 important part of environmental struggles.
Further, the impacts of global warming fall disproportionately on the working class and the poor. The effects will manifest themselves in lots of ways: more expensive foods, a shortage of water, less fertile soil, and more extreme weather. Those who will suffer (and already are suffering) as a result are ordinary working and middle class people, peasant farmers – in short, everyone except the super-rich, who can always up sticks and move to a more pleasant climate. Although at the moment the effects are largely confined to the so-called third world, they are already starting to impact on the richer countries. This means that global warming is not just a scientific issue, but a class issue. Marxism, being the most developed theory of class, is clearly relevant here.
In addition, the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism offers the means to analyse and explain today’s climate crisis. Marx and Engels in the mid-19th century showed how both society and nature develop through the build-up of contradictions leading to qualitative leaps . Today, climate researchers echo this method in warning of tipping points, the moment when the environment passes irreversibly from one stage to another . In this sense, climate change is dialectical in nature. The dialectical nature of climate change is a striking confirmation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism developed by the founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
In his unfinished book The Dialectics of Nature, Engels provides us with an explanation of dialectical materialism: “the transformation of quantity and quality – mutual penetration of polar opposites and transformation into each other when carried to extremes – development through contradiction or negation of the negation” . This is confirmed to be just as correct for global warming, particularly through the discovery of ‘tipping points’, as in other aspects of science and nature. For example, computer models predict that an overall increase in global temperatures, Britain could experience a dramatic fall in temperature, much colder than at present . The reason is simple: the Gulf stream, the current of warm water from the Caribbean that keeps the British Isles warm, could be diverted due to melt water from the Arctic. What better confirmation could there be of the dialectical “mutual penetration of polar opposites?” In order to successfully combat climate change, it is vital that we understand how it functions. Marxist theory, best describes this process. Given this, it would be utterly incorrect to characterize Marxism as irrelevant to issues of environmental justice.
In the third volume of Capital, published in 1894 after Marx’s death in 1883, Marx describes capitalism as a break with the natural laws of life: “On the other hand, large landed property reduces the agricultural population to a constantly falling minimum, and confronts it with a constantly growing industrial population crowded together in large cities. It thereby creates conditions which cause an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life” .
Based on a discussion about the long-term degradation of the soil following the use of chemical fertilisers in agriculture, Marx wrote that “all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but 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” . Contrary to popular belief, Marx was not only concerned with the horrors capitalism inflicts upon the working class. His analysis also dealt with the planet itself. As such, claims that Marx had nothing to say on the issue of environmental justice are unsound.
Marx warned that capitalism’s constant modernisation would increase “this process of destruction” . Marx predicted the atrocities capitalism would inflict on the environment over one hundred years ago. How, then, can we call his tho