#Marx#Marxism#Capitalism#Ecology: "I think that the ‘original Marxian message’ – the theory of revolution as the self-emancipation of the oppressed – is still relevant today. The fall of the Wall confirmed Marx’s intuition: it is impossible to ‘build socialism’ without the working people (or against them), without a genuine revolutionary democracy – of which the Paris Commune gave the first historic example.
However, I believe that this 19th-century Marxian heritage must be complemented by the contributions of 20th-century Marxists: Marxism is a thought in motion, which did not stop with the death of Marx and Engels. It is also an open form of thought, capable of integrating (critically) the contributions of other revolutionary currents: utopian socialisms and feminisms, libertarian socialisms and romantic socialisms (William Morris, Charles Péguy, Georges Sorel, Bernard Lazare, Gustav Landauer), as well as the contributions of the human sciences, from Max Weber to Sigmund Freud, to cite two obvious examples.
A word on the ecological question. It is present in Marx’s writings, as the work of John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett and Kohei Saito has shown, especially from the 1860s onwards. But it occupies only a marginal place, which is easily explained by the fact that the ecological crisis was not in his time, as it is today, a decisive social and political issue. The Marxism of the 21st century can only be an eco-Marxism, in other words, a theory that places the question of the destruction of ecosystems and climate change at the centre of the debate on capitalism and the socialist alternative."
