“Capitalism tends to destroy its two sources of wealth: nature and human beings” – Karl Marx
“Man lives on nature — means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” ~ Karl Marx, 1844.
Engels asserts that humans have thus become distinguished from animals by their ability to manipulate nature in manifold and dynamic ways, as opposed to fitting into a singular ecological niche. He notes that “whole continents” have been reconfigured through human industry, and that even plants and animals themselves have been transformed by selective breeding to the extent “that they become unrecognizable.”
However, he cautions against the conceptualization of nature as standing in opposition to humanity in any sense, writing, “Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”
— Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876)
“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. … The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” – Marx & Engels, Manifesto
http://www.onehundredmonths.org/
onehundredmonths.org
Time is slipping away
100 Month and Counting…
We have 100 months to save the planet. When the clock stops ticking we could be beyond the climate’s ‘tipping point’, the point of no return.
Binay Sarkar is a retired college teacher
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seems the end of the world is coming.
I am not a Marxist, nor a Marxist-Leninist (Communism) for philosophic reasons. My affinity lies more with Hegel whose Dialectic Marx took over and applied to his time’s history and came to the conclusion that Classless Society is the ultima ratio the final solution to humankind’s economic maladies, thus eternal but static. No, for Hegel the Human Evolution continues and will not stop with classless society (CS)[synthesis of Monarchy (Capitalism) versus mass Peasantry clash. by definition of the Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis nature and structure of evolutionary process], will again give rise to another Thesis which in turn will generate another Antithesis that will result in another clash leading to a Synthesis, so the Dialectic continues till it finally terminates in the Absolute Idea which for Hegel was God. The Dialectic was not a discovery of Hegel either, but of Immanuel Kant, Germany’s foremost ingenious thinker, who discovered it in the thought process of human beings. Hegel’s genius was that he applied it to history.
It is all the more a welcome note to observe that Karl Marx, who was a left-wing young Hegelian, and who is rubber-stamped by most commentators as an atheist, speaks of man’s physical and spiritual life without qualifying the latter. But his statement, a century and a half before the Climate Change crisis facing the world, is truly valid, if not prophetic today. What need be added in this context of Marxian prophecy are two psychological dimensions of today’s capitalists (multibillionaires plundering the Globe and its resources).
a) Limitless Selfishness despite all feigned but pseudo Philanthropy and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) virtues claimed by the billionaire looters’ club, and b) rampant Material Greed; both go together. Just One percent of the world possessing over 45 percent of world’s wealth is illegitimately perverse/obscene, moral irresponsibility at its zenith. This has led to Nature’s destruction as Karl Marx prophetically pointed out and what we experience live today.
Unless this structure is changed floods and doom await our doorstep with millions of human lives eliminated.
George Chakko, former U.N. correspondent, now retiree in Vienna, Austria.
Vienna, 01/ 09/ 2019 20:54 hrs CET
If humans had a way of preventing the arising of multi-billionaires action would already have been taken, given the damage and suffering they have done. What happens, happens because of the functioning of the human brain. Addiction is its fundamental weakness, unknown to this extent among any other life form.
‘acertijos faciles de quimica’ has drawn the valid conclusion. Global warming, nuclear radiation, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence are but four pathways to self-destruction. Humans have no answer to these damaging forms of ‘human behaviour’ caused by addictions, principally greed and the wish for excitement, of the human brain.