The Limits to Growth: Ecosocialism or Barbarism
A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on which it—and indeed, all life on Earth—relies. | more…
Surviving Through Community Building in Catastrophic Times
Over the last twenty years, China has gained recognition for its efforts to reduce pollution and remediate the effects of industrialization within its borders. To mitigate the adverse effects of this reality, communities are returning to grassroots projects that present an alternative to unchecked globalization. | more…
Climate Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century
Climate imperialism has emerged as a new—and potentially even the most lethal—form of imperialism in the world economy today. Confronting it requires recognizing and dealing with all its different aspects. But it also requires addressing the monopolies of knowledge created by the global regime of intellectual property rights that has been instituted and cemented by hegemonic world powers. | more…
We Only Have One Planet—Defending It Will Require Collective Measures
As climate change and the deforestation of the Amazon alters conditions of life across Latin America, it is clear that planetary defense will require an organized mass movement of all working people against the levers of global capital. | more…
Measures to Defend Life on Planet Earth and Improve Living Conditions
Out of the dissatisfaction with the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Brazilian popular movements came together to propose measures to defend life on Earth. | more…
End Ecocidal Capitalism or Exterminate Life on Planet Earth: A South African Contribution to Ecosocialist Strategy
The South African climate justice movement presents a model for popular revolt against the ecofascist project. | more…
Surviving Collapse Through Social Transformation and Regeneration
As the effects of the climate crisis become ever-more deeply felt worldwide, our vision of the future must be grounded in radical imaginaries of the world to come, based on the experiences of those who suffer most under the current system of exploitation and violence. | more…
Ecology and the Future of History
Contradicting previous liberal notions of an “end of history,” humanity is now facing unprecedented threats to our species’ survival, but an environmental proletariat to combat them is emerging. | more…
June 2022 (Volume 74, Number 2)
Time is running out for the world to carry out the social transformations necessary to avert irreversible climate catastrophe, keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 1.5°C (or below 2°C). The most optimistic scenario currently provided by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes a pathway in which the increase in temperature will not rise to 1.5°C until 2040, peaking at 1.6°C, and then falling back to 1.4°C by the end of this century. But to achieve this will require revolutionary scale transformational change in global social relations affecting the human relation to the climate and the planetary environment as a whole. | more…
Panopticon
Capitalism’s two main underpinnings are control and exploitation/expropriation. While there are many sites of control they are all generally supportive of the interests of capital, namely, the endless drive to accumulate wealth. They all help to ensure that we behave so that the system continues to reproduce itself. Since workplaces are the sites where profits are extracted from our labor, it is here that control is most critical. | more…
Mészáros and Chávez: The Philosopher and the Llanero
What made István Mészáros’s life so fascinating, and relevant to issues of socialist construction, was that, having seen both sides of the Cold War, he came to perceive both “real socialism” and twentieth-century capitalism as two variants of the same system. He called this the capital system. The basic commonality among most countries of both the East and the West in the twentieth century was the extraction of surplus labor from workers who did not control their own work processes. | more…
Mészáros and Chávez: “The Point from Which to Move the World Today”
István Mészáros was a global thinker strongly committed to anti-imperialist struggles. In this respect, he allied himself with those fighting for socialist transformation in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, and elsewhere. He argued that in the descending phase of capitalism there was a “downward equalization of the rate of exploitation,” by which he meant a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, enforced by a global system of monopolistic competition. | more…
The Roots of the Science-Practice Gap: A Materialist View
The scientific development of humanity—that is, the ability to investigate the planet collectively, integrating reason and empirical data—allowed humans to understand the world with increasing precision and transform it powerfully. Despite this, attitudes against this knowledge have been widespread, both individually and collectively. | more…