Working Nature

What do we talk about when we talk about energy? We do so all the time, but rarely does anyone bother to open this black box that fuels everything. In Working Nature, Daniela Russ makes the most classical critical move - stripping something of its presumed naturalness - and demonstrates that 'energy' is a regiment imposed on nature through myriad acts over the past centuries. No lump of coal ever jumped into the capitalist furnace of its own volition. Nature has been dragged into the fire, and not without resistance. Consistently brilliant and illuminating, Working Nature announces the arrival of a major new voice on the scene of ecological Marxism. -- Andreas Malm, co-author of The Long Heat
In this brilliant book, Russ proposes that energy has a history: not just the history of a human idea, nor the simple materialist history of increasing exploitation of nature. Under capitalist industrialization, energy came into being as something new in the world, forming a novel arrangement of both natural things and human bodies. This "energetic economy" has served as both a misrecognized mode of domination and an unrealized promise of freedom -- Timothy Mitchell, author of The Alibi of Capital