“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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