“John Bellamy Foster”
“his 2022 book Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution”
“Foster opens the book by arguing that the Marxist ecological framework views economic and environmental crises as two sides of the same capitalist coin. He goes on to state that our current moment is defined by a dual struggle: the inner human need for freedom from exploitation and the simultaneous battle for a safe and livable planetary environment”
“Foster traces what he calls the “three critical breakthroughs of ecological Marxism””
“These breakthroughs include the discovery of the ecological value-form in Marx’s original analysis, the recovery of Marx’s metabolic rift theory, and the retrieval of Marx’s economic and ecological crisis duality present within capitalism”
“making a compelling argument that Marx’s thinking was not an insignificant contribution to the development of the ecosystem concept put forth by Arthur Tansely and later advanced by Howard T. Odum”
“Foster devotes an entire chapter to criticizing (and willfully misunderstanding) radical environmental geography. The primary target of his criticism is geographer Jason W. Moore, who Foster has had an ongoing back-and-forth with in what can only be described as the most pedantic of academic disputes over the use of the terms “Anthropocene” (by Foster) and “Capitalocene” (by Moore)”
“Basing this all on a loose connection to Bruno Latour and the Breakthrough Institute, Foster instead reveals his near total lack of understanding of the environmental project within human geography that seeks to understand the way in which society influences its own understanding of nature.”
“Another glaring omission in the text is the almost complete absence of the work of Murray Bookchin. Foster goes to great lengths to (accurately, I will add) elucidate the role of Engels’s dialectical nature in shaping ecological thought, perhaps as much or more so than Marx himself. However, he seems to entirely miss (or deliberately ignore) the work of Bookchin, who did more than any other 20th century ecological thinker to recover and advance Engles’s writings on the dialectics of nature. Perhaps this is due to the now-centuries long “rift” between leftist anarchism and Marxism”
“He does pay lip service to the coinciding economic and ecological crises eventually leading to “ecodemocratic” and “ecosocialist” revolutions, but has virtually no interest in the specific type(s) of organizing (current or future) that might produce said revolutions”
“Who is this book for? Those interested in bringing about an actual ecosocialist future will find little of use in the pages here”