Manuel Sacristán at the Onset of Ecological Marxism after Stalinism Enric Tello Department of Economic History, Institutions, Policy and World Economy, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Introduction Thirty-one years ago, in 1985, Manuel Sacristán died in Barcelona at the age of 59. After the publication in 2014 of a volume with some of his writings translated into English (Llorente 2014), it is time to help non-Spanish-speaking readers to know more about him. Yet it is not easy to explain to generations born after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that Manuel Sacristán was a most important Marxist philosopher and at the same time one of the few pioneers introducing political ecology and antinuclear peace movement during the last quarter of the 20th century in Spain. Many people believe that Marxism, environmentalism and pacifism are views that exclude each other. Most of what has been said and done on behalf of Marxism since Stalin took over the leadership of the Communist Party of the USSR in the 1930s, up to its dissolution in 1991, contributes to sustaining this belief. The fast industrialization of the Old Russian Empire undertaken by the Soviet State was nowhere near taking into account ecological sustainability. Its socio-environmental impact turned out to be comparable or even worse than the ones caused by capitalist industrialization. Environmentalists and Marxists from the 1970s Onwards in Barcelona Sacristán began reflecting about political ecology from a Marxist standpoint when most of the world’s left still disdained this view—social-democrats as well as orthodox communists. He did this in a place where it was least expected—in a Spain still under Franco’s dictatorship where he was involved in the underground fight for freedom and a different kind of socialism. Thirty years after his death it is time to rescue Manuel Sacristán from oblivion and consider him one of the first post- Stalinist Ecological Marxists in Europe alongside Gorz (1975), Bahro (1977), Harich (1977), following in the steps of some earlier proponents of ecosocialist approaches like Barry Commoner, René Dumont or Robert Jungk, and ecofeminist ones like d’Eaubonne ([1978] 2000). After having debated on how to politically respond to the economic crisis of the 1970s (Lacalle, Martínez Alier, and Sacristán 1978), Joan Martínez Alier and Manuel Sacristán took the lead in introducing environmentalism in Spain together with economist José Manuel Naredo and a small group of ecologists and epidemiologists. In 1979 the Antinuclear Committee of Catalonia, of which Sacristán was a founding member, held in a seminar on the energy crisis in capitalist society at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Barcelona. It opened with a lecture by Martínez Alier (1980) on energy and agrarian economics. Sacristán closed it with a lecture on “Why Does the Environmentalist Movement Lack Economists?” (1987), pointing to the methodological inhibitions of mainstream economics to take environmental factors into account. Seen in retrospect, an ironic situation took place. On one hand, Sacristán wondered why there were no economists in the environmentalist movement though he had Martínez Alier as a guest speaker, who was then writing his well-known book Ecological Economics (1982, 1984, 1987a). On the other hand, Martínez Alier also wondered why there was no ecological Marxism, criticizing the general reliance of Marx’s followers on the “growth of productive forces” as a lever to attain socialism, having in front Sacristán who was then developing a Marxist political ecology. At that time Martínez Alier still regarded Marxism as a current without any bonds with political ecology due to its “adherence to the bourgeois ideology of progress based on the growth myth” (1984, 264–265). Together with José Manuel Naredo, he brought to light the disagreement of Engels and Marx with the energy analysis put forward by Sergei Podolinsky in 1880–1883 (Martínez Alier and Naredo 1982). Later on Martínez Alier (1991, 318–319) became more open toward ecological Marxism. He dedicated the 1991 Spanish edition of his book to the memory of Manuel Sacristán, among others. Yet he considered Capitalism Nature Socialism, founded in 1988 by James O’Connor, to be the first international journal of ecological socialism. Dates are important: CNS began one year before the