From the Journal
The central case in Saito’s new book is that the more Marx learned of the metabolic rift, the more he embraced ecological and anti-colonial positions until ultimately he arrived at “degrowth communism.”
The process of diamond and gemstone commodification masks the exploitation of labour and the extractive practices that wreck the ecology and impair the health of local populations, and have a particularly debilitating effect under neoliberal extractive regimes and regulations.
Beautiful, powerful, and edifying, Stephen Buhner’s book is recommended to everyone who has felt the full scope of the environmental crisis and wants, at the very least, to encounter someone else who has faced the abyss of grief and has some insights about how to live with it.
The Future is Degrowth recommends practical proposals for degrowth, and while the authors recommend a lot of things which would be vast improvements over what we have now, they don’t really know how it’s going to happen, and so what we can expect is a conflict-ridden and untidy process.
Veganism should be enacted broadly on the Left as a praxis not only of anti-speciesist or animal-rights-motivated politics, but also broader politics of anti-capitalism and liberation.
We can distinguish between two forms of humanism in the Marxian tradition and locate the conceptual space occupied by animals in each, providing valuable conceptual tools for critical animal studies to employ.
Thinking about animals as a class, with common interests and common suffering, enables us to see suffering and exploitation as results of a larger system, not particular acts of cruelty.
Mass incarceration is anathema to the pursuit of public health and environmental justice because carceral systems are inherently anti-ecological and produce illness and disease within and beyond the walls of confinement.
Health and Environmental Justice Struggles in America’s Prisons During a Global Pandemic ★ The Zoological Marx ★ Essence, Alienation and Animal Liberation: Toward a Humanism for Non-Humans ★ Veganism as Left Praxis ★ Green New Deals: What Shapes Green and Deal? ★ Ecologically Unequal Exchange Theory: A Rejoinder to Hornborg ★ Commons in the Common Sense: Resisting Enclosures with Anti-Fracking Activists in Lancashire, UK ★ “We Are All Indigenous!” Insurgent Universality on the Extractive Frontier ★ Poetry ★ Review of The Future is Degrowth: a guide to a world beyond capitalism.