Marx and nature Book

Marx and Nature is a challenging, but very important book for all those concerned with developing and acting on the ecological insights in Marxist theory. Its republication is long over-due, but should offer new readers the opportunity to grapple with Paul Burkett's analysis, and build on the ideas here. It has a new foreword by John Bellamy Foster which locates the book in the wider debates that have arisen among Marxist thinkers since its publication.

In Marx and Nature Paul Burkett takes up a number of arguments that are made regarding Marx's ecological thinking. A common criticism, that Marxism is "Promethean" in its vision of the development of the forces of production is challenged very effectively here. Burkett notes though, it is not just anti-Marxists who make this criticism, but it also occurs from among Marxists too. Burkett quotes Michael Lowy for instance, suggesting that

"There is a tendency in Marx... to consider the development of the forces of production as the principal vector of progress, to adopt a fairly uncritical attitude toward industrial civilisation, particularly its destructive relationship to nature."

Burkett effectively challenges this view through the book. He does this by returning to the very core of Marx's ideas, and showing how, at almost every stage of Marx's intellectual development, the question of human relationships to nature is key.

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