Introduction

This chapter explores the intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical change and unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis. For at least a century after the deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – that is, the end of the nineteenth century – Marxism in one expression or another was viewed as foundational to any prospects for a transition from capitalism to socialism. The recent dramatic growth of technological enterprises, centered in North America, Europe, and Asia, can hardly be exaggerated. By the 1950s Mills had identified yet another component of postwar American state-capitalism, a prelude to President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the “military-industrial complex.” The familiar trope that a modern Jacobinism might give rise to an even more monstrous authoritarian system – parallel to the earlier transition from Leninism to Stalinism – appears equally misplaced.