Ingrid H. Kvangraven To separate economic forces from political is very Un-Marxist analysis. Marx didn't talk about 'economic' forces but about 'material' forces, which include political and even ideas as 'material' forces. Engels cause of separation referring to 'superstructure'. Academics like that

A very short introduction. #worldecology #capitalocene

France owes 30 billion euros to Haïti In 1825, the French state imposed a tribute on Haiti to compensate slave owners for their loss of property. It is now time to start concrete discussions about restitution. lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2…

morning

possibly my favorite event this summer term. sign up below 👇

Or, to paraphrase the great David Graeber, the British state is a Tory state, and Labour are only allowed in as long as they pursue Tory policy.

Faience mosaic tile depicting Karl Marx, commissioned by Nasser-ed-Din Shah Qajar, Iran. (Private Collection?)

Fantastically important if one wishes to understand how CO2/GHG reductionism is a bourgeois grift: the Environmentalism of the Rich! #capitalocene #capitaloceno

Environmentalist radlibs have an easier time imagining homo sapiens species extinction - anything other than having to imagine the survival of the struggling masses. Yes, I just rewrote the Jameson quote everyone loves so much. You're welcome.

We are living through a dismal age, where anti-intellectualism is no longer hidden but paraded like virtue. A fascist monoculture thrives—dreary, mechanized, overrun by wooden stuntmen and podcast ventriloquists mouthing algorithmic bile.

📰 “La crisis climática es una lucha de clases” Pablo Elorduy entrevista a Jason W. Moore para El Salto "El catastrofismo climático, la retórica de las amenazas existenciales, son herramientas alarmistas de la élite mundial para pacificarnos" elsaltodiario.com/pensamiento/ja…

Following Hegel, Marx in the Paris Manuscripts understands human reason as nature brought to self-consciousness - and thus as “identical” with nature from the get-go. It is for this reason that the degradation of nature matters - bc it is a degradation *of us*. 3/

Saito’s reading remains fundamentally dualist: nature constitutes an external limit to human activity, a finite resource we have to treat with care. But Marx’s thought is different: we *are* nature and it is not an external limit but an *internal condition*. 9/

That is, the point is not to accommodate ourselves to an externally imposed constraint but to *realize ourselves* by recognizing the conditions for our own flourishing and by adapting them in a self-consistent, rational, and democratic manner. 10/10

The number of capitalists having been diminished, their competition with respect to the workers scarcely exists any longer; and the number of workers having been increased, their competition among themselves has become all the more intense, unnatural, and violent.

Marx never said the critique of capitalism explains everything. He said it explains the material basis of social life. It isn’t about shoehorning all causality into one box but showing how empire, religion, and madness get materially organized. Find on libgen. Highly recommend.

Tuscany

One of the worst features of academia is reliance on especially younger people taking low paid, short-term jobs, going from one such position to the next, irresponsibly encouraged to believe that a permanent job will eventually be theirs. We are all diminished by this

Useful concise thread from my comrade: The obsession with "precision" in mathematical "models" reflects an ideological confidence in quantification and formalization, which legitimizes the capitalist status quo by presenting the models as "objective".