Daniel Tanuro is one of the principal theorists of ecosocialism, author of several works devoted to the theme, from the best-seller “L’impossible capitalisme vert” [The Impossible Green Capitalism], published in 2010, to “Écologie, luttes sociales et révolution” [Ecology, Social Struggles and Revolution] (2024). He is a member of the Fourth International (ex-USFI) and lives in Belgium.

The conference was centred on the interpretations that have been made of Marx with the aim of finding a coherent ecological thought within his work. A synthetic transcription follows.

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In 1962 (even before the publication of “Silent Spring” ,one of the first widely-distributed books to raise awareness about the ecological crisis), the German philosopher Alfred Schmidt published “The Concept of Nature in Marx’s Theory” (“Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx”). Twenty-five years later, he was violently attacked by Anglo-Saxon “eco-Marxists”, who accused him of not having done justice to the systemic character of Marx’s ecological thought. For Schmidt, there is in fact a tension between the utilitarian character of the subject-object relation (of human beings in their relationship to nature) and indisputably ecological reflections in Marx. This ambiguity is summarised by the Trotskyist theorist Daniel Bensaïd [leader and founder of the French LCR [Revolutionary Communist League], who died in 2010] in the formula: “In Marx there is a green angel and a productivist demon.”

For the “eco-Marxists”, on the contrary, ecology is at the heart of Marx’s thought. They particularly emphasise the Marxian concept of metabolic rift. We indeed find in the third volume of Capital:

“Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to a minimum, to a number that constantly decreases in relation to an industrial population concentrated in large cities, which constantly increases. It thus creates conditions that provoke an irremediable hiatus in the complex balance of the social metabolism composed by the natural laws of life. There follows a waste of the forces of the soil, waste that commerce transfers well beyond the borders of the country considered. Large industry and large industrially-exploited agriculture act in the same direction: if, originally, they are distinguished because the former devastates and ruins the labour force more, they end up by joining hands in their development, the industrial system in the countryside also ending up by debilitating the workers, and industry and commerce, for their part, providing agriculture with the means to exhaust the earth.”

The concept of metabolism (“Stoffwechsel”, exchange of matter) bears a certain resemblance to Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis” [the Earth functions as a living organism]. But unlike Lovelock, Marx integrates humanity into the metabolic functioning of the rest of nature, within which it has a specific and disruptive role (through the form of large industry and agribusiness).

Is this sufficient, however, to affirm that ecology is at the heart of Marx’s thought? The entirety of citations on ecology that can be found in Capital and in the theories on surplus value constitute no more than a dozen pages, whilst the “Grundrisse” [manuscripts that gave the basis for Capital] contain a significant quantity of productivist passages. The citation below shows well, in its conclusion, the persistence of productivism in Marx at the end of a very lucid analysis of the dynamics of capitalist production from which today’s ecosocialists would draw other consequences.

“The production of relative surplus value, based on the increase of productive forces, requires the creation of new consumption. Within circulation, the sphere of consumption must therefore increase as much as the productive sphere. Consequently, primo, quantitatively expand existing consumption, secundo, create increased needs by propagating to a larger sphere, tertio, create new needs, discover and produce new use values. It will therefore be necessary to explore all of nature to discover objects of new properties and uses to exchange on a universal scale the products of all latitudes and all countries and subject the fruits of nature to artificial treatments in order to give them new use values, the Earth will be explored in all directions, both to discover new useful objects and to give new use values to old objects, using these in a sense as raw material, the natural sciences will therefore be developed to the maximum, efforts will be made to discover, create and satisfy needs arising from society itself.”

This first part of the citation is of great relevance in view of contemporary developments, which can be seen in the example of materials science and biomimetics (among others).

Marx continues however thus:

“Production based on capital thus creates the conditions for developing all the properties of social Man, of an individual having the maximum of needs, and therefore rich in the most diverse qualities, in short, as universal and total a creation as possible, because the more Man’s level of culture increases, the more he is able to enjoy.”

It therefore appears here that Marx had not rid himself of illusions about an emancipatory character of production under the capitalist regime.

The “Grundrisse” had certainly not been intended for publication originally, but we also find this in the “Communist Manifesto”:

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to increase as rapidly as possible the quantity of productive forces.” If the context of misery and shortage of the era justifies and makes urgent an increase in the production of certain goods, it appears here that Marx relies on a conception of historical materialism that is both productivist and Promethean.

In his “Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy”, Marx considers that the proletariat will abolish the domination of the bourgeoisie because it will end up constituting an obstacle in the development of productive forces (analogously to the process leading to the abolition of the Ancien Régime [Old Regime] by the bourgeoisie).

If the thesis of the “eco-Marxists” is therefore subject to caution, there is however more than “ecological intuitions” (Bensaïd) in Marx.

Kohei Saito, an eco-Marxist of a particular kind, recognises the presence of productivism in Marx’s work, maintains that Marx eventually abandoned it in his developments. Marx’s objective in his first works would have been to combat Malthusian thought and its influence on British political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

Thomas Robert Malthus, [1766-1834, English economist and demographer] thought that agricultural production increased in a linear manner whilst population increased exponentially. The political conclusion that Malthus draws from this is that the poor should not be helped, because then they would have more children, which would lead to more impoverishment – Malthus’s political obsession being the defence of the Ancien Régime.

Contrary to Malthus, Engels, then Marx, seek to rely on the developments of the sciences of their era. Justus von Liebig [1803-1873, German chemist], a specialist in soil chemistry, affirmed that soil productivity could grow almost infinitely. But in the seventh edition of his treatise on soil productivity, Liebig completely changed his mind and began to denounce the “predatory” character of modern agriculture. He affirmed that no supply of industrial fertiliser could compensate for the loss of soil nutrients. With excrement no longer returning to the fields, there is a progressive impoverishment of soil fertility.

According to Kohei Saito, this leads Marx to revise his theoretical system, not to vindicate Malthus, but to highlight the responsibility of the capitalist production system. Marx revises his vision of the emancipation of the proletariat and the human individual in Capital, written after reading the seventh edition of Liebig’s works. “The only possible freedom is that social Man, the associated producers, rationally regulate their exchanges with nature, that they control it together instead of being dominated by its blind power, and that they accomplish these exchanges by expending the minimum of force, and in the most dignified conditions, most conforming to human nature. But this activity will always constitute the realm of necessity; it is beyond that that begins the development of human forces as an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which can only flourish by founding itself on the other base, that of necessity. The essential condition of this flourishing is the reduction of the working day.”

The second essential condition of this flourishing is that there be a development that preserves and favours the conditions of existence of future generations (which appears in the famous notarial and patriarchal expression with which Marx advocates a management of the earth “as a good father of the family”).

In Capital, one can find a whole series of authentically ecological elements: rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system, the only possible rational agriculture is agriculture managed by small peasants or by communities, the associated producers (but not the kolkhozes [Soviet collective farms], not the etatisation of agriculture). The long cycle of tree development opposes the short-termism of capitalism. We find similar developments, brief but profound, on the question of mines, space management, livestock, fisheries.

James O’Connor [American socialist economist, 1930-2017] writes that alongside the capital/labour contradiction, there is a capital/nature contradiction. But for Marx, human labour power is also a natural resource.

Conclusion:

1) There is indeed something that resembles an ecology in Marx, but it is not a complete system that runs through the entire work. On the peasantry, Marx fails to choose: does emancipation here pass through small peasantry or through the development of large agriculture? We find in the same work (Capital) contradictory passages on this subject:

“The very spirit of capitalist production focused on the most immediate profit is in contradiction with agriculture, which must conduct its production taking into account the conditions of permanent existence of the generations that succeed each other.”

“One of the great results of the capitalist mode of production is that it has made agriculture a conscious scientific application of agronomy insofar as this is possible under the conditions of private property whilst it was only a series of purely empirical processes and transmitted mechanically from one generation to the next by the least evolved fraction of society.” And more clearly still: “The rationalisation of agriculture which, alone, makes possible its social exploitation, is one of the two great merits of the capitalist mode of production.”

As much as Marx and Engels are sensitive to the know-how of artisans, they have no awareness of peasant know-how (whose extraordinary ingenuity can be understood by reading, for example, the book “Histoire des agricultures du monde” [History of World Agriculture] by the agronomists Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart).

Marx’s ecology remains moreover imbued with a certain scientism. Marx prefers to stick to the first Liebig, rather than rely on Darwin when the latter publishes a work on the role of earthworms in soil fertilisation. Marx moreover mocks a hypothesis (which appears at the time) that states that plants are capable of enriching soils by capturing certain chemical elements from the atmosphere – a hypothesis whose validity is demonstrated a few years later.

Another problem: the question of women is totally absent, whilst the majority of farmers are female farmers (still today in countries of the Global South). Yet, there is an obvious parallel between patriarchal domination and control over nature.

There are in Marx elements of an ecology that go further than intuitions, but no system.

2) There remains an unresolved problem in Saito: Marx did not simply pass from a Promethean productivist conception to the representation of a metabolic hiatus. Indeed, the young Marx was a naturalist: it was for him a matter of humanising nature and naturalising man (1844 Manuscripts). This is the idea of a harmony between Man and nature.

Marx’s productivism is a consequence of his youthful naturalism, which is not liberated from Hegelian idealism. Marx breaks with this, which materialises in his conception of the irremediable hiatus. The objective then becomes more modestly the rational management of nature. (Read on this subject the thesis “La rupture écologique dans l’œuvre de Marx : analyse d’une métamorphose inachevée du paradigme de la production” [The Ecological Rupture in Marx’s Work: Analysis of an Unfinished Metamorphosis of the Production Paradigm], by Timothée Haug – work that can be consulted online.)

It is therefore a matter of making a critical analysis of Marx’s ecosocialist draft to trace another path whilst avoiding two pitfalls:

– the Gaia hypothesis: the Earth is sick, and this sickness is humanity (Lovelock) – another form of Malthusianism, which partially inspired the Meadows report [The Limits to Growth, 1972 report by the Club of Rome];
– the conception of ecology dominant today. According to Bruno Latour [1947-2022, French philosopher and sociologist] and Philippe Descola, [French anthropologist]): there is no nature, no capitalism, no system, no matter, there are only actor-networks, therefore no more reflection to be had on the crisis of relations between capitalist social development and nature, since the two terms are dissolved.

RV, July 2025