CRACK CAPITALISM

5. Appropriately, Foster begins his book on Marx's Ecology (2000: 1) with a
telling quote from Marx's Grundrisse: 'It is not the unity of living and active
humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange
with nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process,
but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human
existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited
only in the relation of wage labour and capital' (1857/1 973: 489).
6. See Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/1979). For a critique, see Wilding
(2008).
7. See Williams (1976: 187-8) on the change in the meaning attached to
'nature'. See also Federici, who speaks (2004: 203) of 'the profound
alienation that modern science has instituted between human beings and
nature'. Probably it would be more accurate to say that science consolidated
rather than instituted this alienation, which was part of the transformation
of human activity.
8. The quotations from Marx and Engels in this paragraph are cited by Foster
(2000).
9. On this, see the excellent critique of Latour by Adrian Wilding (2010).
10. Much of this book has been written in the middle of the Jardin Etnobotanico
of San Andres Cholula, a beautiful garden created by Eloina Peliiez and
dedicated to the struggle for a different relation between human and
non-human forms of life, the fight against the constitution of nature as an
object. Both this thesis and the whole book spring from a life of constant
practical-theoretical dialogue with Eloina.
11. Quoted by Marx in 'On the Jewish Question' (1843/1975: 172) and cited
in Foster (2000: 74).
THESIS 18
1. On our power, see the interview by Marina Sitrin with Neka of MTD de
Solano and Sergio of Lavaca (2005: 195; 2006: 163): 'Neka: Power as
capability and not as a position of command. Sergio: Unlike the noun - to
come to power, to obtain power - we think of power as a verb.'
2. For more on the distinction between power-to and power-over, see Holloway
(2002/2005: Ch. 3).
3. For a similar argument, see Pashukanis (1924/2002).
4. The same can be said of the notion of an 'other economics', which makes
sense only to the extent that it focuses on the overcoming of the separation
of economics from life.
5. There are many other ways in which we externalise our power, that is, give
other people power over us - in our relation with doctors, plumbers, lovers,
friends and so on, but here we concentrate on the question of the state.
THESIS 19
1. As Lukacs puts it (1923/1988: 90): 'time sheds its qualitative, variable,
flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum
filled with quantifiable "things" (the reified, mechanically objectified
"performance" of the worker, wholly separated from his total human
personality): in short, it becomes space.' On the reification of time, see
also Tischler (2005b).
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