John Bellamy Foster is editor of the US socialist journal Monthly Review and author of Marx's Ecology and The Ecological Revolution. Aleix Bombila writes for En Lucha (Spain). This interview first appeared in English at MRZine.

En Lucha: In your book Marx's Ecology you argue that Marxism has a lot to offer to the ecologist movement. What kind of united work can be established between Marxists and ecologists?

John Bellamy Foster: I think it is important to recognise that Marxists and ecologists are not entirely different groups. Of course it is true that there have been Reds who have been anti-ecological and Greens who have been anti-Marxist. But it is not uncommon for the two to overlap, and increasingly to converge. Many socialists are environmentalists and many environmentalists are socialists. Indeed, there is a sense in which Marxism and ecology, both classically and today, lead to the same conclusion. For Marx, the goal was the creation of a society in which the metabolic relation between humanity and nature (i.e. production) was rationally regulated by the associated producers. The original title of my book that you refer to was supposed to be Marx and Ecology, but I changed it to Marx's Ecology because of the depth of Marx's ecological conceptions.

I would argue that a critical Marxist approach, especially in our time, requires an ecological worldview, while a critical human ecology requires an anti-capitalist and ultimately socialist orientation (i.e., a Marxist one). In terms of united work that Marxists and ecologists can share, I would say social justice and environmental sustainability: saving humanity and saving the Earth. You can't expect to achieve one without the other, and neither is possible under the existing system.

Probably the strongest single voice for an ecological relation in the world today is Evo Morales, the socialist (and Indigenous) president of Bolivia. After the failed Copenhagen conference on climate change, Fidel Castro said that we used to think we were in a struggle simply to determine the society of the future, but we now know we are in a struggle for survival. We have reached a point where historical materialists are taking global leadership in defining the ecological needs of humanity.

 The struggle against climate change looks kind of abstract at first sight. How can we organise campaigns against climate change with a real impact? Who should promote them?

In praise of the ideas of Russ Ackoff

IT IS hard to imagine a less enticing title for a book than “Introduction to Operations Research”. Yet Russ Ackoff, one of the authors of this tome of 1959, who died on October 29th aged 90, did not just help to define a nascent branch of industrial engineering. He wrote 30 other books, becoming one of the most influential management gurus of the 20th century in the process. His ideas about systemic thinking are vitally important today if the world is to come out of the current economic crisis in better shape than it went into it.

Today’s crisis is the result of a catastrophic failure, primarily in the financial system but also of our economic and political systems. Mr Ackoff spent most of the past half-century as the premier evangelist of systemic thinking, which he contrasted with the reductionist, atomistic thinking that had long dominated humanity’s approach to problem-solving in his view. Time and again, he would point out, decision-makers faced with crises failed to heed Albert Einstein’s warning that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Put simply, systems thinking—which Mr Ackoff described in books such as “Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems” (1974)—focuses on the performance of a system as a whole. This is in contrast to an approach that breaks systems into parts and focuses on the performance of the individual parts, on the assumption that if each individual part is improved then the sum of the parts will also be better. This assumption often proves wrong in practice, said Mr Ackoff, who had plenty of practical experience as a consultant to more than 250 corporations and 50 government agencies. The only profession that he believed had truly embraced systems thinking is architecture, where the design process starts by asking what sort of building is desired, and then works backwards to focus on what individual parts are required. An architect never starts by saying, “Here are the parts, what can I build from them?”