Abstract
Bunker, Foster, and Moore all address the unjust manner in which dominant actors in the capitalist world-system simultaneously exploit labor and nonhuman or biophysical nature while undermining sustainability. In the context of recent, largely one-sided criticism of Moore by Foster, this chapter highlights fundamental agreements regarding ecologically unequal exchange across all three of these sociologists. Then, it unpacks distinctions regarding capitalism as causing degradation, nature’s ontology, epistemology and dialectical analysis, and possible futures that might overturn the current unsustainable situation. The conclusion reiterates the importance of Bunker’s foundational work, peripheral vantage point, dialectical view of socio-nature, and realistic future vision, partly based in his posthumously published The Snake with Golden Braids.
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Notes
- 1.
Moore builds directly on Foster, but as I explore below, in the current acrid intellectual environment, this depiction of the genealogy of views itself is likely contentious. Yet, Moore has stressed repeatedly his effort as attempting to stand “on the shoulders of” Foster, most recently praising and attempting to “affirm [metabolic rift’s] dialectical core” (Moore 2017a).
- 2.
All three have held positions in sociology, but Moore’s PhD dissertation was in geography, and he identifies as “an environmental historian and historical geographer” (see https://jasonwmoore.com/). He also rejects the label ecosocialist (personal communication).
- 3.
After the publication of the Special Issue on ecologically unequal exchange in the Journal of World-Systems Research (Frey, Gellert, and Dahms 2017) in which we termed this a non-debate (Gellert et al. 2017), I received email from Moore in which he rejected labeling it a “non-debate” because of the implied equivalent responsibility for the lack of debate. After reviewing more of the publicly available comments from Foster, including especially his interview with Ian Angus (2016), I find myself in agreement with Moore about the one-sided ad hominem attacks on him. Moore’s criticisms of Foster, metabolic rift, and other environmentalists are sharp and pointed, but he has repeatedly praised Foster’s contributions and, on a personal level, only complained of the lack of engagement by Foster et al. with his ideas. Foster (2016) does address the intellectual questions of monism and dualism that Moore is interested in, but as far as I know, there has been no public debate on the merits of their positions (as of January 2018). Increasingly, I observe that Foster and his colleagues engage in a kind of intellectual shunning and simply do not cite Moore’s work, although Foster’s (2016) article was an exception for its extended critique.
- 4.
In full disclosure, I do not come completely unbiased into this discussion; Bunker was the chair of my PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin in 1998.
- 5.
For a critique of Moore’s concept of “exhaustion” from a soil scientist, see Engel-Di Mauro (2014).
- 6.
The result is that it is difficult if not impossible to remain neutral or appreciative of the complexities and distinctions in this debate, as I try to do here. Good friends have cautioned me against stepping into the cow pies. As I am not a member of Facebook, I have not joined debates there, although there have been mentions of this in some of the more publicly available material.
- 7.
Bunker (1985:99) also rejected the application of the label “frontier” to the Amazon because it incorrectly implied an eventual incorporation which he deemed unlikely, assumed an expansion into empty space rather than conflict between different systems, and implies linear progress while he saw discontinuous change, especially due to mining.
- 8.
One silly issue between Foster and Moore is the former’s displeasure with having the metabolic rift argument attributed to him, rather than Marx. Foster complains that he has been falsely accused of being the author of the idea of a metabolic rift denying Marx the credit. Marx had written of the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” (Foster 2013) but given Foster’s meticulous attention to the archives and his efforts to “rescue” Marx from the critiques of what he now calls the first wave of eco-Marxist thought, it seems a sort of false modesty to be chagrined by the accusation that the metabolic rift is “his.” As Chew and Sarabia (2016:3) caustically observe, Foster has been “mining the seams of Marx’s mother lode, especially Das Kapital, even to the level of footnotes to support [his] attribution that Marx had always paid attention to Nature in his writings.”
- 9.
In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote a laudatory review of Foster’s earlier book on the Ecological Revolution in which I praised him for bringing empirical precision to claims of ecological crisis. At this point, however, I increasingly find reliance on the weight of scientific evidence of “natural” disaster to be distressingly apocalyptic and, although he surely does not intend to do so, leaves the possibility of readers detaching this diagnosis from the causes in capitalist accumulation that represent the power of eco-Marxist perspectives.
- 10.
In a new article Moore (2017a) attributes this difference to Foster’s exclusion of geographers and geography as a discipline.
- 11.
At the Knoxville Conference there was excessive debate, in my view, over the question of whether particular attendees were “optimistic” or “pessimistic” about the future (see Killian 1971).
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Gellert, P.K. (2019). Bunker’s Ecologically Unequal Exchange, Foster’s Metabolic Rift, and Moore’s World-Ecology: Distinctions With or Without a Difference?. In: Frey, R.S., Gellert, P.K., Dahms, H.F. (eds) Ecologically Unequal Exchange. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89740-0_5
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