(re)discovering Marx’s Materialism

With Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster has written the definitive account of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels’s materialism. Its title notwithstanding, Marx’s Ecology is far more than an account of Marx’s thinking about nature. Marx’s materialism is not contained within the critique of capitalism, Foster argues, but rather the other way around—it is Marx’s critique of capitalism that is contained within a materialist view of history, constituted by the “materialist conception of history,” on one hand, and the “materialist conception of nature” on the other. Far from either a mechanical or contemplative materialism, Foster argues that Marx forged a practical materialism grounded in an antiteleological conception of “evolution as an open-ended process of natural history, governed by contingency but open to rational explanation” (pp. 15-16). Above all, Foster insists that Marx’s materialism suggests in the strongest terms possible a view of history that is “coevolutionary,” constituted by “the mutual determination . . . of organism and environment” (p. 247). In so doing, Foster simultaneously renders a powerful critique of environmental studies, torn as it is between constructionist and anticonstructionist perspectives, and makes a signal contribution to the renewal of an activist materialist outlook that is at once historical and geographical, social and ecological. Marx’s Ecology defies the standard treatment of such weighty theoretical subjects. Writing a book that assumed “something of the character of a literary detective story” (p. viii), Foster has produced that rare theoretical study that is a joy to read. Written with the gracefulness and clarity of the best intellectual history— Isaac Deutscher’s (1960, 1965) classic biographies of Trotsky and Stalin and Stephen Cohen’s (1980) account of Nikolai Bukharin’s life come to mind—Marx’s Ecology is able to wed a virtually seamless narrative history with lucid theoretical exposition. In so doing, Foster brings his considerable talents as an interlocutor of Marxism (Foster, 1985, 1993, 1998) to bear on such seemingly far-flung topics as the ancient materialist philosophy of Epicurus, the debate over geological time in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the relevance of soil chemistry to Marx’s critique of capital.