{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":82,"pdf_page":82,"physical_index":82,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e92f0fe7aa2b97de90bb7869561312f41dfcb7dcb8b3092acd07bb7a00772313"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants.63\n\nBut the drive of capital to create surplus value leads to it undermining of the vitality of nature-and the conditions for human life:\n\nExploitation and squandering of the vitality of the soil takes the place of conscious rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.64\n\nThere arises \"an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life\" .65 \"Capitalist production develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer . . . \"66 Just as \"large-scale industry . . .lays waste and destroys . . .labour-power\", \"large-scale mechanised agriculture ... directly exhausts the natural vitality of the soil . . . \"67 Capitalist production, Marx recognised, was slowly destroying the very basis on which it, like all human production, rested-the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of the natural world.\n\nMarx's remarks were mainly concerned with the immediate effects of capitalist agriculture on soil fertility, which in his time could only be overcome by the use of guano-nitrous mineral deposits resulting from thousands of years of bird droppings to be found mainly on the coast of northern Chile. Marx's insights were taken up and developed in this sense by Karl Kautsky in the 1 890s as implying a crisis of food production in the short term. But they seemed to lose their relevance with the discovery of how nitrous fertilisers could be made artificially (through the Haber-Bosch process) during World War One and world food production was able to expand without difficulty throughout the 20th century. But analyses of the relation between humanity and nature had wider implications than a simple concern with food output, as was spelt out by Engels in his manuscript The Dialectics of Nature, which was not published until 30 years after his death, in the mid- 1 920s.\n\n82\n\nUnderstanding the System: Marx and Beyond","previous_page":81,"next_page":83}