What Are the Problems With Capitalism and Their Solutions According to Marx?

…all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, only 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.

– Karl Marx, Capital vol 1

Following the plummet of the Soviet Union and an economic shift in China it seemed that capitalism had go the only game in town. Karl Marx'south ideas could safely be relegated to the dustbin of history. However the global financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath sent many rushing back to the bin.

For good or ill, the German philosopher'south ideas have affected our earth more greatly than any other modern social or political thinker. Yet on Marx'southward recent 200th birthday, discussion of his continuing relevance was still dominated past "traditional" understandings of Marxism. Commentators, whether hostile or sympathetic, focused on his critique of the exploitation and inequality of capitalism and imperialism, and the struggle to transform society in a socialist direction.

Sadly, there was little – far likewise niggling – on Marx'southward thinking on the relations between humans and nature.

After all, the steady but accelerating destruction by modern capitalism of the very conditions which sustain all life, including human life, is arguably the most fundamental challenge facing humanity today. This is virtually widely recognised in the shape of one of its virtually devastating symptoms: climate alter. Only there is much more than to it, including toxic pollution of the oceans, deforestation, soil degradation and, most dramatically, a loss of biodiversity on a geological scale.

'The history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other and so long as men exist' – Karl Marx. Stephen Bonk / shutterstock

Some volition say that these are new problems, so why should we expect Marx, writing more than a century agone, to have had anything worthwhile to offer to us today? In fact, recent scholarship has demonstrated that the problematic, often contradictory human relationship between humans and the rest of nature was a key theme in Marx'south thinking throughout his life. His ideas on this remain of great value – even indispensable – but his legacy is also quite problematic and new thinking is needed.

Alienation – from nature

Marx'south early on philosophical manuscripts of 1844 are best known for developing his concept of "alienated labour" under commercialism, yet commentators hardly e'er noticed that for Marx the fundamental source of alienation was our estrangement from nature.

This began with enclosure of common land, which left many rural people with no ways of coming together their needs other than to sell their labour power to the new industrial class. But Marx also talked of spiritual needs, and the loss of a whole way of life in which people found significant from their human relationship to nature.

Enclosure turned mutual land into private property and, Marx argued, helped England motility from bullwork to capitalism. Cristian Teichner / shutterstock

The theme running through his early manuscripts is a view of history in which exploitation of workers and of nature go manus-in-mitt. For Marx, the future communist lodge will resolve the conflicts amongst humans and betwixt humans and nature so that people can meet their needs in harmony with 1 some other and with the rest of nature:

Human being lives on nature – means that nature is his torso, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to dice. That man's concrete and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In these writings Marx makes vital contributions to our understanding of the human-nature human relationship: he overcomes a long philosophical tradition of viewing humans as separate from and above the rest of nature, and he asserts the necessity for both survival and spiritual well-existence of a proper, active human relationship with the rest of nature. At the same time he recognises this relationship has gone wrong in the capitalist epoch.

The problem is capitalism – not humanity

In his later writings Marx develops this assay with his key concept of "style of production". For Marx, each of the different forms of human club that have existed historically and across the world has its own specific way of organising human labour to run across subsistence needs through work on and with nature, and its own specific way of distributing the results of that labour. For example, hunter-gatherer societies have usually been egalitarian and sustainable. Withal feudal or slave-owning societies involved securely diff and exploitative social relations, but lacked the limitlessly expansive and destructive dynamic of industrial capitalism.

Marx talked of 'archaic communism' in ancient societies. Anton_Ivanov /Shutterstock

This concept of "modes of production" immediately undermines whatever try to explain our ecological predicament in such abstract terms as "population", "greed" or "homo nature". Each class of club has its own ecology. The ecological bug we face are those of capitalism – not human behaviour as such – and nosotros demand to understand how capitalism interacts with nature if we are to address them.

Marx himself made an important start on this. In the 1860s he wrote most soil deposition, a big concern at the time. His piece of work showed how the sectionalisation of town and country led to loss of soil fertility while at the aforementioned time imposing a nifty burden of pollution and disease in the urban centres.

Modern writers take developed these ideas further, including the late James O'Connor, the sociologist John Bellamy Foster, who identified an endemic tendency of capitalism to generate an "ecological rift" with nature, and those in the United kingdom associated with the Red Green Written report Group.

I suggested above that Marx's ideas were indispensable but also problematic. There are places where he appears to celebrate the huge advances in productivity and control over the forces of nature achieved by capitalism, seeing socialism as necessary but to share the benefits of this to anybody. Contempo scholarship has challenged this interpretation of Marx, but historically it has been very influential. It is arguable that the disastrous consequences of the Stalinist drive for rapid industrialisation in Russian federation came from that interpretation.

But in that location is another betoken. The newer ecological marxists debate, rightly, that capitalism is ecologically unsustainable, and that socialism is necessary to establish a rational relationship to the rest of nature. However, to build a motion capable of transforming society in this mode, we need to recall Marx's early on emphasis on both the cloth and spiritual needs that can be met only by a fully rewarding and respectful relationship to the rest of nature: in short, we demand a Marxism that is greenish, as well as ecological.

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Source: https://theconversation.com/what-karl-marx-has-to-say-about-todays-environmental-problems-97479

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