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Marx and the Climate Crisis #3: Marx and Climate Change by Sean O’Brien
Lecture the 87 press Lecture the 87 press

Marx and the Climate Crisis #3: Marx and Climate Change by Sean O’Brien

Lecture three now moves to confront what is arguably the greatest issue of our age, the product of a carbon-soaked capitalism, and the terrain on which struggles over energy transition play out: climate change. We’ll begin with a critical account of recent theoretical developments on the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’. We’ll then turn to Marxian counterproposals from environmental geographer Jason W. Moore and ecofeminist philosopher Donna J. Haraway, who suggest we might more accurately name this geological period the ‘capitalocene’. Building on these insights, this lecture concludes by asking where our warming world is headed. What will the political and economic consequences be if we fail to reduce rates of carbon emissions sufficiently to keep future heating levels below the critical 2°C threshold?

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Marx and the Climate Crisis #2: Marx and Energy by Sean O’Brien
Lecture, Marx and the Climate Crisis the 87 press Lecture, Marx and the Climate Crisis the 87 press

Marx and the Climate Crisis #2: Marx and Energy by Sean O’Brien

The second lecture extends our line of inquiry into societal nature relations as it pertains to the problem of energy. At the heart of the relation between capital and climate lies energy. Fossil fuels have been the dominant source of energy powering economic expansion since the industrial revolution. This fossil-fuelled economic development, as we now know for certain, has been responsible for the lion’s share of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, leading to global warming, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and extreme weather events. This lecture draws on work in the Energy Humanities, a cross-disciplinary field of scholarship that highlights the essential contribution that the insights and methods of the humanities bring to bear on the study of our carbon-fuelled modernity and the vital question of transition to cleaner, more sustainable forms of energy. Turning also to recent work on Marx and the critique of energy, including the After Oil collective on ‘petroculture’,Andreas Malm on ‘fossil capital’, and Timothy Mitchell on ‘carbon democracy’, we will develop a theoretical language for the age of carbon modernity.

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Marx and the Climate Crisis #1: Marx and Nature by Sean O’Brien
Lecture, Marx and the Climate Crisis the 87 press Lecture, Marx and the Climate Crisis the 87 press

Marx and the Climate Crisis #1: Marx and Nature by Sean O’Brien

This four-part lecture series asks what we can learn from Marx about the climate crisis: its origins, its impacts, and what possible solutions we might seek in the face of increasingly inadequate government efforts to mitigate the escalating devastation worldwide. Developments Marx criticized in early industrial capitalism have had enormous consequences for the planet’s eco-systems, not least in the form of carbon-fuelled climate change. But a century and a half has passed since the early industrial period. What could Marx have to teach us about environmental crisis in the twenty-first century? Was he not a developmentalist and leading proponent of industrial modernization? Did the socialist economies of the twentieth century not pursue a productivist model that churned out CO2 at rates on par with the capitalist world-economy? And what of China, an ostensibly communist country and one of the biggest polluters in the world?

The first lecture returns to Marx to recover his critical theory of nature, or more precisely society-nature relations, since for Marx modernity is distinguished by the social mediation of first nature by a fetishized ‘second nature’. The way we reproduce ourselves under capitalism, always in service to an abstract ‘economy’, limits our ability not simply to see our world for what it really is, but more pressingly to act in an ecologically sustainable way. Drawing on the philosophical critique of the capitalist domination of nature developed by Frankfurt School critical theorists Alfred Schmidt, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, this opening lecture explains how ‘the dialectic of Enlightenment’ constitutes first nature as an external object subject to ceaseless appropriation, exploitation, and depletion, a critique these figures would eventually extend to Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure and to the actually existing socialist states of the twentieth century. We will then consider subsequent efforts to reclaim Marx for a Marxian ecology, weighing eco-socialist theories of ‘metabolic rift’ against value-theoretical approaches to societal nature relations to develop a rigorous critique of capital-induced planetary degradation.

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