Dominique Mosbergen — Insects Are Dying En Masse, Risking ‘Catastrophic’ Collapse Of Earth’s Ecosystems

The insect apocalypse is indeed upon us, according to the first global scientific review of insect population decline.

Another bad omen?

Huff Post
Insects Are Dying En Masse, Risking ‘Catastrophic’ Collapse Of Earth’s Ecosystems
Dominique Mosbergen

More Marx, socialism, and ecology

MR Online
Marx and Metabolism: lost in translation?

Ian Angus | editor of Climate and Capitalism

MR Online
On the eve of Venezuela’s elections, the U.S. empire isn’t sitting idly by

Editorial

MR Online
Ten Marxist ideas that define the 21st century
Sergio Alejandro Gómez

Econospeak
The So-called Labour Fund

Sandwichman

Radical Political Economy

Capitalism and the Expropriation of Nature: The Strategic Discourse of Ecosocialism

John Bellamy Foster

Naked Capitalism

To Reform Capitalism, Look to Marx

Frank Block | Research Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis

Michael Löwy — Marx’s ecology: recovered legacy

While mainstream ecological theory has been dismissive of Karl Marx, serious research in recent decades has recovered some of his very important insights on ecological issues. The pioneers have been James O’Connor and the journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism—a tradition continued by Joel Kovel—but the most systematic and thorough investigations on Marx’s ecological views are those of John Bellamy Foster and his friends from Monthly Review.

Many ecologists accuse Marx of “productivism.” Is this accusation justified? No, insofar as nobody denounced as much as Marx the capitalist logic of production for production: the accumulation of capital, wealth and commodities as an aim in itself.
The fundamental idea of a socialist economy—contrary to its miserable bureaucratic caricatures—is one of producing use-values, goods which are necessary for the satisfaction of human needs. Moreover, the main importance of technical progress for Marx was not the infinite growth of goods (“having”) but the reduction of the labour journey and the increase of free time (“being”).

In the being-doing-having model, being is more important than doing. Doing follows from being. Doing is more than having in that having is a by-product of doing. Happiness is a property of being that accrues from unfolding one's potential as a person (human being) and as an individual (particular personality).

In the consumerist model, having in most important, and doing is the sine qua non of having. Being largely irrelevant in this model, so genuine happiness is precluded. This results in alienation.

In contemporary capitalism, based on the consumer economy, consumerism replaces the increased leisure made available by increases in productivity. Freedom gets traded for trinkets, promoted by advertising, so that firms can maintain profits. One result of consumerism in addition to alienation is ecological degradation.

MROnline
Marx’s ecology: recovered legacy

Michael Löwy | emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS; Paris, France)

Chris Williams — Marx and Engels on ecology: A reply to radical critics

Chris Williams reviews Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique by Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, Haymarket Books, 2017....

As shown by Foster and Burkett, Marx and Engels believed that to be truly free, humanity not only needed to overcome the alienation of labor but simultaneously our alienation from nature, both bestowed on us by capitalism

Capitalism privileges property ownership over people and the environment.

Marx and Engels go far beyond a mere utilitarian conception of nature and ascribe an appreciation of nature as a primary axis of human fulfillment and, furthermore, it is the duty of a socialist society to look after the air, water, and soil for the benefit of future generations of humans and other species. Marx’s tremendously important concept of the “metabolic rift” furnishes us with the analytical tools to understand why capitalism is inherently anti-ecological—and thereby anti-human—and furthermore, how a socialist society must operate to repair those rifts and overcome human alienation from nature....

Defend Democracy
Marx and Engels on ecology: A reply to radical critics

Chris Williams

Peter Singer — Reconsidering Man’s Dominion

A few Christian thinkers have sought to reinterpret “dominion” as “stewardship,” suggesting that God entrusted humanity to care for his creation. But it remained a minority view, favored by environmentalists and animal protectionists, and Aquinas’s interpretation remained the prevailing Catholic doctrine until the late twentieth century. 

Francis has now come down decisively against the mainstream view, saying that Christians “have at times incorrectly interpreted the Scriptures,” and insisting that “we must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures.” Our “dominion” over the universe, he declares, should be understood “in the sense of responsible stewardship.” 

Against the background of nearly 2,000 years of Catholic thinking about “man’s dominion,” this is a revolutionary change. But the encyclical includes another statement that could have even more far-reaching implications. That statement, which originally appeared in the Catechism of the Catholic Church issued by Pope John Paul II in 1992, calls it “contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly.” To ensure that the sentiment would be noticed, Francis tweeted it. (Yes, Francis tweets, using the Twitter handle @Pontifex.)

Project Syndicate
Reconsidering Man’s Dominion

Peter Singer | Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne

Oleg Komlik — Ulrich Beck has died. His powerful concept of ‘Risk society’ is relevant as never was before

His 1986 book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity is a scholarly (and political) bestseller which was translated into 35 languages, with about 24,000 academic citations. While firm in criticising those who claim Western societies are “postmodern”, Beck also offers an immanent critique of modernity’s failed promises. Due to its own successes, modern society now faces failure: while in the past experiments were conducted in a lab, now the whole world is a test bed. Whether nuclear plants, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology – if any of these experiments went wrong, the consequences would have a global impact and would be irreversible.… 

Risk society is ‘an inescapable structural condition of advanced industrialization”. Modern society has become a risk society in the sense that it is increasingly occupied with debating, preventing and managing risks that it itself has produced. The changing nature of society’s relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict. Whereas in earlier class-based societies only the proletariat was victimized, in the emerging worldwide risk society all groups – even the rich – are threatened.… 

“After all, the ecological issue, considered politically and sociologically, focuses at heart on a systematic, legalized violation of fundamental civil rights – the citizen’s right to life and freedom from bodily harm… In the ecological crisis we are dealing with a breach of fundamental rights that is cushioned and disguised during prosperity but that has socially destabilizing long-term effects that can scarcely be overestimated.” (quoted from: Beck, Ulrich. 1995. Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society. Humanities Press. P. 8)

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
Ulrich Beck has died. His powerful concept of ‘Risk society’ is relevant as never was before
Oleg Komlik

Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen — The twilight of neoliberalism: can popular struggles create new worlds from below?

If the ideologists of neoliberalism want to present it as the natural order of humanity, a more sober historical assessment points out that it has lasted about as long as Keynesianism did before it – a few decades.

In our new book We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism we condense four decades of research and activism into an argument about how ordinary people can understand the nature of the world we live in and find ways to push beyond the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last few decades.
We start by asking how we can get beyond the theologies of university economists – impervious to the failures of their ideas and their costs in human lives – and the opinion politics of angry right-wingers on the Internet. We look at how people in struggle learn about the world through attempting to change things (and in the process overthrow apartheid, dictatorships or empires) and develop movement-based theories such as Marxism, feminism or ecological thinking. Often these forms of thought become taken up into the university, and popular movements have to “reclaim, reuse and recycle” them for their own purposes, in attempting to break out of the limits which the powerful and wealthy want to set on them. 

We Make Our Own History rethinks humanist Marxism as a theory of collective action, including the ways in which social movements from below can develop from localised struggles over individual issues to far-reaching projects for social change (a welfare state, an end to patriarchy, an ecologically sustainable society). It also looks at the history of movements from above – those which can draw on the resources of capital, the state or cultural power to impose themselves. Rather than see these as unstoppable, we show how complex the process of constructing power has been, how at every stage of the way popular resistance has shifted the terrain, and how short-lived all historical forms of capitalism have been. If the ideologists of neoliberalism want to present it as the natural order of humanity, a more sober historical assessment points out that it has lasted about as long as Keynesianism did before it – a few decades – and is just as vulnerable to the collapse of the alliances which sustain it.…

Yet any attempt to shortcircuit the slow development of popular agency, whether through opinion politics or intellectual critique which discuss structures in isolation from the kinds of agency which sustain them – and the kinds of agency needed to overcome them – is doomed to failure. The most effective orientation for change is one which starts from dialogue with practically situated struggles – those that people have to engage in to sustain their lives – and supports their extension in alliances across space but also across the social world, into far-reaching projects for change which are grounded in a wide range of differentsituations. These processes of external struggle, internal learning and alliance-building are what matter most, and there is no short-cut (in universities, parties or shouting at the computer screen) that can usefully avoid them. 

Human beings make our own history, but not just as we please: neoliberalism, like all other forms of capitalism before it (and in the bigger picture like every form of class society), had a beginning and will have an end. The key question in this crisis is whether movements from below are able to develop together in a way that enables them to set the direction for what comes next.

Open Democracy

The twilight of neoliberalism: can popular struggles create new worlds from below?
Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Frans van Houten — The Circular Revolution

Just as ecosystems reuse everything in an efficient and purposeful cycle, a “circular” economic system would ensure that products were designed to be part of a value network, within which the reuse and refurbishment of products, components, and materials would ensure the continual re-exploitation of resources.

Project Syndicate
The Circular Revolution
Frans van Houten | Chief Executive Officer of Royal Philips

Like all major transitions in human history, the shift from a linear to a circular economy will be a tumultuous one. It will feature pioneers and naysayers, victories and setbacks. But, if businesses, governments, and consumers each do their part, the Circular Revolution will put the global economy on a path of sustainable long-term growth – and, 500 years from now, people will look back at it as a revolution of Copernican proportions.

Paying attention to land (natural resources, ecology) as a crucial economic factor that is finite and fragile. Is private property a sufficient incentive for appropriate stewardship? Not under the current institutional arrangements that promote unlimited growth and profit based on freely exploiting resources. 

The real tragedy of the commons is turning out to be overuse, depletion and degradation due to privatization under contemporary economic liberalism (neoliberalism) as a socio-economic and political theory. The problem is traceable to power structures, institutional arrangements, negative externality, adverse selection and perverse incentives that market-based theories do not take into account in pursuing innovation and efficiency based on the assumption of (near) perfect competition.

Audrey Clark — Biologist Paul Ehrlich gives dire prediction for global civilization

“I believe and all of my colleagues believe that we are on a straightforward course to a collapse of our civilization.”

VTDigger
Biologist Paul Ehrlich gives dire prediction for global civilization
Audrey Clark

Technology running ahead of our ability as a species to adapt to emerging challenges arising from it.

After an hour-long talk about all the reasons why a collapse of civilization is likely and how hard it will be to prevent, Ehrlich offered one iota of hope: “If there’s any reason for hope, it’s that we do have a history of showing that human beings, human societies, in relatively recent times can change extremely dramatically, extremely rapidly.” 

Ehrlich went on, “For some reason — we don’t fully understand it — when the time is right, you can get dramatic, dramatic changes, which indicates to me that there’s a chance that when the time is right, we can change the way we behave towards each other and towards our environment and it can happen very very rapidly. I think … your main challenge is to find a way to ripen the time.”