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The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift:

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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.

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

RD 333.7 Fos c

Publisher

New York : Monthly Review Press., 2020

Collation

224 pp.; 13 x 20 cm

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781583678398

Classification

333.7

Content Type

digital text

Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

1st ed.

Subject(s)

social studies
ecology
cap

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

John Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark

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