacial periods. The potential for a new climatic state, expected to rise 5-6 degrees Celsius by 2100 if present trends continue, may lead to catastrophic socio-ecological events as major food and water shortages, the destruction of fertile lands, shifts in weather patterns, massive species extinction and the destabilization of major ice-sheets and glaciers raise sea-levels upwards of 2-metres this century engulfing land presently occupied by at least 1-billion people. Moreover, with 1-billion people suffering from chronic and severe hunger and another 2-billion facing perpetual food insecurity and poverty continuing ecological degradation is likely to cause the greatest harm to those who have contributed to it the least.

As food crises continue to mushroom throughout the global south, with food prices rising 140% between 2002-2008, some immediate questions then become imperative: Is there a major shortage of the food needed to feed the world's population or are there issues of redistribution, usage and agricultural practices that negatively affect access to foodstuffs? What is the relationship between food insecurity, poverty, ill-health and ecological decay? Since access to the means of life in capitalist society is near-universally mediated through market compulsions, what are the social 'laws of motion' which govern resource extraction, production, distribution, exchange and waste disposal? The forthcoming analysis will, first, discuss the inherent environmental destructiveness of capitalism; second, overview the dialectics of long-term trends with short-term neoliberal policies; third, explore the Cuban alternative to capitalist agriculture; and, fourth, conclude on the need to (re)generate socialist inspiration.

On the Inherent Environmental Destructiveness of Capitalism

In Capital Vol.1, Marx (1990, p.449) argues, "The driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest extent possible, i.e. the greatest possible production of surplus-value; hence the greatest exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist". Though relatively short on words, this brief sentence lends major insight into the historically-specific social relations which govern capitalist production. First, Marx is suggesting that the governing purpose of producing a commodity is to make a profit on that commodity; whether selling bread, medication or guns, the commodity itself is not so important so long as its value at the point of exchange is greater than that at the point of production. Second, Marx's concept of surplus-value stresses that human labour-power in transforming nature creates the value which is embodied in a particular commodity. Though the worker's labour-power is congealed in that commodity, giving it its added value, its surplus is appropriated strictly by the capitalist. It is at this point, thirdly, where Marx deconstructs the structural basis of inequality, that is, fundamentally antagonistic class relations. In pointing to the centrality of class, as the broadest though by no means absolute point of exploitation, Marx was unpacking the way the unequal appropriation of the social surplus product through intersecting axes of exploitation - race, gender, ethnicity, age - leaves the overwhelming majority of persons with nothing but their labour-power to sell.

Marx's conception of class was radically different than the classical political economists' understanding. For Adam Smith, J.B. Say and David Ricardo, for example, classes were seen as repressing each other. For liberals it was 'progress against the old order' which was to be overcome - historically against the church and aristocracy, and today, in its neoliberal veneer, against the state and indeed the masses. For liberals, and neoliberals as we will later see, class is predominantly a function of privilege, social rank and opportunity and is not defined in Marx's terms as fundamentally exploitive and antagonistic relations. Class struggle for liberals is viewed as 'holding back' another class, what Comninel (1987; 2006) has referred to as the 'Pez-dispenser' or 'ladder-version' of class, and not a conflict over the appropriation of the social surplus product. Instead an historical materialist account of class stresses essentially exploitative class relations, lord and serf, capitalist and worker, propertied and property-less, which is the paired opposition of classes and a very different social relation distinct from ranks of classes. While there have always been classes in society, class relations in capitalist society take on a very specific manifestation, that is to say, the 'symbiotic embrace' of political-economic, hence social, exploitation whereby workers are estranged from the fruits of their labour.

The historically-specific imperatives of capitalism, namely its cutthroat drive towards infinite accumulation, increasing exploitation of labour in the form of productivity gains and efficiency, techno-centrism and market irrationality, disguise the fact that capitalist markets are not governed by opportunity and choice, but compulsion and necessity. As Wood (2003) has argued, material life and social reproduction in capitalism are universally mediated by the market so that all individuals must enter into market relations in one way or another to gain access to the means of life. In denaturalizing the liberal account of capitalism, Marx sought to show that social relations of capital were not 'natural', transhistorical or unchanging, but rooted in specific material and cultural changes distinct from earlier periods. That said, capitalism in no way represents the epitome of civilization, the end of history or progressive modernity, but just as capitalism came to birth through historical struggles it may also come to its end ushering in a very different and historically transient means of reproducing the means of life.

For Marx and Engels, capitalism creates an 'irreparable metabolic rift' whereby the material exchange between our environments and society - a conceptual as opposed to absolute distinction - disturbs the organic interchange of plant materials, as well as recycling of air, water currents and agricultural infertility, for example. Since the systemic imperatives of capitalism run counter to any ecological notions of natural limits, critical thresholds and consumptive restrictions it is inherently anti-ecological, since all things are systematically subordinated in pursuit of unlimited accumulation and ever-increasing scales of production. Just as capitalism compels market-dependence through the alienation of labour, so too does it establish a historically-distinctive relation with nature. The social metabolic interchange of society and nature, that is, the recognition of reflexive movement and reciprocal transformation, stresses the organic and inorganic exchange of matter and energy, which are in on-going and joint transformation. As Marx argued in Vol.1 of Capital (p. 283),

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between nature and himself. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own [organic] body - arms, legs, head, hands - in order to appropriate the materials of [his inorganic body] nature in a form adapted to his own need. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.

In other words, "Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuous dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature" (Marx, 1844/1964, p.112). Since all species are mutable and subject to the 'struggle for existence', the fact that society's metabolism with nature is not motionless but continuously transforming and evolving, so that a species once well-adapted to particular conditions of life may find themselves under stress or in decline, is contradictory to any human notions of superiority and dominance.

Likewise, for Engels (1934, Np.), Nature "is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up...at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst." Marx and Engels rejected all essentialisms based on innate human characteristics except for the sociability and transformative labour-bearing capacities of human-beings (zoon politikon), which was constituted and reconstituted through social intercourse. Marx and Engels had a "withering contempt for the idealistic exaltation of man over the animals... [since the] creatures too must become free" from subjugation and instrumental rationality. As a new and unprecedented social metabolism with nature continues to manifest, the consequences in the form of an on-going and exacerbating climate change cluster-bomb, coupled with en masse ecological degradation, remains one of the foremost challenges to the livability and social conditions of life on earth in the twenty-first century.

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