Japanese Marxist academic Kohei Saito, author of Capital in the Anthropocene, will be a keynote speaker at Ecosocialism 2023, organised by Green Left. Peter Boyle reports.
Marxism
Margaret McLellan travelled to East Timor, visited refugees in the Villawood Detention Centre and was involved in the Saint Vincent de Paul Society and Christians for Peace. Steve O'Brien and Niko Leka reflect on her life.
Neville Spencer reviews Alan Woods' excellent and readable history of philosophy, which is essential reading for students of Marxism.
Italian historian Marcello Musto's stimulating account of Karl Marx's last decade shows he did not fade as he aged, but engaged with developing his theories, reviewed by Barry Healy.
The name of Friedrich Engels is invariably invoked in the same breath as that of Karl Marx, writes John Green, but who is aware of Engels’ own contribution to the political philosophy of what we today term ‘Marxism’?
Neville Spencer reviews John Bellamy Foster's The Return of Nature, which examines the ecological thought of those who came after Karl Marx and were influenced by his philosophy, politics and ecology.
Comics, graphic novels, narrative drawing, illustrated fiction are a growing arena for serious social and political commentary. Andrew Chuter reviews five that are a must read for activists today.
Chris Gaffney passed away on August 14 after a lengthy battle with cancer. An eloquent speaker, walking encyclopaedia of Marxism, talented actor, aficionado of opera and lover of nature and the animals with which we share the planet, he is survived by his long-time partner Jenny Campbell, their son Danny and granddaughter Elsa.
Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
By Kohei Saito
Monthly Review Press, 2017
RED-GREEN REVOLUTION: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism
By Victor Wallis
Political Animal Press, 2018
Social Reproduction Theory
Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya
Pluto Press $45
The rise of #MeToo, the anti-rape culture movement in India, the global women’s strike and the pro-choice movements that have rocked Ireland and Argentina reveal a new generation of feminist activists organising for change. Many of the new activists may not have heard the debates from the previous upsurge — the “second wave” of feminism.
Social Reproduction Theory
Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya
Pluto Press $45
The rise of #MeToo, the anti-rape culture movement in India, the global women’s strike and the pro-choice movements that have rocked Ireland and Argentina reveal a new generation of feminist activists organising for change. Many of the new activists may not have heard the debates from the previous upsurge — the “second wave” of feminism.
Adam Mayer’s book on Marxist currents in Nigeria is what it says on the cover — a rich history of Marxist and revolutionary thought and struggles that are little known outside the West African nation.
Cyril Lionel Robert James, best known as CLR James, was a Trinidadian-born, Black socialist whose work spanned many of the great struggles of the 20th century and across many continents.
A life-long anti-Stalinist, he died in 1989 just as the Soviet Union was beginning to break up – something that brought him joy.
Now his remarkable life has been captured in a new documentary Every Cook Can Govern.
Ian Parker has a track record as an ecosocialist political activist in Britain. He is a committed but non-dogmatic Marxist and a psychoanalyst so, unsurprisingly, anything he writes is likely to be serious and challenging.
Despite a strong theoretical and academic background, however, Parker writes in a very engaging and interesting fashion.
“The general idea of this little book is to understand and explain why Marx will still be read in the twenty-first century, not only as a monument of the past, but as a contemporary author — contemporary both because of the questions he poses for philosophy and because of the concepts he offers it,” French philosopher Etienne Balibar writes in The Philosophy of Marx.
With some reservations, I feel he achieves this goal. It is a thought-provoking book, but it may disappoint readers who seek either an introduction to Marx’s philosophy or a straightforward account of how Marx’s ideas can inspire focused political action in the 21st century.
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of US-based Marxist journal Monthly Review. His most recent book, written with Paul Burkett, is Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (Brill, 2016). The French magazine La Revue du Projet asked him to reply to three questions on ecology and Marxism. A translated version below is reprinted, slightly abridged, from Climate & Capitalism.
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