Marx and nature
Talks2010sAlan Thornett opening a session on Marx and nature at an ecosocialist day school, introduced by Susan Pashkoff; group discussions and a session on the crisis of fresh water followed. He dates John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology (2000) as “out 16 years”, which puts the talk around 2016. The quotation from Engels’s “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (1876) is given in its standard English wording, which is what he read. Recording on Peter Murry's YouTube channel. Transcript made from a local speech recognition of the audio (faster-whisper, 10 Oct 2026), checked against YouTube's automatic captions; the recording is poor in places. Square brackets mark words supplied or not clearly heard; [inaudible] marks passages neither source could recover.
A corrected transcript of the recording. The recording is the authority.
00:00 [Susan Pashkoff, chairing:] We're going to start off with Alan Thornett speaking about Marx and nature, Marxism and ecology. And then what we're going to do is break into groups. We've got a table over there, a table there, and we can also go around here, so we can discuss this amongst ourselves, and then we'll come back and discuss it together as a whole group. We'll take a break at 2.40. And then our next section is going to be the crisis of fresh water. One of the biggest problems that's going to come about through climate change is [access] to clean fresh water: we'll have some places literally living in deserts and the rest flooded. So this is one of the most important discussions. [inaudible] [Roland] is going to speak as well. So this is Alan Thornett, and he's going to speak today on Marx and nature.
01:17 Alan Thornett: OK, well, thank you. Well, it's very good that we've been able to come together [inaudible].
01:44 This is a very important discussion that we're going to have. Well, we've entitled the subject "Marxism and nature", but actually it could be titled slightly differently, and that is "human beings and nature". The two in a sense are very similar, but nevertheless that is the real one. I think if we had to pick out what is the most crucial theme in terms of the defence of the planet, the biosphere of the planet, the ecology of the planet, then I think that the issue of human beings and nature, and the relationship between human beings and nature, is the most fundamental of all. There are all the other things, climate change and everything, but that's the most crucial of all.
03:06 Because ultimately, if we're going to save the planet, rather than put some firefighting positions in place, if we're really going to save the planet, you have to get human beings as a species, you have to get their relationship with nature right. And until that can be achieved, ultimately you haven't really saved the planet. That's really the absolutely crucial point.
03:37 The advantage we've got as Marxists, in terms of precisely that, human beings and nature, is that this is one of the crucial strengths of classical Marxism, nineteenth-century classical Marxism. Unfortunately, Marxism during the twentieth century, almost all of it, lost that crucial insight. It lost the insight which was developed by Marx and Engels, and I would say William Morris as well. And this is the point I want to try to establish in all this.
04:25 The work which has given us all important new insights into the ecology of classical Marxism is this book, which everybody will be aware of, John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology. It's been out about 16 years, and Bellamy Foster and others have expanded on it since it was published. And what Foster argues, and I very strongly agree, is that the advantage classical Marxism had in coming to terms with nature, with a materialist conception of nature, is that Marx, along with Darwin, was one of the two great materialists of the nineteenth century. And it was that materialism, established by them, which gave classical Marxism the basis for the kind of understanding that it was able to develop.
05:55 Therefore, through classical Marxism, you have the conception of the alienation of human beings, not only from their work but also from nature. Marx developed early on in his work the [metabolic rift] between human beings and nature. [inaudible] Marx identified it in the agricultural crisis of the time, which was a crisis of agricultural fertility, a reduction in soil fertility, [and the import of guano]. [inaudible]
07:20 [Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, was equally concerned with] pollution, [inaudible] but also in terms of the relationship with nature. This is Engels: "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 nature, but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." In other words, he was taking from Marx the basic idea that human beings are part of nature, [inaudible].
08:58 This contribution [inaudible], much of this thinking, these insights, were taken up by the Bolsheviks, who in the first years of the revolution had a very strong ecological programme. They set up committees for the environment, they set up committees to establish national parks, they started taking measures to protect endangered species, and in fact they were more advanced than anyone at that time. This was brought to an end by the advent of Stalinism. And most of those who, in the 1920s, were developing ecological conceptions in the Soviet Union had gone to the firing squads, or disappeared into the [gulags], by the end of the 1930s.
10:18 And Stalinism, the same ideas projected into Eastern Europe, into the bloc states, after the war, wiped out, really, any conception of a materialist conception of nature, and any conception, really, of defending nature. The effect of this was profound in terms of Marxism in the twentieth century, because after the Second World War Stalinism was dominant in sections of the left, and the left became dominated by productivism, really: the idea, which is what I was taught when I was a member of a far-left organisation, that mankind advances in conflict with nature. This was the idea that was predominant on the left after the Second World War.
11:34 It meant that when the ecology movement began to develop in the 1960s, it wasn't made by Marxists. [It was made by naturalists] and scientists, in particular American writers [inaudible] on the wilderness in the United States, and of course Rachel Carson, who wrote, in 1962, Silent Spring. It's hard to stress how much the impact of Silent Spring had on the post-war movement in terms of ecology. In fact I think it was recognised as one of the most important books of the entire twentieth century. It didn't mention climate change. It was about the impact of agricultural chemicals.
12:44 It was very strongly opposed by the agricultural chemical producers, who took Carson to a congressional commission, saying that it would damage the agricultural industry. The famous thing is that she won: they actually came down in her favour, and the book went on to sell two million copies and so on. And then, ten years later, the ecology movement, Greenpeace, then the Green Party, began to develop in that way. But Marxism at that stage... There were Marxists at that time writing on ecology, and Bellamy Foster points to quite a few of them. But they were marginal to the development of the movement. It wasn't really until the late eighties, and the rise of the understanding of climate change, and the formation of the [IPCC], that more Marxists, including Bellamy Foster, began to look at the issue and began to start writing again about the ecology of the planet.
14:12 So that's the twentieth century. I'll try to go into the twenty-first century in a minute. But it's impossible to talk about the relationship of human beings and nature without looking at the biodiversity crisis: the biodiversity crisis which is known quite widely as the sixth great extinction in the history of the planet, which means that species are disappearing at a thousand times the rate of their natural disappearance. It's the biggest aspect by far of the whole ecological crisis.
15:07 If you take, for example, and I've been using Elizabeth Kolbert's book, The Sixth Extinction, which we've got at the back, which is popularly written but a very good exposition of the depth of the ecological crisis: mammals, for example. At the current time a quarter of all mammal species is at risk in the short to medium term, a quarter. The background rate of extinction of mammals is one every 700 years. One every 700 years. The rate of this is astonishing, absolutely astonishing. Amphibians are the most at risk. Amphibians are going extinct at 45,000 times the background rate of extinction. 45,000 times the background rate of extinction. It's a catastrophic development that's taking place.
16:25 And it's not, of course, just that species are important. Do we have this vision of eventually achieving socialism and being the only ones left, in a desert of some kind? The whole biosphere is a closely integrated and finely balanced equilibrium. If one species disappears, others become vulnerable as a result of it. If the pollinating insects that produce half of our food disappear, we have a very big problem. We have a very big problem anyway: we have to [ask whether we] can feed nine billion people. It's quite possible to feed nine billion people, [with] technology, but to feed nine billion people, or ten billion people, or eleven billion people, without destroying the biosphere in the process is another question.
17:44 So we're seeing habitats destroyed, and an increasing rate of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide dissolves easily in water, therefore it goes quickly from the atmosphere into the sea, and the seas are becoming ever more acidic. And as a result of this the coral reefs, particularly the Great Barrier Reef at the present time, are bleaching, and the crustaceans in the sea that rely on calcium to produce their shells are being dissolved, and some areas of sea are going to become completely dead. This is the situation that we're in.
18:41 [The chair indicates that time is short.] Oh, OK. OK, so, the debate. There are big debates now on all this on the left, on ecology. I think the most important taking place at the present time is the debate on what is called the Anthropocene, which didn't exist ten years ago. It's a proposal that the climate scientist [Paul Crutzen] made: that the impact of human beings on the biosphere of the planet is now such that it defines the geological epoch that the planet is in. There is a committee of scientists that divides the four and a half billion years of the history of the planet into eons and periods and epochs and all these kinds of things. The epoch of the present time is called the Holocene. This basically means the period since the last ice age: a period of [12,000] years since the last ice age, where the planet has been stable. And the proposal is that that is redefined, and in the next two or three years it will be redefined as the Anthropocene: in other words, an epoch defined [by human beings]. This is the first time that an epoch has been defined in that way.
20:50 It has many implications. It is, in fact, a very big debate. Andreas Malm, for example, who is an FI comrade in Sweden and a scientist, opposes the concept of the Anthropocene. He opposes it on the basis that we should be talking about the [Capitalocene]. This, in my opinion, is a very, very big mistake, and I think it goes to the heart, really, of many of the debates going on. Because it tries to argue that the impact of human beings on the biosphere started with the rise of capitalism in the [eighteenth] century. [But] since Homo sapiens emerged from Africa [inaudible] years ago, they quite quickly had an impact on every [continent] they went to, because they were so efficient, because of their organisation; they were able to very quickly overcome [other] species.
22:39 So this starts a long way before. It was, of course, much boosted by [capitalism], and we've seen it boosted many times over. But it is an important point: we just can't define this as capitalism. And Andreas Malm argues, for example, that we shouldn't talk about species, because that's speciesism; we should only talk about capitalism. This is a problem, and it's a fundamental problem, because I think we have to talk about the impact of our species on the planet. This is not anti-Marxist. It doesn't mean that we don't recognise the class divisions that exist within that species. But nevertheless, the species has an impact, and every single [ecological] footprint [inaudible]. So there is an issue of the species. So that's some of the issues [inaudible]. Thank you.
24:04 [The chair sends the meeting into groups, proposing among the questions for discussion whether it is anti-Marxist to talk about the impact of human beings on the planet as a species, rather than just the impact of capitalism.]