February 20, 2024
Holt-Giménez: “We already produce one and one-half times more than enough food to feed every man, woman, and child on the planet… People go hungry not because there’s not enough food; they go hungry because they can’t afford food…”
February 20, 2024
There is a growing movement of people thinking about how their food is grown, what it contains and its impact on their health and the environment. Often this is tied up with an individualistic view of improving the world – the idea that you can save the world by simply choosing the best food with the least impact on the planet. Eric Holt-Giménez explains he wrote "A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism" precisely to argue that this approach is inadequate...
February 20, 2024
According to Stephen Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, poor little America got hoodwinked by devious Asians, signing a deal that would wreck the economy and throw millions of people out of work, especially (white) coal miners in Appalachia, whom the president loves dearly. Climate change is an insignificant issue compared to these hardships and injustices. Coal is a fantastic fuel that will return America to greatness. ¶ Contrast this with the closing of Ian Angus’s Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System...
February 20, 2024
For years, intellectuals have argued that, with the triumph of capitalist, liberal democracy, the Western World has reached “the end of history.” Recently, however, there has been a rise of authoritarian politics in many countries. Concepts of post-democracy, anti-politics, and the like are gaining currency in theoretical and political debate. Now that capitalist democracies are facing seismic and systemic challenges, it becomes increasingly important to investigate not only the inherent antagonism between liberalism and the democratic process, but also socialism. Is socialism an enemy of democracy? Could socialism develop, expand, even enhance democracy?
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.
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….
February 20, 2024
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... READ MORE
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….
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.
