Public discourse regarding the pandemic has eroded, with disinformation campaigns and lab leak theories reaching wide distribution, which has furthered the conspiratorial discourse against China as a civilizational enemy. These dire conditions make Chuang’s book, Social Contagion: and Other Material on Microbiological Class War in China, including a revised version of the titular essay, all the more critical.

At best, Adam McKay’s new Netflix film, Don’t Look Up (2021), is an emotional salve for those activists and climate scientists experiencing frustration at government inaction on climate change, and the media’s failure to inspire a response to the Anthropocene. For others who are already familiar with these inglorious trends, McKay preaches to the choir without offering any viable road to salvation.

Cheri DiNovo is a well known figure among activists, including the queer community, progressive religious groups, and socialists in Toronto. This autobiographical book is a remarkable story of transformation, a perspective on challenging church and state (both from within and from without) and coming away victorious after a life of “speaking truth to power.”

What is the experience and future for China and its Communist Party rule? It seems appropriate to consider a number of new books on China that have been published that try to answer this question. In this review, Michael Roberts takes a closer look at Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy, John Ross’s China’s Great Road, and China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse by System Change Not Climate Change co-founder Richard Smith.

Capitalism and the Death Drive is a set of essays and interviews published between 2012 and 2020 by South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han. The stress in these pieces is on such ideas as the “digital panopticon” of the internet, the surveillance state and our voluntary cooperation with it, the idea of the foreign, capitalism as death drive, and so on. Each is pervaded by a general hopelessness.

Stephen Dale’s Shift Change examines the trajectory of Hamilton, Ontario. This city of more than half a million people on the western shores of Lake Ontario was, for most of the twentieth century, synonymous with heavy industry, especially steel and associated manufacturing. Though the book covers the Stelco strike of 1946 and a history of the city’s industrial decline, it is Hamilton’s “urban renaissance” that is Dale’s primary focus.

As climate breakdown intensifies, filmmakers are endeavouring to capture the anxiety driven by a warming world. Caught up in this anticipatory energy is a notable rise in pagan-inflected art that could be connected to these growing concerns. Writer-director David Lowery’s The Green Knight should be understood as part of this cultural exploration of eco-anxiety and our relationship to nature.

This new collection edited by Steve Ellner, Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism, and Resistance in Broad Perspective, provides much food for thought for anyone who wants to think through the challenges of governing from the Left in an age of globalized capitalism and climate change. Ellner is a retired professor at the Universidad de Oriente, Venezuela, and is currently associate managing editor of Latin American Perspectives.

Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination is a fine collection willing to challenge and explore a number of different paths out of the ecological wasteland that the many forms of capitalism are condemning us to. But it also goes some way to addressing the largely unrecognized crisis of all too many of the alternatives to that capitalist system.

In his new book, A People’s Green New Deal, Max Ajl dismantles ruling class and ostensibly progressive visions for a Green New Deal, contrasting these settler futures with revolutionary alternatives grounded in agroecology, anti-imperialism, and Indigenous self-determination. In doing so, writes James, Wilt, Ajl demonstrates these alternatives aren’t utopian solutions but are already very much in motion.