“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]
Subjects Archives: Ecology
Marxist Ecology, Environmental Science and Ecological Crisis
Capitalism in Crisis
“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]
Thailand: A Second “Coup for the Rich”
“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]
Power in the Early Republic, Inc.
“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]
Reflections on the Global Economic Crisis and Its Likely Impact on South Africa
“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English. We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history. Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]
Indigenous Peoples Rising in Bolivia and Ecuador
Introduction Indigenous peoples in Indo-Afro-Latin America, especially Bolivia and Ecuador, are rising up to take control of their own lives and act in solidarity with others to save the planet. They are calling for new, yet ancient, practices of plurinational, participatory, and intercultural democracy. They champion ecologically sustainable development; community-based autonomies; and solidarity with other […]
Neoliberalism and Hindutva: Fascism, Free Markets and the Restructuring of Indian Capitalism
Over the 1980s and 1990s we witnessed the simultaneous rise of two reactionary political projects, Hindutva and neoliberalism, to a position of dominance in India. Such a combination is not unusual, in that neoliberalism is usually allied with and promoted by socially reactionary forces (such as the hyper-nationalism of the “bureaucratic-authoritarian” dictatorships in Latin America, […]
Saving 7 Billion Environments
As I write this, the most serious economic crisis in 80 years is rolling across the planet. Only time will tell if we are now going into one of history’s U-turns or if it’s all just part of the normal boom-and-bust business cycle. And no one yet knows how badly humanity and the ecosphere […]
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
In the prime of our youth We dreamt of hope Testimonies of a new world Anthems of a new tomorrow A world in which no one Suffered sorrow or knew of hunger On this side there were multitudes On the other the elite On this side the hungry, the naked On the other the treasures […]
Paloma Causes Devastation But . . . It Is Fortunate That We Have a Revolution
It is too soon to know exactly what material damage was caused by Hurricane Paloma, the third hurricane of great intensity to hit us in less than 10 weeks during the present hurricane season, but, facing this new blow dealt by nature, we Cubans can affirm that it is fortunate that we have a Revolution. […]
Dikmen Valley: A Story of Resistance from Turkey
Dikmen Valley in Ankara, Turkey was originally Dikmen Village. The village goes back to the 1950s, but it wasn’t settled in the form of a squatter [gecekondu in Turkish] neighborhood till around 1968. The valley has five etapes. The first and second etapes were settled the earliest while the fourth and fifth etapes were […]
Developing Countries: Dangerous Times for the Internal Public Debt
Since the second half of the 1990s, the internal public debt of the world’s developing countries has increased significantly. This increase is now reaching alarming proportions in a number of middle-income countries. While some very poor countries have not yet been affected, the historical trend indicates a continuing rise in the debt level for developing […]
Making Environmentalism in Postsocialist Hungary
Krista Harper. Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activists and Post-Socialist Ecology in Hungary. Boulder: Eastern European Monographs, 2006. 160 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-88033-592-8. Wild Capitalism offers a set of ethnographic essays on environmental activism in Hungary from the 1980s through the 1990s, in which Krista Harper “interrogates how the meanings of ‘environment,’ ‘citizenship,’ […]
Capitalism and Climate Change
John Bellamy Foster: We need to go down to 350 parts per million [the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere], which means very big social transformations on a scale that would be considered revolutionary by anybody in society today — transformation of our whole society quite fundamentally. We have to aim at […]
Multiplicity at the Heart of Asia: “Chinese Turkestan” in Broad Historical Perspective
James Millward. Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. New York Columbia University Press, 2007. 352 pp. $41.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13924-3. There are precious few well-written and well-researched books on Central Asia/Eurasia on any topic or period, especially for a non-specialist readership. This magnificent survey history of an important heartland in the region […]
Seized! The 2008 Land Grab for Food and Financial Security
Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production. On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits […]
Asia and the Meltdown of American Finance
The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America’s troubles. Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.” But asking Asia’s business and governing elites to repress shivers of […]
Taking Politics Seriously: Looking beyond the Election and beyond Elections
We have nothing against voting. We plan to vote in the upcoming election. Some of our best friends are voters. But we also believe that we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that the most important political moment in our lives comes in the voting booth. Instead, people should take politics seriously, which means […]
The Depression: A Long-Term View
The depression has started. Journalists are still coyly enquiring of economists whether or not we may be entering a mere recession. Don’t believe it for a minute. We are already at the beginning of a full-blown worldwide depression with extensive unemployment almost everywhere. It may take the form of a classic nominal deflation, with all […]
Monopoly-Finance Capital and the Crisis
Klassekampen: Is the credit crisis a symptom of overaccumulation of capital? It seems to me that investments worldwide, but especially in the United States, were funneled into the traditionally “safe” housing market following the bursting of the dotcom-bubble. This overinvestment in turn generated a new bubble, thus causing today’s havoc. Is this correct? JBF: […]
