E-Verify is back on the political agenda. ¶ For years, politicians have wanted to force all of the country’s 7.7 million private employers to check new hires against this online system–which compares employees’ documents with government databases in order to catch immigrants without work authorization–but so far, the efforts to impose a universal E-Verify requirement have failed. Now the idea has been given new life by a tentative agreement that President Trump and Democratic leaders made on September 13 to promote legislation protecting the immigrants previously covered by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)… | more…

Society and nature are weighty topics. Ian Angus confronts them with force in A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism. ¶ We read of the related work of 19th century natural and social scientists, from Charles Darwin, Justus von Liebig and Karl Schorlemmer to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Their revolutionary critiques blend with those of Earth System scientists of the 21st century, from Paul J. Crutzen to John R. McNeill and Will Steffen. ¶ I read Angus’ informative and provocative book as Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria pounded Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. Climate chaos is here. Blame fossil-fuel-driven imperatives of capitalism to grow endlessly… | more…

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. | more…

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. | more…

Thanks to climate change, science and socialism have become entwined in ways previously unimaginable. Science brings the news that, unless we act swiftly to control climate change, we will inhabit a dying planet. Socialism traces the causes of this catastrophe to the destructive and chaotic growth model of capitalism and advocates for a different system. Meanwhile, sensing the source of danger to their profits, corporate and government reactionaries fuel disinformation campaigns to discredit science and confuse the public. This has been going on for years, with disastrous results…. | more…

In John Bellamy Foster’s rousing foreword to Ian Angus’ “Facing the Anthropocene,” he notes that the Russian geologist and paleontologist Alexei Petrovich Pavlov (1854–1929) was the first to use the term “Anthropocene” in 1922. When it comes to the infighting on the left over what the term means and the denial by the right that it even exists, Ian Angus’ book makes quite clear that unless the left can focus on developing radical alternatives to fossil capitalism we will only be fooling ourselves…. | more…

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…. | more…

ÖSK: U.S. President Donald Trump came to power with the support of the lower-middle class. But clearly his agenda is for the benefit of the rich. After gaining power, is he ignoring the lower classes and engaging primarily with corporations and the rich?

JBF: Answering this requires some background. A primary characteristic of political movements in the fascist genus, to which both the classical fascism of the 1930s and the nascent neofascism of today (including the Trump phenomenon) can be said to belong, is a tenuous class alliance between the lower-middle class, on the one hand, and significant fractions of the upper echelons of monopoly capital,

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…. | more…

Helena Sheehan, author of “The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left,” talks to Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network about her book and about Syriza’s embrace of the austerity measures it once promised to stand against, and the current situation in Greece. Note: this interview consists of three parts. | more…

‘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…. | more…

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. | more…