Marxian View on the Environment

A common misconception is that Karl Marx completely ignored the environment in pursuit of industrial growth. However, Marx’s core philosophy, known as dialectical materialism, views history, society, and nature as deeply interconnected parts of a single reality.

Man lives on nature — nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In his writings, Marx makes vital contributions to our understanding of the human-nature relationship. He overcomes a long philosophical tradition of viewing humans as separate from and above the rest of nature, and asserts the necessity — for both survival and spiritual well-being — of a proper, active relationship with the rest of nature.

At the same time, he recognises this relationship has gone wrong in the capitalist epoch.

Marxism and the Environment

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Marxism is often mistakenly accused of taking the environment for granted — in the pursuit of economic growth needed to alleviate poverty and want. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

Two Common Accusations Against Marxism

 Reality

Contrary to these claims, consciousness about and struggle for the environment is nothing new for Marxists. Marx was a pioneer in analysing and criticising the destructive effect of capitalist industrialisation on nature as well as on society. Both Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, closely studied and followed science in all fields.

Labour, Nature, and Wealth

Marx viewed labour as “a process in which both man and nature participate.” This is underlined in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875):

“Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists of) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour-power.”

— Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

Alienation from Nature — a Double Process

Marx warned of the effects of the disruption in the relationship between humanity and nature. He saw the alienation of workers in capitalist production as part of the same process as humanity’s alienation from nature. In his time, this was particularly obvious in the industrialisation of agriculture.

Workers’ Role

• Working class is at the forefront of capitalism’s effects on the environment
• Energy companies (oil, coal, nuclear) pose direct threats to workers and nature
• Workers are often the most conscious of environmental dangers
• Struggle to improve the working environment is an important part of environmental struggles

Dialectical Materialism

• Marxist philosophy offers tools to analyse today’s climate crisis
• Society and nature develop through build-up of contradictions leading to qualitative leaps
• Climate researchers echo this in warning of tipping points — when environment passes irreversibly from one stage to another

On Those Who Misread Marx

Many of those blaming Marx for neglecting the environment have not studied his work, but that of his self-appointed ‘followers’ in social democracy or Stalinism. The societies they constructed — described as socialism — completely contradicted Marx about workers’ democracy, the role of the state, and their treatment of the environment.

“Natural science… will become the basis of human science, as it has already become the basis of actual human life.”

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)

Marx on Nature

To understand Marxism and the environment, there is a need to understand the method: Marx always looked at the world and its history in its totality as the point of departure for his analysis and programme.

Misunderstandings About Marx and Capitalism

The fact that Marx regarded capitalism as a historically progressive system has been misunderstood and distorted by many. For example, Michael Lowy (1997) wrote that Marx had “a fairly uncritical attitude toward industrial civilisation, particularly its destructive relationship to nature” and that “Marx does not possess an integrated ecological perspective.”

Nature Under Capitalism Has No Value

• Some critics claim that Marx saw nature as something that was for free and unlimited. But his point was that nature under capitalism had no value. He concluded that unexploited nature also held use value: for example, the air, forests, and fish.

Dialectical Materialism and Nature

• Marx studied the non-mechanistic materialism of Epicurus (341–270 BCE) and the dialectics of GWF Hegel (1770–1831) and developed his philosophy, dialectical materialism. Its core positions:
  • Always changing: The world is always changing, even mortal — not static or God-given
  • Humanity in nature: Humanity was one with nature, not outside it. Life is a product of Earth, not of a god
  • Dialectical unity: Marx did not divide history into social or natural — he saw them as one, with dialectical laws applying to both

The Concept of Metabolism

• Marx used the term metabolism: a chain of processes linked to each other, as one body. The organism interacts with its environment while simultaneously the environment acts back on the organism — in the process, both are changed.

“Nature is man’s inorganic body — nature in so far as it is not the human body. 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 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.”

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)

The Metabolic Rift — Capitalism Breaks the Natural Cycle

• Marx showed that the increasing division between town and country was a breach of this metabolism — summarised in the term ‘metabolic rift’ by John Bellamy Foster, author of Marx’s Ecology.
• In the third volume of Capital (published 1894, after Marx’s death in 1883), Marx describes capitalism as a break with the natural laws of life:
  • “Large, landed property reduces the agricultural population to a constantly falling minimum and confronts it with a constantly growing industrial population crowded together in large cities. It thereby creates conditions which cause an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III (1894)

Capitalism Robs Both the Soil and the Labourer

• Marx’s analysis of capitalist agriculture was strikingly farsighted. Based on a discussion about the long-term degradation of soil following the use of chemical fertilisers, he wrote:
  • “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867)
  • “Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres… disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it, therefore, violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867)
  • “Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867)
• In a farsighted prediction, Marx warned that capitalism’s constant modernisation would increase “this process of destruction.”

Engels on Humanity’s Place in Nature

• “Thus at every step, we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, exist in its midst and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” — Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876).

The Dialectical Interconnection of Organism and Environment

• Marx and Engels viewed humans not as something separate from the environment — as capitalist ideological orthodoxy does — but as dialectically interconnected with it.
• The environment is no longer a passive object to be shaped at will — it plays a role in making the organism what it is. Environmental niches don’t just pre-exist; the very idea of an environment has no meaning unless we are talking about an organism’s relationship to it.

“The ‘essence’ of the fish is its ‘being’ — water. The ‘essence’ of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the essence of the fish and so is no longer a suitable medium for existence as soon as the river is made to serve the industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats.”

— Marx & Engels, The German Ideology

Tipping Points — Marxism and Climate Science

• Climate and the earth’s ecosystem are dynamic and complex — best viewed as a process of many interacting factors. Every change feeds back and creates new effects on all actors. This leads to the concepts of tipping points and holism, both central within Marxism.

What Is Required to End the Contradiction?

• To end the contradiction between humanity and nature requires, in Marx’s view, something more than mere knowledge:
  • “It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.”
• To truly end the exploitation of nature in the service of profit requires that the profit motive be excised from society. The right to privately own land and the means of production — which lies at the very root of capitalist economics — must be abolished. Only by holding land and instruments of production in common and producing to meet social needs will the simultaneous exploitation of nature and humanity end.

Socialist Ecological Thought Since Marx

Marxism is a science, not a religion. As such, it is a continually evolving body of thought, adapting and learning from new situations and knowledge. Several Marxists and socialists have made significant contributions to ecological thought.

Vladimir Vernadsky and the Biosphere

• The term “biosphere” — encompassing the entirety of an open system that supports all life and its interaction with the atmosphere and the energy coming from the sun — was coined in the 1920s by a leading scientist of the Bolshevik Soviet government, Vladimir Vernadsky.
• Vernadsky was one of the very first — in a prophetic speech in 1922 — to warn of the dangers of the misuse of atomic power. In 1926, he published The Biosphere. This was before Soviet science became intensely productivist, anti-ecological, and, in some important and notorious episodes, anti-scientific.

“Life is, thus, potently, and continuously disturbing chemical inertia on the surface of our planet. It creates colours and forms of nature, the associations of animals and plants, and the creative labour of civilized humanity, and becomes a part of the diverse chemical processes of the earth’s crust. There is no substantial chemical equilibrium on the crust in which the influence of life is not evident, and in which chemistry does not display life’s work. Life is, therefore, not an external or accidental phenomenon of the earth’s crust. All living matter can be regarded as a single entity in the mechanism of the biosphere.”

— Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere (1926)

Key Thinkers in Socialist Ecological Thought

Marxism vs. Individual Green Thought

Much of green thought has for too long neglected the issue of class and the nature of the economic system. Many people truly concerned with environmental degradation and global warming view sustainability through the lens of individual responsibility: