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 […]
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Articles
A Terrible Omission
Review of Marx’s Capital: A Student Edition by C. J. Arthur.
The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Crisis of the Pacific Northwest
Many prominent environmentalists today have adopted a political stance that sets them and the movement that they profess to represent above and beyond the class struggle. For example, Jonathon Porritt, the British Green leader, has declared that the rise of the German Greens marks the demise of “the redundant polemic of class warfare and the […]
‘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 […]
Dock Strike
In the 1989 national dock strike, British dockworkers, falling into a pattern already evident in the fate of coalminers, printers and seafarers, suffered an historic defeat. The National Dock Labour Scheme of 1947, which had enabled the Transport and General Workers Union (T&GWU) to exercise considerable control not only over the labour process but more […]
Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910-
“Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910–” in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992, pp. 562-70. [PDF] Editions Revised and expanded for 2000 edition.
The Absolute General Law of Environmental Degradation Under Capitalism
James O’Connor has asked us to consider the relationship between what he has termed the “first and second contradictions” of capitalism. I would like to refer to the first contradiction, following Marx, as ‘the absolute cereal law of capitalist accumulation.” The second contradiction may then be designated as “the absolute general law of environmental degradation […]
Paul Alexander Baran 1910-1964
Paul Baran, the internationally acclaimed Marxist economist, was born on 8 December 1910 into a Jewish family in Nikolaev, Russia, on the Black Sea. His father was a medical doctor with ties to the Menshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic party. The chaos rustling from the First World War and the Russian Revolution made […]
Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910–
“Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910–” in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992, pp. 562-70. Revised and expanded for 2000 edition.
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 […]
