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Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, J. O'CONNOR, Guilford Press, London/New York (1998). 350 pp. 32.95 (hbk). 15.95 (pbk). ISBN 57230 279 8 (hbk). ISBN 1 57230 273 9 (pbk).
Opinion polls appear to demonstrate that the vast majority of people in the developed countries believe that degradation of the environment poses one of the most important problems facing humankind today. Unfortunately, nothing like a majority even of those active in environmental movements would appear to agree that Marxism could aid in understanding this problem. There are a good many reasons for this, but two of the most important must be, first, that few people are encouraged or have the patience to wade through the difficult prose of Marx and Engels, even though Marxist concepts are found in the furthest reaches of modern discourse (though not always acknowledged by their users). The second is the all too common and unfortunate confusion in peoples' minds between Marxism and communism, or more properly socialism. Marxism is a framework or paradigm in the Kuhnian sense which, at its most philosophical moments, can be used to analyse any social order, but which, in its detailed application by Marx and Engels, is indispensable to a proper understanding of capitalism, referred to euphemistically by neo-classical economics as the 'free market system'. Marxism, though subject to the same dogmatic tendencies or what Burke would call the 'bureaucratization of the imaginative', as any conceptual framework, continues to be an extremely 'fruitful' paradigm (to use Kuhn's measure of success) with dialectical roots extending back to Democritus and Epicurus.
Socialism, on the other hand, is an idea, or rather an evolving set of ideas, about how to create a social order that would overcome the many damaging social (and to an increasing degree, environmental) effects of capitalism. Marx's limited policy directives for socialism were inspired by his attempt to envision a system that would grow out of and surpass the contradictions of capitalism. Twentieth century communist leaders and thinkers have, of course, had their own ideas about how to confront these contradictions, within an extremely hostile...