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Marxist ecology after Marx (‘The Return of Nature’ reviewed in ‘Critical Sociology’)

In Foster’s own words, ‘what we must dethrone today is the idol of capital itself, the concentrated power of class-based avarice, which now imperils the ecology of the earth’. This reaffirms the importance of the fusion of red and green. In effect, this fusion is a revival of the historical tradition started more than a century ago by socialist materialists such as Marx, Engels, Lankester, and Morris to combine socialism and ecology… | more…

Abolition democracy (Horne on Du Bois, in ‘The Nation’)

By the time his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction, was published in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois was already a rara avis—a prominent Black activist-intellectual in the midst of Jim Crow. Dapper and diminutive, and nattily clad in suit and tie, he was renowned throughout the country. The first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate, Du Bois cofounded the NAACP in 1909 and thereafter helped organize a pan-African movement that bedeviled European colonizers. But what distinguished his close study of slavery and Reconstruction (and does so even today) was its Marxism. Du Bois had been exposed to Marx’s penetrating analytical framework in the early 1890s in

Foster on ‘The Marx Revival’

On Saturday, May 7th John Bellamy Foster will present on the ecology section of “The Marx Revival” (Cambridge University Press), alongside Marcelo Musto, who will present the Communism section of the book. The event is co-sponsored by the Marxist Education Project and Shelter and Solidarity. | more…

Antifascism on the “home front” (Horne and the Criterion Collection)

During the Red Scare, a telling phrase came to describe some who had been clamoring for more demonstrative anti-Hitler manifestations before the U.S. entered the war in late 1941: “premature antifascists.” Outside a narrow wartime period, antifascist convictions were now seen from a postwar vantage as suspect, evidence of Communist loyalty. Now forgotten is that there was an offshoot of this tendency: one whose adherents we might call “premature antiracists”…. | more…

On “a coup in search of a legal theory” (Tigar interviewed on “Law and Disorder”)

In what might prove to be the most serious blow yet to Trump’s effort to stay out of jail, on March 28th, a federal judge ruled that both former president Trump and Atty. John Eastman who had advised him on how to overturn the 2020 election had most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States…. | more…

Urgently rethinking our relationship with the natural world: Where to start? (Listen to Foster interviewed on New Books Network)

The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way… | more…