Depending on which accounts of globalization one reads, culture is either at the center of the new global economy or it has been totally eclipsed by it. On the one hand, cultural objects and practices now appear as absolutely constitutive of economic, political and social practices, to such a degree that analyses of the latter that do not take culture into account have to be treated as theoretically and empirically impoverished. On the other, as popular culture becomes reduced to mass culture on an intensified, global scale, the liberatory and resistant impulses once associated, if in different ways, with both high and low culture seem to have been almost fatally diminished. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and should be mailed on or by MAY 31, 2001. He demonstrates the centrality of ecology for a materialist conception of history, and of historical materialism for an ecological movement.
Progress requires the conquest of nature.
Marx it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. He shows that Marx was deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature. Although there is a long history of denouncing Marx for a lack of ecological concern, it is now abundantly clear, after decades of debate, that this view does not at all fit with the evidence. From the start, Marx's notion of the alienation of human labor was connected to an understanding of the alienation of human beings from nature. It was this twofold alienation which, above all, needed to be explained historically.