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Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, by John Bellamy Foster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. 310 pp. $18.00 Paper. ISBN: 1-58367-012-2.
As anyone who teaches sociology knows, the primary problem is how to tell the story of the social. In this book, John Bellamy Foster tries to tell the story of Marx's conception of "ecology." He begins by discussing Marx's dissertation on Epicurus. His aim is to establih Marx's engagement with the philosophical materialism of the ancients and to build a bridge between materialism and Marx's appreciation of Darwin and the natural sciences.
After Marx, Darwin is the central figure of importance in this story. However, it is first necessary to show how Marx gets from Epicurus to Bacon, and from Hegel and Feuerbach to Malthus and political economy. Foster does this biographically, through a close reading of Marx's writings.
Ernst Haeckel coined the term "ecology" in 1866. However, Foster is not interested in a mere word. He is interested in what Marx refers to as the "metabolism between society and...