Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature

Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis.

Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx’s neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature.

Marx’s Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley.

By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx’s Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Materialism

Ecology

The Crisis of Socio-Ecology

1. The Materialist Conception of Nature

• Materialism and the Very Early Marx
• Epicurus and the Revolution of Science and Reason

2. The Really Earthly Question

• Feuerbach
• The Alienation of Nature and Humanity
• Association versus Political Economy

3. Parson Naturalists

• Natural Theology
• Natural Theology and Political Economy
• The First Essay
• The Second Essay
• Thomas Chalmers and the Bridgewater Treatises

4. The Materialist Conception of History

• The Critique of Malthus and the Origins of Historical Materialism
• The New Materialism
• Historical Geology and Historical Geography
• Critique of the True Socialists
• The Mechanistic “Prometheanism” of Proudhon
• The View of the Communist Manifesto

5. The Metabolism of Nature and Society

• Overpopulation and the Conditions of Reproduction of Human Beings
• James Anderson and the Origins of Differential Fertility
• Liebig, Marx, and the Second Agricultural Revolution

6. The Basis in Natural History for Our View

• The Origin of Species
• Darwin, Huxley, and the Defeat of Teleology
• Marx and Engels: Labor and Human Evolution
• The Plight of the Materialists
• The Revolution in Ethnological Time: Morgan and Marx
• A Young Darwinian and Karl Marx

Epilogue

• Dialectical Naturalism
• Marxism and Ecology after Engels
• Caudwell’s Dialectics
• The Dialectical Ecologist
• The Principle of Conservation

Notes

Index

John Bellamy Foster is associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Vulnerable Planet and co-editor of Hungry for Profit (2000), Capitalism and the Information Age (1998), and In Defense of History (1996).