"New materialist approaches tend to adopt a kind of naive materialism, where the material world is treated as something that can be understood almost on its own. The assumption is that phenomena can be studied as purely material processes — by tracing relations among actors, for example — without offering a sustained account of the social relations that structure a particular society or orient human action within it.
While this can reorient our perspective and draw attention to material activity, it cannot really explain what is happening unless it is paired with an analysis of social dynamics. That is what a Marxist approach provides. In this respect, my critique of new materialism is not unlike Marx’s critique of classical political economy. We can observe the effects of material entities, but to understand what drives those effects we need an account of the specific social form in which they appear. At the same time, I do want to integrate some insights of new materialism into a Marxist framework — especially their insistence on materiality — by holding together the social and the material rather than separating them.
The problem with much eco-Marxism is different. I have learned a great deal from that tradition and see myself as working within it. But there has often been an assumption that showing capitalism to be destructive of nature is, in itself, a sufficient critique. Human activity always transforms nature; that is part of our metabolic relationship with the more-than-human world. The critical question is not whether nature is transformed, but how, and under what social relations.
Much eco-Marxist thought rests — often implicitly — on the idea that the core problem is alienation from nature. What is missing is an account of how specific capitalist social relations organize and compel destructive interactions with the natural world..."
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/nature-capitalism-marxism-ecology-freedom/
#Capitalism #Ecology #NewMaterialism #Marx #Marxism #EcoMarxism #PoliticalEconomy
Muir
Miguel Afonso Caetano
The Marxist-Leninist Guy
Bryan (he/him) 🇺🇸 🏳️🌈
Terrestres
