Viento Sur, no. 165, 2019, pp. 52-59.
The element common to the most ambitious contributions of recent ecosocialist theory is its desire to get rid of the guilt complex that would have crossed previous generations of that tradition of critical thought. In the interpretation proposed by authors such as John Bellamy Foster or Paul Burkett, the emergence of ecosocialism would have consisted of a rectification of the productivist inertias that ran through Marx’s work. The first formulations of ecosocialism attempted to generate a virtuous synthesis between the critique of political economy and political ecology. But the fact that it was a synthesis made evident from the outset the relative estrangement between Marxism and ecology. Historical materialism had to pass through a green sieve to retain its productivist lumps, as well as its claim to dominate human-nature relations. On the contrary, Foster and Burkett, as well as the Japanese scholar Kohei Saito, whose work has been disseminated in the editorial space of the Monthly Review, are committed to placing ecology at the heart of Marxian critique. Taking this as a starting point, this article analyzes some of the most relevant contributions of ecomarxism in the context of the ongoing ecosocial crisis.
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