Content area
Full Text
Abstract: The most pressing problem confronting humanity in the 21st century is the ecological crisis. The "problem of nature" is really a problem of capital, as natural cycles are turned into broken linear processes geared to private accumulation. Important advances in ecosocialist theory illuminate the continuing importance of Marx's materialist and metabolic approach for studying the dialectical interchange between humans and nature and the creation of ecological rifts within ecosystems. Additionally, Marx's ecology serves as a foundation for understanding environmental degradation, given his critique of capital as a whole and his focus on the contradiction between use value and exchange value (which facilitates the expansion of private riches at the expense of public wealth, i.e., the Lauderdale Paradox). In stark contrast to the market mechanisms proposed to address the ecological crisis, which place profit above protecting nature, Marx's ecology stresses the necessity of establishing a social order that sustains the conditions of life for future generations.
Key words: Marx, ecology, ecological crisis, capitalism, metabolic rift, Lauderdale Paradox
To speak of "Marx's Ecology in the 21st Century" may sound strange to the contemporary ear. Marx wrote in the mid-19th century, while ecological thought is generally believed to have emerged in the late 20th century. Although it has been fairly widely recognized on the leftin recent decades that Marx was an important precursor, indeed pioneer, of ecological critique, some have argued that these insights are, from today's standpoint, of mere historical value, to be relegated to the age of the steam engine.
Thus Marx's ecology in the eyes of some green leftand even ecosocialist thinkers is largely irrelevant to 21st-century conditions. Maarten de Kadt and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro have contended that "thinking about nature" "was then [in the time of Darwin and Marx] at a relatively early stage," with many advances in science still to be made. Marx was writing before nuclear power and before "the development of the chemical sciences that produced PCBs, CFCs, and DDT."1 Therefore the direct contribution of his thought to the understanding of our current ecological problems is bound to be small.
Our argument is radically different. We contend that Marx's materialist and metabolic approach, his emphasis on the contradiction between use value and exchange value and between wealth and accumulation,...