#ecomarxism

[azspot]

Marxism is known for socialism, and socialism is often described as the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism has a tendency to increase technologies and promote innovations because of market competition. But Marx thought that once the workers take over power and kick out the capitalists, they can utilize the development of productive forces for the sake of themselves — more wealth, more well-being. But there is one problem: Sustainability. Because as Marx started to study natural sciences later in the 1850s and 1860s, he came to realize the development of technologies in capitalism actually don't create a condition for emancipation of the working class. Because not only do those technologies control the workers more efficiently, they destabilize the old system of jobs and make more precarious, low skilled jobs. At the same time those technologies exploit from nature more efficiently and create various problems such as exhaustion of the soil, massive deforestation, and the exhaustion of the fuels, and so on.

Kohei Saito

[prole-log]

[dokutamazu]

Sounds about right. Also seemed Tumblr worthy.

[towardsaspeculativenature]

Humankind by Timothy Morton review – no more leftist defeatism, everything is connected

A bracing book from the fashionably wild thinker embraces anarchist and Buddhist ideas in an argument for solidarity with all that exists

“There’s another possibility Morton too quickly dismisses. Zambia’s tourism minister Jean Kapata had a point when she suggested the reaction to Cecil’s slaying showed westerners care more about African animals than African humans. No matter. We should, Morton argues in this exasperating, beguiling, intellectually reckless and restless book, have solidarity with non-humans – not just with charismatic megafauna such as Cecil, but algae, cutlery, rocks. This follows from his adherence to object-oriented ontology, the argument that nothing has privileged status and philosophers exist equally with Xboxes and excrement.“

[wwworlding]

“If a sustainable universal prosperity is technically feasible, what political constituency might bring about ecosocialism or basic solar communism or whatever you want to call it? Classical Marxism had a plausible if ultimately mistaken theory of how capitalism cultivated the collective actor that would one day replace it. A constantly more numerous and better-organised working class, its identity cohering as proletarian experience became more uniform across industries, regions and countries, would need only to perceive its shared strength in order to wield it, and the workers as a body would seize the world they’d made. The hypothesis retains its elegance, but has lost its persuasiveness so far as the working class remains nationalist in perspective and its organised component has dwindled in proportion to the rest.

The discussion or discourse of the Anthropocene often promotes a new universal subject: not the class-conscious international proletariat, but a species-conscious planetary humanity. This is a nice idea amid a runaway ecological crisis with no deliberate agent behind it; even corporate directors and high officials can sincerely protest that they may do nothing beyond what shareholders or voters will accept. But no collective actor can be conjured from a name, and the literature of the Anthropocene so far fails to identify any historical process that might combine with moral exhortation to produce a borderless social movement in which human beings throughout the world effect their ecological solidarity as a political force. The ecomarxists who contend that capitalism can’t become an ecological civilisation meanwhile maintain a judicious silence on the question.”