One of the problems that has most troubled analysts of global ecological crisis is the question of scale. How momentous is the ecological crisis? Is the survival of the human species in question? What about life in general? Are the basic biogeochemical cycles of the planet vulnerable? Although few now deny that there is such […]
Archive | Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles
Journal Articles (Other Major Scholarly)
Virtual Capitalism
One of the great technological myths of our time is that the entire system of organized capitalism dating back to the Industrial Revolution (and even earlier), is being displaced by a new age of “the electronic republic” rooted in the technology of the Information Revolution.
Ecology and Human Freedom
We live at a time when it is reasonable to speak of the possibility of complete ecological destruction, in virtually the same sense that critics of nuclear armaments have often referred to the possibility of complete nuclear destruction. Both human society and the survival of the planet as we know it are now at risk.
Marx and the Environment
It has become fashionable in recent years, in the words of one critic, to identify the growth of ecological consciousness with “the current postmodernist interrogation of the metanarrative of the Enlightenment.” Green thinking, we are frequently told, is distinguished by its postmodern, post-Enlightenment perspective. Nowhere is this fashion more evident than in certain criticisms directed […]
Global Ecology and the Common Good
Over the course of the twentieth century human population has increased more than threefold and gross world product perhaps twentyfold. Such expansion has placed increasing pressure on the ecology of the planet. Everywhere we look—in the atmosphere, oceans, watersheds, forests, soil, etc.—it is now clear that rapid ecological decline is setting in.
“Introduction to Special Issue Commemorating the Twentieth Anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital”
It is a measure of the influence of Harry Braverman and radical labor process analysts generally that only two decades after the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) it is difficult to recall the absolute confidence with which the orthodox view of work relations was espoused […]
Multiculturalism and the American Revolution of 1776
Many Americans of European ancestry, like me, now see the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere as invasion, conquest, and genocide. Many have grave misgivings about the constitutional settlement that protected trade in slaves, committed government to helping slave catchers, and gave extra votes in Congress to slave owners. The moral perceptions that underlie those […]
‘Let Them Eat Pollution’
On December 12, 1991, Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, sent a memorandum to some of his colleagues presenting views on the environment that are doubtless widespread among orthodox economists, reflecting as they do the logic of capital accumulation, but which are seldom offered up for public scrutiny, and then almost never by […]
Capitalism and the Ancient Forest
The battle for the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest, which gained widespread national attention with the designation of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species in June 1990, can be thought of as a complex set of social and ecological problems traceable to a single cause: the continuing failure on the part […]
The Uncoupling of the World Order
In every discussion of the current global crisis one single fact eclipses all others – the demise of undisputed US hegemony within the world hierarchy of nation states. Despite differing al political persuasions, there seems to be widespread agreement among social scientists that it is only in this context that the chief threats of our […]