Engels and the Second Foundation of Marxism

You are here

Back to top
30 November 2022

John Bellamy Foster, Editor of Monthly Review (New York, USA) gives our annual Engels Memorial Lecture, joint with the Working Class Movement Library Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature pioneered a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. More recently, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster has developed this narrative, revealing a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that can help us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies.  In this fifth Engels Memorial Lecture John Bellamy Foster focuses particularly on the contribution of Friedrich Engels from his The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) to his Dialectics of Nature (1883) and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) and Engels’ contribution to a Marxist understanding of human impacts on our planetary ecosystem today.