Join the Cosmonaut Ecocrew as they discuss Andreas Malm’s piercing 2016 text Fossil Capital and attempt to dispel the myriad of myths that have been erected around the energetic transition to coal. The fateful intertwining in mid-19th century British cotton districts of capital and fossil fuels is examined in the context of class struggle, the ascendancy of the steam engine, and alternative futures that were incompatible with the logic of capital.
Check the previous episodes of this series:
Remi and Niko join Comrade Adam from Red Library to discuss Kohei Saito’s Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy: Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. We discuss the concept of metabolism, Marx’s evolution of thought on ecology being the core realm of capitalist crisis, agricultural chemistry, the role of a Marxist ecosocialist perspective to stop the destruction of capital across the planet, and much more even including Žižek’s thoughts on ecology!
Note: The episode ends a bit abruptly as technology bailed on us in the final moments.
Join us for the second installment in Cosmonaut’s critically acclaimed ecology podcast series to discuss Jason Moore’s “Capitalism in the Web of Life”. Niko, Matthew and Remi discuss how this work merges concepts from Marxist ecology and world-systems analysis to reveal how capitalism organizes nature as a whole oikeios, and how this sets limits to capitalist accumulation once “the Four Cheaps” (energy, food, work and raw materials) become scarce and capitalism is forced to shift to new regimes of accumulation. The team talks about how Moore’s concepts of oikeios and capitalism-in-nature extends the dialectical relationship of organism and environment, and how this can be applied for a socialist project, as well as addressing the critiques of Moore’s work from other ecosocialist schools.
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