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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.