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Marx and the Climate Crisis #1: Marx and Nature by Sean O’Brien
Lecture, Marx and the Climate Crisis the 87 press Lecture, Marx and the Climate Crisis the 87 press

Marx and the Climate Crisis #1: Marx and Nature by Sean O’Brien

This four-part lecture series asks what we can learn from Marx about the climate crisis: its origins, its impacts, and what possible solutions we might seek in the face of increasingly inadequate government efforts to mitigate the escalating devastation worldwide. Developments Marx criticized in early industrial capitalism have had enormous consequences for the planet’s eco-systems, not least in the form of carbon-fuelled climate change. But a century and a half has passed since the early industrial period. What could Marx have to teach us about environmental crisis in the twenty-first century? Was he not a developmentalist and leading proponent of industrial modernization? Did the socialist economies of the twentieth century not pursue a productivist model that churned out CO2 at rates on par with the capitalist world-economy? And what of China, an ostensibly communist country and one of the biggest polluters in the world?

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[Digital Poetics 4.9] Four Poems by Stuart McPherson
Hythe, Digital Poetics, Poetry the 87 press Hythe, Digital Poetics, Poetry the 87 press

[Digital Poetics 4.9] Four Poems by Stuart McPherson

Set firmly within contemporary Britain, these four pieces look at the linkage between power, media, and financial institutions, and explore their impact upon displaced people, the impoverished, and the working class. The poems discuss how narratives are controlled, how power is wielded with a view to maintaining the status quo, often at the negation of human life and the health of wider society itself.

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[Digital Poetics 4.2] Ophélimité: a specimen of emptiness by Keston Sutherland
Hythe, Digital Poetics, Essay the 87 press Hythe, Digital Poetics, Essay the 87 press

[Digital Poetics 4.2] Ophélimité: a specimen of emptiness by Keston Sutherland

This essay describes some of the early attacks on Marx by right-wing economists. It considers some of the consequences of the rejection of the labour theory of value and the development of an increasingly mathematized economic theory of marginal utility. What are the implications of this shift from a critical theory of the lives of producers to an econometric and nominalist theory of the habits of consumers? What does it mean for poetry?

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[Digital Poetics 4.1] Two Poems by Shani Cadwallender
Hythe, Digital Poetics, Poetry the 87 press Hythe, Digital Poetics, Poetry the 87 press

[Digital Poetics 4.1] Two Poems by Shani Cadwallender

These poems, paying notice to un-idyllic trees in urban landscapes, probe at the uneasy but productive identifications between humans and nature made possible by language. The first, about a poplar on Peckham Rye, reinscribes the site of Blake’s vision of Ezekiel in an examination of literary legacy; the second explores perception and the trouble with anthropocentric metaphor through an observation of leaves that linger around streetlights.

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