The development of culture and of industry in general has evinced itself in such energetic destruction of forests that everything done by it conversely for their preservation and restoration appears infinitesimal.Įven the need for fresh air ceases to be a need for the worker. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. Frederick Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy And the original appropriation - the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life - yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. To make earth an object of huckstering - the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence - was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. Man lives from nature - i.e., nature is his body - and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. What follows is only a small selection of their writing on the subject. Even before the word ecology was coined, they repeatedly stressed the inseparable oneness of humanity with nature, the inherent destructiveness of capitalism, and the necessity of socialism for the survival of earth.

In reality, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels addressed these concerns in nearly everything they wrote. The slander that Marxism has little to say about the environment persists.

Friedrich engels socialism