Humans and Nature

It is basic Marxism to state that wealth is anything useful produced by human labour from materials found in nature. Humans meet their material needs by transforming parts of the rest of nature into things that are useful to them; this in fact is what production is. So the basis of any society is its mode of production which, again, is the same thing as its relationship to the rest of nature. Humans survive by interfering in the rest of nature to change it for their own benefit.
But in capitalist society wealth takes the form of an immense accumulation of commodities and a commodity is an article of wealth produced for the purpose of being exchanged for other articles of wealth. Thus commodity production is an economic system where wealth is produced for sale, for the market. Socially useless production constitutes a large and growing proportion of economic activity within capitalism and, as such, contributes significantly to the perpetuation of artificial scarcity.

From The German Ideology:
“Animals…change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them…But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards preconceived ends...In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction”

That humans have to interfere in nature is a fact of human existence. How humans interfere in nature, on the other hand, depends on the kind of society they live in.

Before anyone goes and accuses the Marxist of wishing to dominate Nature , heed the later words of Engels in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man:
"...let us not flatter ourselves overmuch for our human victories over nature. For every such victory it takes its revenge on us. Indeed, each in the first place brings about the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third place it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first ones... At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature -– but that we with flesh, blood and brain belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to know and correctly apply its laws...As long as individual capitalists produce and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results can be considered in the first place... In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, the most tangible result. Why should one be surprised, then, that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different character, and mainly even of quite an opposite one..."

Marx in Capital is critical of the effect of capitalism on the ecological balance of Nature.
"Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer...all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth- – the soil and the labourer."

In The Communist Manifesto Marx argued for the "Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country." and we see the influence of such views in the Marxist William Morris’ News from Nowhere, where London is virtually semi-rural and Manchester no longer exists.

Greens are wrong to see interference as inherently destructive of nature, it might do that but there is no reason why it has to. Does the fault lie in all industrial production, or could we, by adopting proper socialist arrangements, produce, transform nature, reap benefits from science and technology and have growth in needs satisfaction and in life quality: all without bringing on ecological crisis? Socialists say ‘yes‘. An ecological-communist society requires the development of productive forces. Not profit-seeking blind economic growth to increase capital accumulation, to reinvest in the hope of creating yet more capital, with all their destructive effects on the rest of nature , but eco-socialist growth must be a rational, planned development for everyone’s equal benefit, which would therefore be ecologically benign.

Today’s environmental problems are world problems – global warming, pollution, deforestation, not to mention poverty and disease – that can only be tackled on a world scale, socialists should be sceptical of this being able to be undertaken effectively by loose adhoc federations of local communities. There requires the continuation of some permanent administrative structure beyond local level. A socialist central administrative body. But having said that, it involves a high degree of decentralisation and local control. Socialists recognise the need also for permanent administrative bodies at regional and global as well as local level that some socialists will take issue with