A farmer was on his way down to Biella one day. The weather was so stormy that it was next to impossible to get over the roads. But the farmer had important business and pushed onward in the face of the driving rain. He met an old man, who said to him, “A good day to you! Where are you going, my good man, in such haste?” “To Biella,” answered the farmer, without slowing down. “You might at least say, ‘God willing.’” The farmer stopped, looked the old man in the eye, and snapped, “God willing, I’m on my way to Biella. But even if God isn’t willing, I still have to go there all the same.” Now the old man happened to be the Lord. “In that case you’ll go to Biella in seven years,” he said. “In the meantime, jump into this swamp and stay there for seven years.” Suddenly the farmer changed into a frog and jumped into the swamp. Seven years went by. The farmer came out of the swamp, turned back into a man, clapped his hat on his head, and continued on his way to market. After a short distance he met the old man again. “And where are you going, my good man?” “To Biella.” “You might say, ‘God willing’.” “If God wills it, fine. If not, I know the consequence and can now go into the swamp unassisted.” Nor for the life of him would he say one word more.
– Calvino, Italo. 2015 [1956] Fiabe Italiane [Italian Folktales]. Milano: Mondadori, p. 153.
For this net positivity, Leigh Brownhill and Daniel Faber are, in particular, among those to be praised and much thanked. They will soon be the ones to undertake the role of Editors in Chief. The journal will doubtless be further improved in their capable hands. Their distinctive and distinguished prints have already for years been adorning the content of the journal and shaping its direction in a most edifying way, bringing into relief, among others, Ecofeminist Ecosocialist and Radical Environmental Justice frameworks and voices. These perspectives should find much more following than at present and, more importantly, direct manifestation in daily social struggles and political organising.
Equally major changes to the composition of the journal’s editorship have also been under way, with a new Managing Editor, Federico Berghmans, and a new Poetry Editor, Charles Levenstein, joining. They will be helping continue the outstanding work and crucial responsibilities carried out by Adi Forkasiewicz and Jules Boykoff. Regretfully, the journal will lose Senior Editor Mazen Labban’s incisive analyses and innovative ideas, as he is unable to continue in the same capacity. The journal is forever indebted to Adi, Jules, and Mazen. There may be further substantive shifts in the journal in the year or so that follows. Those shifts cannot be accounted for at the time of writing, but I invite readers, authors, and reviewers to appreciate and embrace them.
It is thanks to editorial comrades, both current and soon former, that much has been accomplished in the journal, as indicated on occasion of the 25th anniversary of the journal in 2014. Sustained efforts have succeeded in continuing to feature and promote activists and younger scholars. Judith Watson has greatly enhanced the journal’s content and scope by including multiple media, aside from books, in the Reviews section. Another important development has been an increasing number of writings dedicated to Ecosocialist thought, including from Marxist and other Leftist scholars in or from the People’s Republic of China, Brazil, India, and South Africa. Those perspectives are of great importance to grasping the present conjuncture yet remain under-represented, if not misrepresented, in Left Anglophone discourse. The journal has continued to serve as an inclusive conduit for dialogue and debate among varied Leftist currents, welcoming Anarchist work and making room for and engaging critically with intellectual movements like Environmental Justice and Degrowth. Much progress has been made in offering increasingly more refined and radical perspectives on climate change policies and on bourgeois ideologies thereto related, including by means of poetry and reviews. In all this, a salient achievement – for me a point of pride – is publishing The Red Nation’s Ten-Point Program in 2015.
Of rather secondary relevance is what I imagined as new or potential directions for the journal. One was to expand the geographical horizon even further than had already been done, especially to include more scholars in African countries (beyond Anglophone contexts) but especially in state-socialist countries. Successes have been sporadic on this score. Internationalising the content and author provenance of the journal has been and remains difficult, especially with respect to scholarship from countries under a neocolonial, colonial, or imperialist yoke. This effort at internationalism, shared by all journal editors, will require even more perseverance than what I have managed to deliver.
Another path for me worth pursuing was inspired by Jim O’Connor’s original call for more studies on socialist states. Despite much effort, few manuscripts arrived on the topic. It has been disappointing to find that much of Leftist scholarship (especially in liberal democracies) appears to be disinterested if not dismissive of state-socialist histories and constructive contributions, especially when it comes to ecological matters. Capitalism Nature Socialism has provided an exception to this tendency, despite the continuing dearth of studies published on socialist states. Perhaps the still widespread politically self-neutralising attitude undergirding such paucity will finally be overturned. A recently rising and mainly non-academic generation of intellectuals are making great research strides on the subject. With meticulous re-readings of and interpolations from existing studies and primary sources, they are demonstrating the critical importance for our current struggles of learning from the experiences of state-socialist formations and appreciating their immense accomplishments, both past and present.
Finally, a third branch, whose growth I had hoped to enable in the journal, is the one represented by the works of Marxists in the biophysical sciences. The idea is to cultivate an inquisitiveness for the biophysical sciences among readers and socialists more broadly as well as to encourage those in the biophysical sciences to integrate socialist frameworks in their studies and methodologies and those in other fields of knowledge. The objective was and is to stimulate socialists to become much more conversant with techniques, theories, and debates in the biophysical sciences. To my chagrin, over time, such rare Marxists within the biophysical sciences either passed away or could no longer contribute to the journal. Yet mine was an unreasonable ambition, given prevailing politics within the sciences and the institutional divides impeding authors from the biophysical sciences to contribute to a journal like Capitalism Nature Socialism, overwhelmingly inclined towards the social sciences and humanities. I was overtaken by exuberance and a dose of willing ingenuousness. Ironically for someone of my sort, substantively involved in the environmental sciences, it seems that over the years of my tenure the amount of works received and published from the humanities has even risen. This was a most pleasant surprise likely traceable to the examples from and endeavours of other journal Editors.
Those maladroit attempts on my part will hopefully serve as constructive examples for anyone sharing the above-raised concerns and objectives. Regardless, a relative failure to establish those three additional areas of focus in the journal by no means diminishes the sense of collective accomplishment I have experienced and felt as chief editor. A mainly academic journal may have severe limitations of reach, mainly due to the scandalous state of the publishing world. Still, candid dialogue, clarificatory debate, and spreading socialist ideas in any way possible are important supports for the much wider struggles to build a classless, state-free, ecologically sustainable society.
Such are among the tasks soon spearheaded by Leigh Brownhill and Daniel Faber, as Editors in Chief. As for me, time has arrived, so my fatigued editorial neurons and sinews tell me, to proceed to Biella (may all reactionary forces there be extinguished within my lifetime). Some respite thereafter, I aim to return to the journal under different guise, contributing in other ways, as a stubborn soul forging ahead with communist praxis in most unfriendly waters shaped by bourgeois intellectual gods. A quagmire be visited unto them and their capitalist wardens. May Capitalism Nature Socialism continue to serve as a fulcrum of ecologically minded socialist intellectual growth and a supporting beam for all those dedicating themselves to creating socialist futures.