The Dual Crisis in Science and Society

Our present achievements in science and technology appear to contrast vividly with our present lack of achievement in solving social problems. We can nourish a man in the supreme isolation of outer space-but we cannot adequately feed the children of Calcutta or Harlem. We hope to analyze life on other planets-but we have not yet learned to understand our own neighbors. We are attempting to live on the moon-but we cannot yet live peacefully on our own planet

Manuel Sacristán at the Onset of Ecological Marxism after Stalinism

Thirty-one years ago, in 1985, Manuel Sacristán died in Barcelona at the age of 59. After the publication in 2014 of a volume with some of his writings translated into English (Llorente 2014), it is time to help non-Spanish-speaking readers to know more about him. Yet it is not easy to explain to generations born after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that Manuel Sacristán was a most important Marxist philosopher and at the same time one of the few pioneers introducing political ecology and antinuclear peace movement during the last quarter of the 20th century in Spain. Many people believe that Marxism, environmentalism and pacifism are views that exclude each other. Most of what has been said and done on behalf of Marxism since Stalin took over the leadership of the Communist Party of the USSR in the 1930s, up to its dissolution in 1991, contributes to sustaining this belief. The fast industrialization of the Old Russian Empire undertaken by the Soviet State was nowhere near taking into account ecological sustainability. Its socio-environmental impact turned out to be comparable or even worse than the ones caused by capitalist industrialization