Ecology a central field of Marxism: Expert

PATNA: President of International Che Guevara Foundation, Italy, Roberto

Massari

, on Tuesday said Che Guevara, a major figure of the Cuban Revolution, was never intoxicated by power.

Delivering his address on ‘Che Guevara and Marx’ on the fourth day of an Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI)-organised international conference on Karl Marx here, Massari traced the journey of Che from medicine to communism as he realised that the problems of the Latin American people could be solved only through a revolution.

“When Che was the minister of industries in the Cuban government, he visited factories and lived with workers to understand their problems. Che was a harsh critic of the

New Economic Policy

of the

Soviet Union

and his book on the subject was kept secret till 2006. He maintained that we cannot advocate violence against those who speak against us,” Massari said.

Delivering the Gyorgy Lukacs Memorial Lecture on ‘Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship Revisited from an Ecological Perspective’, Kohei Saito, associate professor, Osaka City University, Japan, said the destructive side of capitalist production in this era of globalization, such as degradation of forests, global warming, disruption of

nitrogen cycle

and extinction of species have made ecology one of the central fields of

Marxism today

.

“Western Marxism never developed a Marxist critique of ecology because of less than a clear perception of intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels. Western Marxism regarded natural science as the domain of Engels’ expertise,” said Saito.

According to Saito, Marx was very much conscious of the danger of serious global disruption in the inter-dependent processes between ‘social metabolism’, that is production, circulation and consumption and the natural world.

“Since capitalist production cannot fully take into account complex dimensions of the social and natural metabolism, it destroys nature, annihilates the possibilities of co-evolution of humans and nature and even threatens human civilization. All that capital cares about is whether accumulation can be somehow achieved, so it does not really matter even if most part of the earth becomes unsuitable space to live for humans and animals. So, instead of waiting for the collapse of capitalism thanks to nature’s revenge, it is indispensable that individuals confronting the global ecological crisis take a measure for the conscious and active control over the metabolism with their environment,” said Saito.

Other key speakers at the conference on Tuesday included Elvira Concheiro, professor, UNAM,

Mexico

, who delivered the Georgi Plekhanov Memorial Lecture. Her topic was ‘Notes on a Dispossession: How Have We Read Marx’.