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Marxism and the environment

Marxism and the environment

Released Wednesday, 25th February 2015
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Marxism and the environment

Marxism and the environment

Marxism and the environment

Marxism and the environment

Wednesday, 25th February 2015
Good episode? Give it some love!
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This podcast was produced and presented by Kieron YatesClimate change, environmental pollution, privatisation of the biosphere, water crises are all signs of the impact of neoliberal policies on our environment, but where will the solutions to these problems come from?Thirty years ago, there seemed to be a disconnect between an ecology movement that had emerged in the 1960's and the traditional left - neither readily  embraced the other. But over the last two decades there's been a rediscovery of a strand in Marx and Engels' writings that relates to the environment, and this has led to the growth of an eco-socialist movement that campaigns not just on issues of environmental concern but also social justice.

Pod Academy's Kieron Yates talked to Chris Williams, Adjunct Professor at PACE University in the Department of Chemistry and Physical Sciences and Gareth Dale, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Brunel University

Kieron began by asking Chris Williams what was the reality of the disconnection between the environmental movement and socialist politics of the 1980's.

 Chris Williams:  There was a strand in Britain of what could be termed deep ecology which was more commitment to protecting the earth and naturral systems... saving the whale and natural systems and less concerned with the social world or social justice questions... which is obviously more of a left sociualist concern.

But there was also another strand to environmental concerns in the 1980's, in Britain anyway... which was CND and the campaign for Nuclear Disarmamanet... and just the general idea that the world was in a very bad sitauation with regards to the possibility of nuclear warfare and what did that mean in connection to nuclear power stations and nuclear power.

I think in Britain my recollection is that there were different strands but certainly the left was somewhat disassociated from both in a certain regard but certainly much more so from the idea that we should promote the natural world over and above any concerns for the people in it, as if there was this big split between the two and we didn't depend on each other. That was proababy most evident in the United States with the people of Earth First which split off from what they thought were the sellouts of the mainstream environmental movement and turned anti-human in many ways... and some sections of it embraced HIV and AIDS as a way of cleansing the earth, depopulating it of a human virus and other despicable ideas like that. So, there were different strands even within the deep ecology movement... some of them were overtly racist and so the left would obviously have condemned that anyway. The situation has definitely moved on since then.

Kieron Yates: When I began doing research for this podcast I was surprised to discover Marx and Engels themselves had a highly developed concept of the relationship between capitalism and the environment and it's a theme that is explored in both Marx's Capital and some of Engels' later writings - in fact, to my mind, their thinking still seems remarkably contemporary and holistic. I asked Gareth Dale if this was a fair assessment.

Gareth Dale: I think your surprise is related to the fact that the thought of Marx and Engels was for a long time interpreted in very orthodox ways by social democratic and communist parties for most of the twentieth century and these were parties that were linked to very state centered modernizing projects… geared to economic growth, and geared to urbanising society and to capital accumulation at the end of the day… whether that was in the form of state capitals in Soviet Union and eastern Europe and in social democratic nation states in western Europe and elsewhere.

These were parties therefore that interpreted Marxism in a very growth orientated modernising framework which fetishised technology. I remember I lived in East Germany for a couple of years and I remember the children’s...

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