The Environment in Brazilian Culture: Literature, Cinema, and the Arts, edited by Patricia Vieira, 2025, University of Florida Press
In a brilliant article from 2013 on the defence of extractivism by leftwing stalwarts sympathetic to Marxism, the Spanish economist Joan Martinez Alier dismantles comments by then president of Ecuador Rafael Correa.
Correa had become a mouthpiece for mega-mining and oil drilling, and sought to justify their crude developmental benefits by asking “Señores marxistas, where was Marx opposed to the exploitation of non-renewable resources?”
On the surface, it’s a fair question: the works of Marx, read traditionally, largely overlooked—or arguably ignored—the dramatic material impact on the natural environment of capitalism as an insatiable system of endless growth. Indeed, this under-theorisation has been the basis for a reinvigoration of “eco-Marxism” in the last 15 or so years.
The rape over centuries of Latin America, including Correa’s beloved Ecuador, provides ample testament to the unbridled ecological destruction visited through extractive accumulation since colonisation.
It also highlights the apparent weakness of engagements with the natural world in Marxist theory and criticisms of it that emerge from scholarly exchanges about extractivism as a form of capitalism, both highly relevant in today’s Latin America.
A criticism often levelled is that the bearded sage cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces—he was most definitely not an environmentalist, and in fact was hostile to the notion of nature’s intrinsic worth.
Marxist theory of value, critics say, is anthropocentric, for failing to acknowledge the agency of non-human nature in wealth production, and as a result aligns with liberal economic theory by treating non-human nature simply as an external object.
Nonetheless, as Martinez Alier and other scholars have made clear, there are concepts in the work of Marx—written, of course, well before the very first scientific rumblings about climate change caused by excessive burning of fossil fuels—that offer a critique of unrestrained extractivism.
Extraction, such as mining, is often considered to be a form of labour that differs from production because it retrieves objects “found” in nature rather than creating them through human work.
Citing a range of research by other scholars, from David Harvey to John Bellamy Foster, Martinez Alier restates Foster’s discussion of “social metabolism” and how capitalism leads to a “metabolic rift” because it is not capable of renewing its own conditions of production, thereby exhausting or destroying both renewable and non-renewable resources.
Martinez Alier also restates the notion of the primitive or original accumulation of capital—often through the use of slave or indentured labour—by which Marx drew attention to damaging extraction in Mexico of silver and (via Justus von Liebig) in Peru of guano.
Foster’s magisterial Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature teases out Marx’s neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and ecology, naturalism, and evolutionary theory, showing that he was concerned about adverse changes in the human relationship with nature.
More importantly, Foster does this from a materialist perspective, demonstrating both the centrality of ecology for a materialist conception of history and of historical materialism for the ecology movement.
He shows that Marx understood alienation to encompass human estrangement from the natural world and hence takes aim at environmentalism that equates the Marxist vision of modernity uncritically with the degradation of nature.
In short, he makes the point that a less nostalgic environmentalism—one that challenges a spirituality often evoked by contemporary ecologism—is needed in order to recognise capitalism, not modernity itself, as the essential threat to be addressed. To cite Alyssa Battistoni: this is not merely an academic lacuna, but an urgent debate with real-world consequences.
If we are to proceed with a materialist critique of extractivism as an unwelcome form of development in such a way, we need to take a leaf from Foster by considering the metaphysics of ecologism.
Indeed, we need to analyse these using the same sociological toolkit that is applicable to all capitalist production—and, hence, identify similar superstructural phenomena.
These are clearly on display in the Amazon, by far the most important global focus of ecological concerns in our lifetimes but also, as editor Patricia Vieira establishes through this collection, a rich vein of cultural production around the theme of extraction.
A common denominator of most writing, art and cinema discussed in Vieira’s collectionis an effort to grapple with the social and geographical asymmetries in Brazil that shaped its extractivist past, resulted in the degradation of vast areas, and continues to this day.
This is important for helping to place the understanding of cultural production in any context of capital accumulation—in this case, the rampant exploitation of natural resources in a peripheral developing economy—on a firmly materialist footing.
It is only if we can draw direct and clear links between the cultural forms by which we seek to understand and explain our lives and the modes of production with which capital shapes social relations that we can determine the best ways to resist exploitation.
The Environment in Brazilian Culture examines the relationship between the natural world and Brazilian cultural productions from the twentieth century onwards and offers fascinating alternatives to the rapacious view of nature as a monetizable material resource.
As the editor points out, by uncovering the many aspects of this relationship depicted in literary, cinematic and artistic works, these essays question the inevitability of extractivism.
Through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to cultural production ranging from ecopoetics and environmental art criticism to ecofeminism, they imagine paths towards a more equitable co-existence between human and non-human beings in Brazil.
More importantly, they offer enticing evidence of how the material relationships underpinning accumulation through often violent extraction find their expression in and are challenged through culture and ideology. The results can be both surprising and radical.
Leila Lehnen, for example, considers how Itamar Vieira Junior’s 2018 novel Torto Arado (Crooked Plow) defies the extractive logic that has ultimately prevailed in Brazilian culture.
The book’s exploration of Brazil’s colonial and slaveholding legacy on both natural landscapes and the country’s Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous populations blurs the frontiers between human and non- (or “other than”) human—the material and the spiritual—thereby hinting at a way forward.
As Lehnen argues, Torto Arado proposes a decolonial aesthetic that challenges the binary between human and other than human, between “nature” and “culture”.
She writes: “By blurring the frontiers between human and other than human, the material and the spiritual, Vieira Júnior’s text hints at a decolonial epistemology, one which comes about through literary activity. This perception challenges the reader’s understanding of the natural world and human relations to this realm.”
A decolonial theoretical approach is only one of the efforts made by these contributors to address and heal the separation of humans from their natural world—another is to conceptualise a form of “alliance” with nature in the struggle against capitalism.
Ultimately, however, what they all seek to rationalise is the underlying theme of human alienation from nature and do so here by exploring the forms this takes in cultural production.
Troy Vettese has pointed out that Hegel, the formative influence on Marx, portrayed nature as the “moment” of alienation (das Moment der Entäußerung) reconciled to humanity through thought.
Marx took this to suggest that this reconciliation occurs through material processes of human life and the uniquely human endeavour of labour. Labour power itself was simply the manifestation of a “force of nature”, thereby bridging the conceptual division between nature and society.
If extraction differs from productive labour for being merely a form of scavenging that depletes nature, it clearly encapsulates Hegel’s moment of alienation.
What Martinez Alier and his cohort are alluding to is that more of the same will do little to address this, but that there remains a basis in materialism for doing so. So perhaps cultural labour can offer the basis for a reconciliation?
Vettese writes: “Labour, Marx argued, is the practice that ‘transforms the in-itself of nature into a for-us’ and thus promises an eventual transcendence beyond the antithesis of humanity and nature.”
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Categories: Brazil, Ecuador, South America