The 2023 boreal summer broke heat records across the globe. Wildfires, droughts, and floods are increasingly frequent. But these symptoms of broader global climate changes also entail a broader transition in the history of our ecological system. We are entering a new geological age that Earth system scientists have called the “Anthropocene.” But is this planetary crisis caused by an abstract “Human” (or “Anthro”)? Or by a specific historical set of relations of production called capitalism? Perhaps, as Andreas Malm has posited, it is more adequate to state that we live in the Capitalocene. 

While the appropriation of nature takes place across all human communities and all social relations of production, the planetary crisis we are now facing is an effect of the ongoing process of destructive appropriation that puts all human and extra-human life at risk. An unprecedented and irrational squandering of nature in the past half century has produced what John Bellamy Foster has called, following Marx, a “metabolic rift.” This is not the result of human modes of appropriation of nature in general but of a specific mode of appropriation – the appropriation of what Marx called the “free gift of Nature” (human and extra-human alike) by capital. 

In the Fall semester, we will take stock of the conceptual tools produced by Marx, Engels, and other thinkers who have taken the critique of capitalism as a central focus point in their accounts of the current ecological planetary crisis. We will read from Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (2022) and Jason W Moore’s Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (2016), Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature. A Red and Green Perspective (1999) and John Bellamy Foster’s seminalMarx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature(2000). What conceptual tools have Marxists produced to describe and understand the planetary crisis? How should these conceptual tools be sharpened today? How do they differ from other dominant ecological approaches?

During the Winter semester, we will engage the history of capitalism alongside the history of the extraction of fossil fuels through Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016). Then we will turn to contemporary struggles on resource extraction and the political challenges it poses in Latin America by engaging with Thea Riofrancos’ Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (2020) and Martin Arboleda’s Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (2020). 

If you would like to join the reading group please email alejo AT umich DOT edu and mlauram AT umich DOT edu.

Maria Laura, Alejo and Dan Nemser