Marxism and Earth's Habitability Crisis

Karl Marx once famously said that “there is only one science.” Today, when the integration of natural science, social science, and the humanities are desperately needed in order to address the contemporary planetary ecological crisis and chart a path forward for humanity, Carles Soriano has taken this task of theoretical synthesis on, rooting his analysis in both classical historical materialism and the most recent developments in science. This is a book that no one who is deeply concerned with the future of the world would want to ignore. --John Bellamy Foster, author The Dialectics of Ecology This book argues that as long as capitalism is globally dominant, there must be a crisis of habitability on Earth. Overcoming this crisis is not a matter of technology. Technological strategies need to be adopted to mitigate human impact on Earth, but as long as they are implemented on a capitalist basis the crisis will not be overcome. Unfortunately, this is not fully understood today, and initiatives to confront the crisis based on idealism and positivism flourish everywhere. This makes research into the main epistemological reasons for the misunderstanding of the relationship between the reproduction of capital and the crisis of habitability an urgent task, which is undertaken throughout the book. Such misunderstanding is ultimately related to the old problem of philosophy, the relationship between thought and being. A problem that the crisis of habitability expresses as the insurmountable contradiction between capitalist humans and nature. Carles Soriano Clemente is Senior researcher at Geosciences Barcelona, CSIC, Spain.