Non-human forms of life are not valued by Marxists except in so far as they can teach humans to behave better towards one other. The deep ecologist believes that the struggle for emancipation must be taking one step further to include non-human forms of life. The irony is that it sounds very much as though Eckersley, in his deep ecological critique of Marxism, has taken a page out of Marxist teaching to criticise Marxism. Marx argued that the liberal demand for freedom had to be taken one step further by the proletariat to include all classes of man. Eckersley argues that the Marxist demand for human freedom must be taken one step further, beyond mankind.
Animals are the new proletariat.
No Marxist, argues Eckersley, however sympathetic to the ecological movement,can be other than anthropocentric and the gulf between the ecosocialist and the ecocentricist is unbridgeable. Eckersley is here writing in a non-Marxist humanist tradition which rejects the Marxist notion of evolutionary struggle and the survival of the fittest, questioning instead, like Fritjof Capra, the excessive rationalisation of the Western civilized approach to nature with its essential maleness and valuation of worthiness in terms of power, intelligence and successful development. Newtonian and anti-Progress as well. Eckersley believes not. His argument is that what precedes even conservation as the goal of ecological change is emancipation and emancipation is exactly what political conservatism is not about.