The Soviet Union’s efforts at centralized economic planning suffered greatly by neglecting to integrate cybernetics into a comprehensive model. Today, this cybernetic approach to economic planning is still blocked. The time has come to implement alternative planning in the form of an automated model that coordinates the activities of all industries and sectors of toward a prosperous and sustainable future. | more…
There is hardly any theme in Karl Marx’s theoretical corpus that has garnered as much traction as his theory of fetishism. Ever since Marx introduced the term into his critique of political economy in Capital, fetishism became a field of theoretical force. While much ink has been spilled on the specific content and theoretical scope of fetishism in Capital, young Marx’s initial exploration of the term has rarely enjoyed critical attention. | more…
Our current geological time period, characterized by drastic planetary shifts due to anthropogenic climate change, is popularly known as the Anthropocene Epoch. Recent proposals for naming the first age of this epoch highlight capitalism’s central role in the ongoing climate crisis. | more…
More than twenty years after the publication of John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (2000), ecosocialist scholars continue to explore the evolution of Marx’s ecological thinking, from the Greek atomists to his later work on ethnology. | more…
John Bellamy Foster’s recent work, The Return of Nature, makes a strong case that Marxism’s central, materialist conception of nature and history makes it the best possible theoretical basis for radical ecological scholarship. | more…
From the era of overt eugenic research to the present-day education system, the attempts to categorize and rank individuals’ “intelligence” through testing and statistics reflects and reinforces the power of racist, capitalist, and imperialist institutions. | more…
Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by a new more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The onset of the Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population. | more…
Time is running out for humanity to avoid a catastrophic planetary tipping point. Widespread mass mobilizations of populations worldwide must fight to bring about revolutionary societal changes and dismantle neoliberal monopoly capitalism, with its reliance on extractive exploitation of our planet’s resources and communities. | more…
A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on which it—and indeed, all life on Earth—relies. | more…
Climate imperialism has emerged as a new—and potentially even the most lethal—form of imperialism in the world economy today. Confronting it requires recognizing and dealing with all its different aspects. But it also requires addressing the monopolies of knowledge created by the global regime of intellectual property rights that has been instituted and cemented by hegemonic world powers. | more…
For most economists, labor is simply a commodity, bought and sold in markets like any other – and what happens after that is not their concern. Individual prospective workers offer their services to individual employers, each acting solely out of self-interest and facing each other as equals. The forces of demand and supply operate so that there is neither a shortage nor a surplus of labor, and, in theory, workers and bosses achieve their respective ends. Michael D. Yates, in Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, offers a vastly different take on the nature of the labor market. | 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…
