Article Subjects and Geography: Ecology
The Dialectics of Ecology and Ecological Civilization
April 1, 2025
This article will be released in full online April 7, 2025.
What is ecological civilization? In this article, Chen Yiwen presents a dialectical analysis that illuminates the theoretical and practical elements of ecological civilization, particularly as it develops in the context of China. In China, she notes, significant progress has been made, but there remain outstanding questions that must be resolved during the transition to an ecologically harmonious society that promotes global equality and human flourishing.
March 2025 (Volume 76, Number 10)
March 1, 2025
The editors analyze recent shift in mainstream discourse away from the goal of energy transition toward capitalist friendly policies that allow corporations to receive large subsidies for inadequate “solutions.” Despite the scientific consensus that these are insufficient to tackle the planetary crisis, capital and its advocates continue to promote the abandonment of the energy transition in the effort to maintain U.S. imperial dominance and feed its hunger for fossil fuels.
Chinese-Style Modernization: Revolution and the Worker-Peasant Alliance
February 1, 2025
Since the 1980s, writes Lu Xinyu, a division between industrial and agricultural labor has grown in China, reflected in the fractured relationship between urban and rural areas. China’s successful navigation of the issue, Lu concludes, relies on creating a vigorous alliance between the rural peasantry and urban workers that aids in the ultimate delinking of China from the imperialist, world system. Chinese-style modernization, Lu concludes, represents a path that, while developed in a Chinese context, “represents the aspirations of the Global South to break free from worldwide Western hegemony.”
Emerging Oceanic Struggles for No-Nukes in Japan
February 1, 2025
In this deeply stirring account, Sit Tsui and Lau Kin Chi share their field research, conducted over years of travel and relationship-building, into the Japanese antinuclear movement. As the people and environment of Fukushima continue to be impacted by the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March 2011, the No-Nukes movement has grown in response, encompassing aspects of society ranging from artists and monks to fisherfolk and intellectuals.
The Dialectical Ecologist: Richard Levins and the Science and Praxis of the Human-Nature Metabolism
January 1, 2025
In January’s Review of the Month, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark revisit the legacy of scientist and MR author Richard Levins, from his “red diaper” infancy to his agroecological work in Cuba and his contributions to Marxian ecological thinking as a whole. “As a dialectical ecologist,” they write, “Levins proposed that we ask the big questions, as part of understanding why the world came to be organized in a particular way, and how it might be different.”
An Ecological Civilization Will Have to Be Socialist
January 1, 2025
In this interview with Claudia Antunes of Brazilian magazine Sumaúma, Ian Angus takes stock of our current planetary crisis, from its origins in Marx’s ecological thought and the present debate over its designation to the future of human civilization as we know it. “The key question is,” he concludes, “Are we going to see large number of people moving for change?”
Some Preliminary Theses on the Concept of Eco-Civilization
January 1, 2025
In this talk given at Peking University in October 2024, John Bellamy Foster shares ten theses describing both the roots and contemporary manifestations of the idea of ecological civilization. Relating the concept’s origins in the writings of Marx and Engels to its expression today in Chinese society, Foster reveals the inherently socialist nature of eco-civilization and the necessity of a worldwide ecological revolution to shift toward sustainable human development.
Monopoly Capital and the Rise of the Synthetic Age
December 1, 2024
Following Harry Braverman’s assertion that we must examine “by way of concrete historical specific analysis of technology…on one side and social relations on the other” in order to understand the impact of the Scientific-Technical Revolution on our daily lives, John Hedlund and Stefano B. Longo describe the explosion of the Synthetic Age of plastics, revealing the commodification of science in service of capital.