"The history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each so long as men exist "
Karl Marx
The environment was primarily seen by Marx as a medium of human labour. He felt that nature was to be used by humans for their production purposes.Marx saw that the rapid growth of capitalist economy was achieved by exploitation; the exploitation of one social class i.e. proletariat by another i.e.bourgeoisie.Under this circumstance all values and relations including environmental one, becomes sub-ordinate to monitory or commercial one i.e. market orientation.
Alienation from nature
This began with enclosure of common land, which left many rural people with no means of meeting their needs other than to sell their labour power to the new industrial class. But Marx also talked of spiritual needs, and the loss of a whole way of life in which people found meaning from their relationship to nature.
Enclosure turned common land into private property and Marx argued, helped England move from feudalism to capitalism.
The theme running through his early manuscripts is a view of history in which exploitation of workers and of nature go hand-in-hand. For Marx, the future communist society will resolve the conflicts among humans and between humans and nature so that people can meet their needs in harmony with one another and with the rest of nature.
Capitalist society is dominated by private property and the exchange of commodities for profit. This produces a double alienation – firstly, the alienation of human beings from the land, town from country; and secondly, the alienation of the worker from the product of his/her labour in industrial production.
Capitalism and nature
The ecological problems we face are those of capitalism – not human behaviour as such – and we need to understand how capitalism interacts with nature if we are to address them. He says Each form of society has its own ecology. The ecological problems we face are those of capitalism – not human behaviour as such – and we need to understand how capitalism interacts with nature if we are to address them.
Marx himself made an important start on this. In the 1860s he wrote about soil degradation, a big concern at the time. His work showed how the division of town and country led to loss of soil fertility while at the same time imposing a great burden of pollution and disease in the urban centres.
This is the “metabolic rift” that has alienated nature from us. Marx wrote about it in relation to nineteenth-century agriculture depleting the natural productive capacity of soils and causing contamination of urban rivers due to poor sanitation and unregulated dumping of chemical waste by the burgeoning manufacturing industry. ( ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS AND SUSTAINABILITY ).
Marx and Engels both argued that an environmentally sustainable society would require the "abolition of the antithesis between town and country." Engels spelled out that this meant "as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country" and "an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production."
In Marx and Engels' day, the environmental damage caused by capitalism was localized to particular regions or countries. Today, the threat of climate change is global in scope, with the production of greenhouse gases by the most developed capitalist economies threatening ecosystems across the planet.
Friedrich Engels says that— the ruling class has lost its ability to harness the productive forces of capitalism for social good and the incessant drive for profit that motivates the capitalist class is careening out of control towards environmental disaster.
Criticisms
1.Marx had shown very little interest in- the issues of science and or in the effects of technology on the environment. Hence he had no real scientific basis for the analysis of ecological issue.
2.Marx adopted a ‘Promethean’ (pro-technological, anti-ecological) and ‘productivist’ view of history and failed to address the exploitation of nature.
3.Marx’s writings are found about ecological problems are only passing remarks and have no systematic relation to the main body of his work.
4.By describing “Prometheanism” as responsible for the ecological disasters, some ecologists replace the real culprit, modern capitalist industrial civilization, by a mythological image. The ecological crisis ceases to be a historical phenomenon, related to a specific mode of production, and becomes an immemorial human tendency, since Antiquity.
Adavance Capitalistic agriculture :- progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, 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...Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth--the soil and the laborer.( RURAL AND AGARIAN TRANSFORMATION IN INDIA ).
It is perhaps clear from the discussions made so far that Marx cannot simply be condemned out as anti-ecological. Throughout his lives he has consistently expressed his concerns about ecological issues and the question of sustainability.
