Tag: Ecosocialism

John Bellamy Foster’s “Breaking the Bonds of Fate”

John Bellamy Foster’s “Breaking the Bonds of Fate”

The latest: The title of John Bellamy Foster’s latest book "derives from Lucretius’s famed De Rerum Natura, usually translated as On the Nature of Things. Lucretius wrote: “Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order – if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will break the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect – what is the source of the free [will] … .” ([On the Nature of Things,] Book II, 251ff) This exact quotation, moreover, was one made by Karl Marx in his Epicurean Notebooks, compiled in preparation for his doctoral thesis: “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” of 1841. From this point of departure, Foster initiates the reappraisal of two thousand years of philosophical controversy...."

A “dialectic of exploitation and expropriation” (The Robbery of Nature reviewed by ‘Socialist Alternative’)

The authors write, “the failure to maintain the soil metabolism was central to Marx’s understanding of the extreme ecological degradation of colonial Ireland.” The peasant farmers, cottiers, lived on a substandard diet, mainly of potatoes. The combination of the economic and ecological system led to the famine that killed one million people and the social collapse that forced another million to emigrate.

Register: Kohei Saito to speak at Ecosocialism 2023

Japanese Marxist academic Kohei Saito will be a keynote speaker at the Ecosocialism 2023, being organised by Green Left — and supported by LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal — in Naarm/Melbourne over July 1–2.