Product Description: From reviews of the first edition (1994): "Extraordinarily well written . . . "--Contemporary Sociology "A readable chronicle aimed at a general audience . . . Graceful and accessible . . . "--Dollars and Sense "Has the potential to be a political bombshell in radical circles around the world...read more

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Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This startling new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis. Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature. Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley. By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx's Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis. (view table of contents)

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Their analyses locate recent developments within a longer historical arc, and set out the central questions for research and debate: is US unilateralism and militarism a sign of the increasing strength of the world's only remaining superpower? Or a desperate response to the erosion of the strategy it developed for ensuring its leadership over.

Product Description: As John Bellamy Foster writes in his foreword to the present book, “István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism...read more

This is the first systematic discussion of the Marxian political economy of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and Samir Amin. John Foster explains their theoretical contributions and situates these in the context of on-going debates on economic theory. While orthodox economics takes account of the preeminent role of the giant, monopolistic corporation under capitalism only in passing, John Bellamy Foster's new study belongs to a distinguished tradition in Marxian social science which sees the rise of concentrated capital as the fundamental aspect of accumulation in the twentieth century, accounting for the tendency toward economic stagnation, helping to explain the growth of militarism and imperialism, and complicating the problem of radical social transformation. In this analysis of recent debates in Marxian political economy-the first to provide a sympathetic and thorough treatment of the pioneering work of Baran and Sweezy in particular-Foster focuses on the debates surrounding the theory of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and dependency theory, and the contentious issue of socialist construction in postrevolutionary societies. This book will be useful for all those-students and general readers alike-who want to understand the issues and debates, now and in the past, that Marxian political economy addresses.