摘要：In his critique of capitalism, Marx is fundamentally asking whether or not this
system we have created is functioning to maximize human freedom, wealth, and
happiness. While Capital seems to depart from the more humanistic and philosophical
works of earlier Marx, it is essentially a critique of an economic system that does not
fulfill the promises laid out in a humanist ethos. In this paper I will show that in an age
of global environmental crisis we need to radically rethink what it means to be citizen in
a global-ecological sense. My goal is to demystify the operations of humanism as a
rational means of attaining democracy, freedom, and prosperity for all by situating it
within the environmental crisis and analyzing the root causes of anthropogenic
environmental degradation. By performing a theoretical cross-pollination between deep
ecology and Marxism, I hope to illustrate the insights and trappings that both theories
have on their own, and suggest a number of useful conjunctions that emerge in this act of
discursive recycling. That said, the inability of capitalism and Marxism to conceptualize
value outside labour, results in a larger genetic contribution from deep ecology than from
Marx. However, I will use Marx’s various critiques of capitalism, especially relating to alienation, reification of exchange value, and the creation of surplus value, in order to
reveal the limitations of an anthropocentric humanist discourse that does not factor nature
into the equation, and also to point out some of the limits of the purely biocentric
environmentalism espoused by deep ecology. By looking at ideas of species-being,
labour, and capitalist production, I argue for the need to incorporate a deep ecological or
biocentric perspective into any formulation of value, the good life, freedom, and
democracy. Deep ecology is similarly limited because it is riven with contradictions
surrounding the practical application of biocentric equality. Moreover, while deep
ecology attempts to address the conceptual impasse of binary thinking and the pervasive
nature-culture dichotomy, it relies too much on notions of spiritual connection to the
earth based on a very bourgeois conception of wilderness/nature, and therefore
establishes an ideal that is very likely impossible and perhaps not even desirable. Thus I
will argue that Marxism needs to (re)consider the environment, and deep ecology needs
to (re)consider the human. In the same way that capitalism obscures the social relations
of individuals within a market of commodity exchange by making it appear that the
relation is between things, anthropocentric humanism asserts a similar system of
individual autonomy that ignores the visible and invisible processes of nature we depend
upon. Anthropocentrism is the bourgeoisie capitalist to the biospheric proletariat. For
humanistic discourse to have any currency within the age of global environmental crisis,
we must extend the scope of the linguistic and ethical address to the various seen and
unseen agents within the natural world upon which our mutual survival, quality of life,
and ultimately freedom is contingent.
