Tag: Metabolic Rift

A “dialectic of exploitation and expropriation” (The Robbery of Nature reviewed by ‘Socialist Alternative’)

February 20, 2024

The authors write, “the failure to maintain the soil metabolism was central to Marx’s understanding of the extreme ecological degradation of colonial Ireland.” The peasant farmers, cottiers, lived on a substandard diet, mainly of potatoes. The combination of the economic and ecological system led to the famine that killed one million people and the social collapse that forced another million to emigrate.

Marxism and the Climate Crisis (John Bellamy Foster on the ‘Historical Materialism podcast’)

Marxism and the Climate Crisis (John Bellamy Foster on the ‘Historical Materialism podcast’)

February 20, 2024

In this wide-ranging interview with Lukas Slothuus and Ashok Kumar of the Historical Materialism Podcast, John Bellamy Foster discusses, among other things, his lecture on “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature,” the influence of mechanistic worldviews on the field of ecology and 20th century Socialist thought, fundamental assumptions on the part of many Western Marxists regarding the nonexistence of a “dialectics of nature,” misunderstandings about Lukács’ supposed rejection of a dialectics of nature, Leibig’s work on the “soil crisis” and the ways that this steered Marx’s concept of the “metabolic rift,” etc. – and moves on from there.

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