Andreas Malm
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
Some blazing rhetoric to stoke the machine of revolution:
Capital does not eat because someone is hungry: capital always eats. The ecological voracity of this relation-in-process cannot be captured by a model of substitution and relief, precisely because it is not embedded within the natural limits of ecosystems. It operates on a higher level, above that of the use-value, in the thin abstract air of exchange-value, and just as it must pump out surplus labour in perpetuity, so it must pump out material substrata from the ground whether or not they are scarce. Capital is supra-ecological, one could say: a flying biophysical omnivore with its own peculiar social DNA. It is not a timeless growth pursuit bumping into walls of shortages and transcending them by moving on to abundant goods, not a universal process unfolding through reaction upon specific constraints. Rather, it is a specific process unfolding through a universal appropriation of biophysical resources, insatiable in its appetite, starting and ever continuing with energy.
This brilliant burst comes after pages and pages of careful historical analysis.
And so for day 2866
17.10.2014