A Hard-Hitting Critique... Brings Together Fine Essays That Speak Directly To The Underlying Assumptions Of Postmodernism And Offer A Stunning Critique Of Its Usefulness In Both Understanding And Critiquing The Current Historical Epoch. Contemporary Sociology.

The resurrection of the classical Marxian ecological critique in the context of the current planetary emergency has led to the return of the concept of the dialectics of nature, associated with the work of Frederick Engels in particular. In the century following the deaths of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, the dialectics-of-nature conception played a formative role in the development of the modern ecological critique within science, notably in Britain, and helped inspire the contemporary environmentalist movement. Nevertheless, all of this (...) occurred outside the dominant streams of Marxian thought and practice, where a great chasm had arisen in this area. Whereas official Marxism in the Soviet Union reduced the dialectics of nature to a fixed dogma, Western Marxism rejected it altogether. In the current Anthropocene Epoch in the geological time scale – and in what is referred to here as the Capitalinian Age of the Anthropocene – a new historical-materialist synthesis constructed on classical foundations, reintegrating the dialectics of nature, so as to address the immense ecological challenges confronting humanity, is seen as objectively (and subjectively) necessary. (shrink)

Nesta entrevista, realizada em 10 de fevereiro de 2023, John Bellamy Foster fala com Daniel Tutt sobre o trabalho de István Mészáros e Paul Baran, as tendências irracionalistas contemporâneas no pensamento ecológico de esquerda, a intensificação das lutas de classes globais e a relevância contínua de A Destruição da Razão (1952), de Georg Lukács, recentemente reeditado com uma introdução de Enzo Traverso pela Verso em 2021. A entrevista está sendo disponibilizada antes de uma próxima edição especial da Historical Materialism, da (...) qual Tutt é co-editor, dedicada a The Destruction of Reason, de Lukács. (shrink)

Translated and reprinted by permission of Monthly Review magazine. (c) Monthly Review. All rights reserved. The New Irrationalism by John Bellamy Foster (February 2023, Volume 74, Number 9). Tradução por Lara Nora Portugal Penna. Revisão por Elcemir Paço Cunha.