[D66] The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology

[R.O.]

Essential Reading


  The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology

Posted on November 13, 2020
*Bulletin*: On the day this review was published, it was announced that 
/The Return of Nature/ has won this year’s Deutscher Memorial Prize, 
awarded annually to “a book which exemplifies the best and most 
innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.”

*/<https://monthlyreview.org/product/the-return-of-nature/>
/*

*/John Bellamy Foster’s brilliant recovery of a century of ecological 
and socialist thought will inform, enable, and inspire a new generation 
of reds and greens/*

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John Bellamy Foster*
/THE RETURN OF NATURE
Socialism and Ecology 
<https://monthlyreview.org/product/the-return-of-nature/>/*
Monthly Review Press, 2020

*reviewed by Peter Critchley*

In an age in which the call for system change is being heard more and 
more, in increasing recognition of the socio-economic causes of climate 
crisis, a book establishing the connection between socialism and ecology 
could not be more timely. In tracing the evolution of that connection, 
John Bellamy Foster’s /The Return of Nature /identifies the conditions 
for an effective ecosocialism.

The book is a work of recovery in several related senses: of Marx and 
Engels and those they inspired as pioneer social ecologists; of nature 
as necessarily ingrained in social analysis; of dialectics as a 
critical-practical method; of materialism as field of immanence and 
emergence; of socialism as the systemic mediation of the social-natural 
relation; and, importantly, of politics as the practical engagement with 
the world, rendering knowledge and reason socially effective.

Though neither Marx nor Engels used the word “ecology,” both displayed a 
critical systematic interest in the environmental questions arising from 
the metabolic interchange between human society and nature. Having 
established the foundations of Marx’s socio-ecological critique of 
capitalist society in /Marx’s Ecology /(MR Press, 2000)/, /Foster traces 
its further development in /The Return of Nature /in the work of an 
impressive range of socialist scientists and thinkers. Taking up the 
story from the deaths of Darwin and Marx in 1882 and 1883, with a 
primary focus upon Britain, Foster shows that from its inception, 
ecology was “deeply intertwined” with “struggles for human equality and 
the revolt against capitalist society.”



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