Download or read book Ecology and Historical Materialism written by Jonathan Hughes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the widely-held view that Marxism is unable to deal adequately with environmental problems. Jonathan Hughes considers the nature of environmental problems, and the evaluative perspectives that may be brought to bear on them. He examines Marx s critique of Malthus, his method, and his materialism, interpreting the latter as a recognition of human dependence on nature. Central to the book s argument is an interpretation of the development of the productive forces which takes account of the differing ecological impacts of different productive technologies while remaining consistent with the normative and explanatory roles that this concept plays within Marx s theory. Turning finally to Marx s vision of a society founded on the communist principle to each according to his needs , the author concludes that the underlying notion of human need is one whose satisfaction presupposes only a modest and ecologically feasible expansion of productive output.

Download or read book Marx s Ecology written by John Bellamy Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This startling new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis. Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature. Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley. By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx's Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

Download or read book Marxism and Ecological Economics written by Paul Burkett and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book initiates a dialogue between Marxism and ecological economics. It shows how Marxism can help ecological economics fulfill its commitments to methodological pluralism, inter-disciplinarity, and openness to new visions of structural economic change that confront the current biospheric crisis.

Download or read book Marx and the Earth written by John Bellamy Foster and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Marx and the Earth John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett respond to recent ecosocialist criticisms of Marx, offering a full-fledged anti-critique. They thus extend their earlier pioneering work on Marx’s ecology, providing the basis for a new red-green synthesis.

Download or read book The Return of Nature written by John Bellamy Foster and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2020 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize A fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of the efforts to unite questions of social justice and environmental sustainability, and helps us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies. The Return of Nature begins with the deaths of Darwin (1882) and Marx (1883) and moves on until the rise of the ecological age in the 1960s and 1970s. Foster explores how socialist analysts and materialist scientists of various stamps, first in Britain, then the United States, from William Morris and Frederick Engels, to Joseph Needham, Rachel Carson, and Stephen J. Gould, sought to develop a dialectical naturalism, rooted in a critique of capitalism. In the process, he delivers a far-reaching and fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology. Ultimately, what this book asks for is nothing short of revolution: a long, ecological revolution, aimed at making peace with the planet while meeting collective human needs.

Download or read book Marx and Nature written by P. Burkett and published by Springer. This book was released on 1999-02-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Marx and Nature , Paul Burkett reconstructs Marx's approach to nature, society, and environmental crisis. While recognizing that production is structured by historically developed relations among producers, Marx also insists that production as a social and material process is shaped and constrained by natural conditions, including the natural condition of human bodily existence. Marx's value analysis places him squarely in the camp of the growing number of ecological theorists questioning the ability of monetary and market-based calculations to adequately represent the natural conditions of human production and development.

Download or read book The Robbery of Nature written by John Bellamy Foster and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism’s relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism’s degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism’s plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth. Instead we must maintain it for future generations and the innumerable, diverse inhabitants of the planet as part of a process of sustainable human development.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought written by Terence Ball and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-14 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book Capitalism in the Web of Life written by Jason W. Moore and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrating both social and historical factors, this radical analysis of the development of capitalism reveals the ever-deepening relationship between capital and ecology Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a “world-ecology” of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism’s greatest strength—and the source of its problems—is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature—rather than capitalism and nature—is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead.

Download or read book The Robbery of Nature written by John Bellamy Foster and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism’s relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism’s degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism’s plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth. Instead we must maintain it for future generations and the innumerable, diverse inhabitants of the planet as part of a process of sustainable human development.

Download or read book Vibrant Matter written by Jane Bennett and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

Download or read book The Dialectics of Ecology written by John Bellamy Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2024-04 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores ecological socialism's potential against capitalist environmental degradation Today the fate of the earth as a home for humanity is in question—and yet, contends John Bellamy Foster, the reunification of humanity and the earth remains possible if we are prepared to make revolutionary changes. As with his prior books, The Dialectics of Ecology is grounded in the contention that we are now faced with a concrete choice between ecological socialism and capitalist exterminism, and rooted in insights drawn from the classical historical materialist tradition. In this latest work, Foster explores the complex theoretical debates that have arisen historically with respect to the dialectics of nature and society. He then goes on to examine the current contradictions associated with the confrontation between capitalist extractivism and the financialization of nature, on the one hand, and the radical challenges to these represented by emergent visions of ecological civilization and planned degrowth, on the other. The product of contemporary ecosocialist debates, The Dialectics of Ecology builds on earlier works by Foster, including Marx’s Ecology and The Return of Nature, aimed at the development of a dialectical naturalism and the formation of a path to sustainable human development.

Download or read book Toward a Critical Theory of Nature written by Carl Cassegård and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the normalization of a capitalist reality in which environmental destruction and catastrophe have become 'second nature', Towards a Critical Theory of Nature offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current crisis via the work of the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on core Marxist concepts to confirm humanity's central place in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers of the Frankfurt school, including, Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Schmidt, are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. Further theoretical claims and practical consequences of a critical theory of nature challenge other contemporary theoretical approaches like eco-Marxism, social constructivism and new materialism, to situate it as the only approach with genuinely radical potential. The possibility of utopian idealism for understanding and responding to the current climate crisis is carefully measured against the dangers of false hope in setting out realistic goals for change. Environmental change in turn is seen through the prism of recent cultural currents and movements, situating the power of a critical theory of nature in relation to understandings of the Anthropocene; concepts of apocalypse, and postapocalypse. This book culminates in a powerful tool for an anti-capitalist critique of society's painfully extractive relationship to a deceptively abstracted natural world.

Download or read book Making Political Ecology written by Rod Neumann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Political Ecology presents a comprehensive view of an important new field in human geography and interdisciplinary studies of nature-society relations. Tracing the development of political ecology from its origins in geography and ecological anthropology in the 1970s, to its current status as an established field, the book investigates how late twentieth-century developments in social and ecological theories are brought together to create a powerful framework for comprehending environmental problems. Making Political Ecology argues for an inclusionary conceptualization of the field, which absorbs empirical studies from urban, rural, First World and Third World contexts and the theoretical insights of feminism, poststructuralism, neo-Marxism and non-equilibrium ecology. Throughout the book, excerpts from the writings of key figures in political ecology provide an empirical grounding for abstract theoretical concepts. Making Political Ecology will convince readers of political ecology's particular suitability for grappling with the most difficult questions concerning social justice, environmental change and human relationships with nature.

Download or read book Democracy Against Capitalism written by Ellen Meiksins Wood and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian and political thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of “postmodern” fragmentation, “difference,” and con-tingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subject it to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the critical program of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political power. She goes on to explore the concept of democracy in both the ancient and modern world, examining its relation to capitalism, and raising questions about how democracy might go beyond the limits imposed on it.

Download or read book The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital written by Xueming Chen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking an eco-socialist perspective, The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital explores the logic of capitalism as a fundamental cause of today’s environmental crisis, in particular the thirst for profit and the capitalist mode of production.

Download or read book The Progress of This Storm written by Andreas Malm and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An attack on the idea that nature and society are impossible to distinguish from each other In a world careening towards climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Everything is a blur of hybrids, where humans possess no exceptional agency to set them apart from dead matter. But is it really so? In this blistering polemic and theoretical manifesto, Andreas Malm develops a counterargument: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable.