The emergence in the 1980s and ’90s of an increasingly global approach to ecological problems-marked by the ascendance of such issues as the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, tropical deforestation, and an annual loss of species possibly in the tens of thousands-has altered forever the relation of ecology to the social sciences. Recognizing […]
Nature, Technology and Society
Nature, Technology and Society is a book that promises much. Purporting to be a study of the cultural roots of todays global environmental crisis, it consists of three parts. The first deals with the history of ideas on nature and technology, beginning with Mesopotamian civilization and ending with the conservation movement in the United States […]
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”
By on November 1, 1994 in Articles, Introductions, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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 […]
Is There an Allocation Problem?: A Comment on Murray Smith’s Analysis of the Falling Profit Rate
In the Fall 1993 issue of Science & Society the editors observed that Murray Smith’s articles on the falling rate of profit, which formed the opening contribution to that issue, constituted an important new study that “should be compared with the work of [Thomas] Weisskopf, [Edward] Wolff and [Fred] Moseley’- all of whom have carried […]
Radical Ecology
“Radical Ecology,” [PDF], Science & Society, vol. 58, no. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 120-23. (Review of Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology.) Carolyn Merchant is known principally as the author of two landmark studies in Ecological History and the Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980) and Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (1989). In […]
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 […]
A Terrible Omission
Review of Marx’s Capital: A Student Edition by C. J. Arthur.
Introduction to a Symposium on The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought
In the decade before his death Raymond Williams frequently referred to the need for “resources for a journey of hope” that would enable socialists to continue the “shared search” for human emancipation in spite of all the obstacles posed by the reality of capitalism and of the first attempts to create socialism. In Cornel West’s […]
