We live in an age where multiple crises are converging. Runaway climate change, the loss of biodiversity constituting the sixth mass extinction, and the unprecedented concentration of wealth alongside extreme poverty and destitution for billions are part of our shared experience. This is also an age of unreason. In the face of such grave developments, scientists become insular, the appeals of activists are silenced or ignored, while climate denial, vaccine skepticism, and “post-truth” are on the rise. At the same time, fascism is again taking hold in various parts of the world as irrationalism proliferates. Exterminism is being live-streamed from Palestine and other parts of Southwest Asia and North Africa, and naked US imperialism is exercised with impunity in Latin America. These are not separate phenomena. These are manifestations of deeper structural contradictions in the capitalist organization of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, which shapes institutions, ideologies, forms of knowledge, and consciousness. In short, the root cause of the converging crises is capital’s irrational mode of control over humanity’s entire social metabolism, which prioritizes the growth of profits for a selected few over the needs of the majority. Indeed, this is the rational pursuit of an ultimately irrational goal.

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In this context, a group of scholars has come together to form the International Society of Critical Social-Ecological Studies (CRISES), which seeks to contribute to a counter-hegemonic project of structural transformation. As a nonprofit scientific association, CRISES promotes scientific knowledge and research that focuses on the fundamental drivers of the contemporary contradictions, drawing on and contributing to the rich tradition of historical and dialectical materialism across the natural and social sciences, while being open to critical inputs from other traditions, such as from critical political economy and dependency theory, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist analysis, to social reproduction and dialectical ecology, and more.

We understand that science, as any other form of knowledge, is not neutral. Science emerges within a given historical socioeconomic context, while at the same time contributing to shaping it. In this latter respect, science (and knowledge more generally) also acts as a lever of social transformation. This approach implies an engaged science, allied with struggles against the accelerated global ecological destabilization, mounting inequality, imperialism, militarism, sectarianism, fascism, and other barriers to human emancipation. Scholarship, in this context, carries with it a commitment to combating the prevalent irrationalism and the accelerating decay into barbarism.

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CRISES seeks to promote research and education, to expand research funding, and to provide a scientific network for scholars dedicated to the critical analysis of the underlying causes of our social-ecological crisis – while advancing class consciousness as part of the historical challenge to build the future within the ruins of the present.

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The outlook is grim, the stakes could hardly be higher, and the challenge scarcely greater. At no point, however, is despair an option. Even a planet ravaged by destructive forces would be worth saving – no catastrophe is so complete that it ceases to be a site of hope, struggle, and potential flourishing. The future is open; it is never too late to build a new system on a clear understanding of the one it is replacing and to institute a new dawn for humanity. As Ursula le Guin noted, ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.’ We cannot allow ourselves to forget this. However unassailable the power of capital might appear under the aegis of US imperialism, it is in reality highly fractured, its legitimacy severely eroded, and its future overshadowed by its own limitations as a mode of social metabolic control. We cannot allow ourselves to forget both the efficacy and importance of mass mobilization and systemic transformation. To do so is to invite paralysis, and a de facto endorsement of our current trajectory.

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We therefore encourage all like-minded people, from all backgrounds and walks of life, to join us. We need all of you to face the unprecedented challenges of our time.