Who Speaks for the Soil?
Marxism and the Ethics of Nature
“It is possible to be a tyrant in the family, in relation to animals, and even in relation to so-called dead nature—to woodland, to water, to mineral resources.” Evald Ilyenkov[1]
Introduction
The links between environmental issues and (actually existing) socialism are complex. Socialism has sometimes been described as necessarily destructive to the environment. And one can find examples of this across the history of socialist movements and states. But there have also been convergences, examples of socialism working together with the protection of the environment.
One example of both the contradictions and unity of socialism and environmental concerns is the USSR. As John Bellamy Foster writes:
“From an ecological perspective, the USSR can be seen as a society that generated some of the worst ecological catastrophes in history but that also gave birth to some of the most profound ecological ideas and practices, based on materialist, dialectical, and socialist intellectual foundations.”[2]
There is on the one hand, the predominance of Lysenko’s [Soviet biologist who rejected genetics as bourgeois, KP] pseudoscientific thought, based on a dogmatic reading of Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, the draining of the Aral Sea, and there is on the other hand, the zapodedniki [state nature reserves in the USSR, KP], zones “of relatively pristine nature, set apart for scientific research”,[3] the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature, which tried to restore forests “as a grand attempt to reverse anthropogenic regional climate change in deforested areas”[4], and a great number of ecological thinkers from early to late soviet ecology.
Another example can be Cuba, “the most environmentally sustainable country on Earth”[5] according to Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro. After the soviet collapse, and with it the end of the aid the USSR provided, Cuba had to change its economy, but it chose to turn towards agroecological approaches. As Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro writes:
“Novel agroecological approaches, on the other hand, have been a hallmark of the Cuban soil and agroecosystem restoration process. Much state investment in scientific education and research infrastructure facilitated this outcome, with dozens of agricultural research centres set up and dotting the country already by the 1970s. Scientific inquiry into agroecology and development of agroecological applications started within research and field centres at least a decade before the 1990s hardships. The development of biological pest management dates back even further, to the 1970s. This state-supported foray into eco logically oriented, low-input agriculture was a major factor in making possible the turn away from agrochemicals-intensive farming.”[6]
These achievements in ecology are connected to the fight against the US blockade and the fight for economic prosperity:
“the state socialism of Cuba, where social equality and well-being are priorities, is the sole existing model that meets a minimum requirement of standards of living ‘within a consumption pattern that could be extended globally without entering [planetary] overshoot’ (Moran et al. 2008, 4). That is no small feat for a small country under siege by the mightiest military in world history.”[7]
The history of the links between environmental issues and socialism is complex, full of mistakes and successes that should each be studied on its own. As Andy Bruno writes: “A key point here is the need to see social and environmental struggles as entwined and mutually reinforcing, as well as distinct and multifaceted”[8]
We shall however, here, work on a more theoretical basis: is Marxist theory, as it currently exists, sufficient to deal with environmental issues?
We will argue that Marxist theory as it exists is still insufficient to deal with environmental issues. The anthropocentric [treating humans as the sole measure of value, KP] ethical theories that have been elaborated by some Marxists, as well as the lack of ethical theories in other Marxists, are a limit to Marxism as it exists. We will therefore argue that Marxism can still learn from different ecological philosophies (such as environmental ethics, on which we will focus here, but we could also learn from social ecology and ecofeminism[9]). Marxist theories have argued that socialism is necessary for a new relation to the environment. But that socialism is necessary to mend the metabolic rift [a break in the metabolic exchange between humans and nature, KP] doesn’t mean that socialism is sufficient. A ruthless exploitation of nature can still happen in socialism, and this is where an environmental ethic can help.
Environmental ethics and Marxist theory have often ignored each other, one considering the other anthropocentric and productivist [treating growth in production as the highest aim, KP], which in some cases is true, and the other considering the one Malthusian [reading overpopulation as the root cause of misery, KP] and reactionary, which in some cases is true. Yet I will argue that these currents can enrich one another.
Our focus will be first on what Marxism can bring to the table, and then on what environmental ethics can bring to Marxist theory.
Division of labour, alienation, idealism
Production (work or labor) , is the activity through which humans transform nature to meet their needs. However, with the social division of labor, people lose concrete control over their own work, their own activity and the products of said activity. A division arises between those who organize labor and those who perform it; a class division emerges, an opposition between the propertied classes that control labor and political power, and the working classes. However, the ruling classes’ control over the organization of labor is also limited, because the ruling class must organize labor according to laws independent of itself, particularly based on the balance of power between the ruling class and the exploited classes: individuals in the ruling class have only a very limited control over labor, as they find themselves constantly driven by a necessity independent of them: Members of the ruling class cannot organize production in a truly rational manner; this organization is always driven by necessities stemming from the existing form of private property and the prevailing balance of power [competition, crisis dynamics, accumulation etc., KP].
People thus find themselves alienated from production, even though it is their own activity: relations of production are not established on the basis of a rational organization by people; rather, they become forces that dominate people and their activity. This social division of labor is established, among other things, by the division between intellectual labor (which includes the technical organization of work, as well as the production of knowledge necessary for this organization) and manual labor. From this social division arises an antagonism: the domination of intellectual labor over manual labor. From this arises an idealist ideology (based on idealist tendencies that may have existed prior to this division): the exploitation of workers cannot be presented as exploitation.
The ruling class has no experience of manual labor, and this dominance of intellectual labor over manual labor is reflected in a way that “veils” labor: it is thus reflected as the primacy of idea over matter, not as a distinction existing within labor itself but as something universally present in the natural order. Because of the ruling class’s efforts to preserve this state of affairs, to maintain its power and the organization of labor that enables it, this antagonistic dominance of intellectual labor over manual labor is reflected in its ideas as an eternal dominance. Within the ideology of the ruling class—and thus the dominant ideology—the conception of an eternal priority of the idea over matter is created. Nature thus no longer appears to humans as what it is, but as an inferior product of spiritual beings (such as God). Man is thus practically alienated from production, his primary relationship with nature, and he finds himself alienated from it in his consciousness as well. It thus becomes more difficult for people to realize that “we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst.”[10] (Engels)
Marx’s criticism of ethics
Some authors, such as Allen W. Wood, emphasize the amoral dimension of Karl Marx’s thought. Marco Maurizi, in the context of the animal condition, also advocates for an amoral approach to social transformation. For him, the abstract moralism of theories in animal ethics renders them incapable of truly questioning the historical social framework within which individual actions take place. For example, certain theories portray our practices of animal exploitation as the result of a prejudice that our species is superior to animals, and imagine that by criticizing this moral prejudice, we could persuade humans to stop exploiting these animals. According to him, a critique of morality reveals that we do not exploit animals because we consider them inferior, but rather that we consider them inferior because we exploit them.
Moral theories are limited because they are incapable of understanding the material necessities and social relations that condition the practices that these theories criticize and thus render themselves powerless to produce an effective critique of these practices. As Marco Maurizi writes:
“Capitalists simply mirror a social mechanism that they unconsciously produce with their very existence qua elements of production. It would be pointless to ask them to be ‘good’ and not exploit workers, because this would simply mean they should disappear as capitalists.”[11]
What we need is not just to change the mind of people so that they change their behaviour; what we need is to transform the social relations that structure people’s behaviour.
Thus, most Marxist approaches to environmental issues do not deal with ethics. One example of this is the theory of the metabolic rift, which provides a materialist theory of (or at least some aspects of) the environmental issues under capitalism, without providing an ethical theory of our relation to the environment.
Theory of the metabolic rift
Capitalist society enters into contradiction with many cycles of material circulation of nature, a rupture is formed in the material circulation between society and nature. To find a new relation with nature, individuals must have control over production as a whole, which is something that cannot happen in a class society that always leads to an alienation where individuals are dominated by their social relations. Under capitalism, in particular, capitalists are subject to the “coercive laws of competition” (Marx) that operate as an “external force” on every capitalist. The absence of rational control over production, blind development according to the laws of competition, leads to many forms of destruction of nature. Engels recalls how many forms of transformation of nature can have unforeseen disastrous effects, to call for man to learn to recognize our belonging and our unity with nature,[12] and Marx denounced in his time the effects of capitalist agriculture on soil fertility:
“Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. […] Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. […] Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.”[13]
Here Marx theorizes what has since been called (notably by John Bellamy Foster) the ‘metabolic rift’: the idea is that labour is a metabolism between humans and nature, and that capitalism, notably through the concentration of people in cities, creates a rift, a rupture in this metabolism.
Kohei Saito, following Marx, identifies three dimensions of the metabolic rift: firstly, the metabolic rift is a rupture in the material circulation of the elements of nature, secondly, a spatial rupture between city and countryside, which is exported up to an international division of labor, thirdly, a temporal rupture, the contradiction between the cycles of capital and the cycles of nature. Unable to adapt to the cycles of nature, capitalism undergoes a metabolic shift [displacement of ecological burdens across space and time, KP], of which three dimensions can also be identified: a material dimension, for example the use of chemical fertilizers to maintain the fertility of soils impoverished by capitalist exploitation, a spatial dimension, the search throughout the earth for new resources, and a temporal dimension, through actions that carry ecological problems into the future, ignoring future generations or hoping for solutions from technological development.[14]
Marx was concerned with the interests of human beings, their individual needs and forms of affirmation as individuals. Even though Marx criticized capitalism for its effect on the soil, his theory does not express concern for non-human beings. Marx does provide a theory of the environment under capitalism, but this theory remains held in the contradictions of Marx’s age. As Daniel Bensaid writes: “Obviously, it would be anachronistic to exonerate Marx of the Promethean illusions of his age. But it would be just as inaccurate to make him a heedless eulogist of extreme industrialization and unidirectional progress.”[15] We will argue that the lack of concern for non-humans is a limitation of Marxist theory, which environmental ethics can help us to overcome.
The search for a Marxist ethical theory and their limits
Marx was extremely critical of morality, though some authors have seen Marx’s theories as full of ethical goals or presuppositions.
Engels in his Anti-Dühring wrote on the possibility of an ethic for a communist society, and many writers in the 20th century have tried to develop a Marxist theory of ethics. One example is Lukacs, who argued that ethics is the weakest point of Marxist theory,[16] and whose works theorized an ontological theory of society as a preparation for the elaboration of a Marxist ethic. Another example can be Ilyenkov, who argued that science and humanism must work together, and that neither science nor morality are ends in themselves, that they are only tools for Man.[17]
Those ethical theories are, most of the times, anthropocentric, which means that they attribute a value only to humans, and do not consider that animals, living beings or dead matter can have any value outside of the different uses we can make of them – though there are exceptions, with for example Tran Duc Thao who claimed that..
“In the real universality of communist society, the symbols inherited from the mysticism of private appropriation are maintained as pure aesthetic memories of a past that has forever disappeared: thus ends the alienation that took man away from the enjoyment of real life, and consciousness recognizes itself in its natural existence, where every being takes on an infinite value for it, because it is nature itself in its becoming-human.”[18]
If every being in nature takes on an infinite value for man, this may lead to an ethical theory where every being has value. But Tran Duc Thao never developed these thoughts. According to Tran Duc Thao, in the result of scientific work, we see “man recognizing himself in nature, of which he appears as the supreme moment”(p.237) ; he also writes that in dialectical materialism, “the original familiarity of man with nature is restored, but on a higher level, where the mediations that made the grandeur of classical rationalism are preserved and absorbed” (p.294) In the first two quotes, the idea is that man recognizes himself in nature. Marxist ethics have sometimes been grounded on recognition, in the idea that humans recognize themselves in other humans, I recognize myself through the other and the other through me. As Marx writes:
“In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom “I am I” is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.”[19]
Tran Duc Thao extends this idea: the human being recognizes himself through nature, because he is nature, both a part of it and the result of its becoming.[20] We can recognize aspects of ourselves in animals, living things, and even non-living things, even if those beings can’t recognize themselves through us – because in fact, human beings recognizing each other will recognize each other as humans but also as animals, as living beings, and as simply beings.
Many people have intuitions contrary to the anthropocentric perspective present in traditional Marxism. Many people consider that unnecessary harm, for example, to animals, or even to living things, is wrong (the problem then becoming how to distinguish necessary and unnecessary harm). And they think such acts are wrong, not just because it could indirectly harm humans, but because they are wrong in themselves. Such intuition can be wrong, of course. Yet I cannot help but think that if a species disappears, or if a type of being stops being through human action, that something of value would then be lost.
According to some environmental ethicists, nature should be considered as having intrinsic value [worth in itself, independent of any use to humans, KP]. This does not necessarily mean either that nature has a value outside of human consciousness. For John Baird Callicott, value is anthropogenic [originating from humans, KP], that is, it comes from human, but we can value non-human things for their own sake. Intrinsic value then means that a being can have value outside of its instrumental use. It does not mean either that everything has the same value and should be treated the same way. And it does not mean that we can’t use nature, but that even when we don’t use it, we can think of it as having value.[21]
Traditional ethics gives ethical consideration to subjects, as opposed to objects. But human beings, subjects, are also objective beings, just like objects have already something of a subjective aspect, an activity. Marx writes:
“The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun’s objective essential power. A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for some third being has no being for its object; i.e., it is not objectively related. Its being is not objective. […] A non-objective being is a non-being.”[22]
We could also argue that our interests are linked with those of other living beings; or that the affirmation of our individual personality is richer when linked to the affirmation of non-human beings, through our similarities with animals, living beings and other beings; or that the species-being [species-being: Marx’s term for humans as social natural beings, KP] of man is impoverished when the natural world is impoverished, that the richness of man also depends on the richness of the world.
The point being that we must learn from environmental ethics, that non-human beings can have value, even if that value exists only in human consciousness.
The question will be where to draw the line. For some authors, only animal beings can be considered morally, because only they can suffer, that is only they can have positive or negative experiences, and as such interests.[23] For some authors all living beings have value, because each living being defends its life. For some author it is rather wholes, ecosystems, the biosphere, that has value. Holmes Rolston develops a theory of the value of inorganic matter, seeing geological formations and other manifestations of matter as inventive results of a projective nature. The question of where to draw the line is complex, but perhaps the dialectical tradition in Marxism can help us to integrate and articulate these different spheres of different beings and different forms of respect owed to them.
Of course, a Marxist theory will also help us avoid the idealist attitude, will help us avoid thinking that an environmental ethic will be sufficient for changing our attitude towards nature. But perhaps an environmental ethic can help us avoid some dangers in the building of a socialist society. If, in a capitalist society, environmental ethics might be powerless, in a communist social formation, where production is in the control of all individuals, an environmental ethics might be useful, to help us consider the interests of other beings in the biosphere, and with this, to develop a new relation to the biosphere. If we recognize ourselves in other living beings, in ecosystems, in the biosphere, we could consider these entities in our economic planning, and we would have all the more reason to mend the metabolic rift and other environmental issues. Environmental ethics could help us first to consider ourselves as a part of nature, and with that to consider other beings that are part of nature, in our metabolism with them. “That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”[24]
An example of both the appeal and the limits of Marxist theory in relation to the environment could be through what we call the cooperative attitude present in Marxism.
Cooperative attitude in Marxism and its limits
John Passmore distinguishes an attitude of domination of nature, consisting of a purely instrumental vision of nature, an attitude of cooperation with nature, where man is seen as bringing something new to nature, as having to cooperate with the forces of nature and as being able to perfect them, and an attitude of stewardship of nature, where man is seen as the manager of nature, but possessing a responsibility towards it.[25]
An example of the cooperative attitude can be found in Bookchin, who argues that “An ecotechnology – for consumption no less than production – serves to enrich an ecosystem just as compost in food cultivation enriches the soil, rather than degrading and simplifying the natural fundament of life.”[26]
We will argue that such a cooperative attitude is present in Marxist theory and consider its usefulness and its limitations.
For Marx, in order to survive, human beings must confront nature: “Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.”[27] Marx celebrates, in the Communist Manifesto, the fact that…
“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”[28]
An attitude of domination towards nature is thus present in the Marxist tradition. But the Marxist theory and tradition cannot be understood only through this attitude.
Human labour, according to Marx, proceeds similarly to nature and depends on natural forces: “The latter [man] can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter. Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.”[29]
Human labour and nature are both sources of wealth, and labour itself must be considered a force of nature: “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.”[30] Work sets in motion a metabolism between man and nature, where man acts as a natural force and transforms his own nature by transforming the external nature:
“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.”[31]
For Marx, human activity is sustained by natural forces and must cooperate with natural forces to transform nature, bringing new forms to the materials used and awakening still untapped potentialities of nature.
The Soviet Marxist Tovmassian thus links the infinity of the potentialities of nature and the infinity of the potentialities of human work: “The limitlessness of nature’s creative possibilities rests upon the eternal and infinite existence of matter and motion in space and time […]. Equally unlimited are the creative possibilities of human activity, the second form of objective process.”[32]
Such a cooperative attitude is also present, in a more obvious way, in the thought of the Marxian philosopher Walter Benjamin, who writes: “The Gotha Program already bore traces of this confusion. It defined labor as “the source of all wealth and all culture.” Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that human being, who owned no other property aside from his labor-power, “must be the slave of other human beings, who… have made themselves into property-owners.” He values “a labor which, far from exploiting nature, is instead capable of delivering creations whose possibility slumbers in her womb.”[33]
As Gérald Hess writes:
“For my part, these representations of the steward and the cooperator appear to me too weak to really replace man in nature. On the one hand, they remain inherently ambiguous, because in secularized democratic societies, the use and transformation of nature are not limited by any a priori limits or otherness; hubris, the hubris of an ambitious steward or cooperator, remains always possible: In the name of what will we then slow down his ambition? On the other hand, recognizing as a fact that man depends on nature is not enough to move from arrogance to modesty.” [34]
An example of such hubris could be found in the soviet popularizer Adabachev, who claimed that “After having begun with some timid transformations, almost insignificant for nature, man, if he wants to be able to support the rhythms of progress and to satisfy its multiple needs, will finally be forced to create an absolutely new biogenosphere.”[35]
These concepts seem thus insufficient to lead us towards a new relationship with nature, they forget, as Bookchin says, “the need to allow for a high degree of natural spontaneity”.[36]
But these concepts are not necessarily useless. If humans must limit their impact on nature, humans must also use nature to survive and cannot do otherwise. Man must reduce his impact on nature; but where this impact must remain present, it must occur in different forms and not unilaterally favor the instrumental aspect. The preservation of the biosphere cannot only depend on the restriction of human practice; it will sometimes require humans to intervene in the environment (controlled burns can be an example of this). This is why we should not also abandon the concepts of a cooperative attitude and stewardship attitude towards nature. These different attitudes are all, it seems, necessary aspects of our relationship to nature: the instrumental aspect, as well as stewardship, cooperation and non-intervention.
The confrontation between Marxist theory and environmental ethics, then, show ways in which both traditions can criticize each other, reveal aspects of each other and enrich each other. Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift, and his criticism of capitalism shows that we need an economy rationally controlled by the individuals of that society, if we want to deal with environmental issues. But environmental ethics can show us how that is insufficient, how an anthropocentric ideology can still become dangerous to the environment and to humans; environmental ethics and Marxist materialism can, together, give us the basis for non-alienated human relation to the natural world and the different beings that exist, live and feel in it.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/esthetic-education.pdf
[2] https://monthlyreview.org/articles/late-soviet-ecology-and-the-planetary-crisis/
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Socialist States and the Environment, London: Pluto Press, 2021, p.170
[6] Ibid., p.179
[7] Ibid., p.190
[8] https://monthlyreview.org/articles/a-new-environmental-history-of-socialist-states/
[9] Many have criticized ecofeminism as essentialist and reproducing a sexist association of woman and nature. However, this criticism fails faced with ecofeminist authors such as Val Plumwood and Ariel Salleh. These authors conceive the link between women and nature as historically constructed. Plumwood writes: “Ecological feminists are involved in a great cultural revaluation of the status of women, the feminine and the natural, a revaluation which must recognise the way in which their historical connection in western culture has influenced the construction of feminine identity and, as I shall try to show, of both masculine and human identity” Plumwood Val, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London and New York: Routledge, p.8 Their revaluation of both nature and femininity is articulated with a historical criticism of the constructions of femininity and masculinity. Val Plumwood, for example, is critical of approaches that simply try to value the oppressed term – here, femininity – without criticizing how that term is historically constructed. Val Plumwood seeks to “show how to affirm the underside of a dualistic contrast (for example, how to affirm nature in contrast to reason) without employing a reversal of values strategy.” (p.33) Plumwood refuses to choose between accepting the identity of the master or accepting being inferior: “Women have faced an unacceptable choice within patriarchy with respect to their ancient identity as nature. They either accept it (naturalism) or reject it (and endorse the dominant mastery model). Attention to the dualistic problematic shows a way of resolving this dilemma. Women must be treated as just as fully human and as fully part of human culture as men. But both men and women must challenge the dualised conception of human identity and develop an alternative culture which fully recognises human identity as continuous with, not alien from, nature.” (p.36) We can see how off the mark is, for example, Bookchin’s dismissal of ecofeminism as man-hating and essentialist. As Emilie Hache writes, “In this sense, ecofeminists proceed with what could be called ‘an inversion of stigma’, except that it is a double stigma concerning women and nature”
[10] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch09.htm
[11] Maurizi Marco, Beyond Nature, Boston : Brill, 2021, p.107
[12] Maurizi Marco, Beyond Nature, op.cit.,p.104
[13] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
[14] Saito Kohei, « La théorie du métabolisme chez Marx à l’ère de la crise écologique mondiale », Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines, Vol. 40, 2021, p.161-182
[15] Bensaïd Daniel, Marx for Our Times, London and New York: Verso, 2009, p.294
[16] Tertulian Nicolas, « Le grand projet de l'”Éthique” », Actuel Marx, No.10, 1991, p.81-96
[17] https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/humanism-science.htm
[18] Tran Duc Thao, Phénoménologie et Matérialisme dialectique, Paris : éditions des archives contemporaines, [date], p.318
[19] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
[20] Doesn’t Tran Duc Thao’s designation of the human as the supreme moment in nature imply a form of teleology? There is in orthodox Marxist thought, as B. Jeu says, “a kind of pantheism of materialist emanation” in the doctrine that “matter, by developing spontaneously, cannot but give rational life.” Bernard Jeu, La philosophie soviétique et l’Occident, Paris : Mercure de France, 1969, p255 But our argument, I think, works even without the teleological idea that nature necessarily results in human consciousness.
[21] I will not deny that the notion of intrinsic value has sometimes been used to justify a mystified appreciation of wilderness, but this is not what I will focus on here.
[22] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf
[23] Animal ethics and environmental ethics do not necessarily go hand in hand; these trends mostly opposed each other in their beginnings. But we will not focus here on this contradiction.
[24] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf
[26] Bookchin Murray, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, Black Rose Books, 1996, p.91
[27] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm
[28] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
[29] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
[30] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
[31] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
[32] Tovmassian S., Problèmes philosophiques du travail et de la technique, Moscou : Les Editions du Progrès, 1976, p.79
[33] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
[34] Hess Gérald, Ethiques de la nature, Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2013, p.199-200
[35] Adabachev I., La vie demain – tragédie ou harmonie ?, Moscou : Editions Mir, 1976, p.126-127
[36] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-janet-biehl-the-murray-bookchin-reader
