I learned about this in my class today, where we read Marx’s 1844 manuscripts. My understanding is that in pre/post-capitalist society, humans have a reciprocal relationship with nature mediated by labor, whereas under capitalism, humans are alienated from nature due to both human labor and nature falling under the domain of “private property,” and so that bond between people and nature is broken. Worsening the problem is that capitalists don’t participate in the delicate dance between our economies and our natural environments, but seek only to extract as much as possible as quickly as possible.

It’s a sustainability argument, clearly, and I understand abstractly how and why capitalism is unsustainable from an environmental perspective. It’s a prescient theory, but when Marx goes on about the perils of urbanization, he loses me. Is he arguing that we should/will be living in relatively small, closed-system communities? Or that we shouldn’t import and export food? That definitely doesn’t resemble AES states, or any other industrial society, for that matter.

Can someone clarify this theory for me?