Chris Williams, author, with Fred Magdoff, of Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, recently reviewed a book by Paul Burkett and MR’s John Bellamy Foster, Marx and the Earth: An Anti-critique, published by Haymarket Books.
“A long-standing critique of the writings of Marx and Engels has been their supposed lack of concern for the environmental damage caused by capitalism. Worse, even as they envisaged and fought for a world of human freedom, their conception of socialism showed a comprehensive disregard for how humans interact with nature. ¶ Marx has been viewed as Promethean: as soon as the proletariat had taken over the factories, its job would be simply to build more factories, in ever-expanding spheres of production. Given that the regimes claiming the mantle of Marx in the twentieth century took exactly that pathway, it’s not hard to understand why this charge gained such credence. ¶ However, that position has become wholly untenable thanks to two decades of scholarship by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett….”
Read the review at the International Socialist Review
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