Ecology has become one of the central fields of Marxism today in this era of globalisation due to the destructive side of capitalist production such as degradation of forests, global warming, disrupting of nitrogen cycle and extinction of species. This was stated by Prof Kohei Saito of the Osaka State University, Japan on Tuesday at the international conference of Karl Marx being organised by the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI). Tuesday was the fourth day of the five-day conference on Marx’s bicentenary.
Delivering his lecture on ‘Marx and Engels: the intellectual relationship revisited from an ecological perspective’, Saito said Western Marxism never developed a Marxist critique of ecology because of less than a clear perception of intellectual relationship between Marx and Angeles.
According to Saito, Marx was very much conscious of the danger of serious global disruption in the inter-dependent processes between ‘social metabolism’, that is production, circulation and consumption, and the natural world. Since capitalist production couldn’t fully take into account complex dimensions of the social and natural metabolism, it destroyed nature, annihilated the possibilities of co-evolution of humans and nature and even threatened human civilization, he added.
Comparing Marx with Che Guevara, Roberto Massari, president of International Che Guevara Foundation, Italy, said Che was never intoxicated with power. Massari traced the journey of Che from medicine to communism as he realised that the problems of latin American people could be solved only through a revolution. When Che was the Minister of industries in the Cuban Government, he visited factories and lived with workers to understand their problems.
Massari said Che was a harsh critic of the New Economic Policy of the Soviet Union and his book on the subject was kept secret till 2006. Che maintained that “we cannot advocate violence against those who speak against us”, Massari added.