Marx's Ecology & Marx and Nature.

• Author: Smith, Tom
• Position: Review

James Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology, 2000. New York, Monthly Review Press. Paul Burkett's Marx and Nature, 1999. New York, St. Martin's Press.

Many "populist" writers still condemn Marx for his alleged "Promethean" faith in technological progress. Many "Marxists" agree--and accept the charge proudly. For them, workers' control will merely ensure that even heretofore-dangerous technologies--nuclear power, for example--will become safe. Even such "social ecologists" as Murray Bookchin accept this view of Marx's concept of ecology and progress.

Foster's and Burkett's books thoroughly debunk this belief. In actual fact, Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about the impact of industry and technology upon nature. Marx attacked "Prometheanism" when his contemporary Proudhon promoted it. Engels discussed the danger, revealed in one historical civilization's collapse after another, of human hubris in dealing with nature: the idea that man could ever dominate and control nature rather than understand better how to sustainably conform to its laws.

The "deep ecological" ideology fashionable today asserts that we should feel collective guilt for the environmental crisis engulfing the planet, and that what we need is "green values" that place nature rather than man at the center of our ethos. Marx offers a materialist alternative that permits us to deal with the real source of our ecological problems: exploitation and class conflict. In Marx's view, the exploitation of the producer classes by the ruling classes of history is simply the flip side of human society's exploitation of nature. Man exists in what Marx called a "metabolic" relation with nature, a relationship that is absolutely essential to man's survival and welfare. Labor is the essence of this metabolic relation. For labor is the process by which we remold the "raw materials" produced by the "great workshop of nature" (Marx) for our own survival and benefit. When human social and economic relations become alienated and exploitative, the ruling class thus created becomes just as interested in e xploiting nature without regard to the ultimate destructive consequences as it is in exploiting the class that "works" nature--the workers, the serfs, the slaves. Thus human history -- "the history of class conflict"--is simultaneously a history of our increasingly conflictual, alienated relationship with nature. It is this history and these alienated, exploitative social relations, rather than...