• tags :: MarxecologyMarx's Ecology

Notes

• Check out "From the Web of Life"

• Foster wants to tease out the ecology in Marx's writings

• Marx was probably not a developmentalist

• Ecological theory is articulated through materialism

• Marx criticizes Proudhonfor being Promethean. Marx saw Prometheusas a revolutionary

• Marx was opposed to teleologicaltechnological progression

  • That is to say that Marx didn't think that technological progress had an end goal, it just happened

  • And that it happened according to social processes, i.e. that it is a process that's happening

• Technological development is subordinate to social processes (this is mentioned in Capital Vol. 1

• Marx was heavily inspired by Epicurus

• Feuerbachwas a Hegelian but broke with Hegeland became a materialist

• Feuerbach's materialism came from exploring the relationships between human beings

  • Feuerbach felt that man became alienated from his own ideas (hence his ideas on religion). Marx broke with Feuerbach due to alienation of labor

• Epicurus was seen as the materialist antidote to idealismand religion

  • Epicurus's philosophy believed that gods only existed in the spaces between atoms

• Malthusthought that human population and food production didn't increase at the same rate, i.e. that human population growth could outpace food production

  • In his own time this was not well received

  • Marx harshly criticizes Malthus

• Malthus thinks that overpopulation is always happening. Class society is what keeps population in check, thought that reproduction of nature was a steady state, or constant

  • This was a response to the French Revolution which sought to create a model society and undo class society (to some degree)

• Darwin#39;s theory of evolutionhad more to do with co-operationthan with "survival of the fittest"

• Engelstheorized that intelligence presupposes labor, not the other way around

  • Engels has been vindicated by modern science

• Class strugglecan be seen as a sort of social natural selection

• The Long Twentieth Centurytalks about the metabolism of society, much like this work does

• Metabolic riftdescribes the distance between man and nature. Society is a metabolism and outgrowth of nature, yet there's a distinction between them