The Concept of Alienation and the Metabolic Rift. An Analysis of (Eco-)Marxist Findings concerning the Human Relationship to Nature (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject Philosophy - Practical (Ethics, Aesthetics, Culture, Nature, Right, ...), grade: 1,3, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel (Philosophisches Seminar), course: The human relationship to nature, language: English, abstract: Capitalism is the leading economic system of our world. In the past, many philosophers have thought about our economy, about worsening situations of work and about the environment in which we live in. What becomes striking is the fact that, through the last two centuries, an economic system prevailed, which neglected every consequence it had for our planet, our very own habitat. The metabolism between humans and their environment, Marx once claimed, is disturbed. Eco-Marxists like Foster called out a metabolic rift, respectively to Marx' term. I therefore use this term and the Marxian notion of alienation to explain the path of wrongdoing in terms of the environment over the past centuries. The main argument is that the latter is constitutive of the former, and that the metabolic rift became institutionalized. The reader is presented a so to say, Eco-Marxist approach here, however Marxism will also be criticized for parts of its perspective. In the end, the text will have shown that the key process of understanding the alienation from nature in the socialist environmental theory is vital to overcome nowadays capitalistic as well as nature-neglecting model of economy and that the ideal communist society is not the bright future for us to live in either.