Early Capitalism and the Loss of Common Lands
During the mid-19th century in Prussia, five-sixths of all theft prosecutions were related to the theft of wood. The problem was related to the elimination of the ‘common lands’ held perpetually by the peasants up to this point; this land was being quickly snatched up through rapid industrialization, and by private property owners. When peasants went onto these lands to collect firewood, as they had traditionally done for generations, they were accused of being thieves.
Karl Marx
According to Marx, by imposing such laws on the peasants (the labourers), the landowners were “denying any relationship to nature, even for survival, outside of the institutions of private property.” This led to humans being increasingly isolated from the lands that they had known so well, and was a contributing factor to a lesser understanding of the earth, its natural systems, and what is required to sustain them.
Labour: Our Defining Quality as a Species
What’s more, Marx believed that, above all else, labour is what set human beings apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, and defined us as a species. With the creation of tools and machines, it became possible for the ruling class to live off the labour of others, “but in the process, the producers lost control of their labour, and of the products they produced. […] In all cases, it meant the complete alienation of humans from nature.” The alienation of the working class and the monopolization of the peasantry by the bourgeoisie can be described as the essential element of private property and had existed in feudal landed property — which was ‘the root of private property’ — prior to rise of capitalism.
In feudal landownership, we already find the domination of the earth as an alien power over man. Already the land appears as the inorganic body of its lord, who is its master and who uses it to dominate the peasantry. But it is bourgeois society which brings this domination of the earth (and through the domination of the earth, domination of humanity) to perfection.
Original Sources of All Wealth
Furthermore, in the first volume of Capital, Marx identifies the loss of soil fertility as being directly related to the capitalist system;
"All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long lasting sources of that fertility[. . .] Capitalist production therefore only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker."
Alienation of Humans from Nature
The isolation/ alienation of humans from the rest of nature is one of the primary causes of the earth’s environmental woes, leading to increased exploitation and abuse of the land. There is also the failure to recognize the earth as an environment which can be seriously and irreparably harmed by human actions. This is one of the primary criticisms of modern agricultural methods by ecomarxists.
Concept of "Underproduction"
According to many ecomarxists, another fundamental flaw of the capitalist system is the process of “under-production”, which means that capitalists treat nature as if it were a free commodity. There is a tendency inherent to capitalism to “undervalue, and thus, under-produce the conditions of production.” Moreover, according to some economists, “[under a capitalist system] men change their own nature as they progressively deprive nature of its externality, as they mediate nature through themselves, and as they make nature itself work for them and their own purposes.”
Basically, this means that the capitalist system does not take into account the true costs of environmental degradation, resource depletion, etc. into the costs associated with the product, and views nature as a commodity that is here for humans to exploit.
This can lead to many environmental catastrophes, such as clear-cutting the rainforest, and the over-exploitation of the ocean’s marine life.
Ecomarxism
Ecomarxism is an anthropocentric view which sharply criticizes western capitalism; ecomarxists claim that a capitalist system negatively influences the relation of humans and nature, and that “democratic and capitalist economies are mutually exclusive from the protection of nature.”
In the mind of Marx, the only way to solve the problem of environmental degradation, and the dreadful conditions of the worker, was through liberation from the capitalist system; Marx’s notion of human emancipation was linked to his vision of overcoming humanities isolation from nature through the development of a socialist society. “For humanity to progress beyond alienation, it is necessary ‘to govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way’, a goal only obtainable with the elimination of capitalism.”
Avineri, Shlomo, ed. (1977) Varieties of Marxism. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Foster, James B. (2000) Marx's Ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Giddens, Anthony. (1971) Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, Karl. (1887) Capital, Volume 1. Trans. Samuel Moore & Edward Aveling. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. (1894) Capital, Volume 3. Edited and translated by Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers.
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