In this third segment of a series on ecology and materialism, John Bellamy Foster concludes that across different societies starting from ancient China, the Hellenistic world and India, there is a parallelism of class struggles. They involve notions of self-consciousness through production in relation with nature, human freedom, solidarity and substantive equality. Common to them is a praxis that combines Epicurus’s philosophy of enough and reciprocity with Marx’s emphasis on production and transformation.
July 27, 2026 / Produced by Lynn Fries / GPEnewsdocs
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER ON “BREAKING THE BONDS OF FATE” – This is Part 3 of a 4 Part Series. Link for Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here, and for the series Playlist here.
TRANSCRIPT
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: My questions originally were fundamentally ecological, the human relation to nature. But I found in studying Epicurus more deeply, that the central question is really the question of human freedom or of the dialectic of freedom and determinism. But this is connected to the relation between nature and society. It’s connected to the way in which human beings organize society. Epicurus, as I mentioned before, introduced the notion of the social contract. Which he saw in terms of a struggle of the demos of democracy against monarchy and a struggle that went back and forth.
I mean Marx is revolutionary in his time. Revolutionary in Marx’s time, of course, means the critique of capitalism, the attempt to transform and transcend capitalism. Both because of its destruction of human potential – its holding back of human potential and as we say nowadays, human flourishing – but also because it’s destructive of the earth or our relation to the earth. So, it’s unsustainable.
And so, he argues that we need a society of associated producers that’s far more democratic. The word ‘democratic’ has to be given a much larger context here. But the idea is that the associated producers, people working together from the bottom essentially will control human social destiny. Breaking down class inequalities. Which put a few people in charge and encourage not only the exploitation of human beings but the exploitation of the earth.
LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.
That opening short was on ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ and a quick preview of what’s coming up in this segment. This is Part 3 of a 4-part series with John Bellamy Foster unpacking a trilogy of books – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. The focus of this third segment is ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. Part 1 featured an overview of the trilogy and comments on ‘Marx’s Ecology’. Part 2 centered on ‘The Return of Nature’.
‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’, published in 2025, completed the trilogy. And while written last, Bellamy Foster says this book is logically the first and grounds the argument running through all three books. And that “This book is about the historical and theoretical connections between the ideas of two of the greatest materialist thinkers separated by millennia of development and change. Epicurus, writing in Hellenistic Greece at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third century BCE, and Karl Marx writing in mid-nineteenth-century capitalist Europe.“
Our guest, John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prolific author, co-author and editor. As well as today’s featured books and many others, he has authored ‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene’ and ‘The Dialectics of Ecology’ and co-authored ‘The Robbery of Nature’ and ‘The Ecological Rift’. His book ‘The Return of Nature’ won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.
In this segment, the first question asked was: Why did John Bellamy Foster choose ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ as the book’s main title?
We go now to Part 3 of this series as John Bellamy Foster responds to that question.
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: Well, the title ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ is really crucial here. Epicurus used this phrase. Lucretius used it and Marx used it.
The notion that while we don’t reject causal determinism, we reject any kind of fatalistic determinism, any kind of teleology, that is, things are predetermined by God. We reject any kind of mechanism. This is the Epicurean view. And you also reject skepticism. Try to develop a materialism that’s also a humanism that has a room for human agency and change. That ultimately the world that we live in is to a considerable extent up to us. So this is an Epicurean view and it’s crucial.
I originally approached this from the standpoint of ecology and trying to understand Marx’s materialism and its roots by understanding Epicurean materialism. It was at this point that Marx became a materialist. How did this happen? What does it mean? What is the meaning of the materialist view?
What does it say about the nature of being and the relation of human beings to nature? What does it say about how we understand the world? In Epicurean terms, it’s primarily through our senses and through preconceptions and feelings and so on. But how does that work? How does this relate to human praxis?
My questions originally were fundamentally ecological, the human relation to nature. But I found in studying Epicurus more deeply, that the central question is really the question of human freedom or of the dialectic of freedom and determinism. But this is connected to the relation between nature and society. It’s connected to the way in which human beings organize society.
Epicurus, as I mentioned before, introduced the notion of the social contract. Which he saw in terms of a struggle of the demos of democracy against monarchy and a struggle that went back and forth. How do we understand justice, ethics, and human relations to each other?
Epicurus’s answer was friendship and solidarity is what we have to build. We have to build a sustainable relation to the earth, all of these things. We have to develop needs in such a way that they can be satisfied. And that are not overly materialistic in terms of the sense of consumption so that we can focus on human relations.
Epicurus didn’t develop these ideas in abstraction. He developed them in the context of the downfall of the polis in Greece in the fourth and third century BCE. He was living in a time where there was war everywhere because the successors of Alexander were engaged in this massive civil war that went on for decades. Monarchies were reemerging. The laws were held in contempt.
So, he emphasized, as a kind of defensive praxis, that people build their communities of friendship at the ground level. And concentrate on reciprocal relations, on fighting inequality in their midst and so on.
It’s a very attractive philosophy and I realized exactly why Marx was so attracted to it. Of course, he was looking for a materialism or he was looking for a way out of the Hegelian trap of idealism. He admired the Hegelian dialectic but he didn’t admire the Hegelian idealism, the Hegelian approach to religion. He didn’t admire Hegel’s basically acceding to the Prussian state as the end of history. So he wanted another approach, a way to use the dialectic but in a materialist grounding.
He came out of a family background – Marx did – on the radical end of the enlightenment. Marx came out originally with those kinds of radical enlightenment values and encountered Hegel. But did not subscribe to Hegel’s idealism ever. And he needed a way of addressing this and he came up with a conclusion early on. His friend, Köppen [who] wrote a book that related to Frederick the Great and Epicurus said he got his key ideas mostly from Marx.
One of the things that came out at that time was that Epicurus was the foundation for most of the 17th century science and enlightenment thought. And Epicurus was involved in this very strong critique of religion, particularly the astral religion that Plato promoted at the end – that the planets, the sun and so on really represented Gods. A whole hierarchy was set up on that basis that defended a hierarchical state.
Plato had said people are naturally stratified into classes. Epicurus was completely opposed to that. He had created a kind of sustainable community geared to philosophy and focused on this garden. He had a small house and a garden. Their philosophy was around the garden.
And during the Civil war – the civil wars that were going on at the time of Alexander’s successors – when there’s starvation in Athens, Epicurus kept his people alive by what they’d grown in the garden. Sharing it in such a way that everyone had enough to live, while other people were starving.
It was very easy for me to see how this attracted Marx and how it affected his thinking. And to see how the ecological materialism, how this deep materialism informed ecological thinking. To the point that all these British scientists who later on – as I talk about in ‘The Return of Nature’ – were trying to develop a ‘dialectics of nature’, they refer to Epicurus as the foundation, and for Marx as well.
I think there’s a fundamental humanism here. A human relation to nature and to other people that Marx absorbed – the notion that our understanding comes from the senses. For Marx, even art is fundamentally grounded in material conditions and our senses. I think that this, for me, it brings back a kind of coherence to Marxism that’s been lost.
Epicurus doesn’t abandon determinism entirely, causal determinism. He emphasizes that there’s a structure or there’s determining conditions but there’s also contingency which allows for human freedom. He doesn’t abandon religion entirely but he says the gods live in the ‘intermundia’, the pores of the universe, that they have no relation to the earth. The gods have no relation to the earth. So that leaves nature…our lives and nature itself are determined within and not by external forces.
So I think all of this is profound. For me, it’s quite moving. And of course, Marx said that Epicurus was the first to develop a notion of alienation. He was the first to emphasize the distinction between appearance and essence.
The first philosophers he referred to were Plato and Epicurus, and the last was Epicurus. Because he quoted: “death is nothing to us”. ‘Death is nothing to us’ in that in Epicurus, there’s no immortal soul. There’s no Hades. There’s no torture after death. You re-enter the material world. There is no immortal soul, nothing that lives afterwards. But you merge with the physical world.
We live in a world of contingency and accident. And we have the power to make changes. We have certain material conditions and limits that we can’t escape but we still have room for human freedom so there’s this dialectic of materialism and freedom.
I think it’s actually a hopeful view. It’s hopeful because it emphasizes human emancipation, human powers, human ability to have a sustainable relation to nature, human community based on friendship and solidarity.
Epicurus didn’t just help his own community when other groups were going hungry; he sent grain that he had to help others avoid hunger. This is just known. He helped a Syrian friend of his that was being persecuted in Athens. He didn’t subscribe to the arrogance – the Aryan view – of ancient Greece where all non-Greeks were barbarians. He saw human beings as essentially equal and his philosophy encompassed them also.
As a result, his philosophy in ancient times spread further than any others. It spread all through the Hellenistic world and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon – using the present names – and as far as Persia. It spread all the way west to Rome. It was a universal philosophy.
All the church fathers for thousands of years thought Epicurus was the leading threat to Christianity and religion basically because of the materialism. But because it argued that the gods existed, as Marx said, like the statues of Greek art, the artificial statues of the Greek gods. The gods existing as a kind of a sign, you could get them from images of preconceptions in your dreams. And they represented a kind of human perfection or perfection but they didn’t have any relation to the world. They could not intervene in any way, that the world was up to us. And as Marx said in Epicurus’s view “the world is our friend”.
I just think it gives us a new understanding of Marx’s development and how these materialist ideas emerged and ecological ideas up to the present. It gives us a unifying conception. But also, you know, it has been a tendency in Marxism in recent years to reject materialism and reject especially humanism, I think, and naturalism.
Marx argued that humanism and naturalism come together. And this is very much an Epicurean view. It says that we have to be concerned with our relations with nature as well as with society. If we alienate a relation to nature, we’re alienating our labor and our social relations too, and vice versa. That it all comes together.
We have to be concerned at all times about our relation to nature. Because that’s what we’re transforming and we’re transforming society through our production and we’re transforming ourselves.
So ultimately it comes down to the notion that I think is really an ancient notion that Marx in a way clarified. That is human beings are the self- mediating beings of nature. And if we understand that then we have a developed self-consciousness.
And a basis in which to create notions of human freedom, solidarity, substantive equality that go against individualistic, mechanistic, teleological, idealist, skeptical frameworks. All of which are diversions from our humanity and our ability to exercise judgment in accordance with human flourishing.
FRIES: Earlier you commented that for Marx, Epicurus was the enlightenment figure of antiquity. Meaning, Epicurus brought self-consciousness and empirical science to bear. Talk more about this and specifically the notion of the Epicurean Swerve where the atom’s ‘swerve’ breaks free from the deterministic, mechanical path of fate represented by Democritus.
The notion of ‘the swerve’ in Epicurean materialism was of course central to Marx’s doctoral thesis on the ‘Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’.
You say it was Marx who first emphasized that ‘the Epicurean swerve’ formed the basis of a philosophy of freedom. Comment on how this notion influenced Marx and others.
BELLAMY FOSTER: Marx’s work on Epicurus in his dissertation was not published until the 20th century, not until first published in German in 1902 and wasn’t published in English until first time in 1967. His dissertation did not influence anything prior to the 20th century. But it was formative in his own thought.
Later on, he kind of wonders whether he actually exaggerated what he found in Epicurus, the systematic nature of it. But the system that he found – or that he thought he found and we have basically confirmed today – that system sort of became his in a lot of ways.
So like for Epicurus, How do we know about the world? Well, it starts with the senses. So, it’s a materialist view and it starts with the senses but then has to be clarified by rational thought by the mind. And he’s got various epistemological concepts about how we know, like, preconception and so on that are important.
But Epicurus starts with the senses. And this is very crucial for Marx from the very beginning, that our knowledge of the world is through the senses. It is sensual but then we have to bring our mind to bear on that, to analyze what the senses tell us. And this is just fundamental to how we think.
Human beings, we only know things through our connections to nature. And how we how build up knowledge. And how the mind develops in that context and through our attempts to transform nature. So all of this is, gets embedded in Marx…and Marx transforms the ideas in his own way.
One of the things that interests me, is that Epicurus argued that feelings were a source of knowledge. In the Western tradition we tend to say feelings and emotions have nothing really to do with knowledge. But Epicurus said that feelings were also a source of knowledge. You know, beyond the senses, beyond preconceptions and are a part of our knowledge system.
And Marx took over that, at least in his early manuscripts and economic philosophical manuscripts. And I think that’s really important because a lot of this has to do with Marx’s humanism, right? And Epicurus is a very humanistic thinker. And Marx is a very humanistic thinker.
So what you get is a humanistic materialism, a materialism that’s connected to nature. That understands human beings in terms of their development in relation to nature; human society in that context. But doesn’t turn into a naturalistic determinism. It emphasizes freedom.
Epicurus had this idea of ‘the swerve’. Which is his most famous idea. In Democritus the atoms go every which way. And Epicurus said: Well, the atoms fall in straight lines like rain. But there is this indeterminate swerve on occasion that represents contingency or chance; contingency swerving away from that structure.
It was a way of talking about the fact that nothing’s completely deterministic or predictable. That there’s room for human freedom and there’s room for change. And he built his whole system around that, about human’s powers to determine themselves.
He lived in a period where there was essentially constant civil war among Alexander’s successors, fairly bloody warfare everywhere. And he devised an approach. The polis no longer could protect people and was no longer that viable. And so he emphasized people creating their communities based on friendship and solidarity. And these things are really important values.
One of the reasons why it’s so difficult to talk about all this is that it involves so many aspects. But you get maybe a sense of a materialism that is…everything is connected to everything else. And in this, there’s also room for human freedom, for struggle, for development. I think that’s the lesson.
I started off with this just ecological interest and I talk about this as a trilogy of ecological materialism. But the materialism involves more than just society-nature relations – ecological materialism. It also involves everything to do with us as human beings.
FRIES: The book’s title – ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ –explicitly points to revolutionary struggle as foundational in the materialism of Epicurus and Marx.
As stated in the book <to quote>:
“Epicurus was the foremost materialist philosopher in antiquity, whose work extended from epistemology, to physics, to ethics. He introduced a new, if limited and defensive, praxis aimed at human survival, sustainability, and happiness. Marx, in the age of the dual industrial and political-economic revolutions in nineteenth-century Europe, developed a materialist conception of history, complementing the earlier materialist conception of nature.”
“What Epicurus and Marx taken together provide us with is a conception of a complete materialism—ontological, epistemological, and practical—associated with the struggle for human freedom and the creation of a new relation between humanity and nature.”
Starting with Marx, comment more on Epicurus and Marx as revolutionary figures.
BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. I mean Marx is revolutionary in his time. Revolutionary in Marx’s time, of course, means the critique of capitalism, the attempt to transform and transcend capitalism. Both because of its destruction of human potential – its holding back of human potential and as we say nowadays, human flourishing – but also, because it’s destructive of the earth or our relation to the earth. It’s unsustainable.
And so, he argues that we need a society of associated producers that’s far more democratic. The word ‘democratic’ has to be given a much larger context here. But the idea is that the associated producers, people working together from the bottom essentially will control human social destiny. Breaking down class inequalities. Which put a few people in charge and encourage not only the exploitation of human beings but, the exploitation of the earth.
Funny thing is that Epicurus, a couple of millennia beforehand really, was dealing with similar problems. I mean way back in the third century BCE, he was dealing with a breakdown of the Alexandrian empire. He was really a Hellenistic philosopher. Which emerged after the defeat of Greeks polis. I mean, there was Civil War going on.
And he was revolutionary in the sense that he said: Look we need a practice to protect ourselves. Because everything was arbitrary, people were being killed all over the place. The king, monarchy had come back.
So, he argued that we need to build society on the basis of social contract. This was the concept that Epicurus introduced, the social contract. Not in the sense of Hobbes or Locke – although they got the concept from Epicurus – but in the sense that the social contract was imposed by the population in struggles against monarchies and that had been a historical process and that we needed to have a social contract.
We needed reciprocity between human beings was the basis of justice. We had to take into account changing material conditions. Society had to be based on friendship. All of that is directly out of Epicurus.
But it was limited because of his time. It wasn’t really about transforming the mode of production or anything like that because that wasn’t the nature of Greek society. It wasn’t even a possibility conceived at the time.
But there was a kind of revolutionary praxis involved in this. And there were times when Epicureans struggled against the dominant astral religion that had emerged partly as a result of Plato. And they organized against state religion. And this was revolutionary in his time.
The ideas were revolutionary. Because to develop this notion of a world that was based on reciprocity and justice and sustainability with nature and a philosophy of enough – criticizing affluence, acquisition and building society around friendship and solidarity – that was revolutionary at that time. His whole philosophical system was designed to defend that.
And then Marx coming along, Marx being a very bright guy studied Epicurus more thoroughly than anyone else in the 19th century. He saw all that and he pointed it out although he focused on the physics and sort of the more ontological level because he wanted to get into the deep roots of it. And he saw all that and it definitely affected his thinking.
We think of Marx as breaking away from Hegel because of Feuerbach. But nobody reads Feuerbach’s ‘History of Modern Philosophy’ where he studied Gassendi. Feuerbach studied Gassendi who in the 17th century was the great restorer of Epicurus, his philosophy. That’s what Gassendi was famous for.
And Feuerbach took his notion of the senses as the basis of materialism and humanism from Epicurus via Gassendi about the same time that Marx took the same things from Epicurus. And so they converged.
Marx wasn’t ever a follower of Feuerbach. They were meeting on converging paths finding materialist responses to Hegel. But Marx was much more thoroughgoing.
Marx wasn’t simply a follower of Epicurus. But he took in a lot of this and it was fundamental. What Marx said Epicurus had was an immanent dialectic. Within his analysis – though he didn’t discuss the dialectic like Hegel did – obviously his whole system was immanently dialectical. And his understanding of the relationship of nature and society and freedom and determinism was dialectical.
And for Marx, this was a way in which you could connect humanity to nature, and freedom to determinism, without going in the direction of idealism or skepticism or into mechanism; all of which Epicurus fought against.
Marx famously said in ‘Capital’ in what we call the postface or sometimes Marx’s last preface to ‘Capital’, Marx said that: Hegel had been standing on his head. And he was going to put him on his feet. But that actually comes from Epicurus or from Lucretius. Where it’s said that the idealist and skeptic philosophers had been standing on their head rather than on their feet. And so that reflects a materialist view. It’s metaphorical.
Marx liked that Epicurus’s follower Colotes had criticized Socrates for being a non-materialist in saying that Socrates couldn’t live by his philosophy. And he used a joke that: He tries to put corn in his ear instead of his mouth. Marx loved that. He says the point is that we are physical beings.
At the beginning of ‘The German Ideology’ – what is considered to be Marx’s real revolution in thought as Engels says in his funeral speech on Marx’s big insight – at the beginning of ‘The German Ideology’ he says that we can explain human beings any way we want, religion, so on. But we really become aware of ourselves, conscious of ourselves, when we produce.
That production is really the basis of self-consciousness, human self-consciousness because production involves a relationship between human beings and nature. And it involves transformation of nature by human beings and therefore transformation of ourselves and the activation in new ways of our senses and our knowledge.
This is all a materialist approach. Our self-consciousness comes when we produce our means of subsistence. And you don’t find that quite in the ancient philosophy and Epicurus because they’re not talking about production. They had a more static view in some ways. But even there in Epicurus and Lucretius, they talk about that the fundamental thing is planting the grain, sewing the fields. And that our existence is everything, the development of human society is based on that.
So, it’s a way of thinking… but I think what happened to me is that when I went back to in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’, I had striven back to Epicurus again to try to explain more fully Marxist foundations. And then I realized just how broad…I realized even more than I had before just how broad Epicurus’s philosophy was and how it was necessary and his stature…
And I realized that this isn’t just a question of ecology and human beings and nature. This is a question of human freedom. And they’re so tied together in this analysis. And then, I guess that’s what makes it revolutionary.
And it also says: Look, sustainability is something that we choose. We choose to create, say co-evolution, or even you could say solidarity with the earth. We choose to create solidarity with other human beings. We choose a justice that’s based on reciprocity not on the reinforcement of inequality or the promotion of commodity relations.
I was actually stunned by Epicurus all the way through is the number of times that riches, the pursuit of riches is challenged, and the importance of sustaining other human beings.
Epicurus even breaks with the Greek tradition of treating all other peoples as barbarians. And this was really important. You know, he was a very important Hellenistic philosopher in that sense because all peoples were invited into the philosophy. It wasn’t a philosophy for Greeks. It wasn’t colonialist. I mean there was a Greek colonialism. It was not part of that kind of thinking.
FRIES: You make the point that Epicureanism was no longer centered simply in Greece but reached out to the larger Hellenistic world to the east. In a major departure, slaves were admitted to the Epicurean community of friends. Most disturbing to Epicurus’s critics in antiquity was the inclusion of women as full members of Epicurus’s philosophical community.
BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah, it’s interesting in the Epicurean community…Jean Paul Sartre once said something like Epicurus’s philosophy was the first one to free women and slaves. I wouldn’t go that far, but in his community women became some of the greatest philosophers of the time. Epicurus couldn’t abolish slavery but he freed all of the slaves, who were mostly scribes. But they operated at the highest level.
I think that is part of a general conception of justice and equality and he said also, that justice changes historically with changing conditions. So when Marx, was put on trial by the Prussian state over the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx used Epicurus’s defense, Epicurus’s approach to justice and laws to get himself off. And the jury acquitted him. Marx just used the same argument that Epicurus had first introduced.
That if the material conditions change, the laws have to change with them. And any laws that no longer conform to the material conditions are not laws. I’m putting it in different terms, but this was the argument and Marx was acquitted. But it’s one of Epicurus’s principles of justice.
FRIES: Comment more on materialism and socialism. More specifically, as it relates to points you discuss in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ that < to quote>:
“Marx in ‘The Holy Family’ followed Epicurus in arguing that the human individual was not an ‘atomistic individual’ and therefore contentless like the atom itself, but a social individual, living and developing in society, and to be judged in those terms… Epicurean materialism had explicitly introduced historical and social change and development, with the concept of the social contract, and notions of social justice.”
“It was Epicurus, as Marx repeatedly noted over the years, who introduced the concept of the social contract, along with the whole historical approach to the development of society.”
“Hegel’s dialectic, in Marx’s conception, was the single greatest achievement of speculative philosophy. In contrast, Epicurus’s system, with its immanent dialectic, pointed beyond speculative philosophy to materialism, the intellectual birthplace of socialism.”
BELLAMY FOSTER: Yeah. Marx considered materialism, the birthplace of socialism. And he explained that. And he started with Epicurus in ‘The Holy Family’. He has this discussion of the origins of materialism and socialism. And he sees it as rising out of Democritus and Epicurus. And then he traces it through the different Enlightenment figures and contrasts that to Hegel and to Spinoza’s metaphysics. Which he doesn’t really have any truck with at all and is very critical of. But he traces the whole materialist tradition.
One of the things I’ve been looking at lately is, his comments on Helvetius who was an important Enlightenment thinker that we don’t talk about. But I was very interested in Marx’s discussion of Helvetius in ‘The Holy Family’ because Helvetius talks about the role of education. And not education in the narrow sense, of course, education in terms of mentorship and learning and so on but also education coming from life itself.
Helvetius takes the position that education in that sense is crucial to – well, he doesn’t use the term socialism – but to a materialist view and to human progress. Marx says that even if individuals are some way competitive and so on, that the conditions of education can change that.
That education can change that and make us more into social beings. So I’ve been thinking about that. And trying to look at how Marx uses the notion of education as a mediation between egoistic and social beings.
And it makes me think of Veblen and Einstein. Thorsten Veblen had this notion of, well, he used the term ‘instincts’, Marx always used the term ‘drives’. Which is our contemporary term. But Veblen said that human beings (and this was in ‘The Instinct of Workmanship’ mainly)… said that human beings have these kind of divided instincts.
There are instincts like the parental bond which are really social and connected to solidarity. There are other instincts like the instinct of idle curiosity that can take us off into a more individualistic direction. So he has these kinds of instincts divided between ones that are more social and more individual or egoistic.
And then Einstein who was studying Veblen very deeply while he was at Princeton in the United States, Einstein comes up with this notion human beings have both an individualistic or egoistic part of themselves and a social part. And what’s important is how does society enhance the social part? And that was very much Helvetius.
Marx employed that too in his comments on Helvetius. That we are social animals as Aristotle said but we can be more fully social beings, right? Social individuals, maybe you can say and that doesn’t happen of itself but it requires education. Not only direct education but education in his terms comes from people’s experiences and recognizing the importance of those and building on them.
He believed that science really came from the bottom. Scientific revolutions tended to come from the bottom and new ideas because people were dealing out of their actual experiences and the contradictions between their experiences and reality. So, there’s that element.
Epicurus, we’ve discovered in the Book 25, it’s kind of astonishing but he had a notion that human beings had a certain “original constitution”. And this is explained in terms of atoms, mind atoms and so on. But human beings had a certain constitution, human constitution, and then they developed or were educated through their experiences.
And then the mind developed in that way and that there was no room for an essentialist view or reductionist view, that we actually were developmental beings. I think that’s so in line with Marx and also with what Marx thought about Epicurus. But he never had access to Book 25 of ‘On Nature’.
At any rate, it’s a whole philosophical view that we call materialist. Mainly because it’s opposed to teleology, religious determination and idealism in the sense that we’re all taught that ideas are paramount. And ideas, once they’re created, can become kind of material conditions. But the ideas don’t come from nowhere. It’s always the grounding that we have to look for.
FRIES: As headlined with the release of ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’:
“Until now, there has been no full scholarly treatment of the relation of Epicurus to Marx, paying equal to attention to both thinkers and examining the long-term impact of Epicureanism on Marxist thought. ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ fills this gap.”
“If Marx was the first to penetrate to the essence of Epicurus’s philosophy, the study of Epicurus enables us to uncover the essence of Marx.”
You argue Marxist scholarship has to catch up with contemporary Epicurean scholarship. What does this work mean to you?
BELLAMY FOSTER: I’ve ended up being kind of passionate about this. I think it’s because when I started studying Marx seriously, I was introduced to Marx by my father when I was in grade school and so I had a background but I really started studying Marx seriously in college when I encountered his humanism. I had a reader of excerpts by Bottomore and Rubel on [Marx’s] social philosophy. And I was impressed by Marx’s humanism and how it merged with his materialism. I was also influenced by British historians, like E.P.Thomson.
And I was dismayed by how Marxist structuralism took over: made humanism the enemy, removed the human agency. I felt that distortions were introduced. Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ which so influenced my generation became less and less talked about in terms of Marxism.
I’m a political economist, so I’d studied ‘Capital’ and so on. And I was influenced by István Mészáros’s ‘Marx’s Theory of Alienation’. He was a good friend. And he sees Marx’s humanism, his critique of alienation as going through all of his work. And it’s fundamental. And I felt that the loss of that was a terrible tragedy for Marxist thought. I mean, it created a lot of bad Marxist thought, I thought that people couldn’t identify with.
And so I was surprised in a way when as a result of my studies in ecology really and in materialism that I ended up studying Epicurus and Marx’s relationship to Epicurus. And seeing this is where so much of the humanism came from. It clicked with Marx.
Marx of course, is a synthetic thinker. And he was not Epicurean any more than he was Hegelian. He was a critical thinker but so much of the humanistic and materialist notions – the notion of freedom and determinism and what the nature of the human struggle was – was there. He found it in Epicurus. And it influenced him.
He couldn’t refer to it a lot because he was the only one who understood it. His work on this wasn’t published. And the scholarship in Epicurus at his time denied there was any kind of rationality to Epicurus because of ‘the swerve’. They just sort of passed him off as an irrational thinker, quite differently than Marx. And there are traditions that like Tony Burns today said that: Well, Epicurus was illogical and Marx was criticizing him for that.
But Marx said Epicurus had an “Iron Logic”. And it was that “Iron Logic” that connected all of these things up that was so influential for him. But it eventually I think it became as much a part of him that he didn’t really address it that much anymore. He wrote about Epicurus in ‘The Holy Family’ and in ‘The German Ideology’ and referred to him all through his life. But it was, it was so foundational for him that it just became part of his own makeup.
I think this might be important. This is important in my view because we need a more ecological Marxism. We need a way of talking about the dialectic of freedom and determinism, again.
We’re in a different kind of struggle now.Those struggles that emerged when the Athenian Empire was destroyed – when that empire had collapsed and monarchies, dictatorial monarchies were taking over, arbitrary killings and people really having no security – there are resemblances to our time, what kind of a praxis do we need?
We need a praxis that combines Epicurus’s notion of sustainability and a philosophy of enough and reciprocity with Marx’s emphasis on production and transformation. I think this is this is the road, the way as the Daoist would say.
And there is a relation there. And Needham says that we’re all Daoists and Epicureans now. But he was also a Marxist. He saw the three as coming together. And I think in China too, they’re beginning to recognize this. I’ve given talks in that venue too.
FRIES: Can you expand on that? Because in ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’ you go into this <to quote>:
“In his studies of science and civilization in China, Needham was to stress the close correlation between Epicureanism in ancient Greece and Rome and Daoism developing in the Warring systems period in China. Both emphasized the organic material connections of life and a philosophy of self- sufficiency. Reflecting a modern age where ecology was becoming ever more important, Needham argued, ‘Today we are all Taoists and Epicureans’. For Needham, Marxism both in its most authentic materialist scientific version in the West emerging out of Epicureanism and in ways that it had been creatively transformed in the East when placed in contact with traditional Chinese civilization, particularly Daoism, expressed the cross-civilizational affinity of classical organic philosophies – an affinity rooted in material life itself.”
BELLAMY FOSTER: There is the idea of the Axial Age that covers this whole period of the fourth and third centuries BCE in both China and Ancient Greece, the Hellenistic world as a whole. Carl Jaspers introduced that in an idealist way. And there are various kind of religious discussions of this. But I think there is some truth to truth to it.
There is a parallel in human civilization at this time. I think of it in terms of Samir Amin’s notion of tributary societies or the tributary mode of production. So there were parallels in these tributary modes of production that existed, let’s say in China and Greece. I mean, obviously very different societies but they had similar levels of development, the Warring States period in China and Hellenistic Greece kind of overlap in time.
In both you see, in Daoism and in Epicureanism, you see the emergence of this notion of the self-mediating being of nature. I mean, not in those terms, those are Marxist terms, but you see the notion of – in Hegelian terms – the growth of self-consciousness.
Hegel associated Epicureanism and the Hellenistic philosophies in general with the growth of self-consciousness. So did Marx. So that means understanding the human relation to the objective world including the world of nature and seeing the role of human action in that and kind of philosophically grasping that. So that human beings become self-mediating beings of nature or a ‘homo faber’.
And in both Daoism and Epicureanism, there’s the same critique of wealth. There’s the same kind of organicism. There’s the same notion of ‘the way’ as they say in Daoism, that we are self-mediating beings. We can choose. And Needham who was an expert on Epicurean philosophy (he built it into his scientific analysis) and also on Daoism and on the development of science and technology in Chinese civilization, he saw the parallels.
Amin too said the beginning of modernity is not the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. But the beginning of modernity in a world sense happens in this period where self-consciousness becomes…there’s a self-conscious philosophy. There’s this notion of the self-mediating being of nature of our interactions and so on.
And this happened concurrently across civilizations at a certain period of development. But actually in China and ancient Greece, in the Hellenistic world. I think probably in India too at a very similar period of time there was some cultural interaction.
So, I think that’s important. One of the reasons it’s been important in terms of dealing with Chinese Marxism, there’s this argument that Chinese Marxism is an alien imposition parachuted into Chinese society. That Marxism is an artificial imposition in China separate from traditional Chinese culture. And also, that Marxist ecology is sort of an artificial imposition and that we should turn to traditional ecology. Some have argued that ecology in China or ecological civilization in China, that notion comes out of traditional Chinese thought and not from Marxism.
I argue that it’s much more complex than that. Because Marxist thought came out of a materialist view in the case of Epicureanism in the fourth and third centuries BCE. And Daoism came out of a similar time period, a certain similar kind of historical condition, the breaking down of Dynasty in China. And similar kinds of philosophies about the human relation to nature and so on arose.
So that Needham said when Marxism came to China, they felt like it was our own philosophy. In so far as it had this kind of Epicurean flavor still. That is still had this classical materialism. The sort of thing that Needham would have conveyed, that they felt that it was an enlargement on their own philosophy. Because Marxism in the West was to Epicureanism as Chinese Marxism was to Daoism.
So, it’s not an accident, I think that the struggles of humanity, the class struggles of humanity have resulted in similar kinds of results and convergences in history and that there was an early modernity. Really the classic modernity as Amin says, was all about the discovery of human self-consciousness and human mediation of nature. And he attributed it to the Hellenistic world as a whole. But Marx got that – in terms of Hellenism for Marx – it came from Epicurus.
FRIES: So your last statement really encapsulates a central insight uncovered in this discussion and in your trilogy of books – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. As stated in this last book <to quote>:
“What I had originally thought of as an inquiry into Marx and Epicurus turned into an exploration of Epicurus and Marx, with Epicurus’s philosophy as the actual starting point and a crucial part of the millennia-long struggle for human freedom. If Epicurus in antiquity sought to ‘break the bonds of fate’, this was a task that Marx would consciously take up and carry forward under very different historical conditions in modern times.”
“The more complete materialism that results, through the long march from Epicurus to Marx, and then down to the present, allows for a more synthetic development of the materialist philosophical views of nature and society, and thus of ecology, necessary for our time.”
As you say, Marx considered materialism, the birthplace of socialism. So in the long march resulting in this more complete materialism, Marx carried Epicurus’s fight from antiquity into a revolutionary challenge to capitalism in modern times. In your Introduction to the book ‘Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay’ you gave Einstein a core role in the contemporary struggle for a socialist future. And in the Preface to the book you state: “To ask, ‘Why Socialism?’ as Einstein did in his day, is to raise the question of the future of humanity.”
To round off our discussion on the trilogy, talk now about this essay: Why Einstein wrote it? And why it still matters?
LYNN FRIES: John Bellamy Foster’s response follows in Part 4. We are going to break here. This has been Part 3 of a 4 Part series featuring John Bellamy Foster on his trilogy – ‘Marx’s Ecology’, ‘The Return of Nature’, and ‘Breaking the Bonds of Fate’. Many thanks, to guest John Bellamy Foster. And thank you for joining us.
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GUEST BIO
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. A leading scholar in political economy and environmental sociology, he is author of the trilogy Marx’s Ecology (2000), The Return of Nature (2020), and Breaking the Bonds of Fate (2025), and editor of Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay (2025). Among numerous other works, he is also author of The Dialectics of Ecology (2024), Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022), and The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (2014).
