ABSTRACT Capitalism, understood as a world-ecology that joins accumulation, power, and nature in dialectical unity, has been adept at evading so-called Malthusian dynamics through an astonishing historical capacity to produce, locate, and occupy cheap natures external to the system. In […]
Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology
Introduction Of all the domains of Marxian political economy, nature is by far the most vexing. Is nature an economic input as in the notion of natural resources; is it the object of labour in the process of production; or
VALUE, NATURE, AND THE VORTEX OF ACCUMULATION
It was E.P. Thompson who stated, in The Making of the English Working Class, that: When we encounter some sonorous phrase such as “the strong ebb and flow of the trade cycle” we must be put on our guard. For
On the Violent Abstraction of Nature
Rethinking agency in an AI-driven world – as the AMBIENT REVOLTS conference is trying to do – the critic Krystian Woznicki interviews social thinker Max Haiven about seminal notions of agency under AI-driven financialization. Krystian Woznicki: As you repeatedly point
The Politics of AI-driven Financialization (Interview with Max Haiven)
Every civilization must decide what is, and what is not, valuable. The Marxist tradition makes occasional reference to a “law of value.” It is not a phrase that rolls easily off the tongue, apparently. It sounds quaint, curiously out of
The Value of Everything? Work, Capital, and Historical Nature in the Capitalist World-Ecology
… The dynamism of capitalist technological advance not only produces a tendency for industrial production to run ahead of its raw materials supply—Marx’s “general law” of underproduction —it also produces a “general law” of overpollution: the tendency to enclose and
Cheap Food and Bad Climate : From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World-Ecology
….The problem is that the energy system and the technology it powers is not at all modular; it is not possible to swap out dirty energy and swap in clean energy, even if all political obstacles were removed and some
The Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy, and the Future of Communism
by Ray Patel and Jason W. Moore The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget. Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to
How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era
‘Kapitalismus und Okologie’ (1976) by Paul Mattick, translated by Paul Mattick Jr. The historical character of nature follows from the Second Law of thermodynamics, discovered more than a hundred years ago by Carnot and Clausius, spelling an increase in
Capitalism and ecology: from the decline of capital to the decline of the world
Die Verbindung zwischen Arbeit, Natur und der Logik der Vereinfachung zeigt eine längere Kontinuität an. Und in diesem Kontext Arbeit und Umwelt als Gegensatz zu begreifen, ist analytisch falsch. Schon Marx kritisierte die deutschen Sozialisten dafür, die Arbeit als die
Bemerkungen zu: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Moore/Patel) – (2)
Wir liefern hier einen kurzen Abriss zu dem neuen Buch von Jason W. Moore und Raj Patel “A History of The World in Seven Cheaps Things”. Strittige Punkte benennen wir, können sie aber hier nicht weiter ausführen. Die theoretischen Begründungen,
Bemerkungen zu: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Moore/Patel) – (1)
Among Nature/Society dualism’s essential features is the tendency to circumscribe truth-claims by drawing hard-and-fast lines between what is Social and what is Natural.[1] Here is a rift: an epistemic rift.[2] At its core is a series of violent abstractions implicated
NATURE/SOCIETY & THE VIOLENCE OF REAL ABSTRACTION