Tag: News

NEW! Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality

February 20, 2024

Just released! In Class Dismissed, John Marsh debunks a myth cherished by journalists, politicians, and economists: that growing poverty and inequality in the United States can be solved through education. Using sophisticated analysis combined with personal experience in the classroom, Marsh not only shows that education has little impact on poverty and inequality, but that our mistaken beliefs actively shape the way we structure our schools and what we teach in them.

Read an excerpt from What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism in Links

February 20, 2024

Our friends at Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal have posted an excerpt from What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster.

Upcoming Events with Steve Early

February 20, 2024

Steve Early, author of Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, contributor to Wisconsin Uprising, and author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (from Haymarket Books), will be speaking at the following events.

NEW! What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism

February 20, 2024

Just released! This short, readable book is a sharply argued manifesto for those environmentalists who reject schemes of “green capitalism” or piecemeal reform. Environmental and economic scholars Magdoff and Foster contend that the struggle to reverse ecological degradation requires a firm grasp of economic reality. Going further, they argue that efforts to reform capitalism along environmental lines or rely solely on new technology to avert catastrophe misses the point. The main cause of the looming environmental disaster is the driving logic of the system itself, and those in power—no matter how “green”—are incapable of making the changes that are necessary.

Ben Dangl reviews MRP classic Let Me Speak!

February 20, 2024

The life experiences of Bolivian mining activist Domitila Barrios de Chungara traverse some of the most important and tumultuous events in 20th century Bolivian history. Her account of this life in the book Let Me Speak! offers a view from the trenches of militant, leftist organizing within the country labor movements and beyond.

John Tully interviewed on Radio New Zealand

February 20, 2024

Listen to the author of The Devil’s Milk discuss the social history of rubber on This Way Up with Simon Morton.

The Science & Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould reviewed in Human Ecology Review

February 20, 2024

Undoubtedly, Stephen Jay Gould is one of the great thinkers of the Twentieth Century. Gould was a leading figure in the fields of evolutionary biology and paleontology, and made important theoretical and empirical contributions to those fields over his accomplished career. The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould, by sociologists Richard York and Brett Clark, broadly examines the philosophical underpinnings of Gould’s work, and its application for understanding the interweaving relations among and between natural and social systems. This book provides a concise, yet remarkably thorough, survey of key aspects of Gould’s powerful worldview and philosophy, applying a rich overarching analysis of a scientific perspective that reveals numerous insights into the complexity of nature and, compellingly, society.

The Devil's Milk reviewed on Counterfire

February 20, 2024

What is a commodity? On the face of it, simply an object. Marx pointed out however that it is really ‘a very queer thing indeed, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological whimsies’. A commodity like rubber on the one hand contains all sorts of useful, non-reducible physical properties, and on the other, within a capitalist economy, is just the equivalent of a given quantity of money; it contains an abstract exchange value of a definite amount. Moreover, the individual commodity contains within itself all the natural and social processes which brought it into being as a discrete product, from the growth, in this case, of the rubber-producing tree, to its harvesting, transport and manufacture into commercial rubber.

The Ecological Rift reviewed in Earth Island Journal

February 20, 2024

There are more factors than climate change that threaten our existence on Earth. Scientists warn that it is only one of nine “planetary life-support systems” vital for human survival. The other boundaries are: global freshwater use, chemical pollution, ocean acidification, land use change, loss of biodiversity and the increasing extinction rate, ozone and aerosol levels in the atmosphere, and the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles that regulate soil fertility.

The Ecological Rift reviewed in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

February 20, 2024

In the last few decades, there has been a renewed interest in exploring issues of ecology and sustainability from a Marxist perspective. Partially inspired by the ecological movement more widely, partially by the revival of Marxist economic theory since the 1980s, the topic of ‘Marx and ecology’ has been given wide attention in a range of publications in recent years. All three of the authors of the present book have earned their stripes in this field of research, and in particular John Bellamy Foster has been influential in putting ecological questions on the agenda of socialist politics, a tradition that had hitherto often been hostile to the claims of (middle class) ‘green’ campaigners.