# Marx's Ecology | Cosmopod tags : [[Marx]] [[ecology]] [[Marx’s Ecology]] ## Notes - Check out “From the Web of Life” - Foster wants to tease out the ecology in Marx’s writings - Marx was probably not a [[developmentalist]] - Ecological theory is articulated through [[materialism]] - Marx criticizes [[Proudhon]] for being Promethean. Marx saw [[Prometheus]] as a revolutionary - Marx was opposed to [[teleological]] technological progression - That is to say that Marx didn’t think that technological progress had an end goal, it just happened - And that it happened according to social processes, i.e. that it is a process that’s happening - Technological development is subordinate to social processes (this is mentioned in [[Capital Vol. 1]]) - Marx was heavily inspired by [[Epicurus]] - [[Feuerbach]] was a Hegelian but broke with [[Hegel]] and became a materialist - Feuerbach’s materialism came from exploring the relationships between human beings - Feuerbach felt that man became alienated from his own ideas (hence his ideas on religion). Marx broke with Feuerbach due to alienation of labor - Epicurus was seen as the materialist antidote to [[idealism]] and [[religion]] - Epicurus’s philosophy believed that gods only existed in the spaces between atoms - [[Malthus]] thought that human population and food production didn’t increase at the same rate, i.e. that human population growth could outpace food production - In his own time this was not well received - Marx harshly criticizes Malthus - Malthus thinks that overpopulation is always happening. Class society is what keeps population in check, thought that reproduction of nature was a steady state, or constant - This was a response to the [[French Revolution]], which sought to create a model society and undo class society (to some degree) - [[Darwin]]’s [[theory of evolution]] had more to do with [[co-operation]] than with “survival of the fittest” - [[Engels]] theorized that intelligence presupposes labor, not the other way around - Engels has been vindicated by modern science - [[Class struggle]] can be seen as a sort of social [[natural selection]] - [[The Long Twentieth Century]] talks about the metabolism of society, much like this work does - [[Metabolic rift]] describes the distance between man and nature. Society is a metabolism and outgrowth of nature, yet there’s a distinction between them ## Backlinks - [[Marx’s Ecology | Cosmopod]]