How are independent and alternative media adapting and struggling in the current environment? What remains so valuable about these publications? How are independent media able to speak to issues where the “mainstream” media has proven an utter failure? | more…
“Foster and Clark show that the exploitation of wage labor in the capitalist production process is essentially tied to the expropriation of the natural world, the refusal to socially acknowledge care labor as socially necessary labor, the privatization of our common cultural heritage, the treatment of non-white communities as places where the social pathologies of capitalism (unemployment, poverty, and so on) can be concentrated, and so on. From this perspective workers, environmentalists, feminists, community activists, and anti-racists have good reason to make common cause.” | more…
In a recent review of Rob Wallace’ latest work, we are reminded that “If the virus has a source it is not Yunnan but the boardrooms of giant corporations.” The review takes the time to name the culprits.. | more…
On the first Friday in March, SftP member Joseph Graves Jr. interviewed Rob Wallace about his work Dead Epidemiologists. Grave’s expertise in epidemiology and the disproportionate effects of infectious diseases on racial minorities steered the conversation as Wallace offered his take on the relationship between industrial agriculture, capitalist modes of production and the Covid-19 crisis. | more…
From Modi’s India to Erdogan’s Turkey neofascist autocratic regimes have taken hold…The result: widespread immiseration and discontent. In its wake, demagogues exploit the situation. They are coming to power by scapegoating, instigating violence against minorities, coupled with loud calls for ‘getting our country back,’ and lots of flag waving… | more…
Just after January 6th, Gerald Horne was one of the first to remind us that “mobocracy,” generally driven by settler colonialist impulses and schemes, has been a potent force throughout this country’s history… | more…
Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the pathbreaking Capital and Imperialism—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production… | more…
Comparing the health systems of Cuba and the United States, Don Fitz’ book “Cuban Health Care” presents a startling statistic: The cost of healthcare per person in Cuba is one twentieth that of the US. “Why?” Peter Arkell asks, and Fitz answers: “Poor countries simply cannot afford such an inefficient health system”… | more…
“In the middle of 1856, the soon-to-be-celebrated poet Walt Whitman visited an impounded slave ship in Brooklyn. The taking of the ship was an unusual occurrence, as it was one of the few illegal slavers seized by an otherwise lethargic Washington, D.C., and Whitman wanted to give his readers a tour of the vessel, which had been designed to add even more enslaved laborers to the millions already ensnared in this system of iniquity, including of its hold, where those victimized were to be ‘laid together spoon-fashion.’” | more…
“We talked long into the night calling into question everything we had been brought up to believe….One night, it was all cozy and almost comfortable when I was in a pub with Billy and Seamus drinking, talking, and laughing for several hours. I would think back on it later with a strong sense of pathos, in light of what happened later, in light of how they both died. On that night, however, we were comrades and all seemed well,” says Helena Sheehan in a recent interview with The Irish Echo… | more…
Until recently many leftist theorists tended to understand materialism solely in economic terms, arguing almost on principle that historical materialism had nothing to do with ecology. The wider public, in turn, tended to presume that ecology fundamentally originated with early scientific Malthusian theories. On the contrary, as Foster demonstrates in “The Return of Nature” and throughout his talk, the development of ecology as a critical perspective arose from the socialist and materialist critique of capitalist extraction and industrialization… | more…
“A cast of characters, dramatic tensions and intellectual sword fights.” That’s how Morning Star‘s Helen Mercer described The Return of Nature last week. The reader-owned co-operative paper recommends Foster’s Deutscher Prize winning work as both a “challenging account of the interaction between ecological science and dialectical materialism,” and a book with “a lyrical style which makes the details fascinating and absorbing”… | more…
Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that will help us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies…. | more…