Karl Marx, born on this day in 1818, was a foundational political theorist and journalist associated with the philosophy of Marxism.
Among Marx’s best-known texts are the “The Communist Manifesto” and the three-volume “Das Kapital”, in which he set out to define and explain the behavior of the capitalist mode of production.
Marx’s political and philosophical thought have had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history, and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
Marx’s critical theories about society, economics and politics - collectively understood as Marxism - hold that human societies develop through class conflict. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production, and the working classes (known as the proletariat) that enable these means by selling their labor power in return for wages.
Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx concluded that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system known as socialism.
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Honestly I can’t stand Saito and can’t understand how so many people take Marx and the Anthropocene so seriously it’s genuine shit.
Less is More by Jason Hickel is actually surprisingly good and extremely easy to read though
Because they’re Marxist degrowthers, not Marxist degrowthers. They want Marx to agree with degrowth instead of applying the Marxist method to ecology. Saitō is a figurehead for this sort of thing.
I’ve already read some of Hickel’s papers. They’re easy to understand, scientific, and productively advance the debate on degrowth. Would reading Less is More achieve something that reading more of his original research won’t? Because I don’t want to read an entire book for a worse understanding of something that can be gained through reading a few papers. Saitō already got me once.
Yeah I mean I didn’t learn a ton that I didn’t know already from Hickels, nor did I really expect to - if you’re already keyed in to this movement then there’s not much there to learn. I think of a text like that more as an exercise in honing your own rhetoric, by hearing how a professional will deliver these arguments simply and efficiently.
The one thing in the text I didn’t expect was just how much he drew from Silvia Fererici (who I love), and dedicated one of the introductory chapters just to an ideology of extractivism and how that’s not a fact of humanity but a framework necessary for capitalism - a much more bold tack than I expected him to take.