THE MARXIST PERSPECTIVE
understand why it interferes with environmental systems ‘to such an extent that this threatens [our] continued existence. Only when this analysis is available’ can we consider exactly how the environment might be protected from the xundesirable consequences of human use (Johnston 1989). It is Marxism’s socioanalysis of capitalism which makes it so penetrating, revealing and ultimately ‘shocking’, as Heilbroner (1980) puts it. This is an insight into the ‘social relations’ that underlie the economic system’s features and laws (‘social’ relations here includes relations between people, and between people and nature). These relations are not immediately clear to us—for instance we may see a commodity as a ‘thing’ rather than the set of social-economic relationships between people that it really is a product of. So a level of (social) reality beneath the surface of history is revealed. Marxism is therefore a structuralist approach to history and to society-nature relations. There are so many Marxisms and Marxists that it is difficult for us to perceive that they have any coherence. This is why Heilbroner’s (pp. 20–1) definition of the four essential elements of Marxism is useful. If your perspective on history and social change embraces them all, you are a Marxist. A view of capital which starts from Marx’s socioanalysis is one. A second is a dialectical approach to knowledge, considering the ‘innermost nature of things to be dynamic and conflictual rather than inert and static’. A third is its materialist approach to history—highlighting the importance of how we organise together and relate, socially, to produce the means of existence, and how this influences other aspects of society, producing class struggle as an element of social change. The fourth, following on the belief in not merely studying the world but in changing it (praxis) is the commitment to socialism. It is worth noting here that some Marxists distinguish between the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ as historical terms—the latter being the ultimate and most desirable stage of human freedom which is to come, while socialism is an intermediate stage (the former Soviet Union may or may not be regarded as an example). Others, however, regard the terms as synonymous and interchangeable: both describing an ideal state that has not yet been anywhere attained. Within these broad parameters we can distinguish several schools of Marxist thought. Eckersley (1992, 9–116) defines (i) orthodox’ and (ii) ‘humanist’ schools, based respectively on Marx’s later and earlier original works, (iii) a humanist neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School of critical theory (Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse all built on and changed aspects of Marx, and Habermas carried this project further and transformed it), (iv) ecosocialism: a ‘post-Marxist synthesis’. She considers that orthodox Marxism emphasises how historical progress depends on freeing ourselves from nature by subjugating it via production and technology. Humanist Marxism, by contrast, wants to reassess Marx’s technological optimism and belief in material progress, but it still rests on ideas of anthropocentrism and controlling nature. Critical theory also broke away from the so-called scientism of 65