Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) it says. Climate & Capitalism has received review copies of some of these books, but we do not receive any payment for reviews or for reader purchases.
Jennifer Clapp
TITANS OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE
How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters
MIT Press
The products that farmers must buy—from seeds and fertilizers to tractors and combines and more—are controlled by a handful of giant corporations that utterly dominate the market. Clapp examines the forces that enabled this extreme concentration of power and the entrenchment of industrial agriculture, illuminating how corporate power has driven the “lock-in” of industrial agriculture, despite all its known social and ecological costs.
Martin Crook
CAPITALISM, COLONISATION AND THE ECOCIDE-GENOCIDE NEXUS
University of London Press
Focusing on the former British colonies of Kenya and Australia, Crook examines the drivers of ecologically induced genocide—environmental destruction resulting in conditions of life that fundamentally threaten a social group’s cultural or physical existence. Putting forward a political economy of genocide, he enriches our understanding of genocide colonisation, and the capitalist mode of production that underpins developmentalism.
Bruno Leipold
CITIZEN MARX
Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought
Princeton University Press
Challenging common depictions of Marx, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism. He shows how Marx positioned his republican communism to displace both antipolitical socialism and anticommunist republicanism. One of Marx’s great contributions, he suggests, was to place politics, especially democratic politics, at the heart of socialism.
Alvin Finkel
HUMANS
The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality
James Lorimer & Company
Human beings have walked the earth for 300,000 years and through most of that time ordinary people built and sustained egalitarian societies. When tyrants seized power they faced constant resistance from below. Canadian Marxist historian Alvin Finkel offers a long view of human history, from our first communities to COVID-19 and the global environmental crisis. A welcome alternative to accounts that focus on the rich and powerful, or predict disaster caused by unchangeable human nature.
Henry Gee
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE
Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction
St. Martin’s Press
For example, this. Homo sapiens will soon be extinct, doomed by our biology and our destructive behavior. Unless, that is, we leave the earth and colonize other planets as soon as possible. Read to see how completely a well-meaning liberal can miss the plot.
Katarina Kolozova, William Paul Cockshott, and Greg Michaelson
DEFENDING MATERIALISM
The Uneasy History of the Atom in Science and Philosophy
Bloomsbury Academic
In early 20th-century and before, many scientists doubted that atoms actually existed. An intense philosophical controversy involving Lenin, Einstein and many others focused on materialism and a range of idealist alternatives. The authors examine both sides of the idealism/materialism divide, and show how modern science lends new strength historical materialism.
Nat Dyer
RICARDO’S DREAM
How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray
Bristol University Press
Adam Smith gave us the invisible hand, but it was David Ricardo, the “other founding father” of capitalist economics, who began the practice of making policy recommendations based on abstract mathematical models. His influential theory of trade underpinned globalization and hides, behind numbers, a history of power, empire, and slavery. A valuable study of economic thought and its often-deadly impact on the lives of real people.
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