Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China
China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new “ecological civilization.” Some have viewed this as a departure from Marxism and a concession to Western-style “ecological modernization.” However, embedded in classical Marxism, as represented by the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was a powerful ecological critique. Marx explicitly defined socialism in terms consistent with the development of an ecological society or civilization — or, in his words, the “rational” regulation of “the human metabolism with nature.”
In recent decades there has been an enormous growth of interest in Marx’s ecological ideas, first in the West, and more recently in China. This has generated a tradition of thought known as “ecological Marxism.”
This raises three questions: (1) What was the nature of Marx’s ecological critique? (2) How is this related to the idea of ecological civilization now promoted in China? (3) Is China actually moving in the direction of ecological civilization, and what are the difficulties standing in its path in this respect?
Marx’s Ecological Critique
In the late 1840s the German biologist Matthias Schleiden observed in his book The Plant: A Biography: “Those countries which are now treeless and arid deserts, part of Egypt, Syria, Persia, and so forth, were formerly thickly wooded, traversed by streams.” He attributed this to human-generated regional climate change. At the same time as Schleiden was developing these views, the German agronomist Carl Fraas was making similar observations in his Climate and the Plant World, arguing that “the developing culture of people leaves a veritable desert behind it.” Marx and Engels, who were becoming increasingly interested in ecological degradation and regional climate change were influenced by these ideas. In 1858, Marx, following Fraas, wrote: “Cultivation — when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled . . . leaves deserts behind it.”
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