Ecology, Politics, and the Crisis of Marxism

Abstract

This essay examines the Marxist humanism of two recent essays published in leading Marxist journals, by Sunyoung Ahn and Matthew Flisfeder, who argue that posthumanism within social science and philosophy has produced an apolitical response to the question of ecological crisis, removing the human subject from the center of theoretical enquiry and leaving theory without a political motor, whereas Marxist theoretical responses to ecological catastrophe must contain a political and ethical injunction upon the human subject to act. This essay argues that posthumanism’s apoliticism stems from its ideological structure shared with theoretical humanism, and any insistence on a Marxist humanism will reproduce this very apoliticism. However, the renewal of this discussion realizes what Louis Althusser called a crisis of Marxism, and this gestures toward a theoretical antihumanism, reconstructed through a Spinozist-Marxist political anthropology, for developing an effective knowledge of political intervention in the face of ecological catastrophe.