A decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new, revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique of capitalism, including his value analysis. Now in Marx and the Earth Foster and Burkett expand on this analysis in the process of responding to recent ecosocialist criticisms of Marx. The result is a full-fledged anti-critique—pointing to the crucial roles that dialectics, open-system thermodynamics, intrinsic value, and aesthetic understandings played in the original Marxian critique, holding out the possibility of a new red-green synthesis.

By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx's Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

In The Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt examines humanity’s relation to the natural world as understood by the great philosopher-economist Karl Marx, who wrote that human beings are ‘part of Nature yet able to stand over against it; and this partial separation from Nature is itself part of their nature’. In Marx, industry and science are the mediation between historical man and external nature, leading either to reconciliation or mutual annihilation. Schmidt explores this tension between man and nature in Marx and shows how his understanding of nature is reflected in the work of writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.

The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist's moral imagination--the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities--emerge fictional persons through whom we learn to read ourselves. This eloquent book, exploring fictional lives in crucial moments of choice and change, stresses both their difference from and their deep connections with life. Martin Price writes here about ways in which character has been conceived and presented in the novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with chapters that cogently argue the artistic value of character, Price then deals with the different forms character has taken in individual novels. His first discussions center on authors--Jane Austen, Stendhal, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy--who define individuals by their adherence or opposition to social norms. The next chapters deal with novelists for whom the moral world is largely internalized. The characters of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster live in society and act upon it, but the authors are particularly concerned with the confusions, terrors, and heroism that lie within consciousness. The last chapter uses novels about the artist by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann in order to apprehend the process by which experience is transformed into art. Avoiding both formalistic and moralistic extremes, this new book by a distinguished critic helps us recover a fuller sense of literary form and the forms of life from which it emerges.

The Price of Slavery analyzes Marx’s critique of capitalist slavery and its implications for the Caribbean thought of Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and Suzanne Césaire. Nick Nesbitt assesses the limitations of the literature on capitalism and slavery since Eric Williams in light of Marx’s key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value. To do so, Nesbitt systematically reconstructs for the first time Marx’s analysis of capitalist slavery across the three volumes of Capital. The book then follows the legacy of Caribbean critique in its reflections on the social forms of labor, servitude, and freedom, as they culminate in the vehement call for the revolutionary transformation of an unjust colonial order into one of universal justice and equality.

UNDERSTANDING of the economic successes and failures of the past century and today begins here. Dan Blatt, after almost a half-century of accurate published economic forecasts, examines historys most important economic works. He shows why capitalist market mechanisms successfully raise billions out of poverty and why socialist and other administered alternatives flourish briefly and then collapse. UNDERSTANDING begins with the basic texts: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith; The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, by David Ricardo; Capital (Das Kapital), by Karl Marx; The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes; Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph A. Schumpeter. The analysis is readily comprehensible for college level readers and busy professionals. The style facilitates speed-reading and scanning but with liberal inclusion of quoted material covering the key ideas and most famous passages. Understanding the Economic Basics and Modern Capitalism is your source for rapid familiarity with these basic works and the reasons for the repetitive failure of current economic policies.

This textbook offers a comprehensive guide to the systematic structure of capitalism, while at the same time introducing readers to all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Based on his extensive expertise on Marx’s critique of political economy, the author reveals the specific structure of production in capitalist societies and explicates what sets this system apart from other modes of production. Marx’s political economy is explained in a systematic and easy-to-understand manner, using numerous illustrative diagrams to complement the text. This textbook will appeal to all students and scholars looking for a more comprehensive, systematic and theoretical explanation of capitalism, equipping them with a solid theoretical understanding of its core structure.

Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, edited by Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman, offers new perspectives on the possibility of a philosophical outlook that combines Marxism and phenomenology in the critique of capitalism. Although Marxism’s focus on impersonal social structures and phenomenology’s concern with lived experience can make these traditions appear conceptually incompatible, the potential critical force of a theoretical reconciliation inspired several attempts in the twentieth century to articulate a phenomenological Marxism. Updating and extending this approach, the contributors to this volume identify and develop new and previously overlooked connections between the traditions, offering new perspectives on Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger; exploring themes such as alienation, reification, and ecology; and examining the intersection of Marxism and phenomenology in figures such as Michel Henry, Walter Benjamin, and Frantz Fanon. These glimpses of a productive reconciliation of the respective strengths of phenomenology and Marxism offer promising possibilities for illuminating and resolving the increasingly intense social crises of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

In view of the enormous number of works on Marxism in general and in light of the many books and articles touching on the relationship of Marxism to religion in particular, it may fairly be asked why yet another such work should be produced. My reply is that in eliciting answers to the kinds of questions posed by the methodology I have used, it was necessary to go to the primary sources almost exclusively. This is not to bemoan a sad fate but to affirm that there are notable deficiencies in the secondary sources relevant to my topic. By way of general indictment, I contend that the major difficulty with existing studies of the Marxist critique of religion is that their authors, whether expositors or critics, have failed both to specify their own presuppositions concerning religion and to approach the subject with an adequate comprehension of its many dimensions. Since, in most cases, the reader is equally unprepared, anthropologically, sociologically, psychologically, and historically, for clear and informed thought in this vast and nebulous area, the result has been widespread confusion. As if this were not enough, numerous writers with little more than polemical interests have compounded the confusion by failing to distinguish between religion in general and their own brands of faith in particular. Others have not discriminated between the concepts of metaphysics and the supernatural items of religious belief.