The standard solution offered to the environmental problem in advanced capitalist economies is to shift technology in a more benign direction: more energy-efficient production, cars that get better mileage, replacement of fossil fuels with solar power, and recycling of resources. Other environmental reforms, such as reductions in population growth and even cuts in consumption, are […]
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Henry Salt, Socialist Animal Rights Advocate: An Introduction to Salt’s ‘A Lover of Animals
Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) remains largely unknown today, despite his central role in social and humanitarian movements throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Salt is briefly mentioned in passing when discussing the history of animal rights activism, but serious consideration of his philosophical position has not been conducted. General interpretations of Salt often […]
Marx’s Ecological Value Analysis
Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 312 pp., $45, hardcover. If there is a single charge that has served to unify all criticism of Marx in recent decades, it is the charge of “Prometheanism.” Although Marx’s admiration for Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and his attraction to […]
Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millenium
This article is dedicated to Paul Sweezy on his 90th birthday. It is also meant as a personal expression of my conviction that Monopoly Capital (1966) by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, which provided a rich analysis of capital accumulation and crisis rooted in insights from Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, and Schumpeter, is still the most […]
The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line
In recent decades environmentalists have directed a persistent ecological critique at economics, contending that economics has failed to value the natural world. Lately economists have begun to respond to this critique, and a rapidly growing sub discipline of environmental economics has emerged that is dedicated to placing economic values on nature and integrating the environment […]
Harry Magdoff 1913—
Harry Magdoff was born on 21 August 1913 in the Bronx in New York. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; his father was a housepainter. As a youth he was swept up by the left political culture of his time. By the time he entered the City College of New York, where he commenced studies […]
The Canonization of Environmental Sociology
Environmental sociology first arose, as a distinct subfield of sociology, in the 1970s. The Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association was formally launched almost one quarter of a century ago, in 1976. The rise of the subfield was a direct response to the rapid growth of environmentalism in society at large in […]
Remarks on Paul Sweezy on the Occasion of his Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award
I would like to quote at length from Paul Samuelson, who wrote a piece exactly thirty years ago for Newsweek magazine about a time thirty years before that “when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard”: When Diaghilev revived his ballet company he had the original Bakst sets redone in even more vivid colors, explaining, […]
Robbing the Earth of its Capital Stock
In his influential Letters to the President on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the United States, U.S. economist Henry Carey (1858) quoted at length from a talk by an “eminent agriculturist” who had provided rough calculations for the whole United States of the loss of soil nutrients resulting from the failure to recycle organic […]
Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift
This article addresses a paradox: on the one hand, environmental sociology, as currently developed, is closely associated with the thesis that the classical sociological tradition is devoid of systematic insights into environmental problems; on the other hand, evidence of crucial classical contributions in this area, particularly in Marx, but also in Weber, Durkheim, and others, […]
