Revisiting Debates on Marxism and Ecology: Towards a New Paradigm in Political Ecology
The Marxian corpus on this question has remained untouched for a long time. It was only after the intervention of John Bellamy Foster in early 2000 that this debate was reinvigorated. In contemporary times this question has been framed in the light of the recent climate crisis. Certain strands within Marxism due to an adherence to crude forms of economic determinism has somewhat ignored the pertinent question of ecology. This is despite the fact that categories or terms like economics and ecology share a common genealogy and roots.
The perceptive debate initiated by Engels in Dialectics of Nature; in which he sees the existence of nature and society as one metabolic process which exists in continuity. In other words, the processes unfolding in the social setting have a parallel in nature. This guides the course of social and natural evolution which can be explored in the light of contemporary understanding of ecology and society. According to Marx, “capitalist production…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”. It can thus be argued that a certain sort of ecological understanding was inherent in Marx's original frame as is seen in the concept of metabolic rift and social ecology and as highlighted by Marxist naturalists like Richard Lewontin and scholars from Monthly Review School like John Bellamy Foster. Metabolic rift largely propounds the irrevocable damage inflicted on nature and agriculture by industrial capitalist development. According to Foster Marx’s “entire dialectical framework rested on what would today be called an ecological (or socioecological) systems theory, connecting the materialist conception of history to that of nature—and requiring continuing study not only of changing developments in human history, but also in natural history (which in Marx’s work took the form of extensive inquiries into geology, agronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, physiology, mathematics, and more).”
Now, the question that ensues from this discourse is that can this have a bearing on the questions germane to the Indian context like that of ecology and caste or different environmental conceptions and their link with caste and class in the Indian context? Can this Marxist discourse fundamentally deal with the complex question of caste, class and its interplay with ecology?
The articles in this series are an attempt to explore the theoretical debates and their implications on environmental policies.
