Marx’s concept of ecological freedom

In recent years, groundbreaking interpretations of Marx’s theory of freedom as ‘free disposable time’ and ‘socialist republicanism’ have emerged. While these contributions are significant, they remain incomplete for the Anthropocene because they neglect the sphere of nature. In order to update Marx’s theory of freedom, this article reconstructs four heuristic moments in Marx’s theory of freedom: early republican freedom as non-domination; the 1844 critique of alienated activity; the mature accounts of free time and rational metabolic regulation; and the late inquiry into agrarian communes. Drawing on the idea of relational freedom, it introduces ‘ecological freedom’ as an interpretive category grounded in human natural embeddedness. Its distinctive contribution is to connect that embeddedness to material access, democratic non-domination and the collective regulation of human-nature metabolism. Without idealising pre-capitalist peasant life, the article asks how contested capacities preserved in customary rights and communal practices might be reconstructed in a ‘higher form’. Their contemporary relevance lies in struggles for food sovereignty, agroecology and democratic control over land, technology and social metabolism. Ecological freedom thereby gives agrarian content to ecosocialist degrowth by making self-conscious limitation a condition of collective and sustainable freedom.