Karl Marx and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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A Western European social theorist and political activist, Karl Marx wrote voluminously, and his works rank among the most recognized contributions to social analysis. Best known for Das Kapital (1867), and for coauthoring The Communist Manifesto (1848) with his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels, Marx’s examination of the contradictions and crises entailed in social relations under capitalism has played a critical role in most “radical” political economic theory and politics since his death.

There are many ways in which Marx, and the various Marxisms that have followed, speak to the relation between society and environment. It is only since the last decades of the 20th century that the relevance of Marx’s work to environmental politics has been widely recognized. Prior to the 1980s, many argued that Marx largely ignored nature-or even that he thought it unimportant. His “labor theory of value,” for example, is frequently and erroneously brandished as proof that he believed nature contributes nothing of value to human production. Recent scholarship, however, has corrected this misinterpretation in two important ways: by demonstrating the relevance of Marx’s concepts for the study of socio-environmental dynamics, and by bringing attention to the ways in which Marx’s work reflects on the role of nature in the production and reproduction of human society.

First, beginning in the early 1980s, an increasing number of social scientists interested in ecological problems turned to Marx-inspired analytical tools to understand the ways in which environmental change is a product of political economic struggle between humans. Seminal contributions to the study of these dynamics in developing countries like Nepal and Nigeria looked at the political economic, that is, productive and distributional implications for natural resources of political conflict between classes, nations, and ethnic groups.

Marxian concepts like the “social relations of production” (the totality of human institutions that animate a particular “mode of production” like capitalism or feudalism) and “primitive accumulation” (the means through which subsistence producers are dispossessed of ways of providing for themselves without wage work) are essential to these studies. Much of the power of political ecology as an approach to understanding the “society-environment dialectic” is drawn from these explicitly Marxian roots, an analysis only made stronger by political ecology’s marriage of political economy and cultural anthropology, which highlights important dynamics-religious beliefs and practices, for example-obscured by an emphasis on economic structures.

Second, the standard and grossly incorrect caricature of Marx as a dogmatic economic determinist who believed that labor was the sole source of anything meaningful is eroding, albeit very slowly. The work of writers like James O’Connor and John Bellamy Foster shows Marx’s thinking on production as not only far more complicated than often thought, but as speaking, often directly, to environmental concerns. As Marx himself wrote in 1875, “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.” These analyses, and the work of many political ecologists, show the possibilities of a “green Marxism.”

Bibliography:

Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (Longman, 1986);
John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (Monthly Review, 2000);
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (International Publishers, 1938);
Karl Marx, Capital (Vintage, 1977);
James O’Connor, Natural Causes (Guilford, 1997);
Paul Robbins, Political Ecology (Blackwell, 2004);
Michael Watts, Silent Violence (University of California, 1983).