User Tools
Sidebar
John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique
Paperback, 308 pages
Brill/Haymarket, 2017
ISBN: 9781608467051
The authors address certain “critiques of the ecological content of Marx’s and Engels’s work, with some arguing that they failed to develop an ecological approach. This book seeks to address these in order to strengthen classical Marxism’s analysis of environmental questions. These debates are, it must be said, of a highly specific nature which means the authors must delve deep both into the works of Marx and Engels and their critics. The key arguments taken up by Foster and Burkett are the distinction between organic and inorganic nature in some of Marx’s writings, the question of energy and the laws of thermodynamics and how they pertain to the question of production, the question of entropy and finally Marx’s reproduction schemes. Here I want to focus on one particular aspect of these debates as it illustrates the authors’ approach well in defending classical Marxism. This is the question of energy….” Full review by Martin Empson
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Dialectic of Organic and Inorganic Relations
Chapter 2 The Origins of Ecological Economics: Podolinsky and Marx-Engels
Chapter 3 Classical Marxism and Energetics
Chapter 4 Engels, Entropy, and the Heat Death Hypothesis
Chapter 5 The Reproduction of Economy and Society
Conclusion: Marx and Metabolic Restoration
Appendix I:
Sergei Podolinsky, ‘Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces’
(Translated from the Italian)
Appendix II
Sergei Podolinsky, ‘Human Labour and Unity of Force’
(Translated from the German)
