Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 17
Marxist Political Economy and
the Environment
George Henderson
Introduction
It is both easy and diffi cult to place Marxist thought (and politics) in relation to
the environment. Easy because from a Marxist perspective, we are never removed
from the environment; diffi cult because Marxism is not an environmentalism in any
traditional sense of the word. The ambiguity is doubled because environmentally
oriented social movements on the Left have succeeded in politicising environmental
problems to an unprecedented degree, and even though an active engagement with
Marxist thought is maintained by many participants, especially outside the United
States, it is not always clear how much their environmentalism is able to draw from
Marxism (e.g., Benton, 1996a; Panitch and Leys, 2006; see Goldman [2005] for a
study of how environmental politics are by no means reducible to the Left). It is
these ambiguities that ground the present chapter. My purpose will be to convey
an appreciation of how environmental problems have been approached by Marxists
- many of which are to be found in geography - and, conversely, how explicit
attention to these problems presents an opportunity to reconstruct Marxism. I will
begin by introducing Marx's thoughts on what he called our species being, an
important concept strongly linked to his notion of human labour and its mixing
with non-human matter. Then follows a discussion of how species being is joined
to capitalism and why capitalism gives rise to environmental questions and issues.
The latter half of the chapter offers an in-depth look at three reconstructions of
Marxist theory that have gained particular currency in the fi eld of geography: the
notions of a second contradiction of capitalism, the production of nature, and the
plane of immanence.
Species Being
Let us begin with a provocation planted by Marxist geographer David Harvey, in
one of his classic works,
Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference
: 'There's
nothing unnatural about New York City'. Now that jars. Its common sense seems
blinded to the common sense that worries about the impact of human presence on
