{"id":9298,"date":"2015-06-21T07:36:15","date_gmt":"2015-06-21T12:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9298"},"modified":"2015-06-21T07:36:15","modified_gmt":"2015-06-21T12:36:15","slug":"marxism-ecological-civilization-and-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9298","title":{"rendered":"Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new “ecological civilization.” \u00a0Some have viewed this as a departure from Marxism and a concession to Western-style “ecological modernization.” \u00a0However, embedded in classical Marxism, as represented by the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was a powerful ecological critique.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 This has generated a tradition of thought known as\u00a0“ecological Marxism.”<\/a><\/p>\n

This raises three questions: (1) What was the nature of Marx’s ecological critique? \u00a0(2) How is this related to the idea of ecological civilization now promoted in China? \u00a0(3) Is China actually moving in the direction of ecological civilization, and what are the difficulties standing in its path in this respect?<\/p>\n

Marx’s Ecological Critique<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the late 1840s the German biologist\u00a0Matthias Schleiden<\/a>\u00a0observed in his book\u00a0The Plant: A Biography<\/a><\/em>: “Those countries which are now treeless and arid deserts, part of Egypt, Syria, Persia, and so forth, were formerly thickly wooded, traversed by streams.” \u00a0He attributed this to human-generated regional climate change.\u00a0 At the same time as Schleiden was developing these views, the German agronomist Carl Fraas was making similar observations in his\u00a0Climate and the Plant World<\/a><\/em>, arguing that “the developing culture of people leaves a veritable desert behind it.” \u00a0Marx and Engels, who were becoming increasingly interested in ecological degradation and regional climate change were influenced by these ideas.\u00a0 In 1858,\u00a0Marx<\/a>, following Fraas, wrote: “Cultivation — when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled . . . leaves deserts behind it.”<\/p>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China China’s leadership has called in recent years for the creation of a new “ecological civilization.” \u00a0Some have viewed this as a departure from Marxism and a concession to Western-style “ecological modernization.” \u00a0However, embedded in classical Marxism, as represented by the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, was a powerful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[130,141,6573,234,6574,3300,3810,1789],"class_list":["post-9298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-china","tag-climate-change","tag-ecological-civilization","tag-ecology","tag-frederick-engels","tag-karl-marx","tag-marxism","tag-nature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9299,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9298\/revisions\/9299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}