Like all good things, it has taken some time.

Like all good things, it has taken some time to develop, to form, but finally it is here. In June 2026, a group of critical scholars from the Global South and the Global North came together and founded the International Society of Critical Social-Ecological Studies (CRISES).

The catalyzing event occurred over a year before, in March 2025. The occasion was the landmark conference “Marx in the Anthropocene” hosted by the IUAV University of Venice. The conference, which put forward the centrality of Marxian analysis and thought for understanding the current ecological and social crises, has seen the participation of over 300 attendees and has hosted keynote lectures by prominent scholars, including Nancy Fraser, John Bellamy Foster, Helena Sheehan, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Joan Martinez-Allier.

The success of the conference and the energy it transmitted showed the existence of an important gap in existing discourses on the social-ecological crises of our days. While many of the mechanisms and pathways leading to accelerated climate change, biodiversity loss, mounting inequality (to mention some of the manifestations of the current multiple crises) are increasingly well documented and understood, the community of scientists and practitioners has been perhaps less inclined to explicitly confront and denounce the deep structural causes. Yet, it is now becoming increasingly apparent how these causes lie in the organization of our current economic mode of production, consumption and distribution, oriented towards the perpetual accumulation of profit for the few, against the destitutions of many. Indeed some courageous statements in this direction can be found in recent reports by different international organizations (for example, the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment Report, published in 2024 or the IPCC sixth assessment report, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation and Climate Change).

CRISES begins here and goes a step further. CRISES Vision openly recognises how the capitalist organization of our mode of existence, which shapes not just our economies but also our institutions, consciousness and ways of thinking, is the deep structural cause of our current predicament. The influence of capital on our lives is profoundly undemocratic. The majority of people have no control on what is produced and how. These decisions rest in the hands of tiny minority of people who control investment and production, to their own benefit rather than to improve human wellbeing.

In Venice, in March 2025, the core group of CRISES, which included also exponents from the Monthly Review, Science for the People and The Tricontinental, decided that a new organization was needed, a new space, where critical ideas could be freely developed and shared. CRISES wants to be a community, where all scholars and practitioners, from the Global South and the Global North, who are critical of the current way in which our economies and our lives are being conditioned by the irrational pursuit (through rational means) of endless capital accumulation, can come together and create an alternative.

The next milestone will be the first CRISES conference, in Venice, on 2-5 November 2027. Stay tuned! Join CRISES and spread the news! There is a lot of work to do!