Dying for Capitalism: How Big Money Fuels Extinction and What We Can Do About It - Paperback

by Charles Derber (Author), Suren Moodliar (Author)

This is an original, accessible book for scholars, students, activists, and the general public on the greatest crisis the world has faced. The authors challenge the widespread notion that a green and peaceful set of technological reforms in the current economic and political system - perhaps a "green capitalism" - can prevent disaster. Dying for Capitalism analyzes the "triangle of extinction" that links capitalism, environmental destruction, and militarism as a system that cannot sustain life on the planet. The authors analyze how the extinction triangle evolved historically, how it functions globally as integral to the world capitalist order, and how the United States has become the dominant "extinction nation." They also show how recent anti-democratic and anti-scientific cultural and political forces intensify denial of the threat and subordinate health and survival to profit and extreme concentrated power.

The book offers a "slender path" of social and political transformation that can prevent catastrophe. The path requires moving beyond current ruling systems. But possibilities of survival arise from action at local, state, regional, and global levels through multiple strategies and movements that already exist. The authors draw on the history of abolitionism and emancipation from slavery in the United States to show how a system that appears unchangeable can be transformed, while describing organizations, movements, and practices that are models of hope and a shift from the triangle of extinction to the "circle of creation."

Author Biography

Charles Derber is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College and a noted public intellectual who has written 25 books, including several best-sellers reviewed in the NY Times, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and other leading media. His books include Welcome to the Revolution, Sociopathic Society, Corporation Nation, People Before Profit, The Pursuit of Attention, The Wilding of America, and Greed to Green. With Suren Moodliar, he is a co-editor of the Routledge book series Universalizing Resistance. Derber, a life-long activist, has done hundreds of radio, television, internet, and film interviews by prominent media and commentators.

Suren Moodliar is a scholar and activist who helped found and manage encuentro5, a movement-building center in Boston. He is also managing editor of the journal, Socialism and Democracy. He is co-author of A People's Guide to Greater Boston (2020). He also co-edited and contributed to Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency (2020) with Charles Derber and Matt Nelson, and to Internationalism or Extinction (2020) and Chomsky for Activists (2021) with Charles Derber and Paul Shannon. In the 1980s, Suren supported the national liberation movement in his home country, South Africa. He has also participated in public health, peace, solidarity, and pro-immigrant movements and labor organizations.