Environmental destruction isn’t driven by human nature or mistaken ideas. It is an inevitable consequence of a system built on capital accumulation.
Author Archive | Ian Angus
Capitalism ‘solves’ the Nitrogen Crisis: A brief history
Part Three of Ian Angus’s examination of the disruption of the global nitrogen cycle by an economic system that values profits more than life itself.
Ian Angus on the politics of ecosocialism
Ecosocialism — in particular the Marxist wing of the ecosocialist movement — builds and acts on that understanding.
The discovery and rediscovery of metabolic rift
Ian Angus discusses the scientific developments that led Marx to develop metabolic rift theory, and a new generation to rediscover it in our time.
Gee Whiz! Communism is sure gonna be keen!
When I was ten years old, I read and re-read a stack of decades-old Modern Mechanix magazines that I found in my grandfather’s basement. Throughout the Great Depression, MM regaled its readers with breathless accounts of technological marvels that were going to change the world, very soon.
A Marxist History of Capitalism
An important work of Marxist history and theory restores class struggle to central place in explaining how capitalism arose and grew, and can eventually be overcome.
Reply to Trump: Global warming explained in three easy tweets
On October 14, on the CBS television program 60 Minutes, the President of the United States admitted that climate change is not a hoax. It is probably happening, he said, but he doesn’t know what is causing it, and he thinks it might change back.
Climate change in the Anthropocene: an unstoppable drive to Hothouse Earth?
Leading Earth System scientists warn: “The Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions.… Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System.”
Vladimir Vernadsky and the disruption of the biosphere
Virtually unknown in the west, the great Russian geologist and geochemist pioneered scientific study of life’s impact on the Earth.
Marx and Metabolism: lost in translation?
Why wasn’t Marx’s concept of metabolic rift recognized until recently? Changed circumstances, unpublished works, and bad translations all played a role.
Earth’s circular economy: recycling as a law of life
On every scale, from the smallest cells to the entire planet, the essential elements of life are constantly used and re-used. Biogeochemical cycles are the basis of the biosphere.
Five revolutions: how bacteria created the biosphere and caused the first climate crisis
“Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies, the essential element of which consists in continual metabolic interchange with the natural environment outside them.”
The progress of this storm
Andreas Malm’s powerful critique of current environmental philosophies puts historical materialism and cutting-edge science at the center of a call for militant action.
Illusions of world-ecology
Every airport bookstore features books with titles like 10 Ways to Retire Rich, 150 Places You Must Visit Before You Die, or 8 Easy Steps to a Flatter Tummy, with the numbers in very large type on their covers. They are the publishing equivalent of junk food, quickie books written to match titles that were […]
Memo to Jacobin: Ecomodernism is not ecosocialism
Ecomodernism is incompatible with ecosocialism. If Jacobin recognizes that and changes course, it can make important contributions to the fight against climate change.
The Steps to Ecosocialism
John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus reply to a recent article published by Daniel Tanuro on carbon pricing schemes. Tanuro, a vehement critic of such schemes, focuses his critique on the cautiously critical support given by Foster and Angus to proposals developed by climate scientist James Hansen.
Expert Panel: The Anthropocene Epoch Has Definitely Begun
Key conclusion of Anthropocene Working Group report to Geological Congress: the “Great Acceleration” in the second half of the 20th century marked the end of the Holocene and the beginning of a new geological epoch. The evidence is overwhelming: earth entered a new geological epoch in about 1950. In an official report to the International […]
Now Is No Time to Wait
With the failure of the attempted coup of 15 July, the true danger begins now: an attempt to transform the de facto presidential system into overt fascism with the support of a racist and reactionary militant mass movement buoyed by the rhetoric that the “coup was thwarted by popular resistance” “#NATO partner #Erdoğan uses a […]
We Stand with Palestine in the Spirit of “Sumud”
At a moment of growing resistance to state violence and injustice the world over, a delegation of nineteen anti-prison, labor and scholar-activists from the United States traveled to Palestine in March 2016. Our delegation included former U.S.-held political prisoners and social prisoners, former Black Panther Party members, prison abolitionists, trade unionists and university professors. We […]
#CizreyeSesVer / #GiveVoiceToCizre: Urgent Call for International Action
Turkey is increasingly drifting into a civil war. Politics of violence have escalated after the general elections of June 7 led by the AKP provisional government. Today, the peace and negotiation process between PKK and the Turkish state has come to a halt and war has started again. Just within the last month, severe clashes […]
