India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
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.
All signs are that the 21st century will see a struggle for hegemony over the world economy between the US and China. This may be different from similar struggles in the past, due to the uniqueness of China, which is neither entirely capitalist nor entirely socialist.
John Bellamy Foster [The following was published as part of roundtable in answer to the question: What is the main lesson that environmental movements should carry forward from the coronavirus pandemic? —Ed.] In his classic ecological work, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Frederick Engels observed that “in nature…
Foster says that Trump’s handling of the pandemic catastrophe only buttresses his argument that Donald Trump’s presidency represents the resurrection of fascism in the United States.
Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social system. The world is mired in economic stagnation, financialisation, and the most extreme inequality in human history, accompanied by mass unemployment and underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at this point can only…
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