Hmm: Andy Revkin's Pace University colleague Chris Williams quotes Karl Marx while using Sandy to argue that we need to "get rid of capitalism"?

Frankenstorms and Climate Change: How the 1% Created a Monster

There is little doubt that freakish and unnaturally-assembled storms are a taste of what the future holds under an economic system that has “interfered with the tranquility of domestic affections,” galvanized the forces of nature into a fury of clashing dislocations as we pump ever-more heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere and industrial filth into our lungs.

The riptides of climate change are beginning to tear at the fabric of our biosphere as the earth’s climate system lurches, in ungainly and lumbering jerks, from the relatively dormant and benign stability of the last 10,000 years, toward a more volatile, violent and less hospitable new climatic state previously unknown to human civilization.

Alluding, therefore, to Mary Shelley’s great work of gothic horror through the appellation of Frankenstorm for the confluence of Hurricane Sandy and a cold front is, in many ways, quite apt.
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Never has Marx’s comment in the Communist Manifesto on the nature of capitalism been so apposite:

“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

At this point, as a thunderous storm barrels up the east coast of the United States, still suffering from an unprecedented drought in other parts of the country, it seems indisputable that the capitalist system has put the entire web of life on a collision course with a stable biosphere and climate system. One of those systems has to give, and there is no indication that it will be capitalism...if we don’t get rid of capitalism, there won’t be much of a world left to imagine.
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In other words, Dr. Frankenstein, much like capitalism, has created its own gravedigger, in the shape of the organized workers, peasants and communities who must fight in the streets, fields and forests of the world for the emancipation of ourselves and our planet.
...Chris Williams is a professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis.

Faculty and Staff | Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies | Pace University

Andrew Revkin has joined Pace University as a senior fellow for environmental understanding