Ecology and the Future of History
Contradicting previous liberal notions of an “end of history,” humanity is now facing unprecedented threats to our species’ survival, but an environmental proletariat to combat them is emerging. | more…
Contradicting previous liberal notions of an “end of history,” humanity is now facing unprecedented threats to our species’ survival, but an environmental proletariat to combat them is emerging. | more…
Time is running out for the world to carry out the social transformations necessary to avert irreversible climate catastrophe, keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 1.5°C (or below 2°C). The most optimistic scenario currently provided by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes a pathway in which the increase in temperature will not rise to 1.5°C until 2040, peaking at 1.6°C, and then falling back to 1.4°C by the end of this century. But to achieve this will require revolutionary scale transformational change in global social relations affecting the human relation to the climate and the planetary environment as a whole. | more…
The scientific development of humanity—that is, the ability to investigate the planet collectively, integrating reason and empirical data—allowed humans to understand the world with increasing precision and transform it powerfully. Despite this, attitudes against this knowledge have been widespread, both individually and collectively. | more…
We are facing today the most pronounced and remarkable of all contradictions: that between “capital’s time” and “nature’s time.” As a result, a series of intertwined ecological and social crises have come together, posing existential threats to life on the planet. | more…
In 1980, the great English historian and Marxist theorist E. P. Thompson wrote the pathbreaking essay “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization.” Although the world has undergone a number of significant changes since, Thompson’s essay remains a useful starting point in approaching the central contradictions of our times, characterized by the planetary ecological crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, New Cold War, and current “empire of chaos”—all arising from features deeply embedded in the contemporary capitalist political economy. | more…
The history of Marxism in relation to science is extraordinarily dense and dramatic. Although it is a fascinating and important story, it is one increasingly forgotten. | more…
The rapid financialization of nature is promoting a Great Expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on an unprecedented scale. | more…
Degrowth and ecosocialism are two of the most important movements—and proposals—on the radical side of the ecological spectrum. | more…
From September to November 2021, overlapping with the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference negotiations in Glasgow, three major interrelated developments occurred in global finance. Taken together, these changes mark a turning point in the financial expropriation of the earth and the culmination of a theoretical shift in the dominant economic paradigm aimed at the unlimited accumulation of total capital, which is now seen as including “natural capital.” | more…
This poem was published in volume 18, number 4, of Monthly Review (September 1966). | more…
Across the humanities and the social sciences, critical attention is being given to the nonhuman as an ecological, philosophical, and political problem—the nonhuman here meaning anything from animals and plants to manufactured objects. Going under names as various as new materialism, political ecology, and object-oriented ontology, these studies comprise a movement that is largely described as the nonhuman turn. | more…
Cuba’s world leadership in sustainable human development is of world-historic importance. | more…
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