Marxist theory

Mike Treen - The key questions for Marx were understanding why capitalism operates the way it does and whether capitalism is a historically limited system that will reach a limit and need to be superseded.

Jason Devine - Gregory Zinoviev once aptly noted that around “everything that Lenin wrote there is always seething strife. Nobody can remain indifferent to his writings. You can hate Lenin, you can love Lenin to distraction, but you cannot remain neutral.” Nowhere is this truer than his famous 1909 book Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (MEC).

Much of the knowledge, and especially that which comes from academia and media, is extremely problematic. It is often too empirical, lacking the ability to provide general explanations of phenomena under study.

Marxism’s contributions to ecological literature and struggles is a rich and contradictory field of discussion. Marxism in diverse ways has fed into environmental struggles and broader ecological politics. Broadly, I would argue that there has been a deepening appreciation of the ecological themes in the work of Marx and Engels in recent decades. Most significantly, and recently, there has been a shift towards debates around Eco-Leninism, with several different attempts to read the climate crisis through the insights of Lenin. However, specifically Green Party politics, in some states, has seen a movement of former Marxist-Leninists towards a revisionist understanding of politics, with revolutionary objectives being discarded.