Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly Climate & Capitalism feature, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly Climate & Capitalism feature, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
Mandla Langa and Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s new novels, The Lost Language of the Soul and The Wanderers, intersect in their reflections on the lives of Umkhonto weSizwe freedom fighters.
(Photograph by Thabang Malatji)Novelist, poet and short story writer Mandla Langa’s latest book, The Lost Language of the Soul, is a coming-of-age tale set largely in Zambia and apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s. The novel chronicles the odyssey of Joseph Mabaso, the son of an Umkhonto weSizwe soldier who goes in search of his mother after her sudden disappearance from their home in Lusaka. The search takes Langa’s teenage protagonist through various towns and borders until he ends up in South Africa.
There are now 2,776 articles on the Climate & Capitalism website. How many have you read?
In 2021, Climate & Capitalism published 91 new articles. These attracted the most readers.
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by Paul Buhl
The Cancer of Colonialism: W. Alphaeus Hunton, Black Liberation and the Daily Worker 1944-46. Edited with an Introduction by Tony Pecinovsky. Foreword by Vijay Prashad. New York: International Publishers, 2021. 353pp, $19.99.
This highly unusual book highlights a forgotten journalist and thinker, but just as much, the assiduous research and interpretations by Tony Pecinovsky, a St. Louis activist and non-academic scholar, on the history of the U.S. Left. W.A. Hunton, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, was “the kind of absolutely honest and unselfish scholar who is apt to be trampled on and neglected in the present American world.” (p.177) Thanks to Pecinovsky, Hunton is rediscovered.
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
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… and that’s why the market can’t solve the climate crisis
Bernice Maxton-Lee is co-author, with Graeme Maxton, of Resetting Our Future: A Chicken Can’t Lay a Duck Egg (John Hunt Publishing, October 2021)
by Bernice Maxton-Lee
How often are we told that the market must be part of the solution to the climate crisis? The efficiency, the focus, the discipline embedded in the pursuit of profit, the refinement of responding to consumer demands, each of us maximizing our individual utility, those are the values that will get us all pulling in the same, sustainable direction.
We’re told the collaboration of business and society will be win-win: companies will make loads of money; we, the people, will get a planet to live on. Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, said “there will be great fortunes made” when businesses start doing “what society wants”.
Twilight capitalism: Karl Marx and the decay of the profit system is the best book on Marxist political economy in 2021. Authored by Murray EG Smith, Jonah Butovsky and Josh Watterton, these Canadian-based Marxist economists have delivered a comprehensive and often original analysis of global capitalism in the 21st century.
5 new books for reds and greens … plus 4 important articles and 3 recent reviews
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
Stan Cox
THE PATH TO A LIVABLE FUTURE
A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic
City Lights Books, 2021
reviewed by Don Fitz
As climate change leads humanity’s march to Armageddon, data surfacing during late 2021 suggests that the march could be much briefer than previously thought. “Nature is starting to emit greenhouse gases in competition with cars, planes, trains, and factories,” asserts Robert Hunziker. The Amazon has switched from soaking up CO2 to emitting it. Likewise, the Arctic has flipped from being a carbon sink to becoming an emission source. Permafrost is giving off the three main greenhouse gases (GHGs): CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide. So much Siberian permafrost is melting that buildings are collapsing as methane bombs explode, resulting in craters 100 feet deep.
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by Thomas Klikauer (October 12, 2021 ) |
Mike Healy
Marx and Digital Machines: Alienation, Technology, Capitalism
University of Westminster Press, London, 2020, xi+156pp., £ 19,99
ISBN 9781-912656790
Ever since German philosopher Hegel discussed alienation and Karl Marx converted it into the sensible framework of the economics of capitalism, alienation isn’t really a new subject–many might even think all has been said. Yet, Healy’s exquisite book applies several recent frameworks of alienation to two groups of workers–IT workers and academics. His book delivers surprising insights and results. Healy has divided his book into eight short and very readable chapters starting with a conceptual chapter on “alienation”. The book’s key empirical chapters are on IT professionals.
Camel market in Nouakchott, Mauritania, 2008. (Ferdinand Reus CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)By Alexander Hartwiger
Africa is a Country
When Mohamedou Ould Slahi Zoomed into my graduate class from Mauritania in March to discuss his new novel, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, he shared a bit about the role writing fiction played during his detention at Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2016.
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
29 June 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
Tea workers in colonial India
Chris Otter
DIET FOR A LARGE PLANET
Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology
University of Chicago Press, 2020
reviewed by Amy Leather
Why do we eat what we do? This is the question Chris Otter seeks to answer in Diet for a Large Planet. It is very timely. In recent years there has been growing anger and horror at a food system that delivers both unhealthy and environmentally destructive diets. Food has become deeply politicized.
16 June 2021 — MROnline
“Capitalism must die to protect the sacred”
Originally published: “Capitalism must die to protect the sacred” by Susan Rosenthal (June 17, 2021 )
Book Review: The Red Nation (2021). The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth. Common Notions. 176 pages.
Indigenous people have been fighting to survive for centuries. Recently, their struggles have become more militant, more global, and less isolated, aligning with other anti-racist and anti-colonial movements, and leading the environmental movement.
28 May 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
1 June 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
Reading for Reds and Greens
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
14 May 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
The New Dark Age 