Ecosocialism and critical agrarian studies

Abstract

This paper reconstructs Karl Marx’s evolving vision of communism through ecological, agrarian, and decolonial debates. While early Marx was shaped by the trinity of productivism, Eurocentrism, and class reductionism, his later engagement with natural science, agronomy, and ethnology prompted a major reorientation. Influenced by critiques of soil exhaustion and studies of communal property in Ireland, Russia, and non-Western societies, Marx developed the concepts of metabolic rift and multilinear development. In his final years, he envisaged a sustainable, egalitarian, and resilient form of ‘degrowth communism’, offering a basis for renewed alliances among workers, peasants, feminist, ecological, and decolonial movements.