Ebook: Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique

In Marx and the Earth John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett respond to recent ecosocialist criticisms of Marx, offering a full-fledged anti-critique. They thus extend their earlier pioneering work on Marx’s ecology, providing the basis for a new red-green synthesis.

A decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new, revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, including his value analysis. Now in Marx and the Earth Foster and Burkett expand on this analysis in the process of responding to recent ecosocialist criticisms of Marx. The result is a full-fledged anti-critique—pointing to the crucial roles that dialectics, open-system thermodynamics, intrinsic value, and aesthetic understandings played in the original Marxian critique, holding out the possibility of a new red-green synthesis.

Biographical note
John Bellamy Foster, Ph.D., 1985, York University, Toronto, is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review (New York). He is author of Marx’s Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000).

Paul Burkett, Ph.D., 1984, Syracuse University, is Professor of Economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. He is the author of Marx and Nature (Palgrave, 1999) and Marxism and Ecological Economics (Brill, 2006).

Readership
All those (both academics and movement activists) interested in the relation of Marxism and socialism generally to ecology, including those in the fields of ecological economics, environmental sociology, Marxian theory, and history of ecology.