This four-part lecture series asks what we can learn from Marx about the climate crisis: its origins, its impacts, and what possible solutions we might seek in the face of increasingly inadequate government efforts to mitigate the escalating devastation worldwide. Developments Marx criticized in early industrial capitalism have had enormous consequences for the planet’s eco-systems, not least in the form of carbon-fuelled climate change. But a century and a half has passed since the early industrial period. What could Marx have to teach us about environmental crisis in the twenty-first century? Was he not a developmentalist and leading proponent of industrial modernization? Did the socialist economies of the twentieth century not pursue a productivist model that churned out CO2 at rates on par with the capitalist world-economy? And what of China, an ostensibly communist country and one of the biggest polluters in the world?

The first lecture returns to Marx to recover his critical theory of nature, or more precisely society-nature relations, since for Marx modernity is distinguished by the social mediation of first nature by a fetishized ‘second nature’. The way we reproduce ourselves under capitalism, always in service to an abstract ‘economy’, limits our ability not simply to see our world for what it really is, but more pressingly to act in an ecologically sustainable way. Drawing on the philosophical critique of the capitalist domination of nature developed by Frankfurt School critical theorists Alfred Schmidt, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, this opening lecture explains how ‘the dialectic of Enlightenment’ constitutes first nature as an external object subject to ceaseless appropriation, exploitation, and depletion, a critique these figures would eventually extend to Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure and to the actually existing socialist states of the twentieth century. We will then consider subsequent efforts to reclaim Marx for a Marxian ecology, weighing eco-socialist theories of ‘metabolic rift’ against value-theoretical approaches to societal nature relations to develop a rigorous critique of capital-induced planetary degradation.