Heinrich’s reading guide is the best that I have ever come across for volume 1 of Capital and I am certain it is a necessary edition for any person who takes their study of Marx’s ‘Capital’ seriously. Heinrich explains that “Capital provides crucial elements of the basic knowledge that is needed to fundamentally change social structures”. As such this volume, read in conjunction with Marx’s work, should prove valuable to anyone, inside or outside the academy, who is interested and invested in transforming capitalist social structures into something more beneficial to all. | more…
as Marx showed, while accumulation creates an ever greater mass of means of production, this in itself begins to throw up barriers to the profitable reproduction of such great quantities of capital. This contradiction results in the intensification of competition between capitals over labour, raw materials and markets, not the least consequence of which is imperialist tension and war… | more…
As Marx wrote, the common rights “were simply redefined as crimes: poaching, wood-theft, trespass”. The war against the commons removed the rights for people to hunt, forage, collect firewood and more. Game laws put restrictions on the poor, where you were criminalised even “if you took one hare when your family was starving”. The rich enclosed lands to hunt for sport, while the poor could be sentenced to death for hunting deer… | more…
‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene,’ a compendium of Marx’s ecological thought, is intended to blaze the trail to this impending civilization. For this monumental task, Marx could not have hoped for someone better suited than John Bellamy Foster. | more…
With the exception of slavery and the genocide against Native Americans, the endless holocausts associated with the American empire are rarely discussed in high school or even college courses, and are not very well known by the public—despite a rich scholarly literature about them. | more…
Wars never start on the date given in history books. There is always a pre-history, a series of events and decisions that lead to the outbreak of fighting. The war in Korea has been called in America the ‘Forgotten War’ and it is not difficult to see why it was soon shunted out of public sight, consigned to oblivion. It was the first war that the United States did not win and it ended in an armistice, a concession of stalemate, but also an ominous indicator of unfinished business… | more…
This volume is the first in nearly forty years in which Leo Panitch didn’t play a direct role. Though last year’s volume was produced following his tragic death in 2020, he’d been heavily involved in setting its perspectives and goals. The present volume represents both a tribute to Leo and an effort to carry on… | more…
What has changed in the old and new Cold Wars is the economic situation of the US with respect to China and the Global South…. | more…
Tim Beal and Gregory Elich, in the intro to the book, write “There is a certain constancy in human affairs. Deceit, deception, and manipulation are characteristics of power, perhaps especially of modern ‘democratic’ political power—what country does not claim to be adhering to democracy?” | more…
Foster: “‘If accumulation or economic growth is to be halted in the rich countries, even temporarily, out of ecological necessity, this would require a vast new system of redistribution…” | more…
“…the Marxist dependency-and-rift conception of the relation between capitalist societies and the environment is a better gateway to the Anthropocene than widespread social-monistic tendencies…” | more…
Land, animals, wood, forests and space itself was converted into a commodity that could be bought and sold. Fields were engrossed, land was enclosed, commons were privatised. The peasants who lived from the land, were expelled or turned into wage labourers – their old traditions and histories erased. | more…
