Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus presents seven recent books on movement building, modern capitalism, evolution, ecology and colonialism.
* * *
Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements that Won
By Kevin A Young
PM Press
To win the fight against fossil fuels, the climate movement must learn from past victories. Kevin Young shows that electing and pressuring politicians has rarely been successful — that real gains have almost always been the product of upsurges in the fields, factories and streets. He offers lessons for building a multiracial working-class climate movement that can win a global green transition that’s both equitable and fast.
After The Holocene: Planetary Politics for Commoners
By Gene Ray
Autonomedia
Business-as-usual is leading to hothouse Earth and mass extinction, but how can we pull the emergency brake? Ray proposes communing as a pathway to metabolic sanity and collective self-rescue. Because a mass anti-capitalist movement does not yet exist, he writes, “the building of a world of worlds against capitalism will have to begin within it.”
Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity
By Kevin N Lala, Tobias Uller, Nathalie Feiner, Marcus Feldman, and Scott F Gilbert
Princeton University Press
Scientific understanding of evolution is itself evolving. Without undermining the central importance of natural selection and other Darwinian foundations, new developmental insights indicate that all organisms possess their own characteristic sets of evolutionary mechanisms. Five leading biologists draw on the latest findings to examine the central role that developmental processes play in evolution.
What Was Neoliberalism? Studies in the Most Recent Phase of Capitalism 1973-2008
By Neil Davidson
Haymarket Books
It is widely agreed that neoliberalism arose in the wake of the global economic crisis of the 1970s, but there is much debate about how to understand its significance and even how to define it. Neil Davidson, whose untimely death robbed us of an important Marxist thinker, left us this insightful account of what is unique in neoliberalism, and what marks it out as a continuation of capitalism more generally.
The Class Struggle And Welfare: Social Policy Under Capitalism
By David Matthews
Monthly Review Press
Confronting the hypocritical rhetoric of politicians who castigate welfare beneficiaries as lazy, Matthews shows that the welfare state is essential to the prosperity and health of capitalist economies. The working class must build an alternative type of welfare system — one which looks beyond the state and truly reflects the values of equality, solidarity and community.
Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth
By Karen G Lloyd
Princeton University Press
In recent years, biologists have discovered unexpected life — trillions of microbes that live without light or oxygen, deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Lloyd provides a fascinating firsthand account of the search for underground life and discusses discoveries that are challenging science’s most basic assumptions about the nature of life and its possible existence on other planets.
Capitalism, Colonisation And The Ecocide-Genocide Nexus
By Martin Crook
University of Chicago Press
Focusing on the former British colonies of Kenya and Australia, Crook draws attention to the critical role that ecological destruction has in the genocide of Indigenous and place-based peoples. He synthesises radical political ecology with a political-economic approach, illuminating the inherent genocidal and ecocidal properties of global capitalism.
[Reprinted from Climate and Capitalism. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement.]