The Epochal Crisis: Converging economic and ecological contradictions

By John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, October 2013

It is an indication of the sheer enormity of the historical challenge confronting humanity in our time that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, sometimes now called the Second Great Depression, is overshadowed by the larger threat of planetary catastrophe, raising the question of the long-term survival of innumerable species—including our own.

An urgent necessity for the world today is therefore to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat—itself a by-product of capitalist development.

Read more HERE.

Structural adjustment or…. Ecosocialism

By Victor Quintana

REVOLTINGEUROPE 

APRIL 7, 2013

Like medieval plagues, structural adjustment programmes implemented through southern Europe economies are destroying families, trampling on social rights, eliminating jobs, and making life precarious. Burying the hopes of the populations are the political parties that rotate in equal doses in one failed government after another. Given the right-wing and social democratic alternance it seems that all voters in Southern Europe are deciding is how, and at what speed their social rights are to be liquidated.

In this situation, the Left, called by many, the radical left, are adopting a new alternative to meet the challenge of these times that threaten social life, the integrity of the people, the environment, the community of living beings: Ecosocialism. It was presented at the National Congress of the Parti de Gauche (Left Party) held in Bordeaux, France from 22 to 24 March. This party formed the Left Front with the French Communist Party and other smaller parties, in 2012, with Jean Luc Melenchon as presidential candidate and achieved a historic 11% of the votes in the first round.