Class, Nature and

Marxist Views of Class and Nature

The first systematic, geographical analysis of the relations between class forces and nature was presented in Neil Smith's influential volume Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and Production of Space. Smith deploys a Marxist theory of class to reveal the ways in which the social and geographical structures of capitalist society have shaped, and have in turn been conditioned, by certain economic appropriations of nature. Karl Marx's 19th-century reflections on human relations with the natural world were important because they marked a sharp break from the prevailing tendencies at the time to see nature as an object of analysis within the physical sciences but not the fields of economics and politics. In keeping with his broader modes of dialectical thought, Marx asserted that nature was not an eternally unchanging backdrop against which human history is played out but a historically contingent product of prevailing political and economic systems.

It is important to note that the varied social relations associated with a capitalist economy (including systems of market exchange, private property, and regimes of accumulation) have all critically shaped modern relations with the natural world. Smith asserts that it is the particular class formations of capitalism that have determined the specific ways in which modern industrial societies apprehend and transform nature. While Marx himself identified a plethora of socio-economic classes that were characteristic of capitalism, it is the broad division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that Smith focused his analysis on. Following Marx, Smith interpreted the bourgeoisie to be the strata of industrial society that own the means of economic production (viz., agricultural land, factories, mines, etc.) and the proletariat as those whose only property is their own bodies and the associated labor they can sell. While these class positions may be familiar enough, the impacts that they have on socionatural relations are perhaps less easy to discern. It is the various processes of alienation that, in different ways, hold the key to interpreting the ecological significance of such class positions.

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