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  • Monthly Review Essays

About Ian Angus

Ian Angus is a socialist and ecosocialist activist in Canada. He is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism. He is co-author, with Simon Butler, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket, 2011); editor of the anthology The Global Fight for Climate Justice (Fernwood, 2010); and author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press, 2016) and A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017). His latest book is The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2023).
  • A crop-duster spraying pesticide on a field. (Source: USDA photo by Charles O'Rear, Wikimedia commons)

    Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene, Part 3

    Ian Angus

    Ian Angus on chemical warfare against insects.

  • Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene, Part 2

    Ian Angus

    The world’s insects are among the principal victims of capitalist agricultural concentration.

  • The discovery & rediscovery of metabolic rift Speaker: Ian Angus

    The discovery & rediscovery of metabolic rift

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on July 2019 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Ian Angus discusses the scientific developments that led Marx to develop metabolic rift theory in the 1800s, and a new generation to rediscover it the 21st century.

  • ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation’

    The meaning of ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation’

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on September 5, 2022 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    A key concept in Karl Marx’s Capital is widely misunderstood.

  • Locals break into Richmond Park to ‘Beat the Bounds’, 1751

    Against enclosure: The commoners fight back

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on January 15, 2022 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Articles in this series: Commons and classes before capitalism ‘Systematic theft of communal property’ Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back  by Ian Angus In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a […]

  • Building and clothmaking were among the largest industrial occupations in the 17th century.

    Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on December 12, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Deprived of land and common rights, the English poor were forced into wage-labor. CAPITAL VERSUS COMMONS, 4

  • A 16th Century printing press. Commonwealth views were widely disseminated in books, pamphlets and broadsides.

    Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on October 21, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    How 16th century reformers fought privatization of land and capitalist agriculture.

  • ‘Climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity’

    ‘Climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity’

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on October 12, 2021 by World Health Organization (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    World Health Organization urges ‘rapid and ambitious action to halt and reverse the climate crisis’.

  • 200+ medical journals demand emergency climate action

    200+ medical journals demand emergency climate action

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on September 7, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Editors urge ‘fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organized’.

  • Tenants harvest the landlord’s grain

    Robbing the Soil, 2: ‘Systematic theft of communal property’

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on August 30, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    “The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Karl Marx)

  • Harvesting grain in the 1400s

    Robbing the soil, 1: Commons and classes before capitalism

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on August 1, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    “All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” (Karl Marx)

  • Processing cod in a 16th Century Newfoundland ‘Fishing Room’

    The fishing revolution

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on May 13, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Centuries before the industrial revolution, the first factories transformed seafood production.

  • The Spanish Armada off the English Coast, by Cornelis Claesz. van Wieringen, ca. 1620

    The first cod war

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on April 5, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    How England’s government-licensed pirates stole the Newfoundland fishery from Europe’s largest feudal empire.

  • “In the sixteenth and partly still in the seventeenth, the sudden expansion of trade and the creation of a new world market had an overwhelming influence on the defeat of the old mode of production and the rise of the capitalist mode.” — Karl Marx[1]

    Newfoundland = New found fish

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on March 8, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    While treasure fleets carried silver to Spain, far more ships were carrying men, fish and whale oil across the North Atlantic.

  • A trawler reeling in a fishing net containig hunderds of thousands of cod fish, an example of overfishing. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

    Commodity cod & factory ships

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on February 3, 2021 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Beginning a series on the role of fishing in the birth and spread of capitalism, and the role of capitalism in today’s mass extinction of ocean life.

  • the Keeling Curve

    Greenhouse gases set new record, despite COVID-19 lockdown

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on November 23, 2020 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Top meteorologist: only a complete transformation of our industrial, energy and transport systems can stop climate change.

  • Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean. Part Three: The Heat of 3.6 Billion Atom Bombs

    Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean. Part Three: The heat of 3.6 Billion Atom Bombs

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on October 24, 2020 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Since 1987 the ocean has warmed 4.5 times as fast as in the previous three decades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that even if emissions are substantially reduced, by 2100 the ocean will heat 2 to 4 times as much as it has since 1970–and if emissions are not cut, it will heat 5 to 7 times as much.

  • anthropocene opener WB

    Triple Crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean. Part Two: Running low on oxygen

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on September 20, 2020 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Continuing Ian Angus’s examination of the ‘deadly trio’ of CO2-driven assaults on ocean life. Part two: The ocean is losing its breath.

  • Ocean temp

    Triple crisis in the Anthropocene Ocean

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on September 7, 2020 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Scientists call them a ‘deadly trio.’ If acidification, oxygen loss, and overheating are not ended soon, a massive die-off of ocean life may be unstoppable.

  • Dead fish, trash, plastic, ocean pollution awareness (Photo: Pikist.com)

    Dead Zones: Industrial agriculture versus ocean life

    Originally published: Climate & Capitalism on August 12, 2020 (more by Climate & Capitalism)  |

    Worldwide, there are now over a thousand coastal areas where fish can’t breathe. The nitrogen that makes crops grow is also destroying offshore ecosystems.

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Also By Ian Angus in Monthly Review Magazine

  • An Ecological Civilization Will Have to Be Socialist January 01, 2025
  • The Meaning of ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation’ April 01, 2023
  • The Fishing Revolution and the Origins of Capitalism March 01, 2023
  • Marx and Engels and Russia’s Peasant Communes October 01, 2022
  • Facing the Anthropocene: An Update November 01, 2020
  • The Trial of Thomas Hardy November 01, 2019
  • Superbugs in the Anthropocene June 01, 2019
  • Cesspools, Sewage, and Social Murder July 01, 2018

Books By Ian Angus

  • The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism September 13, 2023
  • A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism June 14, 2017

Monthly Review Essays

  • The Migrant Genocide: Toward a Third World Analysis of European Class Struggle
    Iker Suarez A banner at a memorial rally for victims of the 2014 massacre of migrants at Tarajal, 2021.

    Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone.[1] On June 2022, the border fence of Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, was witness to a massacre that killed or disappeared over a hundred African migrants.[2]  A recent BBC investigation revealed that Greek border guards systematically repeal immigrants already on Greek […]

Lost & Found

  • Strike at the Helm: The First Ministerial Meeting of the New Cycle of the Bolivarian Revolution
    Hugo Chávez Mural of Chávez in Caracas. (Univision)

    On October 7th, 2012, after hearing of his victory as the nation‘s candidate with 56 percent of the vote, President Hugo Chávez Frias announced from a balcony in his hometown that a new cycle was beginning the very next day, October 8th.

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