Tag: capitalism

The Shock of the Anthropocene (2013)

Post author By Anarchivist
Post date March 11, 2020
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Author(s)

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Christophe Bonneuil

“What exactly has been happening on Earth in the last quarter of a millennium? The Anthropocene. Anthropo-what? We already live in the Anthropocene, so let us get used to this ugly word and the reality that it names. It is our epoch and our condition.

This geological epoch is the product of the last few hundred years of our history. The Anthropocene is the sign of our power, but also of our impotence. It is an Earth whose atmosphere has been damaged by the 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide we have spilled by burning coal and other fossil fuels. It is the impoverishment and artificializing of Earth’s living tissue, permeated by a host of new synthetic chemical molecules that will even affect our descendants. It is a warmer world with a higher risk of catastrophes, a reduced ice cover, higher sea-levels and a climate out of control.
The Anthropocene label, proposed in the 2000s by specialists in Earth system sciences, is an essential tool for understanding what is happening to us. This is not just an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. The present book sets out to comprehend this new epoch through the narratives that can be made of it. It calls for new environmental humanities to rethink our visions of the world and our ways of inhabiting the Earth together.
Scientists have built up data and models that already situate us beyond the point of no return to the Holocene, on the timetable of geological epochs. They have produced figures and curves that depict humanity as a major geological force. But what narratives can make sense of these dramatic curves ?”

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Tags 2013, anthropocene, books, capitalism, capitalocene, catastrophes, christophe bonneuil, ecological crisis, ecology, fossil fuels, geology, jean baptiste fressoz

19th century 20th century Analytic theory Antifascism Books Capitalism Europe White supremacy

Fascism and Big Business (1936)

Post author By Anarchivist
Post date March 11, 2020
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Author(s)

Daniel Guerin

“When the economic crisis becomes acute, when the rate of profit sinks toward zero, the bourgeoisie can see only one way to restore its profits: it empties the pockets of the people down to the last centime. It resorts to what M. Caillaux, once finance minister of France, expressively calls ‘the great penance’: brutal slashing of wages and social expenditures, raising of tariff duties at the expense of the consumer, etc. The state, furthermore, rescues business enterprises on the brink of bankruptcy, forcing the masses to foot the bill. Such enterprises are kept alive with subsidies, tax exemptions, orders for public works and armaments.
In short, the state thrusts itself into the breach left by the vanishing private customers. But such maneuvers are difficult under a democratic regime. As long as democracy survives, the masses, though thoroughly deceived and plundered, have some means of defense against the ‘great penance’: freedom of the press, universal suffrage, the right to organize into unions and to strike, etc. Feeble defenses, it is true, but still capable of setting some limit to the insatiable demands of the money power.

In particular, the resistance of the organized working class makes it rather difficult to simply lower wages. And so, in certain countries and under certain conditions, the bourgeoisie throws its traditional democracy overboard and conjures up with its invocations – and its subsidies – that ‘strong state’ which alone can strip the masses of all means of defense, tying their hands behind their backs, the better to empty their pockets.”
Daniel Guerin

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