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10 - Ecology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2020

By
John Bellamy Foster
Edited by
Marcello Musto
Marcello Musto
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
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Summary

The widespread recognition of Karl Marx as a leading, classical contributor to ecological thought is a fairly recent historical occurrence. The revival of Marx’s ecology since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, occurred in a number of stages. The dominant interpretation on the left up through the 1980s faulted Marx for his supposedly instrumentalist, ‘Promethean’, conception of nature and alleged lack of an ecological sensibility. This view resulted in what has come to be known as ‘first-stage ecosocialism’, characterized by the grafting of Green thought onto Marxism (or in some cases Marxism onto Green thought) based on the presumption that Marx’s entire critique was ecologically flawed.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Marx Revival
Key Concepts and New Critical Interpretations
 , pp. 177 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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