It is fashionable to argue that nature and society are obsolete categories. The two, we are told, can no longer be distinguished from one another; continuing loyalty to the ‘binary’ of the natural and the social blinds us to the logic of current ecological crises. This paper outlines an argument for the opposite position: now more than ever – particularly in our rapidly warming world – we need to sift out the social components from the natural, if we wish to understand the crises and retain the possibility of intervening in them. Tracing the current of hybridism to the writings of Bruno Latour, this article ends with a critique of the foremost proponent of a hybridism in Marxist garb: Jason W. Moore.

Andreas Malm teaches at the University of Lund. He is the author of Fossil Capital, winner of the 2016 Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Food and drink in Top Bar/Fusion after the seminar.

All welcome to attend.

This event is open to the general public.