Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature

John Bellamy Foster. 2000. Monthly Review Press, New York, ISBN 1-58367-012-2, $20 (paper), 1-58367-011-4, $55 (cloth) 310 pages

In Marx's Ecology, John Bellamy Foster mounts an exhaustive, at times compelling, defence of Karl Marx's credentials as an "ecological thinker." In so doing, Foster takes on both environmentalists critical of Marx's supposed "Promethean" views of human-environment relations and, to a lesser extent, postmodern writers who emphasize the discursive, rather than material, basis of these relations. Although ploughing through at-times obscure and esoteric fields of socialist theory, Foster's work unearths fertile and still-relevant furrows of Marxian thought on ecology and society.

Foster challenges readings of Marx that regard him as an anthropocentrist and an exponent of the technological domination of nature. Rather, Foster asserts that "Marx's notion of the alienation of human labour was connected to an understanding of the alienation of human beings from nature" (pg. 9). Foster suggests that Marx's thinking on nature sprang from the same philosophical well as modern, scientific conceptions of the environment, namely materialism. Indeed, Marx is yoked with Darwin as the twin engines of a materialist attack on natural theology and its implications...