Category: Monthly Review Press /

“An extraordinarily useful book”: Socialist Review looks at A Redder Shade of Green

February 20, 2024

The author describes this collection of articles as ‘debates, polemics and arguments because although environmentalists, scientists, and socialists share concerns about the devastation of our planet, we frequently differ on explanations and solutions’. The argument Angus repeatedly returns to is a defence of the Marxist method as he understands that, ‘If our political analysis doesn’t have a firm basis in the natural sciences, our efforts to change the world will be in vain.

“Vivid, incisive”: Counterfire reviews The Syriza Wave

February 20, 2024

‘You hold your nose, you take it,’ said Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras in a recent interview with The Guardian. ‘You know that there is no other way.’ He was referring to his astonishing volte-face in summer 2015: a few months after being elected prime minister of Greece thanks to Syriza’s opposition to the EU’s austerity drive and refusal to grant debt relief, he suddenly caved in to the pressure from Brussels and imposed a harsh programme of spending cuts and privatisations: the very policies that he had so vehemently denounced in the years before, making him one of the most popular figures on the European left….

“An essential read”: London Green Left Blog reviews Facing the Anthropocene

February 20, 2024

The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers to the start of a new geological epoch which, according to most leading Earth System scientists, has now replaced the Holocene. It means geological strata deposits will now be, for the first time, massively dominated by those of recent human origin - especially the release of carbon and other greenhouse gases as a consequence of increased burning of fossil fuels - as opposed to those due to natural changes....

Ecological Rift and Revolution: two seminal books discussed in Economic & Political Weekly

February 20, 2024

Our lives are inundated by alienation: auto-forwarding advertisements, ‘memes’ and ‘selfies’ replacing our self-consciousness; isolated faces in a crowd; people becoming machines…. Over the past couple of hundred years, people have been facing increasing alienation at many levels: alienation from oneself, from each other, from our acts, from the things we produce, and from our environment—from nature itself. This last type of alienation—or rift—between humanity and nature is the concern of John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York in The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. But this rift exists in interconnection to the other types of alienation, and the authors show that in the study of ecology we cannot avoid an analysis of the structure of capitalist society which produces them all….

István Mészáros: December 19, 1930 – October 1, 2017

February 20, 2024

New! Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy

February 20, 2024

Karl Marx has frequently been described as a “Promethean.” According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance through a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, not only from mainstream environmentalists but also from ecosocialists, many of whom reject Marx outright. Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx’s ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx’s central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks—published only recently and still being translated—Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism.

New! Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce

February 20, 2024

In Trump in the White House, John Bellamy Foster does what no other Trump analyst has done before: he places the president and his administration in full historical context. Foster reveals that Trump is merely the endpoint of a stagnating economic system whose liberal democratic sheen has begun to wear thin.

“Living Well is the Best Revolution”: The Progressive Populist reviews Creating an Ecological Society

February 20, 2024

A book for a future society of buen vivir, or living well, with nature and other people? Yes, write Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams in Creating an Ecological Society. How to achieve sustainability with humanity and the planet? Start with context and vision to transcend the status quo of bio-sphere destruction. Reform is a part of the revolutionary process, according to the authors. It is not an either-or binary. The vision thing matters when it comes to the false consciousness of blaming other people for the system’s baked-in flaws. Dividing the working class to weaken it is elites’ go-to tactic. We see that now....