A Study Of Ecological Thought In The Marx’s Critique Of Political Economy

Marx’s ecological thought is political ecology and economic ecology based on the critique of political economy.Political ecology and economic ecology here do not mean the simple combination of politics and ecology,economy and ecology in a purely disciplinary sense.Marx always understood the relationship between man and nature in terms of the general political and economic environment of a given society,and especially in terms of the relations of production.On the one hand,in elaborating ecological topics such as the concept of nature,agricultural production,land degradation,urban-rural separation,science and technology,and the relationship between man and nature,Marx never left the critical context of political economy,but devoted himself to the integration of ecological criticism and the critique of political economy in his vision.On the other hand,in more than 40 years of research on political economy,Marx never abandoned his early theoretical vision of the unity and separation of man and nature,especially in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.In the study of political economy,Marx understood the relationship between man and nature as a relationship of ownership between laborers and the means of production.In other words,Marx’s ecological thought is a product of the combination of the critique of ecology and the critique of political economy.The class,critical,revolutionary and scientific character of Marx’s ecological thought will be hidden if we detach ourselves from the scientific interpretation of Marx’s political economy on the duality of labor,value contradiction,value appreciation,capital circulation,capital expansion,“separation of labor and capital”,capitalist appropriation,and social metabolism.At the same time,Marx’s ecological thought may be misinterpreted as ecological ethics and ecological philosophy in the general sense of exploring the cognitive relationship between man and nature.The latter usually focuses on the extreme ideological arguments of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism,and thus fails to provide a rational explanation of the relationship between humans and nature,especially the essence of the contemporary ecological crisis.The unity and separation of man and nature have concrete meanings in Marx’s texts,especially in his vision of political economy,rather than superficial,romanticized interpretations.This specific meaning is the ownership relationship between workers and the means of production.This is where Marx’s ecological thought differs from Western green thinking,such as mainstream environmentalism,deep ecology,and ecological romanticism.In elaborating the concept of nature,Marx did not understand it from the perspective of “self-nature”,but rather understood it as the customary images in human economic activities such as land,goods,and machinery from the perspective of “humanizing nature”.In this way,Marx replaced the relationship between man and nature with the relationship between man and land,commodities and machines,and brought the philosophical proposition of “man and nature” into the field of political economy.Further,Marx elaborates on the relationship between man and nature and the forms of nature’s existence from the perspective of man’s economic activity.In his analysis of the relationship between man and nature,Marx examined the relationship between the two not only from the perspective of theoretical relations such as cognitive,aesthetic,and ethical,but also from the level of practical relations.In other words,Marx believed that the relationship between man and nature is not,first of all,a cognitive relationship,but a practical one.Moreover,Marx not only understood the relationship between man and nature as a practical relationship in the first place,but also gave a concrete explanation of this practical relationship from the perspective of political economy,such as the general production activities of human beings,the unique mode of production of capitalism,the separation of laborers from the means of production,the capitalist’s dual possession of constant and variable capital,and the shaping of the relationship between man and nature by the law of value.The most basic form of man’s practical activity towards nature is “productive labor”,and therefore the relationship between man and nature is characterized in the sphere of political economy as “relations of production”.The alienation of man from nature is expressed in the political economy as the separation of man from the means of production.In addition,unlike ecological ethics,which attributes the ecological crisis to science and technology,anthropocentrism,the concept of conquering nature,the industrial revolution,modernization,and the spirit of enlightenment,Marx revealed the economic causes of the ecological crisis from the value logic of capitalism,especially from the contradiction between use value and exchange value,and fundamentally analyzed the internal causes of the ecological crisis.The unlimited expansion impulse of capital has driven the capitalists to plunder natural resources crazily.This has triggered a series of ecological disasters such as global warming,depletion of the ozone layer,ocean acidification,disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles,loss of ground cover,reduction of freshwater supplies,and loss of biodiversity.The unrestrained urge of capital to expand is directly responsible for the metabolic rift between humanity and nature,and the culprit of the alienation of labor and nature,the two sources of wealth.On this basis,Marx proposed practical strategies to solve the ecological crisis,such as realizing the joint production of man and nature,bridging the metabolic rift between humanity and nature,and abolishing the value logic of capitalism,from the perspective of changing the capitalist mode of production.These methods are quite different from attempts to eliminate ecological crises through pure ethical preaching and value criticism such as opposing“speciesism” and advocating “biosphere egalitarianism”.In short,Marx’s ecological thought is an organic fusion of ecological critique and the critique of political economy.This fusion of horizons is a unique perspective of Marx’s ecology to analyze the concept of nature,the relationship between man and nature,ecological crisis,and ecological strategies.Thus,political economy is the key to understanding the true orientation of Marx’s ecological thought.Only by entering the critical perspective constructed by Marx’s political economy can we reasonably replace the relationship between man and nature with a production relationship,recognize the decisive role of the value principles of capitalism in the relationship between man and nature,and appreciate the important significance of the ecological strategy of abolishing private ownership provided by Marx’s ecology.