In 1573 there occurred a murder which would leave today's tabloid editors salivating. George Saunders, a respected merchant tailor, was killed by his wife's lover. Involved in the conspiracy were Saunders' wife, her best friend, and a servant. All were found guilty and hanged, but not before a suspended clergyman fell in love with Mrs. Saunders and sought to have her pardoned. Murder was relatively rare in Tudor times. When it did occur, especially if it involved a female perpetrator and a love affair, it generated widespread interest. The rise of Protestantism, and its accompanying rise in literacy, had provided a strong impetus to read about crime and to ponder the spiritual consequences of breaking both the civil and the divine law. The English system of criminal justice was open and popular, and familiar elements--detection, investigation, the laying of charges, the trial, verdict, sentence--were all well understood and closely followed in the 16th century. Today, people are riveted by crime and violence. But the obsession is not new, as this book shows in vivid and exciting detail. John Bellamy's new book provides a fascinating view of life in Tudor England and offers a new angle on our love affair with murder as a literary form. It was in the Tudor period, he argues, that popular attention was focused on the crime of murder, for edification as well as entertainment. A 16th-century murder inquiry was in many ways a community affair, capable of arousing the interest of a substantial local audience, with the members of the inquest often collecting evidence and statements for twenty or thirty days. Detection, investigation, the laying of charges, the trial, verdict, sentence--all ofthese familiar elements were established in the 16th century. Strange, Inhuman Deaths describes four well-documented cases that occurred between 1538 and 1573. Each of them is deeply rooted in source material, whether legal records or pamphlets, plays or ballads, giving a rich background and a wealth of local colour. The human stories they contain are powerful and lively, and the motivations and personalities that are revealed speak to us directly across the centuries. Murder most foul, murder most English--the tradition begins.

Explores capitalism’s role in creating the current state of climate emergency Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by a new more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population. What caused this massive shift in the history of the earth? In this comprehensive study, John Bellamy Foster tells us that a globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul its own nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations, throwing into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary emergency, exploring the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of the capitalism’s alteration of the planetary environment, is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.

This title, first published in 1989, was one of the first to directly address the legal dimension of bastard feudalism. John Bellamy explores the role and vulnerability of local officials and juries, the nature of the endemic land wars and the interference in the justice system by those at the top of the social chain. What emerges is a focus on the role of land in disputes, the importance of royal favour and political advantage and the attempt to suppress disruption. This is an interesting title, which will be of particular value to students researching the nature of late medieval and early Tudor feudalism, royal patronage and legal procedure.

This title, first published in 1979, was ground-breaking in its exploration of the understudied area of the Tudor law of treason. Bellamy first examines the scope of that law, noting the inheritance from the Middle Ages, the effectiveness of the new statutes and interpretation of the law by the judiciary. Mining the archives for official, legal and literary accounts, the following parts consider how the government came to hear of traitors, the use of evidence and witnesses in trials and finally the fate of the traitor at the gallows and beyond. This is a full, useful and interesting title, which will be of great value to students researching Tudor and late medieval statute law, the Tudor concept of treason and the mores of Tudor society.

A field-defining masterwork, this posthumous publication maps the evolution of the idea of the state from ancient Greece to today Istvan Meszaros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the thinkers discussed in depth. The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-edged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of "the withering away of the state." In his definitive, seminal work, Meszaros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy.

The days of boom and bubble are over, and the time has come to understand the long-term economic reality. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, hopes for a new phase of rapid economic expansion were quickly dashed. Instead, growth has been slow, unemployment has remained high, wages and benefits have seen little improvement, poverty has increased, and the trend toward more inequality of incomes and wealth has continued. It appears that the Great Recession has given way to a period of long-term anemic growth, which Foster and McChesney aptly term the Great Stagnation. This incisive and timely book traces the origins of economic stagnation and explains what it means for a clear understanding of our current situation. The authors point out that increasing monopolization of the economy--when a handful of large firms dominate one or several industries--leads to an over-abundance of capital and too few profitable investment opportunities, with economic stagnation as the result. Absent powerful stimuli to investment, such as historic innovations like the automobile or major government spending, modern capitalist economies have become increasingly dependent on the financial sector to realize profits. And while financialization may have provided a temporary respite from stagnation, it is a solution that cannot last indefinitely, as instability in financial markets over the last half-decade has made clear.

Explores capitalism’s role in creating the current state of climate emergency Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by a new more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population. What caused this massive shift in the history of the earth? In this comprehensive study, John Bellamy Foster tells us that a globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul its own nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations, throwing into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary emergency, exploring the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of the capitalism’s alteration of the planetary environment, is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.

Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality--as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington, most of the mainstream media are working overtime to convince us that we can still stand the heat. Leave it to John Bellamy Foster, one of the world's outstanding radical scholars, to expose Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist. Just at the boiling point, Foster offers us cool logic to comprehend the system that created Trump's moral and political emergency--and to resist it. In Trump in the White House, John Bellamy Foster does what no other Trump analyst has done before: he places the president and his administration in full historical context. Foster reveals that Trump is merely the endpoint of a stagnating economic system whose liberal democratic sheen has begun to wear thin. Beneath a veneer of democracy, we see the authoritarian rule that oversees decreasing wages, anti-science and climate-change denialism, a dying public education system, and expanding prisons and military--all powered by a phony populism seething with centuries of racism that never went away. But Foster refuses to end his book in despair. Inside his analysis is a clarion call to fight back. Protests, popular demands, coalitions: everyone is needed. Change can't happen without radical, anti-capitalist politics, and Foster demonstrates that--even now, with the waters ever warming--it may yet be possible to stop the desecration of the Earth; to end endless war; to create global solidarity with all oppressed people. Could a frog do that?

The rich correspondence that preceded the publication of Monopoly Capital Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran's death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from 1949 to 1964. During those years, Baran, a professor of economics at Stanford, and Sweezy, a former professor of economics at Harvard, then co-editing Monthly Review in New York City, were separated by three thousand miles. Their intellectual collaboration required that they write letters to one another frequently and, in the years closer to 1964, almost daily. Their surviving correspondence consists of some one thousand letters. The letters selected for this volume illuminate not only the development of the political economy that was to form the basis of Monopoly Capital, but also the historical context--the McCarthy Era, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis--in which these thinkers were forced to struggle. Not since Marx and Engels carried on their epistolary correspondence has there has been a collection of letters offering such a detailed look at the making of a prescient critique of political economy--and at the historical conditions from which that critique was formed.

This widely acclaimed book, first published in 1974, was a classic from its first day in print. Written in a direct, inviting way by Harry Braverman, whose years as an industrial worker gave him rich personal insight into work, Labor and Monopoly Capital overturned the reigning ideologies of academic sociology.

This new edition features an introduction by John Bellamy Foster that sets the work in historical and theoretical context, as well as two rare articles by Braverman, "The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century" (1975) and "Two Comments" (1976), that add much to our understanding of the book.

Argues the forces which originally drove us into the Cold War never went anywhere, and the stakes are higher than ever As the American people delude themselves once more into thinking of the United States as a liberating force for peace in the world, Waging a New Cold War invites us, instead, to think for ourselves. Behind the scenes the plans to wage war have been laid--either by proxy, as in Ukraine, or directly, against the U.S.'s old twentieth-century foes. Waging a New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective makes a strong case that, as the official story is laid out by government propagandists, and as the mainstream media provides cover, the aim of this latest set of American military escapades remains the same as ever: Maintenance of U.S hegemony in the global financial system. Foregrounded with an introduction by Vijay Prashad, this cogent collaboration puts forth three essays that illustrate clearly that, while the Cold War against the Soviet Union ended, the "cold war" against the "enemies" of the United States did not. Furthermore, its authors lay out evidence that the U.S. establishment has been willing to risk nuclear winter--in other words, mutual annihilation--to hold onto economic primacy. And they show that, while Russia and China can each be criticized, justifiably, for their violations of human life and dignity, neither, on its own, threatens the eruption of a Third World War and the end of the human race as we know it. Just in time, we have in our hands an intelligent text that strengthens our struggle against the cynical machinations of the American military behemoth and its propaganda machine.

Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism's relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism's degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism's plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.

This title, first published in 1979, was ground-breaking in its exploration of the understudied area of the Tudor law of treason. Bellamy first examines the scope of that law, noting the inheritance from the Middle Ages, the effectiveness of the new statutes and interpretation of the law by the judiciary. Mining the archives for official, legal and literary accounts, the following parts consider how the government came to hear of traitors, the use of evidence and witnesses in trials and finally the fate of the traitor at the gallows and beyond. This is a full, useful and interesting title, which will be of great value to students researching Tudor and late medieval statute law, the Tudor concept of treason and the mores of Tudor society.

This title, first published in 1989, was one of the first to directly address the legal dimension of bastard feudalism. John Bellamy explores the role and vulnerability of local officials and juries, the nature of the endemic land wars and the interference in the justice system by those at the top of the social chain. What emerges is a focus on the role of land in disputes, the importance of royal favour and political advantage and the attempt to suppress disruption. This is an interesting title, which will be of particular value to students researching the nature of late medieval and early Tudor feudalism, royal patronage and legal procedure.

A fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx's revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that will help us comprehend and counter today's unprecedented planetary emergencies. The Return of Nature begins with the deaths of Darwin (1882) and Marx (1883) and moves on until the rise of the ecological age in the 1960s and 1970s. Foster explores how socialist analysts and materialist scientists of various stamps, first in Britain, then the United States, from William Morris and Frederick Engels to Joseph Needham, Rachel Carson, and Stephen J. Gould, sought to develop a dialectical naturalism, rooted in a critique of capitalism. In the process, he delivers a far-reaching and fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology. Ultimately, what this book asks for is nothing short of revolution: a long, ecological revolution, aimed at making peace with the planet while meeting collective human needs.

In recent years John Bellamy Foster has emerged as a leading theorist of the Marxist perspective on ecology. His seminal book Marx's Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000) discusses the place of ecological issues within the intellectual history of Marxism and on the philosophical foundations of a Marxist ecology, and has become a major point of reference in ecological debates. This historical and philosophical focus is now supplemented by more directly political engagement in his new book, Ecology against Capitalism. In a broad-ranging treatment of contemporary ecological politics, Foster deals with such issues as pollution, sustainable development, technological responses to environmental crisis, population growth, soil fertility, the preservation of ancient forests, and the "new economy" of the Internet age.

Foster's introduction sets out the unifying themes of these essays enabling the reader to draw from them a consolidated approach to a rapidly-expanding field of debate which is of critical importance in our times.

Within these debates on the politics of ecology, Foster's work develops an important and distinctive perspective. Where many of these debates assume a basic divergence of "red" and "green" issues, and are concerned with the exact terms of a trade-off between them, Foster argues that Marxismproperly understoodalready provides the framework within which ecological questions are best approached. This perspective is advanced here in accessible and concrete form, taking account of the major positions in contemporary ecological debate.

Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism's relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism's degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism's plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.

Since the atomic bomb made its first appearance on the world stage in 1945, it has been clear that we possess the power to destroy our own planet. What nuclear weapons made possible, global environmental crisis, marked especially by global warming, has now made inevitable--if business as usual continues.

The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital's rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet. Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe, especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most ambitious experiments are taking place.

This bold new work addresses the central issues of the present crisis: global warming, peak oil, species extinction, world water shortages, global hunger, alternative energy sources, sustainable development, and environmental justice. Foster draws on a unique range of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, William Morris, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Vandana Shiva, and Istvan Meszaros. The result is a startlingly radical synthesis, which offers new hope for grappling with the greatest challenge of our age: what must be done to save the earth for humanity and all living species."

Winner, 2020 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize A fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx's revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of the efforts to unite questions of social justice and environmental sustainability, and helps us comprehend and counter today's unprecedented planetary emergencies. The Return of Nature begins with the deaths of Darwin (1882) and Marx (1883) and moves on until the rise of the ecological age in the 1960s and 1970s. Foster explores how socialist analysts and materialist scientists of various stamps, first in Britain, then the United States, from William Morris and Frederick Engels, to Joseph Needham, Rachel Carson, and Stephen J. Gould, sought to develop a dialectical naturalism, rooted in a critique of capitalism. In the process, he delivers a far-reaching and fascinating reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology. Ultimately, what this book asks for is nothing short of revolution: a long, ecological revolution, aimed at making peace with the planet while meeting collective human needs.

Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This startling new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis.

Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature.

Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley.

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 and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.