Anthropocentrism, humanism and eco‐socialism: A blueprint for the survival of ecological politics

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Abstract
In searching for a more coherent politics, ecologism should turn towards Marxism, rather than away from it. Marxism has valuable perspectives to shed on some of the questions about social justice which ecologism increasingly poses. The Marxist view of the society‐nature relationship is relevant to the mass of people, since it is fundamentally anthropocentric and humanist, not (like so‐called ‘deep’ ecology) ‘biocentric’ and tending towards anti‐humanism. However, since it is also in a sense monistic, Marxism's dialectical view of the society‐nature relationship is also inherently green. An eco‐socialism based on both Marx and Morris can claim to be able to meet human material and spiritual needs without destroying non‐human nature or producing alienating environments. In sketching out the practical details of an eco‐socialist society, however, eco‐socialism will have to show how it can reconcile some potential contradictions ‐ particularly that between a desire for autarky and the need to build a sophisticated, planned, co‐ordinated global economy that is ecologically benign and socially just in ways that capitalism and state ‘communism’ never have been.

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