On the place of Epicurus in Marx’s thought

The place of this book in Foster’s trilogy

Since the late 1990s, Foster has been engaged in one continuous project: recovering the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought. This was not easy at first. In the English-language scholarship of the 1990s, neither analytical Marxism, nor the regulation school, nor the dominant Frankfurt School tradition treated “ecology” as a core concern of Marx’s theory. Marx was read as a political economist, as a philosopher of history, as a critic of ideology, but seldom as a thinker with a systematic theory of nature. Against this background, Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, published in 2000, introduced the concept of the “metabolic rift,” drawing out from Capital and the related manuscripts a coherent account of how capitalism destroys natural conditions. As Foster (2000: viii) himself later recalled, the “surprising discovery” of this research was that “the materialism of Bacon and Marx, and even that of Darwin (although less directly), could be traced back to a common point of origin: the ancient materialist philosophy of Epicurus.” This thread was extended by Burkett (1999: 3) and others; Burkett, for his part, understood Marx’s method as insisting that “social life and material life are mutually constituted aspects of a single class-contradictory whole”—that is, there is no dualism in Marx that pits society against nature. The book provoked a broad response in the English-language literature and helped establish ecological Marxism as a still-growing line of research.

Twenty years later, The Return of Nature is a longer book and takes on a longer span of material. It traces almost a century of intellectual history between Marx and the rise of the 20th-century environmental movement, asking how the thread of ecological materialism was sustained across that interval. Foster works through Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, the British circle of “red scientists,” and the debates within Marxism over the dialectics of nature in the first half of the 20th century. Worth noting is that already in the preface to that book, Foster (2020: 7) describes this lineage as “a kind of second foundation of critical thought.” In other words, the concept later christened the “Second Foundation” in the new book had already taken shape here. The Return of Nature won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2020.

Breaking the Bonds of Fate is the third book of the trilogy, but in the order of the argument it arguably comes first—an ordering implied by Foster’s own description of Epicurus’s philosophy as “the actual starting point.” The question Marx’s Ecology had to answer was where Marx’s ecological critique came from, and the partial answer that book offered was to push the question back to the Epicurus studied in Marx’s doctoral dissertation. But that earlier book could only gesture in this direction, since properly working out the relationship between Epicurus and Marx required more than a single ecology monograph could carry. That unfinished work was put off for 25 years. In between came the two decades of research that produced The Return of Nature, along with Foster’s continuing reading in classical scholarship.

Foster admits in the preface to a reversal of perspective. He had originally planned to call the book “Marx and Epicurus,” with the aim of studying how Epicurus inspired Marx. As he wrote, he gradually changed his mind and reversed the title to “Epicurus and Marx.” In his own words, Foster (2025: 9) explains:

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.

The change is not merely rhetorical. It signals that Foster no longer treats Epicurus as the “prehistory” of Marx’s thought, but as a philosophy with its own theoretical standing. This decision also shapes the structure of the book: of its four chapters, the first two are devoted entirely to Epicurus—his historical setting and his philosophical system—before Chapter Three turns to Marx and Epicurus, and Chapter Four to Marxism and Epicureanism.

This structure has its costs. Readers used to going straight into Marx’s text may find that the first two chapters—on Hellenistic Athens, Epicurean atomism, and the Garden as a form of community—take a long time to set up. But this is exactly what Foster is trying to do. He wants the reader, before entering the doctoral dissertation, to understand Epicurus seriously on his own terms, in a non-Marxological way. Only then can the Epicurus that Marx read in 1841 stop being treated simply as a product of Marx’s reading and instead take a place in a larger intellectual history. To my mind this is one of the smartest design choices in the book. The structure itself answers a methodological objection: any study of “how Marx read Epicurus” must first independently establish the figure being read, otherwise the discussion is circular from the start.

The English-language reception of the book has so far produced several distinct readings. Alex Adamson’s long review in Marx & Philosophy reads Foster’s work within the tradition of Marxist humanism, foregrounding the ethical implications of the line that runs from “naturalism as humanism.” The review on socialist.ca leans more toward political application. Prince Kapone’s review for Weaponized Information, reposted on MR Online, plays up the political-allegorical force of the anti-fatalism. Each of these readings is legitimate, but none is the path this review takes. What I am more interested in is something Foster does at the methodological level: he cross-references the new findings of contemporary classical scholarship with a re-evaluation of Marx’s doctoral dissertation, and from this triangulation he draws a verdict of “ancient-modern alignment.” The merits and the costs of this verdict are worth a focused discussion.

A re-reading of Epicurean philosophy and Marx’s doctoral dissertation

In the history of Western thought, the figure of Epicurus has long been obscured. The obscuring works on two levels.

The first is at the level of ordinary language. The English word “epicurean” today is most often used to describe someone who is particular about food and pursues refined enjoyment. This sense is far removed from Epicurus’s own teaching. The concept of “pleasure” (hēdonē) that Epicurus put forward has at its core ataraxia and aponia: the absence of mental disturbance and the absence of bodily pain. The path to this state is not indulgence but the limitation of desire. He divided desires into three kinds: those that are natural and necessary (food, shelter, safety), those that are natural but not necessary (refined food), and those that are neither natural nor necessary (the pursuit of fame, power, and wealth). The true Epicurean satisfies only the first kind. One of his famous lines reads: “Nothing is enough for someone for whom enough is little.” Foster cites this line repeatedly, because in the context of the ecological crisis it has direct meaning.

The second level of obscuring is the history of philosophy. From Cicero and Plutarch to the Christian Fathers, and on through modern philosophical historiography, Epicurus has consistently been treated as a second-rank philosopher. He is either placed in Democritus’s shadow, or treated as a pure ethicist (a hedonist), or filed under “mechanical reductionism” as the standard-bearer of materialism in that mode. Hegel, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, handles him in just this way. Hegel grants that Epicurus is a precursor of empirical natural science, but at the same time argues that his philosophy lacks speculative depth and that, conceptually, as Hegel put it, “he has no thoughts for us to respect.”

From the late twentieth into the 21st century, this picture has changed. Two factors are mainly responsible. The first is a breakthrough in the decipherment of the papyri unearthed at Herculaneum. In 1752, more than a thousand carbonized scrolls were found in the ruins of a Herculaneum villa buried by Vesuvius, consisting primarily of works by the Epicurean scholar Philodemus, but crucially including fragments of Epicurus’s own work On Nature. Work on these scrolls began in the 19th century, with Theodor Gomperz among the most important early decipherers. But the modern reconstruction and translation of Book 25 of On Nature—the book on free will and mental activity—took place mainly in the second half of the 20th century.

The second factor is the work in classical scholarship done by people trained in analytic philosophy. David Sedley’s 1983 paper “Epicurus’ Refutation of Determinism,” and David Furley’s 1967 Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, fundamentally changed the field’s understanding of the Epicurean concept of the atomic swerve (clinamen/parenklisis). In Epicurus’s physics, atoms fall through the void along parallel lines. The swerve is a tiny, uncaused deviation by which an atom departs slightly from that straight path, which allows atoms to collide and combine and keeps the world from being fixed in advance by mechanical necessity. This small opening in physical determinism is what leaves room for human freedom, and it is what drew Marx to Epicurus in his 1841 dissertation. Furley’s key argument is that the swerve is not an event that has to accompany every free action, but rather an opening up of “a space of indeterminist possibility” for the action-system as a whole. Through close reading of Lucretius, Furley (1967: 164) concludes: “Lucretius did not appear to say that there is a swerve of atoms between the stimulus and the response in the case of every deliberate action.” The point at which the swerve enters is at a much earlier stage in the agent’s life. Sedley pushes the argument further, showing that Epicurus’s actual position is anti-reductionist: he holds that truths at the phenomenal level and truths at the atomic level are two different sets of truths. O’Keefe’s (2005) Epicurus on Freedom proposes the opposite reading. O’Keefe (2005: 9) argues that “Epicurus has an identity theory of mind: the mind is identified with a group of atoms in the chest, and mental events and states are identified with atomic events and states,” and on this basis he maintains that Epicurus is still a bottom-up reductionist—a position that stands in direct opposition to Sedley’s reading. Classical scholarship has not settled the matter.

Out of this wave of work, a substantially different Epicurus has emerged. He is not a crude mechanist. He maintains that there is, beyond the level of atoms, an “emergent” level that cannot be reduced to atomic motion, and he insists that what is “up to us” (par’ hēmas) is a real causal force in the world, not something reducible to the collisions of atoms. Sedley puts Epicurus’s position in a single sentence: Epicurus was “almost uniquely among Greek philosophers” in arriving at a view that anyone with basic scientific training today takes for granted—namely, that the microscopic level has its own micro-truths, while the macroscopic level of phenomena has different ones.

Foster cites this sentence from Sedley at least twice, treating it as one of the supports for his “ancient-modern alignment” thesis. The line of argument here is itself contested in the methodology of classical scholarship. Williams (2006: 7), in discussing the method of studying ancient philosophy, has pointed to a “second and deeper level of anachronism which we touch when we deal with writings to which modern conceptions of what is and what is not philosophy scarcely apply at all.” That is to say, applying contemporary conceptual frameworks directly to ancient texts can obscure the specific problems that ancient thinkers were actually trying to solve in their own context. Projecting concepts like “emergence,” “anti-reductionism,” and “micro-macro stratification of truths” back onto a text more than 2000 years old is something Sedley, Long, and others are inclined to do, on the view that this helps bring out the substantive insight of the ancient philosophers. The other side, with O’Keefe as a representative, holds that Epicurus is still a bottom-up reductionist and that the Sedley camp is laying a modern emergentist framework on top of an ancient text. Foster does air this controversy, but he comes down firmly on Sedley’s emergentist side, which happens to suit his own reading of Marx.

This reliance on the emergentist reading is particularly risky for Foster’s argument. What he is trying to argue is not a single-line consistency but a double consistency: that contemporary classical scholarship aligns with Marx’s 1841 reading, and that the conclusions of contemporary classical scholarship in turn align with the concerns of contemporary ecological materialism. If concepts like “emergence” and “anti-reductionism” have themselves been read back into Epicurus from modern philosophy, then the so-called double alignment risks becoming tautological. A modernized Epicurus is being used to argue for the alignment between modern Marxism and Epicurus—the argument has the shape of a circle. A more cautious formulation would be this: working from a more limited textual base, Marx grasped certain directional features of Epicurus’s philosophy—anti-determinism, the value placed on sense perception, the location of human agency within the material order—and these features have, in the late 20th century with more texts and finer analysis, found more concrete support. “Directional alignment” is a stable judgment; “close alignment” is an inflated one. Foster slides back and forth between these two formulations, and the instability is itself worth pointing out.

The genuinely original part of the book is Chapter Three. What Foster wants to argue here is that the Epicurus Marx saw in 1841 in the doctoral dissertation, and the Epicurus rediscovered by contemporary classical scholarship, are at the most important points the same figure.

There are several pivots in this argument.

The first concerns “genetic exposition.” Marx states explicitly in the dissertation that what he is doing is a “genetic exposition” of Epicurus’s philosophy, tracing its “objective logic.” This method later becomes the basic methodology of Capital. As Foster (2025: 18) notes, this so-called “genetic exposition” of Epicurus’s philosophy, exploring its “objective logic,” is of decisive importance: it presupposes that the object of study has its own internal, irreducible developmental logic. This is incompatible with mechanical reductionism. It has something in common with Hegel’s notion of “objective logic,” yet it differs from Hegel because it places the object of genetic exposition at the level of matter and phenomena, not at the level of ideas. In the doctoral dissertation Marx is already engaged in a kind of “internal dialectical” reconstruction proceeding from a materialist starting point. This is the most solid observation Foster makes in Chapter Three. It is the methodological continuity—not the youthful rhetoric—that releases the doctoral dissertation from the label of “early and immature work.”

The second concerns Prometheus. In the preface to the doctoral dissertation, Marx (1975: 30) quotes the words of Aeschylus’s Prometheus: “In simple words, I hate the pack of gods.” He then identifies Epicurus with Prometheus in philosophical terms; as Marx (1975: 31) writes, “Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.” This analogy is not decoration. As Foster points out, the “Prometheanism” at issue here has a specific and definite meaning: it is anti-theocratic, anti-fatalist, the stealing of fire for human freedom; it is decidedly not the “techno-productivist conquest-of-nature” attitude that ecological critics have sometimes read into the Marxist tradition. At the level of Marx’s own text this point holds: the Prometheus of the dissertation revolts against the gods, not against nature. How it bears on Jason Moore needs more care than Foster’s framing allows. Moore’s quarrel is not with Marx. He agrees that Marx’s thought is not built on a “nature/society” dualism. His target is what metabolic-rift analysis became in Foster’s later work, a “metaphor of separation” that treats nature and society as distinct domains joined by material flows, and so reinstates the “Nature plus Society” dualism Marx had refused. Moore’s “not ‘metabolic rift’ but metabolic shift” (Moore, 2015: 25) is therefore less a rejection of Foster than a redescription meant to restore historical agency to the concept. The objection has the same shape as the worry raised earlier about the new Epicurean scholarship, only one level up. There the question was whether modern categories were read back into an ancient text. Here it is whether Foster reads late-20th-century ecology back into Marx. This is a disagreement internal to ecological Marxism, not an indictment of it. Foster’s reading of Marx’s text is sound. Whether it also meets Moore’s methodological charge, and whether it answers for the actual history of the 20th-century Marxist movement, are different questions.

The third concerns the swerve and freedom. Marx’s analysis of the Epicurean atomic swerve in the doctoral dissertation is strikingly close to Furley’s treatment a century later. Marx particularly stresses that the swerve is not an event accompanying every action, but a structural opening for free will within material determinism. This is almost identical to Furley’s 1967 argument. The conclusion Foster draws is that, working only from the surviving texts of Epicurus available to him—mainly Diogenes Laertius and Lucretius—Marx in 1841 had already reached the level of understanding that classical scholarship would arrive at more than a century later, after the work on the Herculaneum papyri. This claim needs to be handled carefully. Where Marx and Furley converge is in their judgment about the structural function of the swerve. On finer matters—such as Sedley’s specific reconstruction of Book 25—there was no way Marx could have reached that level. Extending “convergence on a structural judgment” into “convergence on the overall understanding” is a slide that Foster makes often.

There is a related question around the doctoral dissertation: did Marx later abandon his interest in Epicurus? This is a popular but untenable judgment in the Western Marxist tradition. Tony Burns has argued for it explicitly in Historical Materialism. Foster’s rebuttal is direct. In The Holy Family, Marx explicitly declares Epicurus an unequivocal “materialist.” He continues to engage Epicurus in The German Ideology, where, in the polemic against Stirner, he calls him “the true radical Enlightener of antiquity.” The concept of “metabolism” analyzed in Capital is internally connected to Epicurean atomistic ideas of material circulation. Foster also catches a key detail: in his entire bibliography, Burns cites no original work of Epicurus, and the most recent “authority” he manages to cite is A. E. Taylor’s old 1911 work. This detail is more effective than any theoretical refutation. It shows that the standard Western Marxist judgment on Marx and Epicurus is, to a large degree, not based on textual research but on the self-reproduction of an already-established discourse.

A critique of the Western Marxist tradition

Chapter Four of Foster’s book is the most concentrated part of the work in terms of polemic, and the most likely to provoke disagreement. The target of this chapter is the dominant Western Marxist position, taken over the last century, on the question of the “dialectics of nature.”

Some background needs to be set in place. The concept of the “dialectics of nature” is mainly the work of Engels and is concentrated in his unfinished manuscript of the same name and in Anti-Dühring. Engels argued that the dialectic applies not only to human history and social processes, but to natural processes themselves. In 1925, Engels’s manuscript Dialectics of Nature was published for the first time. That same year, the discussion provoked by Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, which had appeared in 1923, had matured into a coherent position. Lukács explicitly opposed the concept of the dialectics of nature, holding that the dialectic applied only to history and the social sphere and not to external nature. As Lukács (1971: 207) puts it: “the dialectics of nature can never become anything more exalted than a dialectics of movement witnessed by the detached observer, as the subject cannot be integrated into the dialectical process.” This position later became something like a baseline consensus within Western Marxism. From Korsch through the Frankfurt School, from Sartre to Althusser—enormous as their disagreements with one another were—the rejection of the dialectics of nature was relatively uniform.

Foster’s claim is that this rejection is not a methodological choice without consequences. Its result is that Marxism is compressed from a holistic theory uniting nature and history into a purely social critical theory. In the age of the ecological crisis, this compression deprives Marxism of the theoretical capacity to mount a fundamental response to the ecological problem. This overall diagnosis basically holds. But Foster’s handling of several specific cases is uneven: in some places it is precise, in others it is too quick on historical context. The unevenness runs deeper than historical context. By resting the dialectics of nature on a foundational realism about nature, Foster risks reintroducing, from the other side, the very split between the social and the ecological that he faults in his opponents, and this is the point at which Moore’s objection and the Western Marxists’ caution unexpectedly meet. His instinct here, as elsewhere in the book, is to attack rather than to connect.

Sartre is one such case. In Materialism and Revolution, Sartre states explicitly that the concept of natural history is absurd, since the only real history is human history; he dismisses Engels’s case for the dialectics of nature, made via Darwinian evolution, as “mechanism.” Sartre also handles Epicurus in a peculiar way: he grants that Epicurus is an important figure in the revolutionary tradition, but his reason is that Epicurus’s materialism is a “myth” in support of revolution. Myth, not science. Foster points out that this position effectively places the revolutionary basis of Marxism on an idealist foundation. The conceptual critique stands. But Foster is a little harsh on Sartre’s word “myth.” The specific context of Sartre’s 1946 essay was an internal polemic with the orthodoxy of the French Communist Party, and what Sartre was trying to address was the danger that revolutionary subjectivity would be erased by Stalinist dialectical-materialist dogma. “Myth” in that setting had its own target and cannot be taken entirely at face value.

Alfred Schmidt is another case. Schmidt’s 1962 doctoral dissertation The Concept of Nature in Marx, completed under the supervision of Horkheimer and Adorno, is the standard Frankfurt School reading of Marx on nature. The first section of its opening chapter is titled “The Non-Ontological Character of Marxist Materialism.” Schmidt’s central thesis is that there is no independent ontology of nature in Marx, that nature can only be grasped through social mediation. As Schmidt (2014: 27) puts it in his hallmark formulation, “Only by recognizing, as Marx does, that material reality is from the beginning socially mediated, is it possible to avoid ontology.” Foster’s critique of Schmidt comes down to a very specific fact. A book titled The Concept of Nature in Marx contains no mention at all in its main text of Epicurus or Marx’s doctoral dissertation—in Foster’s (2025: 244) own words, “There is not a single direct mention in his book of Epicurus or Marx’s doctoral thesis.” Democritus too is mentioned only in passing. A monograph on Marx’s concept of nature that is silent on Marx’s only systematic work on ancient philosophy of nature is a fact that speaks for itself. This is the most damaging blow Foster lands on Schmidt, and it leaves almost no room for defense.

Adorno’s case is more symptomatic. Marx himself, in analyzing Epicurus in the doctoral dissertation, used the phrase “negative dialectics.” Adorno’s later book Negative Dialectics takes its concept-name from precisely this place. But the only mention of Epicurus in Adorno’s book is a single line of contempt, where Adorno (1973: 377) dismisses “the enlightenment of Epicurus” for merely “depicting the wretched idea of disinterested divine spectators as something better.” There is no historical context to this mention at all. Foster uses the word “forgetting” to describe this attitude, and points out that this forgetting is itself a form of the very “reification” that Adorno spent so much time elsewhere criticizing.

Tony Burns is the contemporary continuator of this lineage in the English-language scholarship. As mentioned earlier, Burns has made the standard claim about Marx’s doctoral dissertation. Foster adds another point: the “modern classical authority” Burns cites for the view of Epicurus stops at A. E. Taylor in 1911. Taylor was a British idealist whose verdict on Epicurus was that “The wisdom of Epicurus is . . . the merest foolishness.” This verdict was thoroughly overturned in the late-20th-century classical scholarship. Burns has no need to know this. His view of Epicurus, in fact, is back-derived from an already-formed Western Marxist judgment, not from any actual research on Epicurus. This style is highly effective against an opponent who relies on a received discourse rather than on textual research. But it has its limits: it can expose the weakness of the opponent’s argument without fully replacing the conceptual response that the opposing position actually requires.

Foster’s critique of Western Marxism rests on a specific judgment. He holds that, in rejecting the dialectics of nature from the 1920s onward, this tradition lost an important strand of scientific materialism within Marxism. That strand was carried forward in the British circle of “red scientists” in the first half of the 20th century: Bernal (physicist), Haldane (geneticist), Needham (biochemist, later historian of Chinese science and technology), Farrington and Thomson (classicists). Between the 1930s and the 1950s, this group were both Marxists in a political sense and serious researchers in their respective fields, and almost all of them had a sustained interest in Epicurus. Needham (1969: 91) writes in one of his books that “the Taoists had a great deal in common with the Epicureans of middle Mediterranean antiquity,” and on that basis he places ancient Chinese Taoism and Hellenistic Epicurean philosophy within the same materialist tradition.

Foster names this lineage the “Second Foundation of Marxism.” The naming deserves a separate discussion. To my mind, it remains one of the most problematic conceptual coinages in the book.

Foster defines the “first foundation” of classical Marxism as the materialist conception of history, and posits a “second foundation”—the dialectical-natural conception of the physical world and life, developed above all by Engels but shared with Marx—which was later carried forward by the British red scientists. The trouble with this framing has two layers: one theoretical, one rhetorical. Theoretically, even though Foster intends the two foundations as a single, mutually constituted whole, the very word “foundation” implies two separable pillars and sits awkwardly with that holistic intent. As his own work on the “metabolic rift” showed, the materialist conception of history already encompasses the human metabolism with nature; naming a separate “second foundation” risks suggesting a division Foster himself does not want. As noted earlier, this foundationalism risks the very dualism Foster opposes.

The second layer is rhetorical. The effect of the “Second Foundation” name is to lift the British scientific materialists of the 1930s from a fascinating side branch toward the center of Marxist theory, as a counterweight to the dominance of Western Marxism. This redescribes what is essentially a “mainstream-and-side-branch” history into a battle of two parallel legacies, and that is a case of rhetoric outrunning fact. “Metabolic rift” was a successful coinage because it really did pick up a concept in Marx’s text that had been overlooked. “Second Foundation” is an unsuccessful one: it inflates a marginalized, albeit valuable, tradition into a “suppressed alternative center.” Reconnecting the red scientists’ lineage to the field of Marxism is itself scholarly work of value, but it could have been done with a plainer name—say, “the forgotten tradition of scientific materialism.” The polemical posture of “Second Foundation” is too obvious, and it actually weakens the academic legitimacy of the work itself.

There is one judgment in Foster’s critique that has to be opposed directly. He holds that, although Soviet Marxism became dogmatic during the Stalin period, it nevertheless preserved the core of materialist ontology, and that on the point of holding onto the “dialectics of nature” tradition it stayed closer to Marx and Engels than Western Marxism did. As Foster (2025: 243) puts it: “Soviet Marxism continued to hold on to the notions of materialism and materialist dialectics, keeping alive some key elements of Marxism, even if often in distorted form.”

This judgment has problems at the level of fact. Stalin-era “dialectical materialism” was not just a stylistic simplification at the philosophical level. In the actual historical record, it was tied to large-scale political violence. Lysenkoism is not an abstract scientific error. It was a state-power campaign of suppression against geneticists, the kind of campaign that put scientists like Vavilov in prison, where he died. The 1931 “Mitin line” purged a large number of Soviet philosophers. To characterize this period as “dogmatic but with the core preserved” compresses violence into a question of style.

It also has problems at the level of argument. Part of Foster’s critique of Western Marxism for rejecting the dialectics of nature is that the Western Marxists “escaped” from the Soviet Union, and this escape is described as a kind of intellectual cowardice. The judgment requires us to assume that Sartre, Adorno, and Schmidt rejected Soviet-style dialectical materialism mainly out of an academic fastidiousness. The assumption is unfair. Sartre, even as he later moved closer to Marxism, kept his distance from Stalinism his entire life. That distance was not a matter of philosophical taste. It was a political judgment.

Two questions need to be kept separate. Whether the “dialectics of nature” is defensible as a philosophical concept, and whether a particular tradition was politically responsible to Marxism in practice, are different questions. Even if we agree that the Western Marxist rejection of the dialectics of nature was philosophically excessive, it does not follow that “the Soviets preserved the core.” By treating the two questions as one, Foster effectively uses philosophical correctness as a tacit defense of certain things in political history. This is the most serious political-ethical blind spot in the book.

The contemporary significance of the book and some open questions

Reading this far, a concrete question begins to surface. To work through the relationship between Epicurus and Marx again, to move the doctoral dissertation from the periphery of Marx’s thought to its center, to call into question once more the Western Marxist rejection of the dialectics of nature—what does any of this mean for us today? The answer Foster offers in the final section of the book can be reduced to several interrelated propositions.

The first proposition concerns a “philosophy of enough.” At the heart of Epicurus’s ethics is the limitation of desire, the pursuit of self-sufficiency, and the grounding of life in friendship and community. In his time, the Athenian polis had already declined, and after the death of Alexander, the Wars of the Successors had pulled the Hellenistic world into prolonged disorder. Epicurus did not opt for political engagement. He set up the Garden—a community of friendship that crossed class lines and admitted women and slaves. This way of life was a refusal of the dominant logics of the time: the accumulation of wealth, the contest for power, and the intimidations of theocracy.

The core operating logic of capitalism, in Marx’s words, is the unlimited valorization of value. Foster sets Epicurus’s ethical position directly against this logic. He writes that what we face today is “a system for which nothing is ever enough,” while Epicurus had already written, in the Hellenistic age, “Nothing is enough for someone for whom enough is little” (Foster, 2025: 104). Read this way, the line speaks almost directly to capitalism. In contemporary discussions of eco-socialism, degrowth, and the “economics of enough,” Epicurus’s ethical position has regained relevance. But there is an immediate problem here. Epicurus’s “enough” is the “enough” of an individual ethics, the “enough” of a small community. Translating it into the institutional arrangements of a large-scale society is a completely different task. Foster is aware of this. His response is that this is precisely the work of Marx’s critique of political economy. The response is right in principle, but the specific path of translation is not really worked out in the book. Foster stays mostly at the level of philosophy and intellectual history; concrete policies, movements, and institutional imaginings receive less of his attention.

The second proposition concerns anti-fatalism. In Epicurus’s own time, “breaking the bonds of fate” was directed against divine providence, the gods, and astrology. Translated to Marx’s time, it was directed against Hegelian teleological philosophy of history and various 19th-century social determinisms. Translated to our own, it is directed at another set of “necessity” narratives: that climate change is now “irreversible,” that capitalist globalization is “without alternative,” that democratic decline is “structural,” that technology has “its own logic.” All of these formulations outsource human agency to some kind of supra-human “necessity.”

What Foster wants to do is reactivate Epicurus’s concept of the “up to us.” This concept is not a romantic voluntarism, since it does not deny objective causal determination. Its core lies in this: the human being, as a material existence with consciousness and agency at an “emergent” level, is capable of constituting a new starting point within objective causal chains. The position is built within materialism, not outside it. This is the most theoretically substantive part of Epicurus’s philosophy, and the part that still does work today. It is also the most important positive contribution of Foster’s book. It frees ecological politics from a familiar dilemma—either techno-determinist optimism (pinning hope on technological breakthroughs that have not yet appeared) or eschatological pessimism (accepting ecological collapse as an irreversible fate). Foster’s Epicurus-Marx path refuses both. It insists that human society as a historical subject can still intervene in ecological processes, but that such intervention has to rest on a materialist understanding of natural laws.

The third proposition concerns the possibility of a “community of friendship” as a political form. The fact that Epicurus’s Garden was possible in its time was directly connected to the shrinking of public political space after the dissolution of the polis. Where public politics had been hollowed out, an inward-turning small community of shared life became another kind of radicalism. This form has its echoes in our own age. Where democracy is in retreat and the space of public discussion is narrowing, small communities of practice grounded in a shared ethical position regain political meaning. Foster handles this point with restraint. He neither romanticizes the Garden nor maps it onto any specific contemporary movement. What he points out is that, in an age surrounded by fatalist narratives and systemic passivity, shared life can itself be a political posture.

Now to the problems I see in the book.

One is the question of how strong the “ancient-modern alignment” claim should be. Foster repeatedly insists that the Epicurus that Marx saw in 1841 is in close alignment with the Epicurus rediscovered by contemporary classical scholarship. The base of support for this claim is in fact limited. The Epicurean texts Marx had access to were mainly the few letters and the Principal Doctrines preserved by Diogenes Laertius, plus Lucretius’s De rerum natura. He did not have Book 25 of On Nature, since its decipherment only began decades later, and its modern emergentist reading did not appear until the late 20th century. “Alignment” and “directional convergence” are different things, and Foster slides between them. If the claim were just directional convergence, the book’s real contribution—returning Marx’s doctoral dissertation to its proper place—would already be enough. But by holding onto “close alignment,” Foster makes the reader expect something close to a miraculous prescience, and that expectation in turn loads onto his argument a burden it does not need to carry. A picky classical scholar could find an opening in this overstatement and use it to attack a point that, more cautiously framed, would have stood firm.

The second problem is whether the critique of Western Marxism is too compressed. Foster treats the question of the dialectics of nature as the central pathology of Western Marxism. This is a forceful diagnosis, but a single one. Sartre, Adorno, and Schmidt rejected the dialectics of nature for specific political and theoretical reasons. In the political climate of the 1950s and 1960s, what “dialectics of nature” first sounded like in their ears was Lysenkoism, science under party control. Foster’s handling of this historical context is inadequate. He treats a rejection that carried specific political judgment as if it were a pure conceptual mistake. By avoiding this context, Foster actually weakens his own argument about the “Second Foundation”—if he could place the tension between the red scientists and the Western Marxists explicitly under the shadow of Stalinism, the complexity of this lineage would come through in a more three-dimensional way.

The third problem concerns the limits of the “Prometheanism” defense. Foster’s strategy for rescuing “Prometheanism” from the objections of ecological critics like Jason Moore is to distinguish between an “Epicurean, restrained Prometheus” and a “modern productivist Prometheus.” The distinction holds at the textual level. The Prometheus in Marx’s doctoral dissertation is anti-theocratic, not in the conquest-of-nature sense. In fact, with the progress of ecological-Marxist research over the past decade or so, this textual defense has become something of a consensus. As Saito (2017: 11) observes, “allegations of Marx’s Prometheanism are now generally regarded as having been proven false.” But whether this distinction can mount an effective defense for the actual history of the 20th-century Marxist movement is still open. The productivist tendencies in the Soviet Union and in some subsequent socialist practices, while not Marx’s own position, cannot be said to be entirely unrelated to certain resources within Marxism that were activated in those settings. By writing all of these later practices off as “misreadings of Marx,” Foster preserves the purity of textual Marx. As textual scholarship this move is legitimate; as a position on the responsibility of intellectual history it is too quick.

The fourth problem concerns the practical orientation of philosophical eco-Marxism. The strongest parts of this book, and of Foster’s trilogy as a whole, are the philosophical argument, the reconstruction of intellectual history, and the structural analysis of capitalism’s ecological destruction. The weakest part is the development of political strategy. Foster knows that capitalism has to be transcended, and he knows that the direction of that transcendence is some form of “sustainable human development” grounded in “metabolic reconciliation.” But on the concrete questions—how it is to be done, who the agents are, what the transitional stages look like, how to deal with the realities of the geopolitical situation—his books mostly remain silent. This is not Foster’s problem alone; it is a shared problem of English-language ecological Marxism. But given that this is now the third book, and given that the title of this one is the strongly practice-oriented slogan “breaking the bonds of fate,” the absence of more concrete practical orientation is worth flagging. If “breaking the bonds of fate” remains a philosophical posture and never settles into any concrete imagination of action, then for readers already pushed toward fatalism by real pressures, the posture risks looking lighter than the fate it is meant to refuse.

Conclusion

The conclusion returns to the parallel set out at the beginning. Epicurus faced the dissolution of the polis and the breakup of Alexander’s empire—a “chaos of empires.” What we face is the metabolic rupture of the climate system and the multiple bio-geophysical cycles of the Earth system. The forms of the two ages are different, but the same ideological pressure is in play in both. We are told that the future has already been decided by some power outside us. Foster’s book is a long rebuttal to this fatalist narrative. The rebuttal does not run on political feeling; it runs on the work of intellectual history and philosophical argument. What it tries to reopen is a particular materialist possibility: a materialism that does not place freedom outside matter, but recognizes that matter itself contains emergence, contains new causal beginnings, contains the space of “up to us.” In an age full of declarations of “necessity,” this position is itself a political posture.

On the whole, the core claims of the book—returning Marx’s doctoral dissertation to the center of the formation of Marx’s thought, restoring Epicurus to the standing of an independent philosophy with contemporary relevance, and putting the question of the dialectics of nature back on the central agenda of Marxism—hold up. On a few specific points—the methodological reading of the doctoral dissertation, the targeted critiques of Schmidt and Burns, and the contemporary reactivation of the “up to us” concept—Foster does clear and forceful work. But on others—the rhetoric of “close alignment,” the naming of the “Second Foundation,” the handling of Soviet Marxism, and the practical orientation of ecological politics—the book has specific weaknesses. These are not matters of detail; they bear on the eventual weight of the book as a political-theoretical intervention.

Whether or not one fully agrees with Foster’s settling of accounts with Western Marxism, and whether or not one fully accepts the scale on which he uses the new findings of classical scholarship, his book puts forward a proposition that has to be taken seriously. As a comprehensive theory of nature and history, Marxism needs to recover its capacity to speak on the question of nature. The roots of that capacity may indeed lie in a doctoral dissertation that has been kept at arm’s length for nearly two centuries, and in the ancient Greek philosopher whom that dissertation studied, who has been kept in shadow for more than 2000 years. Under the urgent pressure of the ecological crisis, this work of returning to the origin is less a piece of academic philology than a long-overdue settling of accounts.