February 20, 2024
Fred Magdoff, author, with Chris Williams, of Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, talks with Brian Becker on “Loud and Clear,” via Sputnik Radio. Listen, below, or at Sputnik News
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.
February 20, 2024
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.
February 20, 2024
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...
February 20, 2024
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)...
February 20, 2024
“What’s behind the recent rise in wages for undocumented workers?” David L. Wilson asks. “It could be immigrants’ rights activism.” Wilson, with Jane Guskin, is author of the 2nd edition of "The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers"...
February 20, 2024
Vladimir Lenin was the pivotal figure of the 20th century. His life and work dramatically pose the central dilemma of that century (and of our own): Should humanity progress by reforming bourgeois society along liberal social democratic lines, or should it move forward by overthrowing capitalism and establishing an entirely different social and economic system? Lenin’s life also suggests that social revolution remains a practical possibility even when historical circumstances seemingly render it unlikely....
