Chris Gilbert examines the ecological aspects of Venezuela’s project of communal socialism, as well as its relation to the country’s inherited extractive economy. These democratically run communities present an alternative to the extractivist and productivist social relations driving the planet to ruin. | more…
As the impending planetary crisis looms ever-closer, Martin Hart-Landsberg proposes a new focus on the Second World War industrial conversion experience, in which production and consumption were guided by central planning agencies. These successes and pitfalls of this period provide many useful lessons for activists and organizers working toward planned degrowth. | more…
Economic planning, Nicolas Graham writes, was not, perhaps a major theme in Capital. However, Marx’s understanding of such planning—as yet unrealized societal capability—yields great insight into how we might reorient modes of production toward cooperation and coordination. “Despite bourgeois and neoliberal ideology,” he writes, “planning is both an urgent necessity and a liberatory potentiality.” | more…
In nine theses, Michael Löwy elaborates on the central themes of ecosocialist degrowth. “The ecological crisis,” he begins, “is already the most important social and political question of the twenty-first century.… The future of the planet, and thus of humanity, will be decided in the coming decades.” | more…
“Degrowth” may often be associated with the left, but can also have conservative—even ecofascist—implications. What do proponents and critics mean by “degrowth”? How do these differences play out ideologically? Ying Chen writes that, for radicals, the answer is to place the economic system at the center of the degrowth narrative, thus naming the system that must be replaced with a more just and equitable socialist society. | more…
In this interview, originally published in the Czech journal Contradictions, John Bellamy Foster discusses the history of environmental thought among socialists from Marx to the present day, with a view to the need to mobilize in order to protect humanity’s only home. | more…
The Fishing Revolution is a rarely explored, yet critical, event in the evolution of capitalism. Ian Angus elaborates on this revolution in the global marketplace and its role as a cornerstone of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. | more…
The Half-Earth movement calls for rewilidng half the earth as a means of combating the planetary crisis. Brian Napoletano explores the implications of the Half-Earth approach as outlined Vettese and Pendergrass’s Half-Earth Socialism. | more…
This month’s “Notes from the Editors” marks the 30-year anniversary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The abject failure of this framework to enact meaningful progress on the planetary crisis continued to be on full display in 2022, including at November’s COP27 in Egypt. | more…
This issue’s Review of the Month discusses Marx’s role as the foremost revolutionary critic of bourgeois Enlightenment humanism. To this day, his conception of “the universal metabolism of nature” remains a powerful antidote to the phantasmagoric “dark ecology” posited by today’s posthumanism. | more…
John Bellamy Foster takes readers back to Marx’s understanding of the dialectics of nature and society. As Marx and Engels noted, humanity must not only struggle for the advancement of human freedom, but also the capitalist destruction of the earth. Today, the struggle for freedom and the struggle for necessity coincide everywhere on the planet for the first time in human history, creating a prospect of ruin or revolution. | more…
The latest Review of the Month, written by Spanish geologist Carles Soriano, considers the implications of idea of the Capitalocene, the historical determinations affecting the study of the Earth Sciences, and how our views of the current planetary crisis are often shaped by inadequate narratives. Current approaches, he writes are “non-dialectic and non-materialist regarding the study of social reproduction modes, and this renders the whole understanding of the planetary crisis not only incomplete but idealist, for the capitalist mode is assumed as absolute rather than historical.” | more…