Climate Change and Socialism | 293
Climate Change and Socialism: An interview with John Bellamy Foster Steve da Silva steve da silva1 (sd): Over the last decade you have emerged as a leading thinker in synthesizing radical ecology with the Marxist tradition. From Marx’s Ecology (2000) to The Ecological Rift (2010) and everything in between, you’ve carried out the much needed intellectual work of recovering the overlooked ecological content of Marx’s original thought, presenting us with a side of Marx that many Marxists may have not been aware of. You have also developed a 21st century dialectical materialism, particularly as it pertains to ecology and the unprecedented ecological crises that confront our species and earth. Could you briely summarize the ecological crises that we confront, perhaps by explaining the concept of the “metabolic rift” and the various “planetary boundaries” that capitalism threatens to surpass or has already surpassed? John bellamy foster2 (Jbf): Scientists led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Center now refer to nine “planetary boundaries” deined by the Holocene geological epoch in which civilization arose. These nine boundaries, all of which we have crossed or are in the process of crossing, relate to: climate change, ocean acidiication, the destruction 1
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Steve da Silva is former PhD student who studied political economy and Canadian history in the Social and Political Thought program at York University. da Silva is a former editor of BASICS Community News Service, with which he remains people’s journalist; an anti-imperialist activist within CUPE Local 3903, its First Nations Solidarity Working Group, and within the Canadian chapter of the International League of People’s Struggles; and a young father within a ledgling Community Parenting Movement and its associated Parenting Coops. John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Marx’s Ecology (2000), The Ecological Rift (2010, with Bret Clark and Richard York); and What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (2011, with Fred Magdof) all published by Monthly Review Press. These texts and his frequent contributions to Monthly Review have made Foster one of the leading Marxist ecologists today, bridging the critique of capitalist political economy with a materialist understanding of the ecological crisis and the increasingly urgent argument for a revolution in social relations.