John Bellamy Foster

Author: John Bellamy Foster

  • The Great Capitalist Climacteric

    “The Great Capitalist Climacteric: Marxism and “System Change Not Climate Change,” Monthly Review, vol. 67, no. 6 (November 2015), pp. 1-18.
    DOI:10.14452

    This article is from a keynote address presented at Manifesta in Ostend, Belgium on September 19, 2015. This year’s Manifesta was organized around the theme of climate change in preparation for the COP21 climate negotiations (and protests) in Paris in December 2015.

    Humanity today is confronted with what might be called the Great Capitalist Climacteric. In the standard definition, a climacteric (from the Greek klimaktēr or rung on the ladder) is a period of critical transition or a turning point in the life of an individual or a whole society. From a social standpoint, it raises issues of historical transformation in the face of changing conditions.

  • Afterword: The Making of Scandinavian Ecosocialism

    “Afterword: The Making of Scandinavian Ecosocialism,”[PDF] in The Politics of Ecosocialism, ed. Kajsa Borgnäs, Teppo Eskelinen, Johanna Perkiö, and Rikard Warlenius (London: Routledge, 2015), 195-203.

  • The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital

    “The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finace Capital,” Monthly Review vol. 67, no. 3 (July-August 2015), pp. 1-22.
    DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-03-2015-07_1

    It is now a universal belief on the left that the world has entered a new imperialist phase.… The challenge for Marxian theories of the imperialist world system in our times is to capture the full depth and breadth of the classical accounts, while also addressing the historical specificity of the current global economy. It will be argued in this introduction (in line with the present issue as a whole) that what is widely referred to as neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century is in fact a historical product of the shift to global monopoly-finance capital or what Samir Amin calls the imperialism of “generalized-monopoly capitalism.”

  • The Power of Inaction – A Review

    Review of Cornelia Woll, ‘The Power of Inaction‘, [PDF], American Journal of Sociology, vol. 121, no. 1 (July, 2015): 313-15.

    The great financial crisis of 2007–9 has given rise to a small industry of academic studies, some directed at the wider systemic tendencies of capital, class and crisis, others at narrower regulatory or managerial issues. Cornelia Woll’s ‘The Power of Inaction,’ is a work of the latter kind. It is a study of the state-finance nexus viewed through the lens of paired comparisons of bank bailouts in six countries: (1) the United States and the United Kingdom (the Anglo-American model), (2) Germany and France (large, regulated Eurozone economies), and (3) Denmark and Ireland (smaller European economies).

  • Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis

    “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,” [PDF] Monthly Review vol.67, no. 2, pp. 1-20.
    DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-02-2015-06_1

    Soviet ecology presents us with an extraordinary set of historical ironies. On the one hand, the USSR in the 1930s and ’40s violently purged many of its leading ecological thinkers and seriously degraded its environment in the quest for rapid industrial expansion. The end result has often been described as a kind of “ecocide,” symbolized by the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the assault on Lake Baikal, and the drying up of the Aral Sea, as well as extremely high levels of air and water pollution. On the other hand, the Soviet Union developed some of the world’s most dialectical contributions to ecology, revolutionizing science in fields such as climatology, while also introducing pioneering forms of conservation. Aside from its famous zapovedniki, or nature reserves for scientific research, it sought to preserve and even to expand its forests.

     

  • The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left

    “The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left,” [PDF], vol. 44, no. 3 (May 2015), pp. 314-21. DOI: 10.1177/0094306115579190a

    On September 21, 2014, the largest climate march in U.S. history took place in New York City, as more than 300,000 protestors signaled to UN delegates arriving for climate talks that more desperate measures were needed to protect humanity and other species. The massive demonstration, though representing a wide array of social and political viewpoints, had its origins on the Left. The radical intellectual thrust of the movement was apparent the day prior to the march, when a vast ‘‘People’s Summit/ Teach-In’’ was led by two organizations- Global Climate Convergence and System Change Not Climate Change- that have arisen out of the left, particularly from the ecosocialist movement, and have been influenced to a considerable extent by U.S. environmental sociology.

     

  • Chávez and the Communal State

    Chávez and the Communal State

    “Chávez and the Communal State: On the Transition to Socialism in Venezuela,” Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 11 (April 2015), pp.1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-02-2015-06_1 [HTML]

    On October 20, 2012, less than two weeks after being reelected to his fourth term as Venezuelan president and only months before his death, Hugo Chávez delivered his crucial El Golpe de Timón (“Strike at the Helm”) speech to the first meeting of his ministers in the new revolutionary cycle. Chávez surprised even some of his strongest supporters by his insistence on the need for changes at the top in order to promote an immediate leap forward in the creation of what is referred to as “the communal state.” This was to accelerate the shift of power to the population that had begun with the formation of the communal councils (groupings of families involved in self-governance projects—in densely populated urban areas, 200–400 families; in rural areas, 50–100 families). The main aim in the new revolutionary cycle, he insisted, was to speed up the registration of communes, the key structure of the communal state.

     

  • Crossing the River of Fire

    “Crossing the River of Fire: The Liberal Attack on Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything” [PDF] (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first) Monthly Review, vol. 66, no. 9 (February 2015), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-09-2015-02_1

    Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything [argues that the source of the looming crisis from climate change] is not the planet, which operates according to natural laws, but rather the economic and social system in which we live, which treats natural limits as mere barriers to surmount. It is now doing so on a planetary scale, destroying in the process the earth as a place of human habitation.… In the age of climate change, Klein argues, a system based on ever-expanding capital accumulation and exponential economic growth is no longer compatible with human well-being and progress—or even with human survival over the long run.… In this way Klein…signals that she has now, in William Morris’s famous metaphor, crossed “the river of fire” to become a critic of capital as a system.… [This] has led to a host of liberal attacks on This Changes Everything, often couched as criticisms emanating from the left. These establishment criticisms of her work, we will demonstrate, are disingenuous, having little to do with serious confrontation with her analysis. Rather, their primary purpose is to rein in her ideas, bringing them into conformity with received opinion. If that should prove impossible, the next step is to exclude her ideas from the conversation.

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Noticas de Abajo, June 14, 2015.

     

  • “Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control

    “Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control

    “Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming December 2014), 15 pp.

    Reprinted as “Mészáros and the Critique of the Capital System,” Monthly Review 66, no. 7: 1-15.

    István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms of thought—is unequaled in our time. No less a historical figure than Hugo Chávez referred to him as the “pathfinder” of twenty-first century socialism.… The role of this foreword is to help to put his system of thought as a whole, and this book in particular, in their historical contexts, while illuminating some of the distinctive concepts governing his analysis.

  • Mathusianism

    “Mathusianism” in Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch Des Marximus, 7/II ((Berlin: Argument-Verlag, forthcoming 2015). 3500 words.