marxism

If you have a solid diff calculus background, one of my favorite intro to thermodynamics texts is Sandler's Chemical, Biochemical and Engineering Thermodynamics. Keep in mind it is less heavy on the abstraction because it's an engineering/practical text instead of a physics one, in fact It was one of the suggested textbooks for my thermo 1 and 2 classes in college, and those were clases only for chemical engineering majors. But it's really well explained and well written, it made many weird concepts like entropy, enthalpy, Gibbs' free energy, fugacity, and so on suddenly "click" for me.

For Marx's understanding of political economy and planetary metabolism, Kohei Saito is, in my opinion, the authority right now. 'Marx in the Anthropocene' is his most well known work, condensing Marx's proposals for an ecological communism, but to better understand Marx's link to contemporary scientists, including people doing thermodynamics, 'Karl Marx's Ecosocialism' is a better starting point, even if it's way more dense and abstract.

Comrade @[email protected] wrote a paper on thermodynamics and Dialectical Materialism. I haven't read it yet (doing the Capital reading group and the Imperialism reading group for now), but it's kinda funny that less than a month ago such a paper was written by a regular here.

There's also the essay Dialectics and Quantum Mechanics, haven't read it yet either and not thermo.

It's not exactly what you're asking for but since others already gave you that, you should also check out Fossil Capital by Andreas Malm which deals with the rise of steam power and develops a theory of both the social forces behind the adoption of the fossil economy, but also a technical scientific perspective. It doesn't necessarily use thermodynamics to model social forces, but it is in the intersection of thermodynamics and Marxism.

Also I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the work finally getting the attention it deserves, which is practitioners with backgrounds in traditional ecological knowledge re-examining the ways we look at systems.

https://ecologyandsociety.org/vol27/iss1/art14/

And I phrased it so weirdly because I’m still learning it, and haven’t dove into the topic enough to know more than the fact that I still need to listen to others. Anyway- this is the most fascinating part of systems engineering in the western field imo

Environment, Power, and Society by H.T. Odum is my number one favorite book for environmental systems engineering and looks at society through the same lens of power structures built around control of power flow. It’s literally the book that made my brain understand the basis of power and how it’s utilized. It has plenty of citations, and Odum and his colleague William Mitsch have a wealth of papers l, largely related to energy flow in wetland systems, but they worked on some of the foundational writing on the topic. It’s somewhat hard to track down a copy, so if you’re interested, but unable to find info, I’ll try and scan my copy to a pdf. I’ll try and dig up some papers today too if I can.

I guess that The Entropy Law and the Economic Process exists, but was maybe wondering if there are modern (more accessible perhaps) takes on the concept.