Though infrequently viewed as an environmental thinker, Karl Marx insisted that production as a social and material process is shaped and constrained by both historically developed relations among producers and natural conditions. Paul Burkett shows that it is Marx's overriding concern with human emancipation that impels him to approach nature from the standpoint of materialist history, sociology and critical political economy.

Over a decade ago Foster and Burkett introduced a 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. In this volume, Foster and Burkett expand on this analysis in the process of responding to recent eco-socialist criticisms of Marx.

China is the fastest-growing economy in the world today. For many on the left, the Chinese economy seems to provide an alternative model of development to that of neoliberal globalization. Although it is a disputed question whether the Chinese economy can be still described as socialist, there is no doubting the importance for the global project of socialism of accurately interpreting and soberly assessing its real prospects.

China and Socialism argues that market reforms in China are leading inexorably toward a capitalist and foreign-dominated development path, with enormous social and politcal costs, both domestically and internationally. The rapid economic growth that accompanied these market reforms have not been due to efficiency gains, but rather to deliberate erosion of the infrastructure that made possible a remarkable degree of equality. The transition to the market has been based on rising unemployment, intensified exploitation, declining health and education services, exploding government debt, and unstable prices.

At the same time, China's economic transformation has intensified the contradictions of capitalist development in other countries, especially in East Asia. Far from being a model that is replicable in other Third World countries, China today is a reminder of the need for socialism to be built from the grassroots up, through class struggle and international solidarity.

This book undertakes the first general assessment of ecological economics from a Marxist point of view, and shows how Marxist political economy can make a substantial contribution to ecological economics. The analysis is developed in terms of four basic issues: (1) nature and economic value; (2) the treatment of nature as capital; (3) the significance of the entropy law for economic systems; (4) the concept of sustainable development. In each case, it is shown that Marxism can help ecological economics fulfill its commitments to multi-disciplinarity, methodological pluralism, and historical openness. In this way, a foundation is constructed for a substantive dialogue between Marxists and ecological economists.
Paul Burkett, Ph.D. (1984) in Economics, Syracuse University, is Professor of Economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. His publications on Marxism and ecology include Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (St. Martin's Press, 1999) and many articles in scholarly journals.

China is the fastest-growing economy in the world today. For many on the left, the Chinese economy seems to provide an alternative model of development to that of neoliberal globalization. Although it is a disputed question whether the Chinese economy can be still described as socialist, there is no doubting the importance for the global project of socialism of accurately interpreting and soberly assessing its real prospects.

China and Socialism argues that market reforms in China are leading inexorably toward a capitalist and foreign-dominated development path, with enormous social and politcal costs, both domestically and internationally. The rapid economic growth that accompanied these market reforms have not been due to efficiency gains, but rather to deliberate erosion of the infrastructure that made possible a remarkable degree of equality. The transition to the market has been based on rising unemployment, intensified exploitation, declining health and education services, exploding government debt, and unstable prices.

At the same time, China's economic transformation has intensified the contradictions of capitalist development in other countries, especially in East Asia. Far from being a model that is replicable in other Third World countries, China today is a reminder of the need for socialism to be built from the grassroots up, through class struggle and international solidarity.