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Capitalism’s New Age of Plagues (Part 4)
Agribusiness assaults on tropical forests are driving the emergence of new diseases and epidemics.
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Nature’s heartbeat, visualized
A stunning animation displays the pulse of the Earth System’s metabolism.
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What is metabolic rift?
The Ecosocialist idea you’ve never heard of and might need.
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The discovery & rediscovery of metabolic rift
Ian Angus discusses the scientific developments that led Marx to develop metabolic rift theory in the 1800s, and a new generation to rediscover it the 21st century.
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Marx on the metabolic rift: How capitalism cuts us off from nature
Marx and Engels were witnesses to and keen analysts of the environmental problems inherent in nineteenth-century capitalism. They wrote about the depletion of coal reserves, the destruction of forests, and, especially, about diminishing soil fertility, which Foster recognizes was the most pressing issue of the day.
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What do we mean by metabolic rift?
rs21 member Greg Peakin explains the concept of metabolic rift, and why it is an important tool for climate organising today.
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Robbing the Soil, 2: ‘Systematic theft of communal property’
“The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Karl Marx)
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Robbing the soil, 1: Commons and classes before capitalism
“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” (Karl Marx)
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Mending the metabolic rift: Marxism, nature and society
Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism provides the key to understanding the environmental catastrophe we’re witnessing, and to gaining a clearer picture of what’s needed to repair our damaged relationship with the Earth.
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In defence of Metabolic Rift Theory
One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.
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Commodity cod & factory ships
Beginning a series on the role of fishing in the birth and spread of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in today’s mass extinction of ocean life.
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Marx, Engels and metabolic rift – Part Two
The development in 1909, by the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch of a technique for taking Nitrogen out of the atmosphere to produce ammonia (NH3) allowed for the production of synthetic fertilisers (and explosives) on an industrial scale.
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Marx, Engels and Metabolic Rift – Part One
Despite our assumed position as Earth’s dominant species, we have seen our society effectively shut down by a virus. Friedrich Engels’s caution against hubris, written over a century and half ago, seems particularly apt.
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The interconnectedness of everything-Capitalist contradictions and Marx’s metabolic rift theory
No person is an island. It takes a village. Circle of Life. We are stardust. Seven generations. These truisms reference connections between people and what we owe each other. Appealing to chaos theory, an action, no matter how small, dominoes around the world.