Conceptual Reconstruction of Karl Marx’s Ecology: Sociological Aspect

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Abstract

The article attempts a preliminary conceptual reconstruction of K. Marx's ecological ideas with a focus on their sociological aspects. The author, criticizing the narrowly ecological and economic interpretations of Marx's ecology in contemporary Marxist studies, proves that it has a totalizing and historicizing character. Firstly, it is shown that the central category of Marx's ecology – social metabolism – is used by him not only to analyze the exchange of substances between society and nature in the processes of production (labor). With the deployment of labor metabolism, peculiar “worlds” are gradually formed (the world of nature drawn into the sphere of human activity; the world of joint activity as the world of social relations and interpersonal communication; the world of material and spiritual culture; the existential world of the individual), in which specific modifications of praxis and corresponding varieties of social metabolism. To designate the organic integrity, the totality of all these worlds held together by the immanent mechanisms of social metabolism, the author introduces the concept of the social universe into the Marxist sociological discourse. Secondly, the author shows that Marx's analysis of social metabolism and its various forms concerns not only capitalism, but pre-capitalist and post-capitalist formations, and the category of metabolic rift also has a totalizing character.  

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Petr Nikolaevich Kondrashov

Institute of Philosophy and Law, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Yekaterinburg, Russia

References

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