as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive fish of its medium of existence” . Capitalist industrial production and with it the working class, had only come into existence in the preceding decades, but were immediately understood by Marx as the key elements for the development of society. Stressing the importance of the working class did not mean ignoring the environment.
Interestingly, Marx viewed labor as “a process in which both man and nature participate” . This is underlined in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme – the programme adopted by the initial congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1875. Marx takes up the programme’s assertion that, “labor is the source of all wealth and all culture” . “Labor is not the source of all wealth”, Marx wrote. “Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power” . The falsehood of labor as the sole source came from Ferdinand Lassalle, not from Marx. Marx understood labor and the environment as inherently interrelated. He did not focus on labor to the exclusion of environmental issues.
In fact, Marx devoted considerable effort to understanding the environment. He warned of the effects of the disruption in the relationship between humanity and nature. Therefore, he saw the alienation of workers in capitalist production as part of the same process as humanity’s alienation from nature. In his time, this was particularly obvious in the industrialisation of agriculture. The working class was and is at the forefront of the effects of capitalism on the environment. For example, energy companies – oil, coal, nuclear power – pose a direct threat to workers in those industries as well as to people and the natural environment in whole regions or countries. Workers in those industries are often the most conscious about those dangers. The struggle to improve the working environment is an 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 inc