So far, I have emphasized the importance of revolutionary ecosocialism or ecological Marxism in the conception of ecological civilization. It is no accident that the notion of ecological civilization first appeared in the 1980s in the Soviet Union and that it is being implemented as a guiding principle and central project in China, while it is scarcely discussed elsewhere in the world. This cannot be attributed solely to China’s traditional culture, though it has played a part. Nor does it make sense to connect this to the notion of postmodern culture, which has had no real material relevance in this regard. Rather, the notion of ecological civilization is inconceivable in any meaningful sense outside of a society engaged in building socialism, and thus actively engaged in combating the primacy of capital accumulation as the supreme measure of human progress. It is exactly here that Marxian ecology has had a huge role to play.

Ecological Marxism has developed in China in terms of its own “vernacular revolutionary tradition,” where new critical concepts are seen as directly problem-oriented and immediately put in operation. This is distinct from its conceptualization in the West, where ecosocialist researchers are more removed from praxis and have generally been engaged in wider, and often more abstract, theoretical developments. A principal concern of Marxian ecology in the West (as well in much of the rest of the world) has been the reconstruction of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, and how to enhance the continuing critique of capital in this respect. Bringing this renewed ecological critique emanating from classical historical materialism to bear on the problems of building ecological civilization in China therefore ought to be a priority—and, in fact, many scholars in China are currently engaged in this.

In terms of what we have learned in the recent renewal and elaboration of Marxian ecology, a number of concepts are crucial. Chief amongst these is Marx’s triad of concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” “social metabolism,” and the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism”—or the metabolic rift brought on by capitalist development. The concept of the universal metabolism of nature recognizes that human beings and human societies are an emergent part of nature. Social metabolism expresses how humanity interacts with and transforms nature through production. And the metabolic rift reflects the fact that an alienated social metabolism, aimed at the expropriation of nature as a means of the exploitation of humanity and the accumulation of capital, necessarily produces an ecological crisis, driving a wedge between this alienated social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature of which we are a part.

Marx himself provided a penetrating definition of what we now call sustainable human development. No one—not even all of the people or all of the countries in the world— he argued, owns the earth; rather, we are obligated to hold it in usufruct as good managers of the household, sustaining it for the chain of human generations. Genuine progress on this score, overcoming the alienation of nature and humanity associated with the processes of expropriation and exploitation, has to embrace the notion not simply of an economic proletariat (and economic peasantry) as the principal force for change, but, in a more inclusive materialism, of an environmental proletariat (and ecological peasantry). Indeed, the three categories that we started with—ecological civilization, ecological revolution, and ecological Marxism—hardly make sense without this fourth term of the environmental proletariat.

Our relation to the earth is our most fundamental material relation out of which our production, history, and social relations emerge. Those who are most alienated, exploited, and degraded by the system in their relations to nature and the earth, constitute both the force and means for change in the twenty-first century. In what Marx called the “hierarchy of [human] needs,” our relation to the earth necessarily comes first, since it constitutes the basis of survival, and of the development of life itself.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Zheng Yifan

From:https://monthlyreview.org/2022/10/01/ecological-civilization-ecological-revolution/.（2022-10-1）