Marxisme, lutte des classes et écologisme

Abstract

Unlike many studies that are too exclusively conceptual in their analysis of the relations between workers’ movements and ecologism, the present article seeks to locate its approach within a firmly anchored Marxist tradition : the analysis of social movements, of the “concrete movement that abolishes the real”. Provided we take these movements seriously, Marx thus helps us to think them. His analysis of capitalism indicates the location of ecologist action : in the moment corresponding to the crystallisation of value. This explains the superficial kinship between ecologists and liberals. For both, the paramount aim is to modify demand. The ecologist struggle thus has no direct hold on the exploitation of labour. Only indirectly is it confronted with it. By contrast, the struggle against labour exploitation has the inverse effect of preserving the existing structure of production. This explains their divergence of approach : the pursuit of growth cannot be the ecologist principle. It also explains the location and chief modalities of the ecologist struggle, undertaken away from the factories and involving a considerable symbolic dimension, inasmuch as “needs,” in the case of human beings, are very largely a function of culture.