A review of China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, Richard Smith (Pluto, 2020), £18.99 In 2017, Xi Jinping, China’s president, spoke of developing the country into an “ecological civilisation”. China has signed all the usual international environment and climate agreements and… Continue Reading
Vegetation fires are astonishing in their severity.1 Temperatures are painfully intense along the fire’s ember-strewn edges even before the white-heat heart of the blaze arrives. Their smoke is dense, choking, acrid and debilitating. Their 5 kilometres per hour speed of… Continue Reading
The need to “seize back control of fishing rights in British waters” was pitched as a symbol of all that was wrong with the European Union by the Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum.1 The right-wing Brexit campaign, including Nigel… 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
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
This article was written at the time of the first UK school student climate strikes. In February and March 2019, UK school students, in huge numbers, took their place in a global movement. The strikes were inspired by the actions… Continue Reading
Capitalism has placed humanity on a devastating collision course with living nature.1 In its 40-year neoliberal phase alone it has unleashed a scale of ecological destruction that has few precedents across Earth’s entire geological history—we are teetering on the brink… Continue Reading
A review of Martin Empson, Kill all the Gentlemen: Class Struggle and Change in the English Countryside (Bookmarks, 2018), £14.99 When Karl Marx analysed the birth of capitalism he drew attention to what he called the primitive accumulation of capital.… Continue Reading
A review of Penny McCall Howard, Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea: “Working the Ground” in Scotland (Manchester University Press, 2017), £75. In the 21st century, 27 million people around the world catch fish for a living which is worth… Continue Reading