The rejection of the ‘dialectics of nature’ has long been thought of as the most fundamental factor distinguishing Western Marxism from official Soviet-style Marxism. Yet, in Tailism and the Dialectic, Georg Lukács – perhaps the most influential figure in Western Marxism – strongly endorses the existence of an objective dialectic in nature. A close examination of Lukács’s main writings on science shows, however, that he still in effect denied the possibility of applying dialectical method to nature. This paradox is bound (...) up with a dualistic conception of natural and social science with distinctly adverse implications for the development of an ecological Marxism. (shrink)

In an earlier article, I responded to Ted Benton's charge that Marx and Engels, upon realising the political conservatism associated with Malthusian natural limits arguments, retreated from materialism to a social-constructionist conception of human production and reproduction. I showed that Benton artificially dichotomises the material and social elements of historical materialism, thereby misreading Marx and Engels's recognition of the historical specificity of material conditions as an outright denial of all natural limits. In place of Marx and Engels's materialist and class-relational (...) approach to population issues and the reserve army of the unemployed, Benton employs a partially Malthusianised Marxism heavily reliant on ahistorical notions of natural limits. (shrink)

The relationship between Marxism and ecology has been sullied by Martinez-Alier's influential interpretation of Engels's reaction to the agricultural energetics of Sergei Podolinsky. This introduction to the first English translation of Podolinsky's 1883 Die Neue Zeit piece evaluates Martinez-Alier's interpretation in light of the four distinct but closely related articles Podolinsky published over the years 1880–3. This evaluation also emphasises the important but previously underrated role of energy analysis in Marx's Capital. Engels's criticisms of Podolinsky are found to be quite (...) justified from both political-economy and ecological perspectives. From the standpoint of Marx and Engels's metabolic and class-relational approach to production, Podolinsky's attempt to reduce use-value to energy is fraught with problems. Podolinsky's energy reductionism does not even come close to representing an alternative value analysis – let alone a groundbreaking perspective on ecological history – as was suggested by Martinez-Alier. Far from Marx and Engels's vision of communism as an ecologically sustainable and coevolutionary human development, Podolinsky's conception of human labor as an energy accumulation machine seems to uncritically mimic the standpoint of the capitalist interested in using nature only to extract as much energy throughput as possible from the labour-power of the worker. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a rethinking and renewal of Marxism on various levels, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s when New-Left movements in the developed capitalist countries combined with Maoist, Guevarist, and other Third-World liberation struggles to challenge the ossified theory and practice of Soviet-style communism and traditional social democracy. More recently, the rethinking of Marxism has been driven largely by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its official Marxist ideology, and by the movement toward neoliberal ‘free market’ policies (...) on a global scale, which together have brought forth a tidal wave of frankly pro-capitalist as well as ‘postmodern’ left varieties of ‘end of history'-type thinking. The contemporary challenge to Marxism, however, also has a positive side in the form of popular revolts against the neoliberalisation of the global economy – the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico, the December 1995 public sector upheavals in France, and many others, not to mention the heroic struggle of the Cuban people against the threat of recolonisation by US and global capital. Here the challenge is to incorporate the changing forms of working-class movement, and their new prefigurations of post-capitalist society, into the theory and practice of Marxian communism. (shrink)