New Left Review I/178, November-December 1989

Ted Benton

Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction

Many on the left find a source of hope in the realignment of ‘green’ and socialist perspectives. [*] I believe they are right to do so, and I share the hope. But it remains true that important currents within Green politics and culture are hostile to socialism (as they understand it), whilst the response of the socialist left to the rise of ecological politics has, in the main, been deeply ambiguous. [1] In what follows I attempt to do two things: first, to demonstrate that these tensions and oppositions have deep roots in the most influential intellectual tradition on the left, and, second, to provide some new conceptual ‘markers’ which I hope will play a part in facilitating the growing Red/Green dialogue. [2] Although some participants in this dialogue (rightly, in my view) favour a revaluation of non-Marxian socialist traditions of thought and action, [3] this should not, I think, take the place of a continuing and rigorous exploration of the limits and resources of Marxism itself. As I hope to show, Marxism still has much to offer, and what it has to offer is unique to it. Moreover, where the mainstream of Marxist thinking has been wrong, or limited, its limitations have been both disastrous and widely shared, so that the effort of critical exposure is doubly worthwhile.

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