Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature

by John Bellamy Foster

Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This startling 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.

Genres: Ecology, Philosophy, Politics, Environment, Nonfiction, Economics, Climate Change

310 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2000

About the author

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, editor of Monthly Review and author of several books on the subject of political economy of capitalism, economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory.

Reviews

[Vicky "phenkos" · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read chapter 5 on Marx and Malthus. This is a subject I've been interested in for some time now but was not aware of this book until a search for secondary literature on the Grundrisse brought this up. I wish I knew about this book earlier! The author makes the innovative and entirely plausible claim that, contrary to received wisdom, Marx was a thoroughly ecological thinker with a serious interest in nature as evidenced in his research on agriculture. What he called the 'metabolism' of human beings with nature which capitalism disrupts (the translator uses the word 'rift', better to look up the German word Marx uses) was at the very basis of his thought. Foster shows how Marx repudiates (to be precise, rubbishes) Malthus' supposed law of population with passages from both the Grundrisse and Capital. Interestingly, he also shows how Malthus' theory had drawn criticism from authors unrelated to Marx or the communist movement -- authors immersed in the study of agriculture. Defo tbc.

[Naeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book in 2009. I am even more impressed with it after a second reading. I find compelling Foster's effort to establish a dialectical materialist ecology. It seems obvious that there is an important relationship between how humans treat nature and how they treat other humans. Clarified, too, is the co-evolutionary relationship between humans and nature that Foster wants to establish.

I paid much more attention this time to tension between emergent and transcendent philosophies and to the role of teleology, determinism, and contingency in the opposing philosophers (Epicurus vs. Hegel, mostly).

The cost for Foster in establishing Marx as a (or the) outstanding ecologist is that he minimizes the modernist aspects of Marx. This means that Foster underplays the short term benefits of treating Nature as a mere thing. And, it means that Foster implicitly treats Nature as either neutral or benign towards its species. But this is a small problem given the richness on offer here. Below is the review I posted from 2009.
--------------------------

Foster turns to Marx's analysis of various theorists (among others, Epicurus -- on whose work Marx wrote his dissertation, Feuerbach, Malthus, and especially Darwin) to recover Marx as a materialist ecologist.

Foster provides a triple critique: (1) he very forcefully, and correctly in my view, demands that the contemporary ecological movement confront how ecological issues are embedded with social problems -- especially of class and capitalism, and, he shows how this blind spot is the result of the ecological movement's spiritualism or idealism; (2) he insists that Marxists take ecological issues seriously; and (3) he shows how a thorough understanding Marx's dialectical materialism necessarily means developing Marx's sensitivity to ecological issues. In his view, and in mine, all this means that Marx was perhaps the greatest of ecologists (along with Murry Bookchin, perhaps) and that we can use his tools, methods, and analysis to take ecological issues seriously. This makes sense to me as I believe the totality of Marx's theorizing is grounded in what Marx calls the "human metabolism with nature."

I was (and continue to be) astonished by how much I learned from this book. The sections on Malthus and Darwin are particularly revealing. I very much felt like I was living within the times and ideas of the late 18th century Europe. Marx's depth, of course, is well known. But his breadth -- from geology, to biology, to soil science, to the industrial and agricultural innovations is really awe inspiring. I remain committed to the methodological divide and difference between natural and social sciences but this book brings a bit of doubt into my clean division.

I have read parts of two of Foster's other books: The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet and Ecology Against Capitalism and will try to read more of them, but this book is where Foster's analysis is the mostly deeply rooted in texts, ideas, and in history.

I am planning a course on "Capitalism and Ecology" (to counter a theoretically thin and an all too easy "feel good environmentalism" that is now running rampant at Ithaca College) and I suspect that this book will be at the center of it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went in thinking Marx's Ecology would teach me about historical marxist ecology, as in the efforts taken and experiments had in the various people's republics and the soviet union, after reading this article containing a positive reference to JBF's work. This turned out to be wrong: much more than focusing on ecology as a material practice, Foster reinterprets (or rather recontextualizes) Marx's lifework in his broader intellectual development, which stood in constant dialogue with Darwin, Morgan and various other agricultural theoreticians. Marx didn't just formalize historical and dialectical materialism as a method, he also applied it to the world to a much greater extent than his readers at large are/were aware of. Soil depletion, the metabolism between society and nature, the simple fact that nature, too, is historical, the interplay between natural selection and the gestation of culture - all these matters he took in consideration.

The primary part of Marx's Ecology doesn't touch this, though. It focuses on the roots of Marx's materialist thinking, stretching all the way back to Epicurus and Lucretius. The various twists and turns taken – essentialist, gradualist and incohrent materialism giving way to the dialecticals that would change the course of history – are a great exercise in properly understanding the significance of Marx's work and especially why it is superior to his forebears. JBF has a big crush on Christopher Caudwell and indeed sees him as one of the only non-idealist western marxists, and fittingly he provides many of the secondary comments.

However, the voluminous leaves me with questions and doubts. Guillaume Suing, who wrote the original article and his own work L'écologie réelle, is both approving of Foster and at the same time holds that the Soviet Union's ecological experiments didn't stop with Lenin's death but rather with Stalin's. Foster's account reduces the Stalin era to an unscientific Lysenko and a crude materialism. I guess Suing is coloured by his own ideological predispositions, too, and there might be more to the history of soviet ecology than he lets on. Proving that a method was already designed with ecology in mind and indeed that this awareness is fundamental to it is impressive, but it remains ink on paper. Going beyond simple "betrayal"-narratives to chart why this got discarded on the path to socialism (or did it?) would, however, have been a much more enriching endeavour.

But all in all a very serious and cool engagement with Marx's method and a rewarding read even if you don't want to know anything about ecology. Recommended.

[Sarah Ensor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant presentation of the development of Karl Marx's ideas about materialism and human beings' relationship to nature. Marx was shaped by intense social inequality and political repression in a time of ecological crises in soil fertility and lethal industrial pollution. He and his great comrade Friedrich Engels read widely and got stuck into the latest arguments about evolution, population, geology and soil science because they wanted to change the world. They understood that capitalism was not a permanent system anymore than previous societies and forms of production had been.

Marx's work has often been misrepresented in relation to ecology; sometimes by ecologists who misunderstood the context of what he wrote. But also the destructive effects of Stalinism on people and nature allowed rightwingers to use this as proof there is no alternative to capitalism. This book is detailed and accessible and shows how deeply Marx thought about ecological ideas but it would be a mistake to think it’s only of historical value. Marx and Engels were activists as well as theorists and their ecological ideas have been used and developed by environmental scientists and activists. Marx famously said the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it and this book helps us do both.

[Γιώργος Πισίνας · Rating 5 out of 5]

Συγκλονιστικό!
Είναι ένα βιβλίο το οποίο νομίζω πρέπει να διαβάσουν όλοι όσοι ασχολούνται με επιστημονικά θέματα οικολογίας περιβάλλοντος (ίσως το βρούνε δύσκολο) αλλά και όσοι ενδιαφέρονται με τον μαρξισμό (θα το βρούνε ιδιαίτερα ενδιαφέρον). Είναι μια διατριβή που θα έλεγα πως είναι περισσότερο φιλοσοφική παρά πολιτική, που το κατατάσει το goodreads. Ένα έργο με ιδιαίτερο βάθος και εύρος, το οποίο εστιάζει σε δυο βασικούς διανοητές του 19ου αιώνα: τον Μαρξ & τον Δαρβίνο.
Προσωπικά μου επιβεβαίωσε πως κάτι είχα καταλάβει από διαλεκτική αλλά και πως δεν είχα καταλάβει τίποτα. Είναι ένα βιβλίο το οποίο θα το πρότεινα με ιδιαίτερο ζήλο, παρά το ότι δεν είναι ιδιαίτερα εύκολο. Δεν απαιτεί προηγούμενες γνώσεις, γιατί εισάγει με πολύ προσοχή όλους τους διανοητές με τους οποίους καταπιάνεται, αλλά ασχολείται με ιδιαίτερα δύσκολα φιλοσοφικά θέματα, τα οποία έχουν ιδιαίτερη δυσκολία στη σύλληψη.

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"From the start, Marx's notion of the alienation of human labor was connected to an understanding of the alienation of human beings from nature. It was this twofold alienation which, above all, needed to be explained historically."

[Christopher Moltisanti's Windbreakers fan]

4/5

Book is dry as a day old hard scone. But grew onto me and challenged me on my views on cities and suburbs. Most importantly gave me a framework that can be used to integrate and emphasize the importance of eco-socialism in (anti-imperialist) communist movement.

Lately, been seeing lot of horseshit ahistorical takes related to many communist/revolutionist leaders and thinkers. Che, Fidel, Mao, Lenin and many others prioritized teaching the workers and peasants theories as well as how to take direct action.

Theories were, are, and will always be dull. However, it gives us clarity in our struggle to decipher capitalist propaganda. But not reading them in your free time is not as hot as many think it to be.

Finally, I would have definitely attempted to murder Malthus. But seriously this book is great.

[Maud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! Tough and theory heavy at times but anything that ends with a goal of “human freedom with an earthly basis - society of associated producers” gets bumped up half a star.
may not have finished this without the reading group but glad to have gotten a deeper understanding of the problems with Malthus and really useful as a base for a liberatory understanding of ecology which can too often be really romantic.
Also a helpful frame for primitive accumulation, the divestment of land from indigenous people, and the liberalism of conservation.
cool.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve wanted to read something by JBF for a while. When someone in a Science for the People (SftP) reading group I’m in mentioned that there was another SftP reading group already half way through this book, I took it upon myself to also join. Though stuck around the Niagara area at the time, I dedicated a good portion of my spare time that week catching up.

Before starting this book, I was already anticipating JBF would be important theoretically for my dissertation research, and coming out the other side of this book, I am even more convinced that this will be the case. Someone in the reading group specifically mentioned to me that JBF did his PhD at York, which is something I have no idea how to respond to lol. I think I recall David Hess mentioning in my department's student-organized conference that he had a research project showing how dissenting or radical research was suppressed or censored in the sense that it almost universally occurred outside the domain of elite academic institutions, and in institutions that do not rank as high, which is possibly why so many radicals end up at York. Anyway, I really loved this book a lot.

The first half of this book is heavily focused on natural theology, which was somewhat surprising, but also something I really really appreciated. I suppose because this type of discourse belonged to another century, I don’t often see 21st century Marxists engaging in theology in this way. But Marx himself, in the years leading up to his dissertation research on Epicurean materialism, was reading a lot of natural theology. JBF remarks:

“At the time that Marx was studying Bacon he was also spending “a good deal of time” on the work of the German natural theologian (later deist) Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), especially the latter’s Considerations on the Art Instincts of Animals (1760).”

I was looking for something like this JBF book after reading Engels’s “Socialism: Utopian or Scientific” where Engels excerpts these Marx quotes from their book “The Holy Family” (a book which includes an extensive critique of Marx's doctoral advisor and liberal theologian Bruno Bauer):

"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for the matter to think?' "In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence — i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen. "The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him, natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.

"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.

"In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy.”

Foster unpacks a lot of this stuff very extensively in this book. This emphasis on Marx’s theological engagements is not only important for helping to contextualize his theorizing on materialism but is also an important setup for Foster’s 4th chapter which critiques one of the more influential ‘scientific’ parsons of Marx’s time, Malthus:

““With the exception of the Venetian monk Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the population theorists,” Marx wrote in Capital, “are Protestant clerics … Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus and his pupil, the arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of the lesser reverend scribblers in this line…. With the entry of ‘the principle of population’ [into political economy] the hour of the Protestant parsons struck.””

Foster also discusses a lot of the scientists Marx was studying or studying under:

“I discovered that Marx’s systematic investigation into the work of the great German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, which grew out of his critique of Malthusianism, was what led him to his central concept of the “metabolic rift” in the human relation to nature—his mature analysis of the alienation of nature. To understand this fully, however, it became necessary to reconstruct the historical debate over the degradation of the soil that had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the context of the “second agricultural revolution,” and that extends down to our time.”

“Marx had considerable knowledge of the development of geological science. In the gymnasium in Trier he had studied under the then famous German geologist Johann Steininger (1794–1874), a follower of the great German geologist—often considered to be the “father of historical geology”—Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817). Later at Berlin University Marx had attended lectures in anthropology given by Heinrich Steffens (1773–1845), a natural philosopher (in the tradition of Friedrich Schelling) and also an important geologist and mineralogist, who had attended lectures by Werner.”

Some of this discussion led to descriptions of later Marxist scientists (like Haldane, Oparin, and Lewontin) who emphasized the capacity of organisms to change their environments and conditions on earth in radical ways, starting from the production of an atmosphere which rendered another event of ‘spontaneous generation’ impossible:

“The answer lay partly in biochemistry, partly in the analysis already provided by the Russian ecologist V.I. Vernadsky in his theory in The Biosphere (1926) that the atmosphere, as we know it, was produced by life itself. By producing the atmosphere, life had altered the conditions from those that had made “spontaneous generation” possible”

This will be an important theoretical approach for my own research.

One of the central things JBF is trying to do in this book is rebut the prevalent accusation that Marx was fundamentally a modernist Promethean that had nothing valuable to contribute to ecological discourse. JBF writes:

“Thus postmodernist environmentalist Wade Sikorski writes that “Marx … was one of our age’s most devout worshippers of the machine. Capitalism was to be forgiven its sins because … it was in the process of perfecting the machine.”

Ironically, this criticism of Marx as Promethean—which has a very long history within Marx criticism, extending back to the early years of the Cold War—seems to have emerged in a very roundabout way from Marx’s own critique of Proudhon in this respect. Thus, Marx’s critique of the mythico-religious bases of Proudhon’s analysis of machinery and modernity has somehow been transposed… into a critique of Marx himself…”

I think Foster succeeds here. There are many proof texts like the ones below, but this book is so much more than prooftexting. However, this was an interesting comment Marx and Engels had on fish:

“The ‘essence,’ of the fish,” Marx and Engels were to write in The German Ideology,

‘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 is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence.’
 
All this pointed to the fact that the fish’s being was in a sense alienated as a result of human praxis. All such contradictions, between being and essence, thus demanded purely practical solution”

And another fascinating comment by Marx on deforestation:

“Marx himself referred to the “devastating” effects of “deforestation” and viewed this as a long-term, historical result of the exploitative relation to nature that had characterized all civilization, not just capitalism, up to that point: “the development of civilization and industry in general,” he wrote, “has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”70 Marx also decried the fact that the forests in England were not “true forests” since “the deer in the parks of the great are demure domestic cattle, as fat as London aldermen”; while in Scotland “the so-called “deer forests” that had been set up for the benefit of huntsmen (at the expense of rural laborers) encompassed deer but no trees”

Engels had a fascinating comment on coevolutionary phenomena in nature. JBF writes: “Animals too relate to the natural world in a way that is coevolutionary, changing their environments as well as being affected by it,” and then quotes Engels’ “Dialectics of Nature”:

‘We have seen how goats have prevented the regeneration of forests in Greece; on the island of St. Helena, goats and pigs brought by the first arrivals have succeeded in exterminating its old vegetation almost completely, and so have prepared the ground for the plants brought by later sailors and colonists. But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally.’”

JBF mentions another comment by Kautsky on the way forestry promoted the replacement of deciduous trees by more profitable coniferous ones:

"whereby in forestry, for example, the destruction of forests is encouraged by “the elimination of slow growing deciduous trees by rapid-growing, and more rapidly exploitable, conifers.”

I also wanted to include this quote by August Bebel, someone who I learned about during a visit to Wetzlar, Germany, because I had the chance to visit his home while in that historic German town where Goethe acquired material for his novel Werther. Bebel laments how deforestation of the highlands was destroying the river flow of the Rhine and Vistula:

“At the same time [August Bebel] wrote an extensive critique of Malthusian overpopulation theory. Hence, his work contained important ecological elements. “The mad sacrifice of forest, for the sake of ‘profit,’” he wrote,

is said to be the cause of the appreciable deterioration of climate and decline in the fertility of the soil in the provinces of Prussia and Pomerania, in Styria, Italy, France, and Spain. Frequent inundations are the consequence of stripping high ground of trees. The inundations of the Rhine and Vistula are chiefly attributed to the devastation of forest land in Switzerland and Poland.”

Finally, a very fascinating comment by Rosa Luxemburg on how deforestation was causing the disappearance of warblers:

“In prison in May 1917 Rosa Luxemburg also demonstrated her concern in this area. She wrote to her friend Sonja Liebknecht that she was studying “natural science”:

‘geography of plants and animals. Only yesterday I read why the warblers are disappearing from Germany. Increasingly systematic forestry, gardening and agriculture are, step by step, destroying all natural nesting and breeding places: hollow trees, fallow land, thickets of shrubs, withered leaves on the garden grounds. It pained me so when I read that. Not because of the song they sing for people, but rather it was the picture of the silent, irresistible extinction of these defenseless little creatures which hurt me to the point where I had to cry. It reminded me of a Russian book which I read while still in Zurich, a book by Professor Sieber about the ravage of the redskins in North America. In exactly the same way, step by step, they have been pursued from their land by civilized men and abandoned to perish silently and cruelly.’”

One interesting and comment by JBF was that Marx and Engels were both working to move beyond anthropocentrism:

“Under the influence of the ancient materialists and Darwin, Marx and Engels repudiated the age-old conception that had placed human beings at the center of the natural universe. Thus Engels professed “a withering contempt for the idealistic exaltation of man over the other animals.” There is no trace in Marx and Engels of the Cartesian reduction of animals to mere machines.”

The last thing I want to conclude on here was that Marx and Engels were involved in a project that was rejecting the teleological assertions of natural theology, which is why they appreciated Darwin so much, despite how he was still fundamentally so bourgeois. Engels specifically mentioned what he saw as one of Darwin’s central mistakes which was his reliance on Malthus:

“However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naively and uncritically, nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles are required to perceive the struggle for existence in Nature.”

Yet one of the contradictions I have not worked out yet is Marx’s critique of teleology in light of how teleological his conception of history was. His faith that capitalism by some sort of law of nature was digging its own grave and communism was an inevitable future that was on the verge of arriving. Was this a rhetorical assertion of faith, or did Marx genuinely see this social development teleologically.

Marx commented on Darwin in Capital, using the curious phrase of ‘natural technology’:

“Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention?”

“In drawing this comparison between “natural technology” and human technology, Marx was of course aware that the Greek word “organ” (organon) also meant tool, and that organs were initially viewed as “grownon” tools of animals—tools, as the artificial organs of human beings.47 As Engels stated, “animals in the narrower sense also have tools, but only as limbs of their body.”48 Human technology was thus distinguished from natural technology in that it did not consist of such adnated organs, but rather occurred through the social production of tools: the “productive organs of man in society.” ”

Marx eventually sent Darwin a copy of his first volume of Capital to which Darwin responded (perhaps somewhat condescendingly as some in my reading group believe):

“Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honor which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnesdy desire the extension of Knowledge, & [“that” added] this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain Dear Sir/Yours faithfully/Charles Darwin.”

[Edgar Moreno Martínez · Rating 4 out of 5]

+: super guay el relato como la discusión materialismo vs idealismo (teleológico) avanzó durante el siglo XIX y como las defensas religiosas fueron cayendo hasta Darwin, todos los debates sobre la evolución (y coevolución naturaleza/herramientas) y las dificultades de asentarse la teoría de la evolución (que realmente es un nombre malísimo, teoría de los cambios aleatorios >>>), la parte filosófica de explicación del "materialismo" es de las mejores que he leído, buenas perspectivas (aunque supongo que un poco básicas para 2023) de cómo necesitamos entender el medio natural como parte inseparable de cualquier análisis "transformador", la parte histórica de Malthus (no era consciente de que fuese tan subnormal) y agraria interesante, interesante la defensa/puesta en valor del "repartir a la gente entre campo y ciudad en el socialismo", muy divertido pasar de Hegel/Epicuro a discutir sobre como los retretes de las ciudades no abonan los campos, super digerible (me lo he leído en un dia)

-: si la palabra dialéctica no existiese el socialismo hace 100 años que dominaría el mundo, en verdad me da igual si X marxista (incluido Marx/Engels) era ecologista o no

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 3 out of 5]

What could have been a great book is opaqued by 3 big mistakes:

*Assuming Engels has a different marxism than Marx (which is false).
*Dedicating two chapters to Darwin (one was enough).
*Assuming Stalin killed Bukharin in the epilogue (what has to do this with ecology it's a mistery only Bellamy knows).

Aside from that, this book does an excellent analysis of the metabolic relationship between human, work and nature as well as nature alienation/metabolic rift and it's transcendence to the communist project.

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really interesting excursion into the ecological roots in Marx's work. That part was highly interesting. The parts I skimmed in Capital are apparently all of those parts. Foster's emphasis on Marx's early article Debate on the Theft of Wood was also highly interesting since before this I had only read the article chopped and diced up in a McLellan reader and it never addressed the issue of the commons at the heart of that article.

However what really hurt this work in my eyes is rather than drawing a conclusion which matched a future politics for Marxism and environmentalism the book sought to show the aspects of Darwin in Marx's account which made for a lot of historical work on Malthus and Darwin which I found rather unnecessary for the ecological movement of today. Sadly this book could've been so much more than what it was. If one has a great interest in Darwin and Marx's historical work on ecology rather than Marxism's need for an environmental aspect in its development of political engagement then this book might be for you.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this broad intellectual history of Marx, Darwin, ecology, the Greek atomists, and the scientific revolution, Foster challenges the common misrepresentations and boogeymen of Marx as a "mechanical," "determinist," "Promethean," or "productivist" thinker. Instead, Foster conjures an impressive range of Marx's texts and correspondence across both his early and later writings to demonstrate that Marx was a deeply ecological thinker, concerned intimately with the human relation to both society *and* nature. Looking at Marx's discussions of soil, his work in the ethnological notebooks, his comments on separation from the land, his understanding of the metabolism of nature, and his concern for sustainability under communism, Foster unequivocally demonstrates that Marx was an unreservedly scientific and ecological thinker concerned with the human relation to nature just as equally as human social relations (contra so much of Western Marxism/the Frankfurt school who reject the correlation of Marxism and science).

A portion of the book I found particularly interesting/novel was Foster's analysis of Marx's deep appreciation for Darwin. Foster convincingly highlights Darwin's influence on Marx's conception of materialism as a contingent, nonmechanical, and coevolutionary emergent process... demonstrating the foundational import of Marx's words to his friend Lankester that Darwin had "provided the basis in natural history for our view." I have to say- the fact that I have been reading secondary Marx works for years now and have never read about this connection and the centrality it had for Marx's thinking only goes to prove Foster's point that Western Marxism/the Frankfurt school won the day when they separated Marx's historical/social thinking from his ecological/scientific thinking. This is, however, an enormous mistake for those of us today who are required to grapple with the ecological crises by deeply theorizing humanity's coevolutionary interdependent relationship to nature.

Unfortunately, where this book succeeds is also where it fails. It gives a stunning historical descriptive account of Marx as an ecological thinker. It fails, however, to give a rigorous prescriptive normative account of what that means for the present and the ways a rigorous materialism would practically effect contemporary ecological questions- but that is perhaps asking the book to do something it never set out to do and is probably left for later works by Foster. All in all a wonderful history book for understanding Marx and his context.

[Enza Maria Galasso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foster è professore associato di sociologia all'università dell'Oregon ed una delle menti più importanti di una corrente di pensiero contemporanea che viene a volte definita "ecomarxismo". Foster ha influenzato il pensiero contemporaneo introducendo il concetto di "frattura metabolica" tra uomo e natura, concetto che egli mutua proprio da Marx. Nella società capitalista le relazioni di produzione producono una frattura nel metabolismo uomo-natura. La natura non riuscirà più a riprodurre se stessa e quindi non riuscirà a produrre neanche più sostentamento per l'uomo,se continuiamo a sfruttarla in maniera insostenibile. Il problema nasce già con la divisione tra città e campagna,ma con lo sviluppo del capitalismo non svanisce,si fa solo più complesso. Il letame,anziché venire usato come risorsa per fertilizzare il terreno,contribuisce solo all'inquinamento di intere aree,e i fertilizzanti di sintesi tamponano il problema ma ne aggiungono di nuovi:inquinamento,costi di produzione...senza contare lo spreco di risorse che potrebbero essere utilizzate anziché gettate via. Il capitalismo non riesce mai a gestire in modo davvero razionale le sue risorse,perché il fine ultimo è sempre il guadagno immediato e ciò che non è economicamente conveniente non viene preso in considerazione. Urge riorganizzare la società in modo più razionale e sostenibile,e secondo Foster ciò è possibile solo in una società di produttori associati.
Unica pecca: ho trovato un po' prolissa la parte sul materialismo premarxista; nel complesso però resta un lavoro molto interessante e ben fatto,sia dal punto di vista storico che filosofico,ed in grado di dare una prospettiva diversa ed interessante sul problema ecologico che siamo costretti ad affrontare in questo periodo storico. Consiglio di leggerlo anche se non siete comunisti,non bisogna per forza essere d'accordo con tutto per riflettere su questi temi.

[Luc Moulaison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually pretty mind blowing. The textual engagement with Marx is a little half baked (but recent works by Mau and Malm do a good job at developing the key insights), but the through line that Foster traces from Epicurus and Lucretius -> natural theology -> Darwin -> Marx is fascinating fascinating stuff

[Erdem Yelmenoglu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dry but informative.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a book on an extremely dry topic—how Marx’s treatises on materialism are rooted in a deep understanding of the natural world and the necessity of an ecological/environmental approach to labor and economic development—this ended up being a much more rewarding read: about the history of an idea and how the abstractions of theories of human alienation and capitalist labor were first formed from notions of provisioning, the natural environment, the nature of god and human purpose, and the necessity of ecology in sustaining humanity. (A key reading of old-materialism-as-new-materialism.)
Foster, a sociologist at the University of Oregon, takes us through Marx’s development to show us what he was reading, what he agreed and disagreed with, how those other scholars were received by the philosophers and economists of the day, and how Marx ultimately filtered them into his own work. First writing about the materialist philosophies of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who rejected Platonism and instead encouraged a knowledge of the world rooted in sensorial/sensual experience, gave Marx a foundation in thinking about human experience as rooted in and derived from an immersion in nature. That such an understanding gave rise to a concept of human alienation from labor when such labor ceased to have meanings in nature is part of the exchange—if industry insists on a mastery of nature, then it is put at odds with sustainability, and thus the inherent tension between town and country that Marx and Engels sought to retire. As we see how Marx drew inspiration from Malthus, Liebig, Darwin, and others, we can see how he conceptualized nature as a resource that we could only begin to understand once we gained the science and technology to see its complexity. (Hence the argument, only being able to have an ecological mindset once we gain full understanding of ecological science.)
This is all very thick and thorny for someone who much prefers straightforward history, but it is valuable to read this treatment of Marx’s works against the essays of E.P. Thompson, as they show how deep and sustained a critique of materialism and the rural/urban divide was prior to the era of full-blown industrialization. A surprisingly edifying read.

[Tomek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Foster provides a comprehensive repudiation of the opinion that Marx disregarded the potential of agrarianism or the importance of nature in valuing commodities and services. Perhaps the most interesting component of the argument is his view of issues of private property, which predate Ostrom's critique of the tragedy of the commons by about a century. However, I have 4 main qualms with the work. First, he tends to bury the reader in the jargon and assumes that its definition is self-evident. He tosses out references to philosophers and assumes that you know them. For instance, I still have no idea what 'dialectic' means, nor do I understand Hegelian philosophy, upon which Marx appears to have predicated much of his work. It would appear that you need to take an introductory philosophy course just to follow along. Second, I find that the argument is based upon several implicit interpretations of Marx's writing that are never explicitly stated. It seems too much like supposition to be conclusive. Also, the work, although comprehensive, tends to go on many, what seem to me to be, tangents that don't drive forward the narrative the author wants to outline. Finally, although it may very well be that Marx saw value in nature and regarded the alienation from nature a "natural" extension of capitalist alienation of labor, however, this does nothing to suggest that he saw anything beyond a utilitarian value to nature or that his desire to reunify humans and nature went beyond use of natural resources. This makes his view perhaps more sustainable and ecocentric than previous mechanistic and hierarchical ontologies, but exploitative nonetheless. This isn't a problem in its own right, as I don't question that human use is one way to value and connect with nature, but his rejection of teleology and inherent value limits this philosophy's value to conservation, which must be predicated upon both.

[Spoust1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely necessary volume. The central claim of the book — that ecological concerns are at the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism — is defended on two levels: theoretically and historically. The historical argument is perhaps even more impressive than the theoretical one. It is a commonplace now that an intelligent anti-capitalism goes together with some kind of environmentalism, and Foster’s Marxist version of this is well-conceived. The surprise is how, by tying together comments by Marx from throughout his corpus so that a common thread of ecological concern can be discerned, Foster convincingly argues not that an ecology can be read into Marx, but that one already exists in Marx, if only one reads closely. I read Marx differently after this book.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work really helped me begin to appreciate the historical importance of Marx's philosophy. It paints the picture of the philosophical context in which Marx was writing. I have duly noted that I must now not only study Marx directly, but Epicurus and Hegel as well...

In the epilogue Mr Foster briefly runs through how mainstream Marxism lost its ecological foundations after the death of Marx (and Engels).

[Dave Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading this wonderful study.

[Conor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foster strikes an excellent balance in this book, providing the reader with just enough technical discussion to grasp the fundamental logic of the ecology of Marxism while remaining accessible to a broad readership. At first glance, the lengthy focus on philosophy seems to be esoteric and unnecessary, but reveals itself to be an essential and insightful component in understanding the relationship between nature and humanity that lies at the core of dialectic materialism.

Readers should not conflate the sluggishness by which they may proceed through the pages as a reflection of Foster's writing, but rather the heady subject material in itself. The text is indeed dense, and one may find it difficult to establish an easy rhythm, but it is nonetheless a well-written, rewarding, and even occasionally humorous read.

Although the seemingly tedious discussions of Marx's philosophy, the details of Marx's engagement with his contemporaries' research in the natural sciences, and the historical debates surrounding biological and geological evolution are, in my opinion, wholly necessary in setting the stage for both Marx's ecology as well as contemporary views on Darwinism, things are neatly rounded off by offering a (somewhat disappointingly) brief overview of the concrete implications of the Marxist view on ecology. The book offers a unique perspective of Marxism's typically underanalyzed ecological approach, but ultimately, readers seeking more direct, concrete, and applicable discussions on Marxist ecology should look elsewhere--and this is fine, since the book does not pretend to be anything other than a largely historical and academic treatment of Marxist philosophy.

Herein lies my only complaint: that Foster's treatment of post-Lenin USSR environmental policy is uncritically flippant and dismissive. Foster (appropriately) extols the unrivaled strides of the Soviet Union in environmental policy under Lenin and (appropriately) admonishes the decline of Soviet environmental policy under Stalin, but offers little in the way of outlining why the nonetheless objectively socialist dictatorship of the proletariat under Stalin, a state that indeed conforms to a socialist logic of production, nonetheless reproduces the environmental bads inherent to the logic of capitalist production. Is this because Foster plays into the Trotskyist myth that Stalin represented a deviation from the revolutionary integrity of the Russian revolution? Or does he follow in the tradition of Western revisionist disillusionment that followed the persecution of Bukharin? In the absence of any serious discussion vis-a-vis the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union, as well as on the concept of revisionism, we may do little more than speculate. Given his reasoned critique of post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School, however, it's likely that the section is written in good faith, however undertheorized it remains.

In this context, Foster fails to capitalize on the rich opportunity to discuss the development of Marxist theory beyond the Soviet Union, especially in regards to China under Mao. Written in 2000, there is little reason to believe that Foster was subject to any historical justification for ignorance of Mao's critique of Soviet economics under Stalin (published as early as 1958) regarding the latter's one-sided focus on the economic base of production at the expense of superstructure, which Foster flattens into Stalin's so-called "emphasis on production". Mao's development of Marxist philosophy is also absent throughout the entirety of the book, again written fully 20 years after the initiation of the protracted people's war by the Communist Party of Peru and the subsequent synthesis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

[yun · Rating 4 out of 5]

To set the stage, if you don’t have a background in materialism and Marxism, this book might be a bit challenging, but people majoring in certain philosophies. This book requires prior knowledge in philosophy, including Materialism and Religious studies. Still, it will help you gain a broader understanding of the ideas and history before Marxism appeared, so it’s a good starting point before reading Marx’s works.

The key points I think
1. Alienation from nature: “A solution to humankind’s alienation from nature will have to be found in human history,” Marx said. And he outlined “the union” in a communist society as the resolution. This perspective led to the concept of labor alienation. He expanded it from the worker being treated as merely an object of labor to include alienation from the process, human creative activity, and further extended, disconnection from nature.

2. The background of the Principle of Population by Malthus: This is the context in which Marx’s theory has evolved. For example, the Elizabethan Poor Law. This marked the beginning of new materialism in Marx and Engels—one that shifted the focus from the natural world to history, emphasizing “private property.”

3. The revolution against capitalism: must put an end to all labor exploitation and re-regulate the metabolic relationship between humans and nature through modern science and industry. In this context, Marx’s call for the abolition of wage labor takes on its full meaning.

4. Sustainable development: It means consciously and rationally managing land as the perpetual property of the community, which is essential for future human generations, and referring to this as “inalienable”.

5. “Anticipation”: It is connected to why philosophy is crucial in this era as well. One’s life is shaped by the lens through which they view the world and the scientific worldview they embrace. The dawn of revolution follows the same principle.

Various other impressions
1. Humans’ evolution began not with the brain, but with upright walking —freedom of the hands and feet
2. The reason why Russia had the first communist revolution

Barbarism(Paleolithic) -> Primitive(Neolithic) -> Civilization(Iron Age) -> Capitalism

Every form of suppression marks an era in civilization. However, ancient Russian communities were still in the Primitive Age—hadn’t progressed industrially even in the 1700s-1800s. Most communist philosophers expected the first revolution to occur in Western Europe, where capitalism was advancing, but it did not.

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 4 out of 5]

It might seem at first that this book is needlessly Talmudic: a deep dive into the obscure textual histories of Marx and his intellectual correspondence with soil chemists and Victorian geologists in an effort to prove that the mechanistic, Promethean cliches about his work are misguided and that in fact his foundational work is deeply invested in ecological concerns. Well, it is precisely this. But it is at the same time an indirect argument for the importance of this very same philological hair splitting that the book undertakes. The dry intellectual history actually does matter, and gives such an important context for understanding, originally, what Marxism was originally an argument against. As Foster, quoting Sartre, states during the beginning of the book "“anti-Marxist” argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea." You can see how and why Malthus and the other Parson naturalists were the zombie idea libertarians of their day, how Darwin's ideas were constantly under threat by Spencerian cooptation, turning it into Stephen Pinker-like scientistic apologetics for the current social order, how Engels work for anti-Duhring tried to bring the logic of dialectics to the clumsy argumentation style of natural science (which I guess the contemporary analogy would be the tone deaf empiricism of the NPR podcast crowd).
Also, it is just fascinating how much Marx and Engels really geeked out on the latest advances in soil science, paleontology, and evolutionary anthropology. This is not just the history of the ideas of Marxism, it is foundational for understanding the relationship between the scientific approach to nature and the scientific approach to history; how they intersect back in pre-history with the evolutionary and social/cultural advances of homo sapiens and neanderthals. It is invaluable to see how the pair tried to navigate and grapple with both the scientific advances and their political interpretations in real time, to see how their theories and methodology emerged in tandem with other young sciences trying to find their footing, and which were drawing embarrassing conclusions or offering timorous excuses for how radical their conclusions actually were.

[Alexander French · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5 Foster creates a very good timeline of the development of material history starting with Epicurus the og materialist working his way up to Darwin who created the means for a materialist understanding of nature and natural history through his theory of natural selection.

Liebig and soil science, Anderson and differential fertility, Malthus and Marx’s critique of his overpopulation theory, Proudhon and “What is Property?”, along with the gymnasium in Trier and Werner’s theory of long-term geological succession come together to form Marx’s understanding of ecology (Foster must be one of the most well read marxists alive).

The synthesis of this knowledge forms what Foster coined as the metabolic rift, an analysis made by Marx that describes the alienation of nature.

“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature… The labor process is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence”

We impose ourselves on nature and nature imposes itself on us. This metabolic relationship is alienated through wage labor, capital, and large-scale agriculture which rose from primitive accumulation. Therefore, Marx and Engels insisted the abolition of town and country along with a society of associated producers are the genesis of regulating the metabolic rift between us and nature.

A very dry book but gave me an understanding of the context of time in which Marx was writing and developing his critique of capitalism.

[William Moriarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foster, in a manner remarkably similar to his legendary predecessor Paul Sweezy, writes clearly about thinkers whose own writings were relatively convoluted. Very thankful for such conceptual distillation. Maybe the most profound lesson of the book for me was how essential the antagonism between town and country was to Marx and Engels’ ecological critiques.

A favorite passage:
‘Marx did not believe, though such views are commonly attributed to him, that the answer to problems of agricultural development was simply to increase the scale of production. Rather his analysis taught him the dangers of large-scale agriculture, while also teaching him that the main issue was metabolic interaction between human beings and the earth. Hence, agriculture could occur on a fairly large scale only where conditions of sustainability were maintained—something that he believed was impossible under large-scale capitalist agriculture. "The moral of the tale,” Marx wrote in volume 3 of Capital, "...is that the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture) and needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers." Marx and Engels consistently argued in their writings that large landholders were invariably more destructive in their relation to the earth than free farmers. Thus Engels wrote in Anti-Dühring that in North America "the big landlords of the South, with their slaves and their rapacious tilling of the land, exhausted the soil until it could only grow firs."’

[Peter Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marx is often thought of as a 'Promethean' thinker, someone who lionised the progress of technology and the development of the human control and domination of nature, something which in both it's capitalism and soviet versions has lead to the horrific degradation of the natural environment and is therefore usually seen as incompatible with realistic strategies to address climate change.

Foster unpicks Marx's view of humanity's relationship to nature and ecology in great detail, founded on his early interest in Epicurus (the subject of Marx's doctoral thesis) and then working through chronologically with sections describing the developing understanding during the nineteenth century of nature and what would become ecology. This encompasses writers such as Malthus, Liebig, and Darwin and their influence - either positive or negative - on Marx's own thought. Foster's view is that Marx holds a fundamentally dialectic view of humanity's relationship to nature founded coevolution of society and the natural world, and driven by the idea of a 'metabolic rift' between capitalist society and nature.

It's a thoughtful book, and rightly critical of both positivistic soviet Marxism from the thirties, and idealistic western marxism of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School. If it lacks anything it is something which more directly takes this analysis forward into how it might influence modern ecology, but I suspect that's a whole other book.

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I made use of this in the following write-up on, ahem, "love"

https://medium.com/@ivanlabayne/a-pos...

The rise of capitalism in the 19th century and its intensification in the 20th saw the intersecting phenomena of rapid urbanization, industrial growth and technological advance. On the flipside of these rosy designations are less cheery developments: the often-violent displacement of people from their (agricultural/indigenous/communal) lands and increased isolation, anomie and competition in cities, coupled with less natural connections aided by technology. Related to this is the simultaneous surfacing of unsustainability in human relationships not just with one another but also with nature, with the stuff that makes living possible. John Bellamy Foster spoke of the rise in the 1950s of ethnoecology and the attendant increased interest in “traditional environmental knowledge.”[iii] Here, subsistence is conceptualized according to “the long-term relationship between community and land base”,[iv] what must be sustained is not just community ties, but in relation to it, the land where such ties are nourished, and where living conditions are reproduced. Pushed by the rise of capitalism, the decline of community life has in turn, reinforced the isolation of individuals.

[Ben Platt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does a very solid job of connecting Marx' writing to undertheorized areas like agriculture and ecology to really thoroughly map out ideas like the metabolic rift in our agroeconomic practices and the way in which our alienation from labor and from labor are twinned struggles that we must overcome.

Thoroughly historical in its focus (you've got to be cool with that going in), but Foster's connections between Epicurus, Darwin, and Marx in particular will stick with me, and he has an actually understandable explanation of Marx' dialectical synthesis of materialism and idealism at the end, which I always need more of. I'm sure that thread gets picked up in greater detail in Foster's dialectics-focused books elsewhere.

I tend to be less enthused about novel readings of Marx, but Foster does a good enough job here that it's worth reading, particularly if a materialist approach to ecology in general is something new to you (but you're still fluent in academica - this isn't easy reading by any means)

[Thomaz Amancio]

O título é enganoso, ou talvez simplesmente irônico (involuntariamente). Embora se dedique a traçar o que seria uma "ecologia" na obra de Marx, Foster só encontra ideias adjacentes à ecologia: materialismo, (anti)malthusianismo, darwinismo... e um conceito propriamente ecológico, a fratura metabólica, que acaba sendo descrito (por conta da carência circundante) como algo muito mais versátil e pertinente do que realmente é. A se crer em Foster, a ecologia marxista se resume a mandar o cocô urbano de volta para o campo, para preserver a fertilidade do solo onde a comida e outros produtos vegetais importantes são cultivados.

Apesar dessa gigantesca insuficiência em termos ecológicos (que não deixa de ser bastante instrutiva), o livro é interessante pelo que oferece de análises contextualizadas de textos essenciais - Epicuro, Malthus, Darwin... - para efetivamente pensar a dimensão ecológica de Marx e de alguns de seus interlocutores no século XIX.