What are they? And how do they distinctly but collaboratively operate as part of an overall architecture of capitalist rule? And then also, why this question of freedom? It's not what you might expect to encounter in a book about the environment.

Absolutely.

I'll start with that second piece because I think it is sort of not necessarily intuitive to make an argument about capitalism and nature and sort of the problem with capitalism's treatment of nature is rooted in capitalism's limitation of human freedom.

In fact, I think we often have almost the opposite argument that it's human freedom that has led to the destruction of nature or that human freedom is somehow purchased at nature's expense and So I wanted to counter or challenge the argument, and I try to do that in a few places in the book, but it really also stems from sort of a dissatisfaction with some of the ways that we tend to talk about what's wrong with capitalism and environmental and ecological and eco-socialist discourses, which are usually some version of Capitalism destroys nature.

Capitalism has opened up this metabolic rift between humanity and non-human nature.

It sort of deteriorates the soil.

Capitalism undermines its background conditions, that capitalism is maybe self-destructive even in some kind of eco-crisis theories.

And,

What are they? And how do they distinctly but collaboratively operate as part of an overall architecture of capitalist rule? And then also, why this question of freedom? It's not what you might expect to encounter in a book about the environment.

Absolutely.

I'll start with that second piece because I think it is sort of not necessarily intuitive to make an argument about capitalism and nature and sort of the problem with capitalism's treatment of nature is rooted in capitalism's limitation of human freedom.

In fact, I think we often have almost the opposite argument that it's human freedom that has led to the destruction of nature or that human freedom is somehow purchased at nature's expense and So I wanted to counter or challenge the argument, and I try to do that in a few places in the book.

But it really also stems from sort of a dissatisfaction with some of the ways that we tend to talk about what's wrong with capitalism and environmental and ecological and eco-socialist discourses, which are usually some version of capitalism.

Capitalism destroys nature.

Capitalism has opened up this metabolic rift between humanity and non-human nature.

And,

Where does this analysis you're making of this core dialectical contradiction between form and content fit into the broader sweep of Marxism from Marx to contemporary Marxism? And then what is the upshot of that insight for understanding non-human nature?

Yeah, this is a great question.

I think it speaks to precisely, I think, both the ways that I've tried to draw on and, you know, learn from and redeploy marks and value form theory and some of these analytic tools that I find very helpful and to modify or sort of think about them slightly differently.

The quote that you read out around the sort of way that Marxist social theories lose track of materiality, I think is in some ways not even something that's explicitly in Marx himself.

I think Marx actually does say, you know, the commodity has to have this sort of material form, you know, obviously is use and exchange value, that these social relations are are sort of instantiated in a material object of some kind.

And so there's that acknowledgement certainly in Marx, and I don't think most Marxist social theory would deny that exactly.

I think that it's more that the focus has so often been on reminding us that it's not just as it appears on the surface that it's not just the thing of the commodity that we're not just sort of relating to that thing that there is a sort of another uh you know there's another person whose labor is producing that that we're sort of enmeshed in this web of social relations and so i i get that point i think at some point i just became a bit frustrated with hearing over and over it's not a thing it's a social relation and i was like well yes i okay uh a um I think there's sometimes certain refrains that we sort of repeat as Marxists, and often they're correct in some form, but sometimes they can kind of just end up getting stuck at like, it's not a thing, it's a social issue over and over and over.

How does this concept of super assumption help explain the free gift of nature under capitalism and also capitalism's complex, perhaps more complex than we thought, relationship to the domination of the labor process?

Where does this analysis you're making of this core dialectical contradiction between form and content fit into the broader sweep of Marxism from Marx to contemporary Marxism? And then what is the upshot of that insight for understanding non-human nature?

Yeah, this is a great question.

I think it speaks to precisely, I think, both the ways that I've tried to draw on and, you know, learn from and redeploy marks and value form theory and some of these analytic tools that I find very helpful and to modify or sort of think about them slightly differently.

The quote that you read out around the sort of way that Marxist social theories lose track of materiality, I think is in some ways not even something that's explicitly in Marx himself.

I think Marx actually does say, you know, the commodity has to have this sort of material form, you know, obviously is use and exchange value, that these social relations are are sort of instantiated in a material object of some kind.

And so there's that acknowledgement certainly in Marx, and I don't think most Marxist social theory would deny that exactly.

I think that it's more that the focus has so often been on reminding us that it's not just as it appears on the surface that it's not just the thing of the commodity that we're not just sort of relating to that thing that there is a sort of another uh you know there's another person whose labor is producing that that we're sort of enmeshed in this web of social relations and so i i get that point i think at some point i just became a bit frustrated with hearing over and over it's not a thing it's a social relation and i was like well yes i okay uh a um I think there's sometimes certain refrains that we sort of repeat as Marxists, and often they're correct in some form, but sometimes they can kind of just end up getting stuck at like, it's not a thing, it's a social issue over and over and over.

How does this concept of super assumption help explain the free gift of nature under capitalism and also capitalism's complex, perhaps more complex than we thought, relationship to the domination of the labor process?