3 THE MARXIST PERSPECTIVE ON NATURE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM
3.1 MARXISM’S RELEVANCE TO ECOCENTRISM What is Marxism? Marxism is several things. Many people regard it as a political doctrine, although regimes which are dubbed ‘Marxist’—self-styled or otherwise—are often gross perversions of the political philosophy of socialism to which Marxism is committed. This is not unusual: National ‘Socialism’ was in fact the antithesis of socialism, just as many organisations and countries now called ‘Christian’, ‘Free’, ’Democratic’ or ‘Communist’ are frequently anything but these things. You cannot judge Marxism, socialism, or any other world view solely by the actions of those who profess them. Marxism is also sometimes called a ‘philosophy’, although by denying the usefulness of purely abstract thought and advocating a dialectic between thought and action it could be thought of as ‘anti-philosophy’ (Marx said ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it’). Above all, Marxism is a Western intellectual tradition inspired by Marx but developed by many others. It tries to analyse how society ‘works’ and how it changes. It is particularly interested in the change from feudalism to capitalism, how capitalism functions, and how it will probably cease to function, perhaps giving way to socialism and, ultimately ‘true communism’. Marxism is often written in difficult, unapproachable language. Different parts of Marx’s own writings say different, sometimes contradictory, things. Marxism’s adherents have, in practice, sometimes committed repression in its name. And because it has a clear moral commitment to socialism and a devastating critique of capitalism it threatens many entrenched interests in the West. So it is unsurprising that Marxism’s critics are many—ranging from the right-wing tabloid press to left-wing intellectual ‘post-Marxists’—and including many mainstream greens and green anarchists. But to infer from this that Marxism has had its day (as, for example, Porritt and Winner (1988) do) is hugely misguided. As Bertrand Russell (1946) pointed out, various features of Marxist analysis have proved so useful and telling that to an extent all of us in the West are ‘Marxists’—we 59