Coming round to ourselves: Labour's self-education in the disrupted Earth system

Abstract

This paper develops an eco-Marxist interpretation of the discovery that Earth is an integrated system, a discovery we have made in grasping our own role in shaping it. It criticizes an idea pervasive among Earth system scientists that our disruption of Earth is a function of human power, while bringing out the truth in the thought from Paul Crutzen that our species has become a self-conscious manager of the Earth system. If labour encounters itself in the disrupted Earth system, it finds itself in an environment increasingly hostile to human life. Yet labour may still impart a lesson to itself, on its own domination and the disorder in our relation to nature this domination effects. To fully recognize ourselves in an Earth system we are actively reshaping would mean grasping our self-conscious relation with it as the form of our dependency on it.