In the 1840s, in the manuscripts later published as The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set out the first comprehensive statement of the approach to understanding history and society that underlay their writing and political activity for the… Continue Reading
The role of trade unions and organised labour in preventing catastrophic climate change is a burgeoning field of research.1 Many academic contributions investigate climate policy issues but leave aside discussion of workers’ action.2 In contrast, this article focuses on past… Continue Reading
A review of John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Monthly Review Press (2020), £30. Since John Bellamy Foster published Marx’s Ecology in 2000, the idea that Karl Marx had little to say on environmental issues has… Continue Reading
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake. Walter Benjamin, 1940, Notes for “On… Continue Reading
It is tempting to see pandemics as unpredictable, cataclysmic incursions of nature into human society.1 Yet the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) is anything but a “natural” phenomenon. Epidemics and pandemics happen in a social, political and economic context,… Continue Reading
As I write this, a global revolt is shaking ruling classes from Hong Kong to Colombia, via Chile, Haiti, Catalonia, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq. Protest movements in the United Kingdom are not on the scale of those in other countries.… Continue Reading
A review of Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), £22.32 Kohei Saito’s book Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism is based on extensive and painstaking research.1 As well as Marx’s published… Continue Reading
The rapid advances in Marxian ecology in the last two decades have given rise to extensive debates within the left, reflecting competing conceptions of theory and practice in an age of planetary ecological and social crisis. One key area of… Continue Reading
A review of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (Brill/Haymarket, 2016), £21.99 Marxist analyses of the natural world have been the focus of intense debate recently, and the publication of any book that further… Continue Reading
A review of Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), £19.99 Jason W Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life sets itself the challenge of locating an account of capitalist… Continue Reading