Articles

Notes from the Editors, March 2017

Notes from the Editors, March 2017

by The Editors

March 1, 2017

U.S. economic, military, and financial dominance have been ebbing for decades, leaving the United States in the position of a wounded mastodon within the world at large, a threat to all around it. Washington has repeatedly tried with very limited success to reverse this slide in its hegemonic role by means of geopolitical expansion, aimed at increasing its "strategic assets" across the globe. The result has been a constantly expanding theatre of global conflict.

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Organisms and Objectifications: A Historical-Materialist Inquiry into the ‘Human and Animal’

Organisms and Objectifications: A Historical-Materialist Inquiry into the ‘Human and Animal’

by Joseph Fracchia

March 1, 2017

The anthropocentric tendency to view nature or the environment as everything that is not human obscures the productive processes that go on in "nature." But non-human animals are also the purposeful producers of their own worlds: they too engage in their own species-specific objectifying activity that transforms what is, from their perspective, nature; they too build worlds in their own bodily image.

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‘Mourning and Militancy’

‘Mourning and Militancy’

by Michael D. Yatesand Richard Seymour

March 1, 2017

There is a degree of unpredictability in politics today that presents opportunities for those who aren't too constrained by past experience to see them. We're seeing the possibility of regenerating a left that has previously been ground down to the scale of atoms, one that, if it adapts creatively to the coming defeats, can prepare the ground for success. But that means recognizing that the history of the left is a history of defeats; it is a history of the vanquished.

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The Battle for the National Health Service: England, Wales, and the Socialist Vision

by David Matthews

March 1, 2017

England and Wales represent two very different, indeed incompatible, approaches to health care. In the former, health care has come under increasing threat from the predatory forces of privatization. In Wales, however, an explicit effort has been made to defend socialist values and formulate them for the twenty-first century, defending and expanding a system that puts the health and well-being of its citizens over profit.

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Marx and Engels and the ‘Red Chemist’: The Forgotten Legacy of Carl Schorlemmer

Marx and Engels and the ‘Red Chemist’: The Forgotten Legacy of Carl Schorlemmer

by Ian Angus

March 1, 2017

Most accounts of Marx and Engels's lives, if they mention Carl Schorlemmer (1834–92) at all, refer to the renowned chemist only as a friend, without acknowledging his influence on their studies of the natural sciences. It is time to restore this neglected figure to his rightful place in the Marxian—and Engelsian—tradition.

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Astronauts at Work: The Social Relations of Space Travel

Astronauts at Work: The Social Relations of Space Travel

by Peter Dickens

March 1, 2017

As astronauts penetrate ever further into the cosmos, how are their bodies and subjectivities being transformed? While space travel remains governed by mechanisms of power and domination that tend to treat astronauts as tools, the practice of "space medicine" is now beginning to interact with astronauts' bodies in a more multidirectional, dialectical fashion.

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Steelworkers in Struggle

Steelworkers in Struggle

by Julia Smith

March 1, 2017

Ahmed White's vivid and deeply researched account of the Little Steel strike of 1937 makes an important contribution to our understanding of U.S. labor history, union organizing, and class conflict. It illustrates the tactical complexity of strikes, reveals the power and ruthlessness of employers, and demonstrates the risks of relying on the state to secure justice for working people.

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Notes from the Editors, February 2017

Notes from the Editors, February 2017

by The Editors

February 1, 2017

For those attuned to the most fashionable trends in mainstream discourse on climate change, it is clear that "resilience" is now in, and "sustainability" is out.… The concept of resilience, while adopted by some progressive thinkers and organizations, is nonetheless being rapidly incorporated into a survival-of-the-most-resilient philosophy in which poor nations, and indeed exploited and dispossessed people everywhere, are told they must simply become more "resilient" in order to survive—but in a world in which such dynamic adaptability is available mainly to the rich, who enjoy monopolies of capital, resources, and technology.

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Trump and Climate Catastrophe

Trump and Climate Catastrophe

by John Bellamy Foster

February 1, 2017

It would be wrong…to see the new administration as simply a cabal of ignoramuses, beginning with the climate-change-denier-in-chief himself. Rather, their efforts to undermine even modest regulations and to discredit sound science are necessary parts of an attempt by carbon capital to proceed undeterred with burning of fossil fuels, as if this did not constitute a dire threat to the human species.… Today virulent anti-environmentalism, tied to a broader neo-fascist politics linked to white supremacy, is the backfire being ignited against both efforts to combat climate change and the larger movement for social and environmental justice.

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