Five new books: Ecological Crisis and Capital … El Niño in World History … Plate Tectonics … Marxist Essays … Origins of Agriculture and the State
Reading from the left
Archive | Marxist Ecology
Metabolic rifts
Vladimir Vernadsky and the Disruption of the Biosphere
Virtually unknown in the west, the great Russian geologist and geochemist pioneered scientific study of life’s impact on the Earth.
Marx 200
Ecosocialism and the recovery of Marx’s ecological legacy
An ecology that truly seeks to confront today’s challenges requires Marx’s remarkable analysis of the destructive logic inherent in the unlimited accumulation of capital.
Metabolic rifts
Earth’s Circular Economy: Recycling as a Law of Life
On every scale, from the smallest cells to the entire planet, the essential elements of life are constantly used and re-used. Biogeochemical cycles are the basis of the biosphere.
New books for reds and greens
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, May 2018
Environmentalism of the Rich, A Scientist’s Fight for a Nuclear Test Ban, Limits to Capitalist Nature, Cocoa, Extracting Profit from Africa, Indigenous Struggles in Peru
Global Environmental Change
Marx, nature, and political morality
Marx saw the rift between people and nature not only as a primary failing of capitalism, but also as a mechanism through which capitalism may be superseded.
Metabolic Rifts
Marx and Metabolism: Lost in translation?
Why wasn’t Marx’s concept of metabolic rift recognized until recently? Changed circumstances, unpublished works, and bad translations all played a role.
Populationism never dies
Ecological Marxism vs. environmental neo-Malthusianism: An old debate continues
Despite being consistently discredited, overpopulation ideology resurfaces with the same predictable regularity as capitalist crises. Only Marxism offers a clear alternative.
Books for Lefts
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, April 2018, Part 2
Three highly recommended books in the Democratic Marxism series: Marxisms in the 21st Century, Capitalism’s Crises, and The Climate Crisis.
Metabolic rifts
Five Revolutions: How bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis
Metabolic Rifts Today. Beginning a new series by Ian Angus, on how contemporary science illuminates and extends metabolic rift theory in the 21st century.
Interview with Zafer Ülger
Ecological crisis and capitalism in Turkey today
Turkish socialist describes growing understanding that Marx’s ideas on ecology are important, and that the oppression of labor, women and oppressed peoples is not separate from the crisis of nature and ecosystems
Book Review
The progress of this storm:
Nature and society in a warming world
Andreas Malm’s powerful critique of current environmental philosophies puts historical materialism and cutting-edge science at the center of a call for militant action
Book announcement
Face à l’anthropocène: Le capitalisme fossile et la crise du système terrestre
Facing the Anthropocene, by Ian Angus, will soon be available in French, published by Éditions Écosociété
Book Review
How to create an ecological society
Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams make a powerful case that ecological disaster can be only be overcome by a revolutionary transformation on socialist principles
A tribute
Alan Roberts, 1925-2017: A pioneer of radical environmentalism
The Marxist author of The Self-managing Environment rejected techno-fixes for environmental crises and exposed the fallacies of populationism
Essential essays
Ecosocialist Resources, January 2018
Recommended reading: CO2 rise and denialism; women, nature and capital; left eco-modernists; carbon pricing; massive insect die-off; food nutrients in decline
Book Review
Do seven cheap things explain the history of capitalism?
Ian Angus says a new book by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore replaces concrete analysis with an artificial schema that reduces the complex organic relationship between society and the rest of nature to cheap things
Essential reading
Paul Burkett on Kohei Saito’s ‘Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism’
The author of Marx and Nature evaluates and introduces an important new book on the deep connections between natural science and political economy in Marx’s work
Interview: JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER
Capitalism, exterminism and the long ecological revolution
C&C begins the new year with an extensive interview with John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, about the need to fight for a revolutionary ecosocialist alternative to the profit-driven world capitalist system.
Ecosocialism
Marx’s ecological critique of political economy
Video: John Bellamy Foster on “Marx’s ‘Capital’ and the Earth” — political economy and the materialist understanding of nature