Marx’s Ecology | Cosmopod

tags : [[Marx]] [[ecology]] [[Marx’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 [[Proudhon]] for being Promethean. Marx saw [[Prometheus]] as a revolutionary
• Marx was opposed to [[teleological]] technological 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]]
• [[Feuerbach]] was a Hegelian but broke with [[Hegel]] and 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 [[idealism]] and [[religion]]
  • Epicurus’s philosophy believed that gods only existed in the spaces between atoms
• [[Malthus]] thought 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]]’s [[theory of evolution]] had more to do with [[co-operation]] than with “survival of the fittest”
• [[Engels]] theorized that intelligence presupposes labor, not the other way around
  • Engels has been vindicated by modern science
• [[Class struggle]] can be seen as a sort of social [[natural selection]]
• [[The Long Twentieth Century]] talks about the metabolism of society, much like this work does
• [[Metabolic rift]] describes the distance between man and nature. Society is a metabolism and outgrowth of nature, yet there’s a distinction between them