India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
Historical materialism, in the dominant twentieth-century narrative in the West, is understood as confined to social sciences and humanities. However, John Bellamy Foster writes, Marx and Engels did not have such a limited conception, instead engaging with the natural sciences, providing insight into the dialectics of nature.
In the Anthropocene, extractivism has become a core symptom of the planetary disease of late capitalism/imperialism, threatening humanity and the inhabitants of the earth in general.
How are we to understand the origins and historic significance of the concept of ecological civilization? What is its relation to ecological Marxism? And how is this connected to the worldwide revolutionary struggle aimed at transcending our current planetary emergency and protecting what Karl Marx called “the chain of human generations,” together with life in general?
While commenting on the first part of the “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” debate, Foster discusses the most urgent task today: to respond to the ecological catastrophe and the danger of an imminent civilisational collapse from an ecosocialist perspective.
István Mészáros was a global thinker strongly committed to anti-imperialist struggles. His most singular contribution to struggles in the Global South was the role he was to play in his strong strategic support of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.
The United States (backed by the whole of NATO) is in a long proxy war with Russia, with Ukraine as the battlefield. The U.S. role in this conception is to provide more and more weapons faster and faster with Ukraine doing the fighting, bolstered by foreign mercenaries.
The ever-growing conflict between ecology and capitalism reflects the startling degree to which profit-making has become the primary and most powerful connection between human beings and between human beings and nature.
Just as the USA declared a Cold War against the Soviet Union and China in the 1940s-50s, as part of a grand strategy to secure its global hegemony in the immediate post-Second World War era, today it is declaring a New Cold War on China in the interest of maintaining that same imperial hegemony.
Engels observed that because of the environmental and epidemiological conditions in the working class districts, disease and mortality rates are high there. He called it social murder. The current COVID-19 pandemic is related to social murder in several ways.
Despite all of the inevitable contradictions, China stands out in the present planetary emergency in having a leadership that has advanced an ambitious vision of ecological civilization with the strong support of the Chinese population, incorporating this directly into its five-year plans.
Janata Weekly is India’s oldest independent socialist weekly.
Ever since its founding in 1946, Janata has voiced its principled dissent against all conduct and practice that is detrimental to the cherished values of nationalism, democracy, secularism and socialism, while upholding the integrity and the ethical norms of healthy journalism. For more than seventy years now, week after week, it has continued to analyse the changes taking place in the country and the world from a socialist standpoint, and thus promote the spread of socialist ideology in the country.
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