Marxism and ecology: an ongoing debate

For a long time, the question concerning ecology has been seen as foreign, or even in plain opposition, to Marxism. A particular use of the category of nature, no matter how complex the role it played in Marx’s texts, was often interpreted as a sign of the quasi-positivist, Promethean character of historical materialism. This putative ‘Prometheanism’ attributed to Marx constitutes the spark that, starting in the 1960s, has given rise to the debate on Marxism and ecology that we assess in this chapter. This task, however, is not easy: although, in the 1970s and 1980s, only a few authors participated in the discussion – which, nonetheless, was already global in scope – the new millennium saw a steady expansion of contributions and, at times, the explosion of caustic, when not vicious, polemics. In recent years these global conversations spread at incredible speed so that, at the time of writing, the field of eco-Marxism is vast and growing.