Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature - John Bellamy Foster

While it is universally accepted that the work of Charles Darwin has revolutionized the natural sciences, lesser known is the impact it had on another of the 19th century's most formative figures. The publication of The Origin of Species helped cohere Karl Marx's ideas about the dialectical principles within the world. Much like Marxism was a philosophy rooted in the interactive, joint production of people and the world, Darwinian thought struck at two of the fundamental tenets of contemporary western thought: essentialism and teleology. By grounding history and society in a "materialist ontology of emergence" (p. 233) both Darwin and Marx would transform how humans conceived of their relations with the world.

John Bellamy Foster sets out to reveal a forgotten history of Marx's (and Engels') ecological thought. Tracing the intellectual development of a young Marx through his dissertation examining Epicurean philosophy, Foster sows the materialist seeds that will blossom into Marx's central works. Overlooked in western recountings of Marxist thought, Foster argues, is an almost proto-ecological ethic. This is was not because Marx was some closeted, dreamy-eyed romantic, but rather because he drew sharp connections between the alienation of men from the landscape, and the domination of the capitalist. In Marx's estimation, the progression of capitalism relied on a double alienation of the worker both from himself (his human-ness) and from access to the land. Only the disconnect of town and country fostered a people abstracted from the world. In a passage that presages our own modern ecological concerns, Marx writes:

"Man lives, from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."

It was, Marx thought, that only through such an awareness could the formative ensemble of relations between people and the world be adequately conceived. Attempts to separate Marx's political economy from his ecological theory will, Foster argues, incorrectly assess both the home-ground and the implications of Marxist thought.

For Marx, the true dialectic requires a proper situating of relations. Marx was a thoroughgoing materialist, one who saw the relational interaction of things as the constant reinvention of the world. In this materialism Marx was echoing the words of Epicurus and Lucretius: in materialism he too imagined the fundamental premise by which men could be freed to make their own history. For Marx, the materialist conception of nature and the materialist conception of history went hand-in-hand. As such, he and Darwin can be heard to speak the message, registering in different octaves.