This document discusses the relationship between political ecology and Marxism, specifically historical materialism. It argues that political ecology should adopt a Gramscian interpretation of historical materialism, focusing on hegemony. Gramsci's concept of hegemony recognizes the importance of both the economic and ethico-political realms in shaping ideology and history. The document asserts that political ecology has traditionally been associated with Marxism and historical materialism but that these terms obscure important diversity and do not adequately capture the role of ideology. Adopting Gramsci's notion of hegemony provides political ecology with a more robust conceptual framework that acknowledges the co-constitution of the economic and ideological spheres.

1. Should political ecology
be Marxist? A case for
Gramsci’s historical
materialism
Geoff Mann

2. Political ecology’s relation to Marxism
specifically its ties toMarxism’s
‘‘historical materialism”
Gramsci reinvigoration of that
relation, and that political ecology
should be Marxist.
Geoff Mann’s concept of hegemony,
arguing that Gramsci’s historical
materialism,
Main Argument

3.  Political ecology is the study of the relationships between
political, economic and social factors with environmental issues
and changes.
Political ecology:

4. A major tenet in the Marxist
theory of history that regards
material economic forces as
the base on which
sociopolitical institutions and
ideas are built. social
structures derive from
economic structures and that
these are transformed as a
result of class struggles, each
ruling class producing
another, which will overcome
and destroy it, the final phase
being the emergence of a
communist society.
Historical Materialism

6.  Political ecologists set themselves two broad explanatory goals
Political ecology after Lenin, hegemony, morality,
and praxis.
First Goal
• to account for the production of nature and environment
Second goal
• to understand the ways in which (produced) natures and
environments help shape social relations

7.  Political ecology turns on the
material relations of
production and the social
and biophysical
determinants of access to
and control over resources
and surplus extraction. The
social relations of
production as arenas of
opportunity and constraint
focus on three broad
horizons:
1
2
3
The patterns and regimes of
accumulation
The forms of access to
and control over
resources (what we can
generally call
entitlements and modes
of enforcement); and
The actors (firms, workers,
peasants, state operatives)
that emerge from the social
relations of production

8.  So political ecology is frequently associated with Marxian ‘‘historical
materialism”. But Marxist tradition and its ‘‘materialism” elides two important
problems
 First problem:
A great deal of diversity and conflict is obscured by the term ‘‘Marxism”
 Second problem:
Determining the links between political ecology and materialism is the
imprecision of the term ‘‘materialism”
So We need a conception of ideology as historically co-constituted by both
moments of hegemony Gramsci identified: the economic and the ethico-
political

9.  Hegemony describes the mode of leadership of an historic bloc
over society as a whole. The operation of hegemony involves
more than an appeal to material or economic interest, and it
saturates both productive and ideological relations across the
social formation
 According to Gramci……
‘‘Historical materialism does not exclude ethical–political history,
since the latter is the history of the moment of
hegemony”(Gramsci, 1973, pp. 236–237).
So It is hard to imagine contemporary political ecology without
hegemony as a central conceptual resource, and hegemony
makes no sense if we do not accept that the ethico-political is
no mere superstructural ‘‘expression”, but can change the
course of history.
Hegemony, Materialism and Historical
Materialism

10.  On the other hand, historical materialism takes the physical
(chemical, mechanical, etc.) properties of matter into ‘‘economic
factor” of production
 Historical materialism does not study a machine in order to
establish the physical–chemical– mechanical structure of its
natural components; it studies it as an object of production and
property, as the crystallization of a social relation that itself
coincides with a particular historical period.

11.  Gramsci did not write to change the way the powerful thought.
Although he was certainly a Leninist as he wrote to change the
worldview of the people ,he did not simply reproduce Lenin’s
concept of hegemony in his own work because he understood
that the rigid Engelsian materialism upon which it was based
was one-sidedly ‘‘economic”.
Limitations:

12. THANK YOU
THE END