Introduction

      For quite a long time, the expression “Marx’s ecology” was regarded as oxymoronic. Not just critics of Marx but even many self-proclaimed Marxists believed that Marx presupposed unlimited economic and technological developments as a natural law of history and propagated the absolute mastery of nature, both of which run counter to any serious theoretical and practical consideration of ecological issues such as the scarcity of natural resources and the overloading of ecospheres. Since the 1970s, when grave environmental threats to human civilization gradually but undoubtedly became more discernible in Western societies, Marx was repeatedly criticized by new environmental studies and an emerging environmental movement for his naïve acceptance of the common nineteenth-century idea advocating the complete human domination of nature. According to critics, such a belief inevitably led him to neglect the destructive character that is immanent in the modern industry and technology that accompanies mass production and consumption. In this vein, John Passmore went so far as to write that “nothing could be more ecologically damaging than the Hegelian-Marxist doctrine.”¹

      In subsequent years, the critique against Marx’s “Prometheanism,” or hyperindustrialism, according to which unlimited technological development under capitalism allows humans to arbitrarily manipulate external nature, became a popular stereotype.² Consequently, it was not rare to hear the same type of critique, that Marx’s theory, especially with regard to ecology, was fatally flawed from today’s perspective. His historical materialism, it was said, uncritically praised the progress of technology and productive forces under capitalism and anticipated, based on this premise, that socialism would solve every negative aspect of modern industry simply because it would realize the full potential of productive forces through the radical social appropriation of the means of production that were monopolized by the capitalist class. Marx was depicted as a technological utopian who failed to grasp the “dialectics of Enlightenment,” which would ultimately bring about the vengeance of nature when the ultimate productivism was realized.³

      This particular critique, which was common in the Anglo-Saxon world, remains widely accepted in Germany, Marx’s homeland. Even in recent years, Thomas Petersen and Malte Faber repeated the widespread critique against Marx’s productivism, albeit without much textual analysis. According to these German scholars, Marx was “too optimistic in terms of his supposition that any production process can be arranged in such a manner that it does not incur any environmentally harmful materials.… This optimism of progress is certainly due to his great respect for the capitalist bourgeoisie, which is already documented in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.”⁴ Rolf P. Sieferle, another German scholar, also rejected the possibility of Marx’s ecology because Marx wrongly believed, based on his historical understanding of capitalism, that the “limits of growth of natural factors would be uncoupled”