Corporate giants are driving the world towards environmental disaster. Will self-preservation force them to pull back and end the destruction?
Book Review
Archive | Capitalism
Book Review
The Omega Principle: A vicious circle of fish, cattle and capitalism
How a giant industry that plunders the seas for tiny fish is reinforcing unsustainable industrial agriculture
John Bellamy Foster:
‘There is still time for an ecological revolution to prevent Hothouse Earth’
We need hundreds of millions of people to mobilize in an independent, revolutionary campaign to reconstitute global production and consumption.
Reading matters
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, August 2018
Six new books for reds & greens. Marxist History of Capitalism. Superbugs. Rising Oceans. Capitalism in Critical Theory. Food Bank Nations. American Oligarchy
Guardian Gets It Wrong
An ecosocialist reply to a defender of ‘green capitalism’
People running big corporations—indeed, those running businesses of all sizes—seek to maximize profits not because they are misguided, but because that’s their job in a capitalist economy.
Movement building
The fires this time: Implications for ecosocialist strategy
A call for public discussion of the role of deindustrialization in building an alternative to the catastrophic course of 21st century capitalism.
No way out
Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich
The wealthier they are, the more they fear that others will try to take their wealth. No wonder the super-rich are building bunkers to escape the apocalypse.
Pseudo-Solutions
An engineer, an economist, and an ecomodernist walk into a bar and order a free lunch . . .
Stan Cox says ecomodernists are far better at inventing technological fantasies than at finding ways to solve environmental crises
Book Excerpt
Why the food movement needs to understand capitalism
To fully appreciate the challenges we face in transforming our food system we need to explore the economic and political context in which food is grown, sold and consumed in the world today
Book review
Poisoned City: How Flint fought back
Anna Clark’s new book shows how working people in Michigan organized and fought back when neoliberal austerity policies poisoned their drinking water.
Discussion
Ecosocialism and consumerism
Commodity accumulation leads people to identify with the means of destruction. We must aim to disintegrate links in the chain of capital reproduction.
The movement we need
Andreas Malm: Revolutionary Strategy in a Warming World
How can climate justice activists stop capitalism’s drive to catastrophe? The author of Fossil Capital considers lessons from past revolutions and proposes an action program for today.
Interview
Andreas Malm: ‘Without a mass movement we don’t stand a chance against fossil capital’
The author of ‘Fossil Capital’ and ‘The Progress of This Storm’ says there are reasons to be hopeful, but success depends on building a global movement of unprecedented scale
creative self-destruction
Why corporate promises to cut carbon can’t be trusted
Relying on markets and corporate responses to the climate crisis will not work, because profits always come first
Reading for reds and greens
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, January 2018
Seven new books on the new terrain of class war, social reproduction theory, limits to NGO radicalism, ideas for change, shrinking the technosphere, technology and inequality, and property formation in colonial North America
Book Review
Private Oceans: The enclosure and marketisation of the seas
Neoliberal policies boost profits for corporate fishing, encourage overfishing, and squeeze out small fishers whose communities have fished for generations
Open letter to the people of the USA
Economic reconstruction, debt cancellation and self-determination in Puerto Rico!
One month after Hurricane Maria: ‘We need an adequately funded program of economic reconstruction (including the transition to renewable energy), the powers to carry it out and a true process of political self-determination.’
In Memoriam
István Mészáros: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction
István Mészáros, one of the finest political philosophers of our time, died on October 1. As this article shows, he was one of the first Marxists to identify the global environmental crisis as a central contradiction of late capitalism.
Hurricane Aftermath
How the ruling class remade New Orleans
What will happen after the destruction caused by Harvey and Irma? The experience of New Orleans after Katrina shows what to expect when capitalists profit from disaster.
Furious torrents
Hurricane Harvey and the Dialectics of Nature
Houston is the city where capitalism’s victory over nature is the most complete — and also where nature takes its ultimate revenge