Ecosocialism

Hurricane Harvey and the Dialectics of Nature

Louis Proyect, CounterPunch, September 1, 2017

Between 1872 and 1882, Frederick Engels worked on a book titled “The Dialectics of Nature” that sought to apply Marxist dialectics to the natural world. Although it was never completed and is filled with dated ideas about science, it is a work that has earned the respect of some of the most important scientists on the left such as Stephen Jay Gould who praised its best known chapter that was issued separately as a pamphlet—The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.

Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

Elaine Graham-Leigh, Counter Fire, August 28, 2017

In August 2016, the International Geological Congress voted formally to recognise that the world has entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene. The effect of human activity on the planet has now become as significant as that of the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs and ended the Cretaceous era.

Capitalist Economies Create Waste, Not Social Value

Chris Williams and Fred Magdoff, TruthOut, August 19, 2017

What would a truly just, equal and ecologically sustainable future look like? Why would it require a change in our economic system, namely the end of capitalism? Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams answer these questions in Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. Suffused with radical hope, this book can be yours with a donation to Truthout!

The root of the climate crisis is capitalism, not demographics

Michael Friedman, mronline.org, August 15, 2017

Growing concerns about climate change and other environmental trends have set off the next round of old Malthusian diagnoses and solutions.

As a case in point, ecological economist William E. Rees recently wrote in the Canadian alternative magazine The Tyee (“Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse” July 17, 2017):

Eve of Destruction…Or Revolution?

Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch, August 8, 2017

“In order to replace capitalism with an ecological society we need a revolution.” That modest sentence is how Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, the authors of Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, begin the last chapter of their new book. Although the chapter is the end of the book, it is also an opening to a new direction, a new movement. It is also the essence of the entire text.

Talking About a Revolution

Staff, FAIR, August 1, 2017

It’s long been clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic climate disruption on a scale that threatens human civilization, we need to leave vast amounts of fossil fuels in the ground.

Marxism and the Earth: An Anti-critique

Review by Chris Williams, ISR, July 31, 2017

A long-standing critique of the writings of Marx and Engels has been their supposed lack of concern for or even analysis of the environmental damage caused by capitalism. Worse, even as they envisaged and fought for a world of human freedom, their conception of socialism showed a comprehensive disregard for how humans interact, or should interact, with nature.

Harvey, Klein, Smith, Foster: Militant Particularism and Ecosocialism

Brad Hornick, NewPolitics, July 31, 2017

In Militant Particularism and Global Ambition: The Conceptual Politics of Place, Space, and Environment in the Work of Raymond Williams, David Harvey discusses the challenges presented by moving from place out across time.

Vote Nikkita Oliver for Mayor

SW Editorial Board, Seattle Weekly, July 30, 2017

The temperature has changed. We can all feel it. The moment we live in now does not resemble any in recent history. Much of this is because of the current occupant of the White House and the anti-government Republicans who abet his belligerent antics in order to push through legislation that threatens to shred our society’s safety nets. The least among us are under threat as never before. But even before Trump came to power, there was evidence that something was going sidewise, across the nation and in our city.

To Be or Not to Be: Ecocentric Ecological Socialism as the Solution to the World Social and Planetary Crisis

Kamran Nayeri, forhumanliberation, July 26, 2017

If man draws all his knowledge, sensations, etc., from the world of senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as a man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all of morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.

Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, 1845

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

Ecosocialism

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