John Bellamy Foster

Author: John Bellamy Foster

  • “Foreword” to Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature

    “Foreword” to Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature

    “Foreword” to Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 7-13.

    Reprinted as “Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature Fifteen Years After,” Monthly Review, vol. 66, no. 7 (December 2014), pp. 56-62.

    Every book more than a few years old needs to be seen within the historical context in which it was written—works of social science most of all. Re-reading Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature today, nearly a decade and a half after its first publication, reminds me of how different in some respects the historical context was then, at the end of the twentieth century, from what we face today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century.… A decade and a half ago the contribution of Marx and Marxism to the understanding of ecology was seen in almost entirely negative terms, even by many self-styled ecosocialists. Today Marx’s understanding of the ecological problem is being studied in universities worldwide and is inspiring ecological actions around the globe.… These changes are of course connected. As the environmental problems engendered by capitalist society have worsened, the necessary movements of ecological defense have radicalized and spread across the face of the planet.

  • Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics

    Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics

    “Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics,” [PDF], with Michael D Yates. Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 6 (November 1, 2014): 1–24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-06-2014-10_1

    Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has it been so apparent that the core capitalist economies are experiencing secular stagnation, characterized by slow growth, rising unemployment and underemployment, and idle productive capacity. Consequently, mainstream economics is finally beginning to recognize the economic stagnation tendency that has long been a focus in these pages, although it has yet to develop a coherent analysis of the phenomenon. Accompanying the long-term decline in the growth trend has been an extraordinary increase in economic inequality, which one of us labeled “The Great Inequality,” and which has recently been dramatized by the publication of French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Taken together, these two realities of deepening stagnation and growing inequality have created a severe crisis for orthodox (or neoclassical) economics.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation by Mustafa Stopped in Alternatif Siyaset (December 2014).

     

  • Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class

    Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class

    “Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class: Beyond the Degradation of Labor,”[PDF],(coauthored with R. Jamil Jonna, Jonna listed first), Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, vol. 26 (2014), pp. 219-36. DOI: 10.1007/s10672-014-9243-4.

    The fortieth anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital is the occasion here for a reassessment of his work as a whole. Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of work is shown to have been only a part of a much larger argument he was developing on the structure of the U.S. working class. Building on his pioneering empirical research into occupational composition, a new empirical assessment of the structural evolution of the U.S. working class over the last four decades is provided, throwing light on current problems of unemployment, underemployment, and socially wasted labor—and the rights of labor.

    Translations:
    • Italian translation (of “Beyond the Degradation of Labor“) in La Sinistra Rivista (January 2015).
    Reprinted/ Revised:

    as “Beyond the Degradation of Labor: Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class,” [PDF] Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 5 (October 2014), pp. 1-24

  • “Foreword” to Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization

    “Foreword” to Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (forthcoming: Zed Press, second edition, 2014).

  • Surveillance Capitalism

    Surveillance Capitalism

    “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age” [PDF] (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 11 (July-August 2014), pp. 1-32. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-03-2014-07_1

    The United States came out of the Second World War as the hegemonic power in the world economy. The war had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression by providing the needed effective demand in the form of endless orders for armaments and troops. Real output rose by 65 percent between 1940 and 1944, and industrial production jumped by 90 percent.

    1, At the immediate end of the war, due to the destruction of the European and Japanese economies, the United States accounted for over 60 percent of world manufacturing output.
    2, The very palpable fear at the top of society as the war came to a close was that of a reversion to the pre-war situation in which domestic demand would be insufficient to absorb the enormous and growing potential economic surplus generated by the production system, thereby leading to a renewed condition of economic stagnation and depression.

    Translations
    • Chinese-language translation in Social Science Abroad, 2015.
    • Spanish language translation by Miguel de Punoenrosto in Sin Permiso (July 2014) http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/index.php?id=7154.
    • French Translation by Miguel de Puñoenrostro in Marx Nangara (February 2015).

     

  • Stagnation and Financialization

    Stagnation and Financialization

    “Stagnation and Financialization: The Nature of the Contradiction” [PDF] (coauthored with Fred Magdoff, Magdoff listed first) Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 1 (May 2014), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-01-2014-05_1

    More than six years after the beginning of the Great Recession in the United States, and nearly five years since it was officially declared over in this country, the core economies of the capitalist world system remain crisis-ridden. The jobs lost in the downturn in the United States have not yet been fully recovered and the economy remains sluggish. In Europe the crisis has hardly abated at all and a number of the peripheral European Union countries are in what can only be called a depression—especially Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The last member of the triad of advanced capitalist centers, Japan, has gone through what have been called two “lost decades” of slow growth and deflation and is attempting once again to jump-start the economy through a combination of devaluation of the yen and deficit spending.

    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Zhou Ying in Young China 6790 (June 2014).

     

  • The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition)

    The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition)

    The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism“The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy,” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 320 pp.

    In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital, a monumental work of economic theory and social criticism that sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of their time. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, influenced generations of radical and heterodox economists. They recognized that Marx’s work was unfinished and itself historically conditioned, and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolving phenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account. Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic) firms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at the center of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such firms accumulated—as a result of their pricing power, massive sales efforts, and other factors—could not be profitably invested back into the economy. Absent any “epoch making innovations” like the automobile or vast new increases in military spending, the result was a general trend toward economic stagnation—a condition that persists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysis was also extended to issues of imperialism, or “accumulation on a world scale,” overlapping with the path-breaking work of Samir Amin in particular.

    John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspective today, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explication of this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporating an analysis of recently discovered “lost” chapters from Monopoly Capital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It also discusses Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis of the financialization of the economy in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, leading up to the Great Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Foster presents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capital theory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in a way that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamant that the deep-seated problems of today’s monopoly-finance capitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcoming the system itself.

    Foster’s book is brilliantly successful elaborating Marxian political economy and the tendency of monopoly-finance-imperialist capitalism toward stagnation. The book deserves a wide (re-)readership and a new generation of theorists to appreciate the explanatory power of Marxian political economy.

    —Hans G. Despain, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

    A clear and powerful explanation of the Marxian political economy, this book is a welcome addition for those who are interested in, or have serious concerns about, monopoly capital as well as economic stagnation, financial instability, and the futures of both capitalism and socialism.

    —CHOICE

    Essential reading for those attracted by the monopoly capital school.

    —The Economic Journal

    A clear and forceful elaboration of basic Marxist concepts such as economic surplus, capital accumulation, imperialism, and value.

    —Labour/Le Travail

    A literate defense of the … Marxian analytical framework of Baran, Sweezy, Kalecki, and Steindl …. Foster develops an improved version of Baran and Sweezy’s … model of of accumulation by adding theoretical refinements.

    —Cooperative Economic News Service

    Editions:

    • Second edition (2013), includes new introduction to second edition by author, pp. 22
    • “Introduction to Second Edition” published in Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July-August 2013), pp. 107-34.
    • Japanese language edition, (Tokyo: Uni Agency, 1988).
    Translations:
    • Chinese Translation of “Introduction to Second Edition” forthcoming in Foreign Theoretical Trends.

  • The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange

    “The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange: A Marx-Odum Dialectic,” [PDF] (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, authors listed alphabetically) Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (2014), pp. 199-233. DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2014.889687.

    A world-system analysis of the ecological rift generated by capitalism requires as one of its elements a developed theory of the unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery. After reviewing the literature on unequal exchange (both economic and ecological) from Ricardo and Marx to the present, a new approach is provided, based on a critical appropriation of systems ecologist Howard Odum’s emergy (spelled with an m) analysis. Odum’s contribution offers key elements of a wider dialectical synthesis, made possible in part by his intensive studies of Marx’s political-economic critique of capitalism and by Marx’s own theory of metabolic rift.

  • The Plight of the U.S. Working Class

    The Plight of the U.S. Working Class

    “The Plight of the U.S. Working Class” [PDF], (coauthored with Fred Magdoff, Magdoff listed first), Monthly Review vol.65, no. 8 (January 2014), pp. 1-22. DOI: 10.14452/MR-065-08-2014-01_1

    Modern capitalism, sociologist Max Weber famously observed early in the twentieth century, is based on “the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labor.” But the “rationality” of the system in this sphere, as Weber was to acknowledge elsewhere, was so restrictive as to be in reality “irrational.” Despite its formal freedom, labor under capitalism was substantively unfree.… This was in accordance with the argument advanced in Karl Marx’s Capital. Since the vast majority of individuals in the capitalist system are divorced from the means of production they have no other way to survive but to sell their labor power to those who own these means, that is, the capitalist class.… The result is a strong tendency to the polarization of income and wealth in society. The more the social productivity of labor grows the more it serves to promote the wealth and power of private capital, while at the same time increasing the relative poverty and economic dependency of the workers.

     

  • Polish Marxian Political Economy and U.S. Monopoly Capital Theory: The Influence of Luxemburg, Kalecki, and Lange on Baran and Sweezy and Monthly Review

    “Polish Marxian Political Economy and U.S. Monopoly Capital Theory: The Influence of Luxemburg, Kalecki, and Lange on Baran and Sweezy and Monthly Review,” in Ricardo Bellofiore, Ewa Karwoski, and Jan Toporowski, ed., The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange and Michael Kalecki, vol. 1 of Essays in Honour of Tadeusz Kowalik (London: Palgrave, 2014), 104-21.

    From the viewpoint of orthodox economists, macroeconomics has no significant historical antecedents prior to the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936. Theories of aggregate demand before Keynes, such as those associated with Lauderdale, Malthus, and Hobson, were generally weak theoretically. A number of important mainstream economic thinkers raised what would be considered macroeconomic questions in the context of business cycle analysis.1 But it required Keynes to construct a monetary theory of production that broke decisively with Say’s Law (the notion that supply creates its own demand) before economic orthodoxy was able to address macroeconomic questions in a significant way.