“WHAT cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees — what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!
#AmericanPrestige welcomes #TheaRiofrancos for a great interview about her book #Extraction: The Frontiers of #GreenCapitalism
https://americanprestigepod.com/episodes/7058544218
#energyTransition #greenwashing #environment #lithium #lithiumMining #extractivism #geoeconomy #politicalTheory #degrowth #ecosocialism #ecomarxism #books @bookstodon
#Ecosocialism Forum to host Ian Angus, author of “Metabolic Rifts” on 25 April, with Helena Sheehan, Inea Lehner, David McNally and Jess Spear. Sponsored by Monthly Review Press & Global #Ecosocialist Network.
The forum will feature a presentation of Ian Angus's new book, Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism’s Assault on the Earth System, which draws on a wealth of modern research to extend and deepen the natural science basis of Marxist ecology. In clear, non-technical language, Metabolic Rifts offers a scientific basis for understanding the deep causes of today’s environmental crises and a program for action to prevent catastrophe in our time. #MarxistEcology #EcoMarxism #MetabolicRift
Learn more and join online at: http://bit.ly/ecosocforum
You can purchase a copy of the book at
https://monthlyreview.org/9781685901615/
Modern environmental crises are not accidental byproducts of economic activity but expressions of a structural contradiction embedded within capitalism’s organization.
"New materialist approaches tend to adopt a kind of naive materialism, where the material world is treated as something that can be understood almost on its own. The assumption is that phenomena can be studied as purely material processes — by tracing relations among actors, for example — without offering a sustained account of the social relations that structure a particular society or orient human action within it.
While this can reorient our perspective and draw attention to material activity, it cannot really explain what is happening unless it is paired with an analysis of social dynamics. That is what a Marxist approach provides. In this respect, my critique of new materialism is not unlike Marx’s critique of classical political economy. We can observe the effects of material entities, but to understand what drives those effects we need an account of the specific social form in which they appear. At the same time, I do want to integrate some insights of new materialism into a Marxist framework — especially their insistence on materiality — by holding together the social and the material rather than separating them.
The problem with much eco-Marxism is different. I have learned a great deal from that tradition and see myself as working within it. But there has often been an assumption that showing capitalism to be destructive of nature is, in itself, a sufficient critique. Human activity always transforms nature; that is part of our metabolic relationship with the more-than-human world. The critical question is not whether nature is transformed, but how, and under what social relations.
Much eco-Marxist thought rests — often implicitly — on the idea that the core problem is alienation from nature. What is missing is an account of how specific capitalist social relations organize and compel destructive interactions with the natural world..."
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/nature-capitalism-marxism-ecology-freedom/
#Capitalism #Ecology #NewMaterialism #Marx #Marxism #EcoMarxism #PoliticalEconomy
Why We Need to Look Beyond Capitalism to Save the Planet
Muir
Paria sans portefeuille
Miguel Afonso Caetano
The Marxist-Leninist Guy