Prolekult

Approaching Marxism is an educational series providing introductions to core Marxist concepts, their ambiguities and development, and the debates that they have spawned since. In this episode, we take a look at Marx's theory of the metabolic rift, its articulation through the work of the second-wave of contemporary western ecosocialist thought (particularly in the work of John Bellamy-Foster), the importance of this theory in disputes between first-wave and second-wave modern ecosocialist thought, and more recent disputes over the dialectics of nature.

It is often argued that the industrial revolution and the fossil fuel economy were driven by a need to increase productivity.

Old video in context of the present state of the war for Palestine. The turning point which has provided the basis for the present wave of Palestinian resistance was solidified in the last major uprising in 2021. This video looked at this uprising when it was happening.

Approaching Marxism is an educational series providing introductions to core Marxist concepts, their ambiguities and development, and the debates that they have spawned since. In this episode, we look at the original revisionist controversy in the German Social Democrat Party (1895-1903) as a window into evaluating both the need for a revolutionary orthodoxy, and the necessity of linking theory and action.

Key quote from the video:

"Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias [good family fathers], they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition." - Marx

"Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in [land] division, namely, equality. In the same way association also re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering." - Marx

Against Segregation: approaching the British disabled peoples' movement is a short, introductory video looking at one of the most significant but neglected social movements of the 20th Century in Britain. We provide a short overview of the movement's historical development - considering its key stages - as well as brief outlines of the core ideas developed by its radical wing - the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation.

This video draws heavily on Judy Hunt's history of the movement - one of only two activist histories of the British DPM - and from an interview with her on the Prolekult podcast.

To be clear: this is the first time since February 2022 that British troops will be deployed in Ukraine openly (they have already been active covertly). That is a major escalation, verging on catastrophic. Whether or not the troops are there for training (doubt), the potential for open direct conflict is huge.

New podcast available now!

Episode description:

This episode is the second part of a longer engagement with eco-socialist theory, environmental politics, ecology, science and revolutionary politics. Here, James and Luke dive into debates between eco-modernist and degrowth tendencies.

"Beyond the Tipping Points" is a short video poem on the rapidly increasing pace of capitalism's environmental destruction and extinction crisis.

Poem in written form:

"Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." - Marx

"Estrangement appears not only in the fact that the means of my life belong to another and that my desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that all things are other than themselves, that my activity is other than itself, and that finally – and this goes for the capitalists too – an inhuman power rules over everything." - Marx

"The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the political economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer." - Marx