The perception that we are living in a critical historical period regarding the conditions of habitability on Earth—not only for humans but for many other living organisms too—is gaining more and more adepts among common people, academics, politicians, and social movements. This critical period has been typified as the planetary crisis of the Anthropocene Epoch and studies undertaken in the present century show that habitability on Earth is progressively deteriorating. | more…
Mariko Frame reviews The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to the World Beyond Capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan (Verso, 2022) and its explorations of the policies, vision, and strategies for social change required for the burgeoning movement. | more…
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of The Limits of Growth, one of the most influential, and also controversial, environmental studies ever written. No other environmental work of the 1970s offered such a direct challenge to the underlying assumptions of capitalist neoclassical growth economics, or was responded to so vehemently by establishment thinkers. | more…
How are we to understand the origins and historic significance of the concept of ecological civilization? What is its relation to ecological Marxism? And how does all of this relate to the worldwide revolutionary struggle aimed at transcending our current planetary emergency and protecting what Karl Marx called “the chain of human generations”—along with life in general? | more…
There is hardly any theme in Karl Marx’s theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fetishism in Capital, young Marx’s initial exploration of the term has rarely enjoyed critical attention. | more…
Our current geological time period, characterized by drastic planetary shifts due to anthropogenic climate change, is popularly known as the Anthropocene Epoch. Recent proposals for naming the first age of this epoch highlight capitalism’s central role in the ongoing climate crisis. | more…
More than twenty years after the publication of John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (2000), ecosocialist scholars continue to explore the evolution of Marx’s ecological thinking, from the Greek atomists to his later work on ethnology. | more…
John Bellamy Foster’s recent work, The Return of Nature, makes a strong case that Marxism’s central, materialist conception of nature and history makes it the best possible theoretical basis for radical ecological scholarship. | more…
For nearly sixty years, H. Bruce Franklin has built a body of work that touches on everything Herman Melville to the military-industrial complex to a lowly, little-known fish that is a historical keystone of the U.S. fishing history. | more…
Time is running out for humanity to avoid a catastrophic planetary tipping point. Widespread mass mobilizations of populations worldwide must fight to bring about revolutionary societal changes and dismantle neoliberal monopoly capitalism, with its reliance on extractive exploitation of our planet’s resources and communities. | more…
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…
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…
