From the Bookshelf of The Transition Movement…

To our knowledge, this is the first book on Marxism written from a process perspective. Some Chinese Marxists are already interpreting process philosophy as a new school within contemporary Western Marxism. As process philosophy begins to play a larger and larger role in China, it is important to think carefully about the ways that it leads to a deeper understanding of Marxist principles. For example, it is highly significant that process thinking appears in many places in traditional Chinese philosophy, in Confucian and Daoist thinkers, and even in the most ancient text in the Chinese philosophical tradition, the I Jing.

Smith wants us to believe that no one needs to act consciously in the public interest and that policies aimed for the common good are doomed to fail. Nevertheless, miraculously, those who promote their own private interests, those who seek to become as wealthy as possible, end up producing the highest possible level of common good.

(1) In the mid-nineteenth century, many people believed that the principles of history are deterministic; they can be grasped and codified in a single, all-comprehensive system. They aren’t, and they can’t be.

(2) Marx and his early followers believed that workers, once they are sufficiently informed, will act in their own best interest and rise up against the injustices of their employers and the capitalist system. This by no means obviously the case after 150 years.

(3) Marx’s work as a social theorist, a historian of economics, and a student of the class struggle remains relevant… His efforts … to prove the doctrine of dialectic materialism using the categories of Hegel’s philosophy are less enduring. At worst, they produce a “vulgar Marxism” that clashes with the scientific spirit of his work and with core assumptions of an ecological civilization.

(4) According to classical Marxism, the natural world forms a backdrop to the class struggle, but only as the “stuff” of materialism, the contributor of raw materials, and the occasion for work. But in fact humans are not the only victims of capitalist excesses, the ecological world must be taken into account.

Just as the social sciences need to describe and explain the personal dimension of human existence, including the complex worlds of meaning that humans create and live within, so also the biological sciences can now describe organisms as organisms, that is, as agents acting with their particular ecosystems.

The goals of the environmental movement can no longer be limited to symbolic steps, supplying band-aids to a dying planet. Nothing less than civilizational change will suffice Movement leaders around the planet are beginning to lay the foundations for a new ecological civilization because they realize the need for fundamental changes in how people think and how we organize human society, both locally and globally.

… The social, political, and economic principles of modernity are (sadly) still often unrecognized. Marx provided some of the most effective tools for uncovering them, which is why we have argued that Marxist analyses are indispensable. But transformative socialist principles need to be embedded in cultures and embodied in post-capitalist communities. For that reason we have used “organic” as the umbrella term to the express the central features of the civilization that is even now being born on this planet: sustainable, culturally and historically embedded, constructively post-modern, process-based, fundamentally local, communal in its orientation: in a word: ecological.