The Role of Class in Environmental Justice

Written by: Adam Assimakopoulos

Edited by: Sunny Bell

Senior Division

Marxism is often recognized for its pervasive role in national and global politics. Associated with industry, collective bargaining, and communist ideology, Marxism has struggled to gain a foothold in mainstream climate change discourse. For many, Karl Marx’s emphasis on workers and wages may seem antithetical to pristine landscapes, untouched wildlife, and the idealized “outdoors.” However, capitalism has become widely discerned as the source of climate change – a common enemy for both environmentalist and Marxist scholars alike. This article does not invest wholly in either school. I find that on both sides of the climate change conversation, everybody is looking for the same thing: a way forward. As inhabitants of the planet, all people share a relationship with land – be it through private property, labour, travel, or even a general interest in nature-centric activities. What I aim to do in this essay is interrogate how these land-human relationships define our engagement with climate change. Of course, Ecological Marxism – “an eclectic combination of traditional Marxist positions on labor and class with a Green theory that was primarily ethical in nature” – is just one angle among many (Foster & Keqing, 2024, p. 1).

The natural environment is among humans’ most fundamental relationships. To pretend that the global climate can be addressed independently of human behaviour is “unscientific, ethically unsound, and unecological,” says founding Ecological Marxist John Bellamy Foster (Foster & Keqing, 2024, p. 3). It is an association that capitalism aims to hijack through a coherent, commensurable, and exploitative logic of extraction and dispossession. This hijacking is shown to negatively impact both land and people. For Marxists, this specifically impacts workers. In order to own the worker’s (a) labour and (b) land to which he tends, the two entities must be distinct and quantifiable (Huber, 2025, p. 67). Abstracting the human from the territory achieves two things for the capitalist: First, it standardizes the cost of labour and territorial property, such that each can be compared on a global scale. Second, the distinction reinforces the idea that our connection to land is strictly economic, rather than ecological.

The line between economy and ecology is blurry and contested. Equally controversial is the role of humans on either side of the line. In instances such as food scarcity, melting icecaps, or rainforest wildfires, scholars disagree on whether ecological or economic shortcomings are responsible (Foster & Keqing, 2024, p. 6). While each point of view champions a different relationship to land, Marxian literature looks closely at the role of production. This emphasis on industry has generated debate on whether or not Marxian scholars appreciate the environment’s intrinsic value. Marx wrote, “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature” (Royle citing Marx & Engels, 2020, p. 443). While Marx’s anthropocentrism may be striking, one must consider that he wrote in response to a human-governed crisis.

He organizes human appraisal into use value, exchange value, and simply, value. The last term, “value,” is defined by Marx to be “the abstract labour time embodied in commodities” (Royle, 2020, p. 446). The difference, he argues, between the value of labour and the value of goods is what creates space for profit. How does this relate to the natural environment and the pursuit of climate justice? Matt Huber, a renowned Marxist scholar, has evolved Marx’s value theory to explain the problem with investments. For example, when firms buy natural land – say, a forest – as a potential investment opportunity, they tend to only consider the monetary output it provides: timber, agricultural space, or minerals. In turn, services like carbon sequestration or air purification are cast aside – not only because they are not profitable, but because they cannot be measured (Royle, 2020, p. 446). The effect is perhaps more obvious than the cause: the climate can only be appraised through the eyes of labour. On the front lines of extractive capitalism are the world’s fishermen, loggers, and miners, whose labour defines the abstract value embedded in the world’s commodities. This labour-first angle may seem jarring, but it forms the basis for significant political and environmental thought.

An extension of Marx’s work, Social Reproduction Theory interrogates “the complex network of social processes and human relations that produces the conditions of existence for [the worker]” (Lindquist, 2024, p. 50). Glen Coulthard argues that settler colonialism, a central driver of capitalism and environmental degradation, does not advance itself solely on repression and violence, but rather, “from its ability to produce forms of life that make settler colonialism’s constitutive hierarchies seem natural” (Lindquist citing Coulthard, 2024, p. 20). In other words, the economic lens through which we view the natural world has become normalized by an exploitative logic. Indeed, the dualism between nature and humans contributes to a myth of mutual creation, where land and humans are seen as distinct beneficiaries of each other. Of course, argues Royle, this myth enables capital to rationalize and appropriate the natural environment under the guise of mutual enrichment. (Royle, 2020, p. 448).

To honour the dynamic between humans and nature, one must first look to history. John Bellamy Foster recalls two “types” of colonial history that colour their interaction with the natural world. The first type manifested through mass farming of colonists who cultivated land to produce their own livelihood. In the second type, capitalism appeared, and fastened the land to a global market (Foster, 2025, p. 3).

So far, I have used Marxist theory to outline the theoretical and empirical contours of environmental destruction. Industry, capitalism, and exploitation are familiar among climate-forward thinkers. However, many proposed solutions pose their own challenges. For example, depletion of environmental resources is measured by the World Bank in “rents,” which are calculated as the difference between a commodity’s price and the average cost of producing it. This resembles Marx’s scrutiny of commodity price relative to labour wages (Roberts, 2025, p. 77). Again, Marxian and capitalist ecologies risk oversimplifying nature into only its commensurable parts. Similarly, climate-forward credit systems (used for emissions, wetland preservation, among others) have reconstituted resource commodities. Before, resources were appraised for their capacity to be transformed into something else, such as wood into a table. Conversely, credit systems commodify resources simply for their status as natural entities.

 If Marxian thought overlooks environmentalism in its estimation of resources, environmental advocates may ignore sites of class struggle. Royle reminds us that steam power came to replace water power because it allowed capitalists to develop an urban workforce, making energy extraction a predictable business (Royle, 2020, p. 444). The point is not that Marxist and environmentalist ideologies are incompatible. In fact, I argue that they are inextricably linked by a logic of productivity. If, as István Mészáros argues, each school seeks true revolution, “an environmental proletariat is thus to speak of a broader proletariat, the coming together of environmental and economic concerns, of proletarians, peasants, and the Indigenous” (Foster & Keqing, 2024, p. 6).

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References

Foster, J. B. (2025, February 1). Imperialism and white settler colonialism in marxist theory. Monthly Review, 76(9). Monthly Review Archives. https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-076-09-2025-02_1

Foster, J. B., & Keqing, J. (2024, February). Ecological Marxism. The Jus Semper Global Alliance. Essays on True Democracy and Capitalism.

Lindquist, K. (2024, July 10). Land, labor, and relationality: A critical engagement of Marx and Indigenous studies. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 47(2). Escholarship. https://doi.org/10.17953/A3.1916

Roberts, M. (2025). Marxism and the environment: The issues. Territorialidades, conflitos socioambientais e perspectivas de luta, 76-99. https://doi.org/10.46420/9786585756488

Royle, C. (2020). Ecological Marxism. Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism, 1, 443-450. Taylor & Francis. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315149608-52/ecological-marxism-camilla-royle