When Robert Cox first published the description of the MHS analytical framework in 1981, ‘nature’ was treated as an aspect of the category ‘material capabilities,’ which he defines as follows:
Material capabilities are productive and destructive potentials. In their dynamic form these exist as technological and organizational
53 Having considered ‘Earth System’ instead of ‘Biosphere’ as the ‘umbrella’ label for
‘material capabilities,’ I rejected this idea as Earth System scientists and authors such as Clive Hamilton point out that humans and their socio-‐economic systems are now not only part of the Earth System but major forces that have changed what would have been its normal trajectory. In that sense, it is the MHS in its entirety that should be enclosed within a larger box, the ‘Earth System,’ now. It is not clear how this would have served as an analytical tool, however, so I decided to refer to ‘Biosphere’ and to trial the use of this category in my analysis. In this research, I therefore understand the Earth System as comprising of two key components: the biosphere, and humans operating within social systems (which are, however, embedded in the biosphere and dependent on it for their existence).
capabilities, and in their accumulated forms as natural resources which technology can transform, stocks of equipment (for example, industries and armaments), and the wealth which can command these.
(Cox 1996b, p. 98)
Cox’s framework was developed before US scientist James Hansen’s 1988
congressional testimony on global warming and the subsequent increasing public awareness of the severity of its effects. Since then, however, not only has public awareness of global warming, climate change and environmental degradation increased, but much more scientific research has focused on the Earth as a dynamic complex system which is at risk of crossing physical ‘tipping points’ that can propel it into a new and unpredictable state (Biermann et al. 2012; Hansen et al. 2013;
Steffen et al. 2011; Steffen et al. 2015) as a result of the spread and intensification of capitalist relations of production.
These developments strongly suggest that ‘nature’ can no longer be treated as a static force or as an accumulation of natural resources. In later publications, Cox does emphasise the urgency of the threats to the biosphere, arguing that it is only through pressure exerted from within civil society that the changes necessary to protect its integrity can be initiated (for example, refer to Cox 2002). Sinclair’s argument for deciding not to make a separate category for ‘the environment’ is similar to Cox’s observation that the changes required to protect the environment will necessarily emanate from social struggles: “while we are material beings as well as social ones, the struggle over how to address the environment is part of the social dynamic, and how we resolve it will not be reducible to material necessity alone” (Sinclair 2016, p. 515). Given the evident inability of capital to solve the problem of the degrading of the biosphere, which Marxists and ecosocialists argue results from a fundamental contradiction inherent in the capitalist mode of production (as discussed in later chapters), Cox and Sinclair are correct to argue that the issue of whether or not the planet remains habitable will be resolved through civil society action (or what Sinclair refers to as ‘social dynamics’). However, as Earth System scientists emphasise, the biosphere is a material physical system in its own right: it reacts to physical inputs and also determines the physical limits underlying living organisms’ productive and reproductive ‘material capabilities.’ While ecological
economists such as Herman Daly and Joshua Farley (2004) recognised this fact and incorporated their understanding of environmental limits and ‘the laws of
thermodynamics’ in their economic models decades ago, standard IR and IPE analyses of environmental politics fail to take such natural limits into account (Williams 1996). Williams (ibid., pp. 55-‐56) argues that “contemporary analyses of the political economy of global environmental change can be challenged on two broad grounds”: firstly, their positivist epistemology (which Williams points out that the neo-‐Gramscian perspective successfully challenges) and, secondly, their failure “to incorporate the ecological perspective on political economy, a perspective which starts from the assumption that economics and the environment are inseparable.” My modification of the MHS Redux aims to apply these crucial insights from ecological economics and thereby to address Williams’s (ibid., p. 56) advice that “…IPE should explore the prevailing assumptions concerning the relationship
between humans and the natural world. This critical task will not be accomplished if ecological economics remains invisible in IPE.” My modification of the MHS Redux schema is thus designed to emphasise the way in which social systems are
embedded within the biosphere and, ultimately, rely on it continuing to support life for their existence.
One idea about how to fit the environment into the MHS Redux schema more overtly is to add it to Sinclair’s already-‐expanded category of ‘productive and reproductive capabilities,’ while a second idea is to enclose ‘productive and reproductive capabilities’ within an ‘umbrella’ category, ‘Biosphere.’ As we are increasingly beginning to understand, the latter is a more realistic depiction of the world we live in as the state of the biosphere determines the conditions under which both productive and reproductive activities occur, and scientists warn that its health could deteriorate to the extent that it no longer supports either production or reproduction of many species (including humans). To emphasise the centrality of the biosphere in this analysis, I make a further modification to Sinclair’s ‘Forces Redux’ (Figure 3), as shown in Figure 5 (‘Forces Redux Version II’). The placement of ‘Material Capabilities: Biosphere’ at the top of the triangle is intended to draw
additional attention to the exceptional importance of the Biosphere as an analytical category.
In Figure 6 (see below), I make a very minor modification to Sinclair’s ‘Spheres Redux’ by changing the format of the arrows in Figure 4 to depict more clearly that ‘social forces’ and ‘social dynamics’ influence each other, as do ‘forms of state’ and ‘world order.’
Figure 5: MHS Forces Redux Version II
The approach adopted when analysing the role of the ecosocialist social movement in the current historical structure’s framework for action involves applying the forces represented in Figure 5 to the spheres and levels of action shown in Figure 6.54 This is done with reference to a number of analytical concepts initially developed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, some of which are highlighted by Robert Cox in his second ground-‐breaking paper, Gramsci, hegemony, and international relations: an essay in method (Cox 1983), and whose meanings are examined in more detail by Gramscian experts such as Peter Thomas (2009, 2013a, 2013b) and Adam Morton (2007).55 As Peter Thomas’s and Adam Morton’s extremely detailed scholarly work focusing on deep textual analyses of Gramsci’s writings demonstrate, the meanings of the concepts outlined below and used in this study are both complex and contested. Given the already extensive scope and purpose of this research project, however, the approach adopted in the use of selected Gramscian concepts, while drawing on the expertise of Gramscian scholars within the limitations imposed by time
constraints, is similar to Cox’s, who wrote: “This essay sets forth my understanding of what Gramsci meant by hegemony and these related concepts, and suggests how I think they may be adapted, retaining his essential meaning, to the understanding of problems of world order. It does not purport to be a critical study of Gramsci’s political theory, but merely a derivation from it of some [useful] ideas…” (Cox 1996c, p. 124). The key analytical Gramscian concepts that are relevant to my study are hegemony; forms of state; integral state; historic blocs; world order; organic crises;
54 It is interesting to consider the ways in which a changing biosphere might affect not
only the material conditions of reproduction and production (and hence institutions, social facts, and competing ideas), but also the forms of state and world orders that are possible.
55 I emphasise Gramsci’s Marxism because this is the reading of Gramsci that is relevant
to my analysis. As Thomas (2013a, p. 28) points out, “…it has often been claimed that Gramsci was fundamentally a theorist of the cultural superstructures, one who was not only a strong critic of economic determinism but perhaps even ignorant of economic theory. Sometimes, it has even been asserted that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony represents the beginning of a ‘post-‐Marxism’, which logically should reject the Marxist critique of political economy and its emphasis upon class. Such readings, however, neglect the totality of the Prison Notebooks, which contain extensive notes dedicated to discussions of Marx’s Capital and economic history. They also neglect the context of Gramsci’s political activism, which remained fundamentally directed against what he repeatedly characterized as the ‘dictatorship’ of the bourgeoisie, including and especially in its fascist variant.”
counter-‐hegemony; war of position and war of manoeuvre; passive revolution and trasformismo; organic intellectuals; subaltern social groups; the modern Prince; ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; and the ‘ethico-‐political sphere’ of struggle. These concepts are used within the context of a historical materialist analysis that is dialectical and aims to understand the nature of the global political economy as it unfolds through the actions of various groupings at a variety of levels (local, national, global) and, importantly, within the overall context of the biosphere’s material responses to these actions, while also taking into account how the material manifestations of biophysical degradation generate new social forces.
Van der Pijl (2009, p. 198) provides a concise explanation of the meaning of historical materialism as the premise that “people create their own world out of nature, but the different forms of society that result, then constitute a second nature further shaping their thoughts and actions.” The historical materialist method of analysis begins with what Marx called “…‘the imagined concrete’ (the world at first sight) to ever-‐more abstract determinations (which the thinker actively constructs from his/her own contradictory experience…. [and] from the abstract determinations, the route is retraced back to more complex constellations, but now ‘enriched’ by
understanding [that constitutes]…. the thought-‐concrete, the view of the totality as it is at that moment… ” (Van der Pijl 2009, pp. 222 -‐ 223). Dialectical analysis seeks to understand historical developments by identifying conflicting, mutually opposite instances (or contradictions) within the social formation being studied, and how these contradictions play out to create new social formations. For Marx, these contradictions reside “in the tensions between humanity as a part of nature and as a historical force; between the ruling classes and ideas, and those arising from other sources in society; in the various aspects of exploitation (of nature, in social
relations) and domination” (Van der Pijl 2009, p. 204). In addition to deploying the Gramscian analytical concepts whose meanings are briefly outlined below, I use historical materialism as the general approach informing my analysis of ecosocialist contributions to the unfolding crises engendered by the expansion and