Risk society and Marxism: Beyond simple antagonism

Moving beyond Beck’s explicit opposition to Marx’s understanding of society, this article proposes to explore some of the deeper commonalities between Marxism and Beck’s theory of risk society. Rather than remaining at the level of propositional claims about society, at which Marx and Beck are opposed in several important ways, this article proposes to analyze these theories in terms of their key commonalities in the problem situations they address. In particular, this article identifies how both of these theories explore the implications of the development of productive forces and the resulting humanisation of nature in the context of widespread social estrangement. This article then identifies key commonalities in the structure of the theoretical solutions that each theory employs to address their commonly held problem situation. In this way, this article rethinks the relationship between Beck and Marx, as well as suggesting alternative ways of re-appropriating classical social theory.