Materials > Ecosocialism

Ecosocialist Manifesto / Belem Ecosocialist Declaration

With a more political than theoretical character, three prominent ecomarxists such as Joel Kovel, Michael Löwy and Ian Angus participated in the drafting of the Ecosocialist Manifesto (in this case, co-written only by the first two) and the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration. These are powerful texts that synthesize some of the most outstanding programmatic lines of…

Ian AngusJoel KovelMichael LöwyManifests
Gentrification and Uneven Development

Neil Smith was a leading Marxist geographer in the study of the production of urban space. His work on uneven development and gentrification has contributed to the critique of capital as an agent of spatial reconfiguration (or “second nature”), and should be read in dialogue with the work of Henri Lefebvre and the work of…

Neil SmithArticles
Marxism and Natural Limits

Ted Benton is a sociologist with a broad engagement with philosophical and natural science issues. His work has been linked to the “critical realism” group, and early on he developed a number of key contributions to the encounter between ecology and Marxist socialism. To this end, in his essay “Marxism and Natural Limits”, he exposed…

Ted BentonArticles
Who Lit this Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy

Andreas Malm, professor of human ecology at Lund University, is one of the leading figures of the latest generation of ecomarxists, with pioneering contributions to the historiography on the link between global warming and the development of fossil capitalism. His book Fossil Capital is a key study on the subject. As an introduction to his…

Andreas MalmArticles
The Concept of Nature in Marx / Response

Alfred Schmidt was a German philosopher belonging to the second generation of the Frankfurt School whose doctoral thesis, The Concept of Nature in Marx, supervised by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, would appear as a book in 1962, becoming possibly the most influential text on the subject until the end of the twentieth century. Schmidt’s…

Alfred SchmidtBooks
The Value of Everything? Work, Capital and Historical Nature in the Capitalist World-Ecology / Responses

Environmental historian and geographer Jason W. Moore gained notoriety, beyond his abundant academic work, with the publication in 2015 of Capitalism in the Web of Life, whose impact in turn aroused not a few responses. Before publishing his book, different articles anticipated some of the central theses contained in it. Among others, we propose the…

Jason W. MooreArticles
The Second Contradiction of Capitalism

James O’Connor was an economist and sociologist, co-founder and editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism, the most influential ecosocialist academic journal. O’Connor, a great communicator of ecomarxist thought, is known for his theoretical contribution regarding the “second contradiction of capitalism”. The first contradiction being that which refers to how the rate of exploitation of capital produces…

James O’ConnorArticles
The Environmentalism of the Poor

Joan Martínez Alier, possibly the best known ecological economist in Spain, has studied throughout his work the importance of ecological limits to combat any doctrine of economic growth. In his work he has explored the possibilities of an encounter between certain forms of communal socialism and ecology to elaborate eco-social alternatives “from below”. One of…

Joan Martínez AlierLectures
Ecology and Freedom

André Gorz was a pioneering ecomarxist author. His thought was linked from a young age to existentialist and humanist Marxism, whose interest in labor studies led him to develop some of the earliest contributions to political ecology within the Marxist field. We propose the reading of Ecology and Freedom as one of the foundational texts of…

André GorzArticles
Tradición marxista y nuevos problemas

Manuel Sacristán, possibly the most outstanding Spanish Marxist thinker of the second half of the 20th century, was also a pioneer in the introduction of ecomarxism. His extensive and very diverse contribution to Marxist thought was accompanied by an inexhaustible work of translation of fundamental authors of the school, in addition to a committed political…

Manuel SacristánArticles
Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift

John Bellamy Foster is possibly the best known and most influential author of what has been called the “second ecosocialist generation”, which would have started with the publication of his Marx’s Ecology (2000) and Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature (1999), outstanding works in the positive recovery of the legacy of Marx and Engels at the…

John Bellamy FosterArticles