The growing recognition that the ecological question is crucial alongside that of the economic, and that the two are intrinsically related, only serves to clarify the conditions currently facing poor countries. The real choice is not one of development versus the environment, but rather between peripheral capitalist development of underdevelopment determined by conditions of imperialist domination or a revolutionary break with the system that implements a socialist model of sustainable human development.
Hence, once we add the ecological factor, it becomes clearer than ever that the world is divided between overdeveloped nations within the capitalist core and underdeveloped countries within the periphery. Per capita energy consumption in the United States is more than sixty times that of Nepal, while an equilibrium level for the world as a whole from an ecological standpoint is somewhere around a third of the current U.S. level.
What this means is that the United States is grossly overdeveloped in terms of what the earth can support, as well as in relation to the world’s population as a whole, while Nepal has been no less grossly underdeveloped by the system. Behind this unequal reality and supporting it are the mechanisms of imperialism, which largely determine the relative position of nations within the world capitalist system.
What this means is that we have to merge the traditional Marxian critique of imperialist development with the ecological critique that in many ways takes this to a deeper level and allows us to articulate more fully an alternative path forward. The essence of the development problem was articulated by Paul A. Baran in The Political Economy of Growth in the late 1950…
Under capitalism, economic development is defined as increases in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and by the accumulation of capital, that is, in terms of the exchange value generated in the society, irrespective of social ends. However, delinking, which is always relative, allows for a form of development that begins with use values, placing a priority on meeting the basic needs of the population and thus establishing the foundations for real human development.
We, therefore, find that socialist-oriented economies in the Global South, though most often still poor, are able to improve the conditions of the population enormously in areas such as food sustainability and sovereignty, access to clean water, availability of electricity, education, child care, health care, women’s rights, life expectancy, housing, poverty alleviation, and so on. In areas of human development, as calculated by the United Nations, poor countries in the Global South with a socialist orientation often come surprisingly close to, or even exceed in some respects, rich nations of the Global North, such as the United States, making nonsense of measures of development that simply focus on GDP.
An ecological approach centered on sustainable human development is simply a broadening of the traditional, people-oriented emphases of socialist planning to incorporate the more fundamental material level of the environment in which we reside. This can be seen most easily perhaps in relation to Cuba, where an emphasis on sustainable human development, particularly since 1992, has been the secret of its success. There is, in fact, no fundamental contradiction in poor countries between a focus on human needs and on the environment.
-John Bellamy Foster
Read more in the following article:
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/12/01/marxian-ecology-and-sustainable-human-development/
