Marx’s concept of metabolic rift has emerged as a prominent theoretical framework with which to explain the socioecological crises of capitalism. Yet, despite its relevance to key concerns in critical environmental geography, it has remained marginal within the field. Here we address this by distinguishing between metabolic rift theory and two predominant Marxist approaches in […]
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“Foreword” to English translation of Marta Harnecker, “Latin America and Twenty-First Century Socialism”
“Foreword” to English translation of Marta Harnecker, “Latin America and Twenty-First Century Socialism” (originally published as a book in Spanish), Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 3 (July-August 2010), iii-xvii. Translation(s): Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, vol. 3, no. 1 (December 2010). Translated by Ashish Lahiri.]
Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical Rifts on the Left
Natural scientists have pointed to the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, with the precise dating not yet decided, but often traced to the Great Acceleration of the human impact on the environment since 1945. Thus understood, the Anthropocene largely coincides with the rise of the modern environmental movement and corresponds to the age of […]
Afterword: The Making of Scandinavian Ecosocialism
“Afterword: The Making of Scandinavian Ecosocialism,”[PDF] in The Politics of Ecosocialism, ed. Kajsa Borgnäs, Teppo Eskelinen, Johanna Perkiö, and Rikard Warlenius (London: Routledge, 2015), 195-203.
The Power of Inaction – A Review
The great financial crisis of 2007–9 has given rise to a small industry of academic studies, some directed at the wider systemic tendencies of capital, class and crisis, others at narrower regulatory or managerial issues. Cornelia Woll’s The Power of Inaction is a work of the latter kind. It is a study of the state-finance […]
The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left
On September 21, 2014, the largest climate march in U.S. history took place in New York City, as more than 300,000 protestors signaled to UN delegates arriving for climate talks that more desperate measures were needed to protect humanity and other species. The massive demonstration, though representing a wide array of social and political viewpoints, […]
Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class
The fortieth anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital is the occasion here for a reassessment of his work as a whole. Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of work is shown to have been only a part of a much larger argument he was developing on the structure of the U.S. working class. Building on his […]
“Foreword” to Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
“Foreword” to Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (forthcoming: Zed Press, second edition, 2014).
The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange
A world-system analysis of the ecological rift generated by capitalism requires as one of its elements a developed theory of the unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery. After reviewing the literature on unequal exchange (both economic and ecological) from Ricardo and Marx to the present, a new approach is provided, based on a critical […]
Polish Marxian Political Economy and U.S. Monopoly Capital Theory: The Influence of Luxemburg, Kalecki, and Lange on Baran and Sweezy and Monthly Review
From the viewpoint of orthodox economists, macroeconomics has no significant historical antecedents prior to the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936. Theories of aggregate demand before Keynes, such as those associated with Lauderdale, Malthus, and Hobson, were generally weak theoretically. A number of important mainstream economic thinkers raised what […]
