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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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[Digital Poetics 4.12] Excerpts from “Palestinian Literature of Resistance Under Occupation, 1948-1968” by Ghassan Kanafani (trans. Hadeel Jamal)
Hythe, Digital Poetics, Essay, Prose the 87 press Hythe, Digital Poetics, Essay, Prose the 87 press

[Digital Poetics 4.12] Excerpts from “Palestinian Literature of Resistance Under Occupation, 1948-1968” by Ghassan Kanafani (trans. Hadeel Jamal)

Hadeel Jamal translates two excerpts from Ghassan Kanafani’s “Palestinian Literature of Resistance Under Occupation, 1948-1968” (1968) which provides analysis on the Palestinian artist’s role in resistance and its global dimension. The excerpts shed light on the deep emotional and cognitive solidarity between Palestinians and other oppressed peoples – which is as relevant now as ever.

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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?

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[Digital Poetics 4.9] Four Poems by Stuart McPherson
Hythe, Digital Poetics, Poetry the 87 press Hythe, Digital Poetics, Poetry the 87 press

[Digital Poetics 4.9] Four Poems by Stuart McPherson

Set firmly within contemporary Britain, these four pieces look at the linkage between power, media, and financial institutions, and explore their impact upon displaced people, the impoverished, and the working class. The poems discuss how narratives are controlled, how power is wielded with a view to maintaining the status quo, often at the negation of human life and the health of wider society itself.

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[Digital Poetics 4.2] Ophélimité: a specimen of emptiness by Keston Sutherland
Hythe, Digital Poetics, Essay the 87 press Hythe, Digital Poetics, Essay the 87 press

[Digital Poetics 4.2] Ophélimité: a specimen of emptiness by Keston Sutherland

This essay describes some of the early attacks on Marx by right-wing economists. It considers some of the consequences of the rejection of the labour theory of value and the development of an increasingly mathematized economic theory of marginal utility. What are the implications of this shift from a critical theory of the lives of producers to an econometric and nominalist theory of the habits of consumers? What does it mean for poetry?

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