Not a day goes by that we don’t see a news clip, hear a radio report, or read an article heralding the miraculous new technologies of the information age. The communication revolution associated with these technologies is often heralded as the key to a new age of “globalization.” How is all of this reshaping the […]
The Communist Manifesto and the Environment
Most of the debate about Marx’s relation to environmental thought has focused on the early philosophical critique of capitalism in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and on his later economic critique embodied in Capital in the 1860s – since in both of these works he had a great deal to say about human […]
Hesitations Before Ecology: David Harvey’s Dilemma
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference is and ambitious work that considers everything from dialectics to globalization. It is a difficult book to assess because over the course of much if not most of the work Harvey deliberately avoids the closures – not just in concepts but in arguments and synthetic vision as well […]
Free Market Democracy and Global Hegemony
Neoliberalism is usually thought of as a purely economic philosophy, stemming from the work of the arch-conservative economist Friedrich hayek and other twentieth century economist (particularly those associated with the University of Chicago), and involving an attempt to construct a much more complete justification for a pure, self-regulating market economy than could be found in […]
The Crisis of the Earth: Marx’s Theory of Ecological Sustainability as a Nature-Imposed Necessity for Human Production
Any systematic, forward-looking ecological vision must include three elements: (a) a theory of ecological crisis and its relation to human production; (b) a concept of sustainability as a nature-imposed necessity for production; (c) a vision of the transcendence of ecological crisis that establishes sustainability as a core part of any future society. All three elements […]
The Age of Planetary Crisis
The final years of the twentieth century have revealed three critical conditions likely to dominate the history of the coming century: (1) economic stagnation and globalization; (2) environmental decline; and (3) the weakness of antisystemic movements. As economic conditions stagnate and environmental conditions worsen, the material bases will emerge for a new, much broader movement […]
The Greening of Marxism
Marxism and radical ecology are both critical of the capitalist commodity economy. Nevertheless, the two traditions often seem opposed. Marxism is often identified with the official Marxism of Soviet-type societies, in which (as in the capitalist world economy) nature was seen as an external object to be used and abused for economic ends. From the […]
The Long Stagnation and the Class Struggle
For more than a quarter-century, the advanced capitalist economies have been mired in a condition of economic stagnation, characterized by slow growth, sluggish investment and high levels of unemployment and excess capacity. Since this condi- tion has persisted so long and shows no signs of abating despite the current cyclical upswing, it seems appropriate to […]
In Defense of History
Are we now in an age of “postmodernity”? Even as some on the right have proclaimed the “end of history” or the final triumph of capitalism, we are told by some left intellectuals that the “modern” epoch has ended, that the “Enlightenment project” is dead, that all the old verities and ideologies have lost their […]
Erde (Earth)
”Erde (Earth),” in Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch Des Marximus, Band 3 (Ebene-Extremisis) (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1997), pp. 669-710. [HTML] Reprints English language version published in Historical Materialism, no. 15, 2007, pp. 255-62.
