New beech leaves, Gribskov Forest in the northern part of Sealand, Denmark. Malene Thyssen, Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link.
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah. Hannah Holleman is a director of the Monthly Review Foundation and an associate professor of sociology at Amherst College.
“The old Greek philosophers,” Frederick Engels wrote in
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, “were all born natural dialecticians.”
1 Nowhere was this more apparent than in ancient Greek medical thought, which was distinguished by its strong materialist and ecological basis. This dialectical, materialist, and ecological approach to epidemiology (from the ancient Greek
This issue of
Monthly Review includes three articles addressing questions of epidemiology and health: John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease”; Vicente Navarro, “What Is Happening in the United States?”; and Jennifer Dohrn and Eleanor Stein, “Epidemic Response: The Legacy of Colonialism.” Taken together, they cover a wide range of issues: economic, ecological, epidemiological, and political. But for each of them, the current COVID-19 crisis necessarily looms in the background.
Where capitalism itself is concerned, the dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis is simply an external, “black swan” event: something that has entered from outside the system, constituting a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under co