Notes on the Ecological Dimension: Marxists and the Environment: Is Marx’s Critique of Science and Technology Radical Enough?

By Mitchel Cohen

“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

For years, as I’ve been active in social justice movements I’ve worked with people who call themselves Marxists. I taught an underground course at Stony Brook for 15 years called “Marxism for Beginners”. And the group that I founded with other students at Stony Brook in the late 1960s, the Red Balloon Collective, saw itself as an anarcho-marxist direct action organization.

And yet, as I became more and more involved in environmental and related issues, I found that the Marxists with whom I marched in antiwar demonstrations and social justice protests were nowhere to be found on certain issues and indeed were hostile to my attempts to raise these issues with them. I also found that as I wrote about these issues for various Marxist journals they would invariably be rejected, even though many of my articles and essays were being published by other publications and books. I had to find out why.