This article argues that the body occupies a central place in Marx’s thought, and that a critical reconstruction of his dialectical understanding of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature and his concepts of corporeal organisation, labour, tools and metabolism provides a foundation for an eco-Marxist theory of human nature and the corporeal roots of human historicity and freedom.
AdornoTheodor W (2013) Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (trans. WDomingo). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
2.
AlthusserLouisBalibarÉtienneEstabletRoger, et al. (2015) Reading: Capital: The Complete Edition (trans. BBrewsterDFernbach). London; New York: Verso Books.
3.
ArruzzaCinzia (2013) Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism. Pontypool: Merlin Press.
4.
ArruzzaCinzia (2016) Functionalist, determinist, reductionist: social reproduction feminism and its critics. Science & Society80(1): 9–30.
5.
ArruzzaCinziaBhattacharyaTithiFraserNancy (2019) Feminism for the 99 Percent: A Manifesto. London; New York: Verso.
6.
BaradKaren (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
7.
BatesStephen R (2015) The emergent body: Marxism, critical realism and the corporeal in contemporary capitalist society. Global Society29(1): 128–147.
8.
BattistoniAlyssa (2025) Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
9.
BeauvoirSimone de (2015) The Second Sex. London: Vintage Classics.
10.
BengtssonStaffan (2017) Out of the frame: disability and the body in the writings of Karl Marx. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research19(2): 151–160.
11.
BennettJane (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.
12.
BenstonMargaret (2019) The political economy of women’s liberation. Monthly Review71(4): 13–27.
BordoSusan (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
15.
BravermanHarry (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
16.
BrennerJohannaRamasMaria (2000) Rethinking women’s oppression. In: BrennerJohanna (ed.) Women and the Politics of Class. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 11–58.
17.
BruffIan (2013) The body in capitalist conditions of existence: a foundational materialist approach. In: CameronAngusDickinsonJenSmithNicola (eds) Body/State. Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 67–83.
18.
BurkettPaul (2014) Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
19.
ButlerJudith (2006) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
20.
ButlerJudith (2011) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge.
21.
CallardFelicia J (1998) The body in theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space16: 387–400.
22.
CallinicosAlex (2014) Deciphering Capital: Marx’s Capital and Its Destiny. London: Bookmarks.
23.
ChambersSamuelCarverTerrell (2008) Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics. Abingdon: Routledge.
24.
EisensteinZillah R (ed.) (1979) Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York; London: Monthly Review Press.
25.
FanonFrantz (2008) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.
26.
FedericiSilvia (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.
27.
FedericiSilvia (2012) Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA; New York; London: PM Press.
28.
FedericiSilvia (2020) Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
29.
FergusonSusan (2019) Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction. London: Pluto Press.
30.
FlohrMikkel (2021) From the critique of the heavens to the critique of the earth: a contribution to the reconstruction of Karl Marx’s unfinished critique of political theology. Theory & Event24(2): 537–571.
31.
FloydKevin (2009) The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
32.
FosterJohn Bellamy (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
33.
FosterJohn Bellamy (2020) The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press.
34.
FoucaultMichel (1980) Body/power. In: Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 261–270.
35.
FoucaultMichel (1991) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. ASheridan). London: Penguin.
36.
FoucaultMichel (1998) The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality 1 (trans. RHurley). London: Penguin.
37.
FoucaultMichel (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79 (trans. GBurchell). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
38.
FoucaultMichel (2012) The mesh of power. Viewpoint Magazine2: 1–16.
39.
FoxJohn G (2015) Marx, the Body, and Human Nature. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
40.
FracchiaJoseph (2005) Beyond the human-nature debate: human corporeal organisation as the first fact of historical materialism. Historical Materialism13(1): 33–62.
41.
FracchiaJoseph (2008) The capitalist labour-process and the body in pain: the corporeal depths of Marx’s concept of Immiseration. Historical Materialism16(4): 35–66.
42.
FracchiaJoseph (2021) Bodies and Artefacts: Historical Materialism as Corporeal Semiotics. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill.
43.
FreundPeter E S (1982) The Civilized Body: Social Domination, Control, and Health. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
HoffmannPiotr (1982) The Anatomy of Idealism: Passivity and Activity in Kant, Hegel and Marx. The Hague; Boston, MA; London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
54.
JaffeAaron (2020) Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon: Work, Power and Political Strategy. London: Pluto Press.
55.
JaffeeLaura (2016) Marxism and disability studies. In: PetersMichael A (ed.) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Singapore: Springer, pp. 1–6.
56.
LatourBruno (2004) How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies. Body & Society10(2–3): 205–229.
57.
LewisHolly (2016) The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection. London: Zed Books.
58.
LewisSophie (2019) Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family. London; New York: Verso.
59.
MalmAndreas (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London; New York: Verso Books.
60.
MalmAndreas (2018) The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso.
61.
MarxKarl (1993) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (trans. MNicolaus). London: Penguin.
MarxKarl (2024) Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1 (ed NorthPReitterP, trans. ReitterP). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press.
64.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1975a) Collected Works, vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
65.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1975b) Collected Works, vol. 4. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
66.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1976) Collected Works, vol. 5. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
67.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1982) Collected Works, vol. 38. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
68.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1984) Collected Works, vol. 40. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
69.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1985) Collected Works, vol. 41. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
70.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1987) Collected Works, vol. 29. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
71.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1988) Collected Works, vol. 30. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
72.
MarxKarlEngelsFriedrich (1991) Collected Works, vol. 33. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
73.
MauSøren (2021) The body. In: SkeggsBeverlyFarrisSara RToscanoAlberto, et al. (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Marxism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 1268–1286.
74.
MauSøren (2023) Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. London; New York: Verso.
75.
McLellanDavid (1970) The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. London; Basingstoke: Macmillan.
76.
McNallyDavid (2001) Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and Liberation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
77.
Merleau-PontyMaurice (2013) Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon; New York: Routledge.
78.
O’BrienME (2019) To abolish the family: the working-class family and gender liberation in capitalist development. Endnotes5: 361–417.
79.
OliverMichael J (1999) Capitalism, disability, and ideology: a materialist critique of the normalization principle. In: Flynn, RobertJLemayRaymond (eds) A Quarter-Century of Normalization and Social Role Valorization: Evolution and Impact. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, pp. 163–173.
80.
OrzeckReecia (2007) What does not kill you: historical materialism and the body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space25: 496–514.
81.
RiouxSebastién (2015a) Capitalism and the production of uneven bodies: women, motherhood and food distribution in Britain c.1850-1914. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers40(1): 1–13.
82.
RiouxSebastién (2015b) Embodied contradictions: capitalism, social reproduction and body formation. Women’s Studies International Forum48: 194–202.
83.
RiouxSebastién (2019) A feast of Tantalus: corporeal crisis and death by starvation in Britain 1830–1914. Capital & Class43(4): 525–542.
84.
RussellMarta (2001) Disablement, oppression, and the political economy. Journal of Disability Policy Studies12(2): 87–95.
85.
RussellMartaMalhotraRavi (2002) Capitalism and disability. Socialist Register14: 211–228.
86.
SaitoKohei (2017) Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
87.
SaitoKohei (2022) Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
88.
SangsterJoan (2007) Making a fur coat: women, the labouring body, and working-class history. International Review of Social History52(2): 241–270.
89.
SargentLydia (ed.) (1981) The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism & Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy. London; Sydney, NSW, Australia: Pluto Press.
90.
SartreJean-Paul (2007) Existentialism Is a Humanism (trans. CMacomber). New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press.
91.
ScarryElaine (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
92.
SchmidtAlfred (2013) The Concept of Nature in Marx (trans. BFowkes). London; New York: Verso Books.
93.
SearsAlan (2017) Body politics: the social reproduction of sexualities. In: BhattacharyaTithi (ed.) Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press, pp. 171–191.
94.
ShillingChris (2012) The Body and Social Theory (3rd edn). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
95.
ShillingChris (2016) The Body: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
96.
Sohn-RethelAlfred (1978) Intellectual and Manual Labour (trans. MSohn-Rethel). Camden, NJ: Humanities Press.
97.
SoperKate (1981) On Human Needs: Open and Closed Theories in a Marxist Perspective. Brighton: Harvester Press.
98.
SoperKate (1995) What Is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Oxford; Cambridge: Blackwell.
99.
TurnerBryan S (2008) The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (3rd edn). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
100.
TurnerBryan S (2012) Embodied practice: Martin Heidegger, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. In: TurnerBryan S (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Body Studies. New York: Rouledge, pp. 62–74.
101.
VogelLise (2014) Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
102.
WendlingAmy E (2009) Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
103.
YoungIris Marion (1980) Throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies3(2): 137–156.