Peter St. Clair
Peter St. Clair was born and raised in Brooklyn and served thirty-three years on the Somerville, Massachusetts Fire Department before retiring as a Deputy Chief in 2010.
The goal of Sven Beckert’s Capitalism, a Global History is to denaturalize capitalism and show how it was a fundamental break in human history that revolutionized how people live in profound ways. But it is difficult to pin Beckert down to a clear definition of capitalism, and as such, he undermines his own objectives.
In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, aided by Marx’s analysis of capitalism (and with a nod to Freud’s insights into psychopathology) have succeeded in making some sense of the present era, when the human-caused disruption of the Earth’s climate system is on a path leading to a largely uninhabitable planet—Hothouse Earth.
With a shrinking window of opportunity for rescue, the world’s near-eight billion people face a horrendous future on an inhospitable planet, while the political leaders and the economic elite of the world’s nations talk the talk but will not, or cannot, walk the walk.
