The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift - Hardcover

Foster, John Bellamy; Clark, Brett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1583678409 ISBN 13: 9781583678404

Publisher: Monthly Review Press,U.S., 2020

Synopsis

Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism

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.

About this title

About the Author

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review. He is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and author of The Great Financial Crisis (with Fred Magdoff), The Ecological Rift and Critique of Intelligent Design (both with Brett Clark and Richard York), The Ecological Revolution, Ecology Against Capitalism, Marx's Ecology, and The Vulnerable Planet. Brett Clark is assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. He is co-author (with John Bellamy Foster and Richard York) of Critique of Intelligent Design.

Edition details

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1583678409
• ISBN 13: 9781583678404
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416