John Bellamy Foster

Author: John Bellamy Foster

  • Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism: A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars

    “Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism: A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 9 (February 2013): 54-61.

    I would like to thank Zhihe Wang, Meijun Fan, Hui Dong, Dezhong Sun, and Lichun Li for doing so much to promote a global dialogue on ecological Marxism by summarizing some of the insights and concerns of Chinese scholars in this area, focusing in this case on my work in particular. The various questions, challenges, and critiques raised in relation to my work and that of related scholars are all, I believe, of great importance to the development of theory and practice in this area. I am therefore providing a brief set of responses to the problems raised, which I hope will be helpful in the further promotion of this global dialogue on ecology and Marxism.

    Marx and Ecological Marxism

    Many of the criticisms expressed relate to the question of the compatibility of Marx’s ideas with ecological Marxism. Xu Yanmei, Pu Xiangji, Li Benzhu, Gao Huizhu, Zhang Xiangli, and Leng Yunsheng have all raised what I consider to be important questions about how Marx’s materialism is depicted in my book Marx’s Ecology, and how this is related to classical Marxian conceptions of history, practice, and dialectics—as well as Marx’s own development. Xu Yanmei, we are told, contends that my work makes the mistake of placing Marx’s dissertation on a par with his mature work. In contrast to my interpretation, she argues that an ecological critique did not consciously enter into Marx’s critique of capitalism or his critique of religion. These are important criticisms. Here I will confine my response to the relation of Marx’s ecological critique to his critique of capitalism. However, the connections of his ecological thought to the critique of religion are also important. I have discussed these in the bookCritique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present, written with Brett Clark and Richard York.1

    The initial research that led me to write Marx’s Ecology began with an investigation into the ecological analysis that came to occupy such a central place in Marx’s critique in Capital. The most important discussions lie at the end of the core chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in Capital, vol. 1, and at the end of the long treatment of capitalist ground rent inCapital, vol. 3—but the same critical ecological viewpoint permeates all of Marx’s mature work. In particular, he relied heavily on Justus von Liebig’s critique of capitalist agriculture (contained espeically in the long introduction to the 1862 edition of Liebig’s great work on agricultural chemistry). But Marx went beyond Liebig in brilliantly incorporating the metabolism concept to explain the relation between humanity and nature, defining the labor process itself in these terms. Human production, like life itself, could thus be viewed in terms of “metabolism,” i.e., as an “organic exchange of matter”—as Engels put it in Anti-Dühring. Marx described capitalism’s necessarily antagonistic relation to nature as an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” He thus anticipated the entire direction that critical ecological science was to take in twentieth-century systems ecology, which made the concept of metabolism the key to ecosystem theory.2

    I wondered how was this possible? How did Marx arrive at such profound ecological conclusions, which could not be explained simply in terms of his encounter with Liebig? Could the answer lie in the nature of Marx’s materialism? What was the relation of Marx’s thought to natural science? The only way to find an answer, I decided, was to go back to the genesis of Marx’s thought—not just to his “early writings” but what I came to think of as his “very early writings,” i.e., his dissertation and other pre–1844 manuscripts.3 That led me to Marx’s early encounter with Epicurean materialism, which had played such a large role in the development of modernity and modern science. Marx approached Epicurus, like all other major thinkers, dialectically, which meant that he appropriated Epicurus’s thought in a critical-transformative fashion. There is no intention here of equating “Marx’s dialectical materialism with Epicurean natural materialism” as Zhang Xiangli and Leng Yunsheng have, it seems, pointedly accused me of doing, and as Pu Xiangji also strongly implied. Marx should be understood as a complex, dialectical, creative thinker. In transcending Epicurus’s views, he retained their rational core, just as in transcending other key thinkers, such as Hegel and Ricardo, he retained what was most rational and critical. Epicurus was significant for Marx both as “the true radical Enlightener of antiquity” and as the main root within antiquity of the viewpoint of scientific modernity. Moreover, Marx admired Epicurus’ concept of freedom (even if a contemplative one) and above all his notion of the “swerve.” (In Epicurean philosophy the infinitesimally small “swerve” of atoms in what was otherwise a smooth, linear movement, stood for contingency, and ultimately the possibility of human freedom.)4

    It is therefore highly significant that Marx chose to write his dissertation on the ancient Epicurean philosophy of nature. In this way the importance of science and naturalism in his thought is revealed very early. I came to the conclusion that Marx, who studied geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and other natural sciences throughout his life, saw the materialist conception of nature promoted by natural science as vital to his own development of thematerialist conception of history within social science (and social praxis). In directly advancing the latter in his work he also continued to explore the former, incorporating new scientific knowledge into his analysis where necessary—for the simple reason that in his view there was “only one science” and thus human history and human labor were inseparable from the human metabolism with nature.5

    In such a conception, then, our understanding of Marx’s dialectic is necessarily widened. Not only was Marx a historical and a dialectical thinker, but the nature of his understanding of the world made him an ecological one as well—and none of this contradicted in the least (indeed it intensified) the revolutionary character of his thought. Hence, I disagree respectfully with the view attributed to Li Benzhu that Marx in my interpretation (and that of others) is degraded from a revolutionary thinker to an ecologist. The two are not antagonistic to each other. In fact, an ecological revolution, which would necessarily also be a social revolution, is the particular historical burden of our time.

    This is not to say that Marx in himself provides us with views adequate to deal with all of the specific challenges of today. That would be an ahistorical viewpoint. But for a long time an influential stream of Western Marxism has followed Lukács in arguing that in Marxism “orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.”6 In this sense, Marx, with his wider dialectic, which was so revealing of the contradictions of capitalism and modernity, remains a guide.

    The additional criticisms of Pu, Zhang, and Leng that there is the danger, in addressing the complex relation between humanity and nature, of falling into dualism and of losing sight of Marx’s concept of “humanized nature” are, in my view, important. What we are learning today, though—and what in my argument Marx had already recognized—was that “humanized nature” in its capitalist form has generated a metabolic rift as a result of our failure to recognize that humanity is “a part of nature.” As Engels said, “we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but…we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and…all our mastery consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws an apply them correctly.” Developing a non-dualistic understanding of the dialectic of humanity and nature, in this sense, without simply subsuming one under the other, is the great theoretical challenge of our age.7

    It never occurred to me, as Gao Huizhu says, to substitute the concept of metabolism for “objective activity.” The notion of metabolism as employed in Marx’s thought had to do with what he called the “eternal natural conditions” within which life exists and human production occurs.8 Revolutionary praxis, in Marx’s conception, is obviously not independent of material conditions, which are partly given by nature and then transformed by human production. Studying natural conditions and limits is part of a materialist understanding of the world. For example, one of the big issues today with respect to global ecology is species extinction due in part to climate change as the temperature zones or isotherms shift faster than species are able to move toward the poles, resulting in increased loss of species.9 I think it is, therefore, of great significance that near the end of his life, in 1878, Marx was studying, and taking scientific notes, on isotherms and their relation to species extinction due to shifts in the former—even making drawings of the temperature zones in his notebook. He clearly regarded this as crucial to the understanding of the material conditions and limits of life.10 The idea that in extending his thinking in these directions he was simply acting as an ecologist and not also as a revolutionary thinker is I think far too narrow. Marx’s view, like Hegel’s, was that “the true is the whole.”11 Marx’s use of the notion of metabolism was thus dialectical in the widest, most critical sense—as Lukács was among the first to perceive, seeing it as the key to a meaningful dialectic of nature and society.12 None of this should be conceived as subtracting from the Marxian notion of praxis or “objective activity.” Today ours is the task of developing a more dialectical and revolutionary ecological praxis, which is vitally needed in our period of planetary crisis.

    It would be a serious mistake, I believe, to view ecological Marxism as a replacement for Marxism or as a superior Marxism. Rather the incorporation of ecological-materialist understandings as integral to historical materialism was conceived in broad outline by Marx, and is an essential element of the dialectical approach to theory and practice, science and history, that he promoted. This was understood by some of his earlier followers. However, the ecological element within Marxism was largely lost in the early twentieth century. In the Soviet Union the leading ecological Marxists were purged. While in critical Marxist philosophy in the West—in what came to be viewed by many as the defining trait of “Western Marxism”—an extreme revolt against physical science as an embodiment of positivism resulted in an unfortunate divorce between Marxism and the ecological ideas that were developing within science at that time.13 Both of these developments were “sins” against Marxism. Today we are in a position to repair these rifts between Marxism and ecology as part of a larger revolutionary movement aimed at repairing the rifts between society and nature.

    China and Ecological Marxism

    A further set of criticisms and challenges raised in the above article relate to the significance of my work and ecological Marxism in general for understanding the conditions governing the former Soviet Union and the situation of present-day China. From a viewpoint influenced by constructive postmodernism—that is, the humanist ecological vision inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy—Meng Genlong argues that my perspective fails to explain what happened in the former Soviet Union or the ecological problems facing socialist China today. He contends that constructive postmodernism offers a more powerful critique in this respect than ecological Marxism, which is unable to account for socialism’s own failures.

    This raises extremely complex historical and theoretical questions. In my own view, modernity, insofar as it is separate from the distinctive development of bourgeois civilization, is too abstract a concept to carry the full burden of ecological critique. Minus historical specificity it becomes prone to Whitehead’s famous “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”14

    In addressing the question of socialism and the environment it is important to understand the accumulation imperative of a capitalist system that drives it inexorably toward ecological disaster, while socialism lacks such an absolute economic growth imperative as an invariant standard and driving force. Nevertheless, this makes it all the more important to explain why socialist revolutions led to ecological results analogous to those of capitalism. The reality is that the Soviet socialist experiment emerged in what was largely an underdeveloped and peripheral (or semi-peripheral) area of the capitalist world economy and was immediately subject to the full force of imperialism—geopolitical, military, and economic, of which the Cold War was itself emblematic. The pressure to prepare for defense and put all other interests aside was intense. In its early phase, until the 1930s, the USSR boasted an unequalled ecological science. But with external pressures, the internal deformations and brutalities of the 1930s, and then fighting for survival against the Nazis, it evolved into a system geared to “production for production’s sake.” When emergency conditions began to ease, deep and lasting damage had been done. The USSR did not even remain socialist in the sense of continually promoting egalitarianism; in fact, a proletarianized working class remained. New ruling elements emerged. The USSR consciously copied methods and systems from advanced capitalist countries—including factory size and organization, scientific management, and agricultural practices. The kind of forced drafting of resources that is characteristic of war economies became institutionalized in the system.

    In terms of Marxist theory, then, the USSR lost most of the essential characteristics of societies in transition from capitalism to socialism.15 Accompanying this was a blatant disregard of ecological conditions—and the purging of the scientists who in the 1920s and early ‘30s had made Soviet ecological science foremost in the world. I have written briefly on the ecological contradictions of the Soviet Union and the role they placed in its demise in a section of my book The Vulnerable Planet, entitled “The Environment of the Cold War: Ecocide in the Soviet Union.” In Marx’s Ecology the destruction of Soviet ecological science is discussed.16

    In China the capitalist road to socialism, articulated by the Chinese Communist Party in the most recent period (since 1979), put development first, and also involved the forced drafting of natural resources and, to a significant extent, reliance on the profit motive to propel investment. In contrast to this, we are now seeing new ecological initiatives taking place in China, such as the New Rural Reconstruction program promoted by Wen Tiejun, basing itself on some of the strengths of the Chinese revolution.17

    An article that I wrote with Brett Clark on “The Planetary Emergency” for the December 2012 issue of Monthly Review points to the ecological significance of the New Rural Reconstruction movement in China.18 In my book, The Endless Crisis, written with Robert W. McChesney, there is a discussion of China’s current socioeconomic problems in which the growing ecological crisis of China—accelerating perhaps even more rapidly than the planetary crisis—is addressed. Our concluding chapter on China does not stop short of the critique of Foxconn and of the abysmal forms of labor exploitation in China, where, as Wang and his colleagues indicate, workers recently have been openly referred to by entrepreneurs as “animals” and compared to occupants of zoos—in obscene violation of everything that socialism has stood for historically.19 My article “James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy” in this issue of Monthly Review discusses China’s response to climate change and some of the challenges it faces.20 All of this makes the new “ecological civilization” discussion emerging in China all the more important. Fred Magdoff, with whom I recently wrote the book, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, published an article in the January 2011 issue of Monthly Review entitled “Ecological Civilization,” which was a talk delivered in 2010 at the Ecological Civilization Conference at Fudan University in Shanghai.21

    I would like to conclude by indicating my complete agreement with Zhihe Wang and his colleagues that ecological Marxism and constructive postmodernism represent overlapping and, to a considerable extent, complementary theoretical interventions, which, from all indications, are generating in China an intellectually powerful and praxis-oriented ecological critique. What Wang has elsewhere called “the indigenization of ecological Marxism in China” represents an extremely hopeful development not only for China but the world.22 China today must confront not simply capitalism as such, but the peculiar ecological and social rifts of a modern Chinese system, which, whatever its defining socioeconomic characteristics, is clearly threatened, both from within and without, by the cancerous spread of capitalist methods and mores.

    Notes

    1. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
    2. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949, and Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 283; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 75; John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–405.
    3. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective,” International Socialism 96 (Autumn 2002): 71–86.
    4. ↩ Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 141; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 21–65; Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
    5. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, excerpt from The German Ideology, in Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 408. This is a crossed-out passage in the manuscript, not included in the Collected Works edition.
    6. ↩ Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 1.
    7. ↩ Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975), 328; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.
    8. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 637.
    9. ↩ James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 146–47.
    10. ↩ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MEGA IV: 26 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 214–19. See also Joseph Beete Jukes, The Student’s Manual of Geology, , third edition (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1872), 479–93.
    11. ↩ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 11.
    12. ↩ Georg Lukács, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness (New York: Verso, 2000), 129–31; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 215–47.
    13. ↩ Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976).
    14. ↩ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 51.
    15. ↩ The general problem of such post-revoutionary social formations is discussed in Paul M. Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980). See also István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 622–54.
    16. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 96–101.
    17. ↩ See Wen Tiejun, Lau Kinchi, Cheng Cunwang, He Huili, and Qiu Jiansheng, “Ecological Civilization, Indigenous Culture, and Rural Reconstruction in China,” Monthly Review 63, no. 9 (February 2012): 29–35.
    18. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review 64, no. 7 (December 2012): 20.
    19. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 155–83.
    20. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “James Hansen and the Climate Change Exit Strategy,” Monthly Review64, no. 9 (February 2013): 1–22.
    21. ↩ Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,” Monthly Review 62, no. 8 (January 2011): 1–25; Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
    22. ↩ Zhihe Wang, “Ecological Marxism in China,” Monthly Review 63, no. 9 (February 2012): 44.
  • The Planetary Emergency

    The Planetary Emergency

    “The Planetary Emergency” [PDF], (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 64, no. 7 (December 2012), pp. 1-25. DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-07-2012-11_1

    Capitalism today is caught in a seemingly endless crisis, with economic stagnation and upheaval circling the globe. But while the world has been fixated on the economic problem, global environmental conditions have been rapidly worsening, confronting humanity with its ultimate crisis: one of long-term survival. The common source of both of these crises resides in the process of capital accumulation. Likewise the common solution is to be sought in a “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,” going beyond the regime of capital.… It is still possible for humanity to avert what economist Robert Heilbroner once called “ecological Armageddon.” The means for the creation of a just and sustainable world currently exist, and are to be found lying hidden in the growing gap between what could be achieved with the resources already available to us, and what the prevailing social order allows us to accomplish. It is this latent potential for a quite different human metabolism with nature that offers the master-key to a workable ecological exit strategy.

     

  • The Endless Crisis

    The Endless Crisis

    The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China“The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China,” (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 227 pp.

    Introduction to book excerpted as “How Monopoly-Finance Capital Leads to Economic Stagnation,” Utne Reader, October 2012.

    Translations:

    • Polish translation, Book and Press/Le Monde Diplomatique Polish Book Series, 2013;
    • German translation (Hamburg: Laika Verlag)
    • Arabic translation by Fuad Nassar Center, Ramallah, Palestine.

    The days of boom and bubble are over, and the time has come to understand the long-term economic reality. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, hopes for a new phase of rapid economic expansion were quickly dashed. Instead, growth has been slow, unemployment has remained high, wages and benefits have seen little improvement, poverty has increased, and the trend toward more inequality of incomes and wealth has continued. It appears that the Great Recession has given way to a period of long-term anemic growth, which Foster and McChesney aptly term the Great Stagnation.

    This incisive and timely book traces the origins of economic stagnation and explains what it means for a clear understanding of our current situation. The authors point out that increasing monopolization of the economy—when a handful of large firms dominate one or several industries—leads to an over-abundance of capital and too few profitable investment opportunities, with economic stagnation as the result. Absent powerful stimuli to investment, such as historic innovations like the automobile or major government spending, modern capitalist economies have become increasingly dependent on the financial sector to realize profits. And while financialization may have provided a temporary respite from stagnation, it is a solution that cannot last indefinitely, as instability in financial markets over the last half-decade has made clear.

    Reviews:

    The authors carefully develop a powerful case that the normal state of ‘really existing capitalist economies,’ increasingly dominated by multinational megacorporations along with associated financialization, is not growth with occasional recession, but rather stagnation with occasional escapes that have diminishing prospects. Hence an ‘endless crisis,’ endless in both time and space, including China. And a crisis that is heading towards disaster unless there is a radical change of course. This valuable inquiry should be carefully studied and pondered, and should be taken as an incentive to action.

    —Noam Chomsky

    In the distinguished tradition of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Foster and McChesney here combine grim analysis with bleak prognosis, reminding us that monopoly power disappeared from the textbooks but not from real life. This is a useful book for anyone raised on the reflexive American optimism of the post-war years.

    —James K. Galbraith, author, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis

    The Endless Crisis provides a compelling discussion of the central economic reality of our time: that the Wall Street collapse and Great Recession of 2007-09 was a human calamity whose effects are ongoing. Foster and McChesney explore the underlying causes of the crisis as a result of the normal operations of capitalism in its contemporary neoliberal variant. Their discussions on financialization, monopoly power, imperialism, and other topics all provide opportunities for us to think more clearly about what is wrong with the societies we live in and how to advance a transformative political project in behalf of equality and social justice.

    —Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

    The Endless Crisis goes beyond being thought-provoking, well-written, and interesting. In many respects it is chilling in its analysis of the evolution of global capitalism and the contours of the global class struggle. This book constitutes a polemic not only with neo-liberal theory but with those who believe that tinkering with the worst aspects of capitalism will resolve the crisis. Foster and McChesney take the reader into the world of the global monopolies and the plutocracies that they have spawned. When you finish this book you cannot but ask the question: ‘When do we get serious about a strategy for the Left to respond to the system of modern day robber-barons that Foster and McChesney so well analyze?’

    —Bill Fletcher, Jr., BlackCommentator.com; author of Solidarity Divided and ‘They’re Bankrupting us’ And Twenty Other Myths about Unions

    The most important book yet to appear on stagnation, the central problem of modern economic reality. Essential reading for serious liberal, heterodox, radical, and all open-minded economic thinkers.

    —Gar Alperovitz, author, America Beyond Capitalism; Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy, University of Maryland

    John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney’s The Endless Crisis very effectively integrates analysis of the development, character, and impact of monopoly-finance capital, which includes the now global and immense reserve army of labor, and with stagnation tendencies harder and harder to overcome. They also demonstrate well the urgency of working class organization on a global basis.

    —Edward S. Herman, professor emeritus of finance, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

    This is a most remarkable and important book. It is political economy at its best. It offers a sophisticated explanation of the socio-economic crisis facing the global and domestic economies. The authors further argue that the socio-economic crisis cannot be resolved without a total transformation away from the oligopolistic capitalistic system. The work of Foster and McChesney can be embraced by all heterodox political economy traditions.

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

    A focused and muscular work that ranks alongside the works of John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran and other great political economists who were unafraid to deliver sobering criticisms of modern capitalism. It is a robustly researched testament to the enduring relevance of Marxist theory in the 21st century.

    —Philip Louro, New Politics

    The Marxist perspective, exemplified in a new book by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, is also useful. This argues that the strong western growth rates in the middle of the 20th century were something of a mirage . . . The result has been a declining trend rate of growth, and the increased financialisation of western economies as the surpluses have been re-cycled through the banks in a search for yield. Hence the Latin American debt crisis. Hence the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Hence the inability of the global economy to emerge from its torpor.

    —Larry Elliott, the Guardian

    Read a review by Bernard D’Mello of The Endless Crisis in Economic & Political Weekly on MRzine.org

  • The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism

    “The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism: A Political-Economic Critique of Ecological Modernization Theory,” [PDF], Organization and Environment, vol. 25, no. 3 (October 2012), pp. 1-27. DOI:10.1177/1086026612459964

    Environmental sociology must address two challenges, emanating both from without and within. The world is faced with a growing planetary rift, as planetary boundaries are being crossed. At the same time a new exemptionalism in the form of ecological modernization theory has arisen within environmental sociology, resurrecting many aspects of the human exemptionalist model characteristic of post–Second World War modernization theory that environmental sociology in its formative years opposed. The answer to these two challenges, it is argued, lies in the development of a political-economic and rational-historical critique of the capitalist environmental regime in the traditions of Marx and Weber. This demands, however, the outright rejection of the new exemptionalism.

  • A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital

    A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital

    “A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital: An Introduction to Baran and Sweezy’s ‘Some Theoretical Implications‘,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 3 (July-August 2012), pp. 3-23.
    DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-03-2012-07_2

    Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, published in 1966, is one of the foundational works in the development of Marxian political economy in the United States and indeed the world, and is today recognized as a classic, having generated more than four-and-a-half decades of research and debate. The completion of the book, however, was deeply affected by Baran’s death, on March 26, 1964, two years before the final manuscript was prepared. Although all of the chapters were drafted in at least rough form and had been discussed a number of times the authors had not mutually worked out to their complete satisfaction certain crucial problems. Consequently, two chapters were left out of the final work.… What happened to these two missing chapters—“Some Implications for Economic Theory” and presumably “On the Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society—II”—remained for many years a mystery.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 32 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2013, pp. 123-46.

     

  • Joan Acker’s Feminist Historical-Materialist Theory of Class

    “Joan Acker’s Feminist Historical-Materialist Theory of Class,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (June 2012), pp. 48-52.
    [Bangla language edition printed in Bangla Monthly Review, June 2013.]

    Marxism and feminism are usually seen as divorced from each other today, following the breakup of what Heidi Hartmann famously called their “unhappy marriage.”1 Yet, some theorists still show the influence of both. In my view, Joan Acker is both one of the leading analysts of gender and class associated with the second wave of feminism, and one of the great contributors to what has been called “feminist historical materialism.” In the latter respect, I would place her next to such important proponents of feminist standpoint theory as Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, and Sandra Harding. These thinkers, as Fredric Jameson has rightly said, represent the “most authentic” heirs of Lukács’s critical Marxist view articulating the proletarian standpoint—giving this dialectical insight added meaning by applying it to gender relations.2

    It is noteworthy that Acker’s important theoretical work Class Questions: Feminist Answersappeared in 2006, one year before the onset of the Great Financial Crisis.3 This of course was no mere accident. Acker was deeply concerned about the waning of class analysis, particularly amongst feminist theorists. At the same time she recognized that class was becoming more important than ever, not only because of growing inequality but also growing instability in the capitalist economy. Thus in the beginning of her book she referred to the “bursting of the economic bubble of the late 1990s,” i.e., the 2000 stock market crash that brought an end to the New Economy bubble, as presaging a new era of class intensification and class struggle (1). Today in the wake of the bursting of the even bigger housing bubble, and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement with its slogan of the 99%, Acker’s analysis can be viewed as prescient.

    Class Questions: Feminist Answers provides a rich and insightful history of class analysis in the Marxian, Weberian, and feminist theory traditions, emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of each. Acker’s treatment of the long debate over capitalism and patriarchy is particularly useful. In her view the only meaningful approach to class is one that is understood to be gendered and racialized. In this sense, she prefers “verbal forms, such as gendering, or adjectival forms, such as racialized, that better capture the sense of process and diversity” as opposed to the omnipresent noun, which all too often “reifies processes and practices” (5). And while class must (as Marxists have always insisted) be seen as related to relations of production and paid labor, it must also, she argues, be seen as encompassing relations of distribution and unpaid labor too.

    This is less of a departure from classical Marxian theory than one might suppose. Marx employed the concept of class more flexibly than we commonly do today—referring to women as a class, i.e., as “slaves,” within the bourgeois family. “In private property of every type,” he wrote in Capital, “the slavery of the members of the family at least is always implicit since they are made use of and exploited by the head of the family.”4 Classical Marxist theory, as a great deal of scholarship in recent decades has shown, defined class primarily in terms ofexploitation, i.e., how surplus product/surplus labor was appropriated from the direct producers. And just as classical Marxism applied this concept of class to pre-capitalist and pre-market relations, and hence to non-paid relationships, so the concept was always applicable to unpaid labor, which in Marxian terms is a relation of production. Slaves, as Marx (as opposed to Weber) insisted, constituted a class despite the fact that they were not wage workers and were regarded as property themselves.5

    The uniqueness of Acker’s work comes out in her critique of “unreconstructed ‘class’” notions, particularly those that make race and gender invisible within the class conception (4–5). In exploring how class, race, and gender are “mutually constituted” she not only criticizes Marxian and Weberian conceptions, but also questions popular feminist and sociological treatments of class, race, and gender in terms of intersectionalities. It is not so much that these conceptions are wrong as they are too crude, trying to reduce class (and along with race and gender) to particular spatial or structural locations/intersections, rather than emphasizing class as a fluid social relation, involving diverse practices and processes, including its gendering and racialization. In this respect, her work draws inspiration from the introductory discussion on class in E.P. Thompson’s classic, The Making of the English Working Class—a work that had a profound effect on Acker and other feminist historical materialists, as did Thompson’s critique of structuralist Marxism.6 What Acker, then, is offering is a methodology that will allow us to look at class, gender, and race together in terms of their inter-relational historical formations (“makings”), with all of the dialectical complexities that this implies. Referring to Rose Brewer, she insists that, “race, class, and gender processes should be seen as simultaneous forces, and that theorizing must be historicized and contextualized” (36).

    In a key statement of her general point of view, Acker writes:

    Because [class] practices are gendered and racialized, there are probably considerable differences in any one grouping…. This is a fluid notion of fragmented aggregates, with shifting boundaries and shifting practices, particularly during times of economic and employment restructuring, such as the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although I am committed to this notion of class as relations always in process, there are times when a shorthand way of indicating location can be very useful. Therefore, I will sometimes use the designations manual working class, service and clerical working class, middle class—a large and heterogeneous grouping—and capitalist class to designate very large aggregates with similar situations of access to and control over the means of provisioning. (68)

    In all of her important theorizing of the gendering and racializing of class, Acker never loses sight of the questions raised by class itself, or the specific historical significance of class issues. Thus a central theme throughout her analysis is that while gender and race discrimination no longer have any direct, legitimate basis in developed capitalist societies, this is not true in the case of class; class exploitation and class discrimination are accepted as fully legitimate in a system that relies on these bases for its core process of capital accumulation. As she puts it: “Class-based inequalities in monetary reward and in control over resources, power, and authority, and the actions and routine practices that continually recreate them, are accepted as natural and necessary for the ongoing functioning of the socioeconomic system” (52–53).

    In the end, Acker holds out the hope of a Polanyian “double movement” in response to neoliberalism, i.e., the promise of a counter revolt from below, emanating from peoples who are subject to multiple, overlapping forms of exploitation. “Global corporate capital,” she writes, “seems to be in control at the moment, but changes toward radically restructuring gendered and racialized class practices, and reversing the race to the bottom in living and working conditions, could come as more and more people confront the realities that global market capitalism has brought affluence to perhaps the top 20 percent of the world’s population, anxiety and insecurity to others who are still consuming and surviving, but deep poverty and desperation to the rest” (183–85).

    If this seems slightly dated today, only six years later, it is only because the general situation is so much more desperate in the period of stagnation and rising unemployment and poverty that has followed the bursting of the housing bubble. Now we readily talk of the conflict between the 99% and the 1%.

    If I have one criticism—or questioning—of Acker’s analysis, it is that in one particular way she deemphasizes the role of class. This is because class too needs its adjectival form. We need to recognize that gender is increasingly “classed,” as reflected in the feminization of poverty even while the conditions of many women improve; and likewise race is “classed.” Class should be seen as a process that also modifies race and gender relations.

    Still, Acker’s criticism of the way in which many Marxian thinkers have employed the concept of class is a welcome one today. Although Acker does not generally describe herself today as a Marxist, and indeed sees herself a critic of that perspective (or at least its more structuralist versions), her work might well be accepted by today’s Marxists as an important advance not so much on but of Marxian theory, representing a further synthesis, and helping to further its critical-revolutionary potential. There is no contradiction between Acker’s deep feminist critique, and the fact that she can be regarded as part of the broad historical-materialist tradition. Indeed, she demonstrates that each is a requirement of the other.

    In all of Acker’s work one sees an attempt to envision new strategies of radical change. Hence, she has been a leader in the struggle for comparable worth, a devastating critic of the role that the welfare system has played in disciplining women as well as the poor, and a penetrating analyst of the gendering of organizations. For her the problem with the New Left was not that it was too revolutionary but that it was not revolutionary enough. As she wrote in Monthly Review in December 2001: “The daunting reality facing radical and socialist feminist visions was, and is, not only that we have no gender and race egalitarian alternative to capitalism, but that the interweaving of gender and race with the economic, political, and social relations of capitalism is much more complicated and pervasive than we had imagined. To fundamentally change the situation of women, almost everything else must change.”7

    Selected Further Reading

    • Acker, Joan. “Class, Gender, and the Relations of Distribution,” Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 473–97.
    • _____.Class Questions: Feminist Answers (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2006).
    • _____.“My Life as a Feminist Sociologist; or Getting the Man Out of My Head,” in Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne, eds., Feminist Sociology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 28–47.
    • _____.“Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 4 (January 1973): 174–83.
    • Harding, Sandra G., ed, The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).
    • _____. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
    • Hartsock, Nancy C.M., Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983).
    • _____. Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
    • Hennessy, Rosemary and Chrys Ingraham, eds., Materialist Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997).
    • Scott, Joan W., “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75.
    • Smith, Dorothy E., The Everyday World as Problematic (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1987).
    • Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

    Notes

    1. ↩ Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” in Lydia Sargent, ed.,Women and Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 1–41.
    2. ↩ Fredric Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness as an ‘Unfinished Project,’” Rethinking Marxism 1, no. 1 (1988): 64.
    3. ↩ Joan Acker, Class Questions: Feminist Answers (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006).
    4. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 1083. In his work on suicide we find Marx commenting on the “unbearable slavery” to which women are confined by law and “social conditions” in bourgeois society. See Karl Marx, Marx on Suicide (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 57–58.
    5. ↩ On the classical Marxian conception of class in relation to exploitation (and the contrast to Weber) see especially G.M.E. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World(London: Duckworth, 1981), 42–55, 88–91. Ralph Miliband pointed out that the emphasis onexploitation in Marx’s theory of class was entirely consistent with a wider understanding of a class system of domination, since it could be argued that “exploitation…has always been the main purpose of domination.” Nevertheless, it is important not to reduce domination in general to exploitation or class. “Patriarchy, for instance, as one form of domination, provides other advantages to its beneficiaries than the exploitation of surplus labour.” Miliband, “Class Analysis,” in Anthony Giddens and Jonathon Turner, eds., Social Theory Today (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 327–28.
    6. ↩ Joan Acker, “Class, Gender, and the Relations of Distribution,” Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 478; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 9.
    7. ↩ Joan Acker, “Different Strategies are Necessary Now,” Monthly Review 53, no. 5 (December 2001): 46–49.
  • The Endless Crisis

    The Endless Crisis

    “The Endless Crisis”, (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 1 (May 2012), pp. 1-28. DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-01-2012-05_1

    The Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession began in the United States in 2007 and quickly spread across the globe, marking what appears to be a turning point in world history. Although this was followed within two years by a recovery phase, the world economy five years after the onset of the crisis is still in the doldrums…. The one bright spot in the world economy, from a growth standpoint, has been the seemingly unstoppable expansion of a handful of emerging economies, particularly China. Yet, the continuing stability of China is now also in question. Hence, the general consensus among informed economic observers is that the world capitalist economy is facing the threat of long-run economic stagnation (complicated by the prospect of further financial deleveraging)…. It is this issue of the stagnation of the capitalist economy, even more than that of financial crisis or recession that has now emerged as the big question worldwide.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 31 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2012), pp. 3-36.
    • German language translation in Info-Verteiler, infoverteiler.net, June 2012.
    • Chinese translation forthcoming in Journal of Gansu Administration Institute.

     

  • Weber and the Environment

    “Weber and the Environment: Classical Foundations for a Post-Exemptionalist Sociology” (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), American Journal of Sociology, vol. 117, no. 6 (May 2012), pp. 1625-1673. DOI: 10.1086/664617.

    In the last two decades classical sociology, notably Marx, has been mined for environmental insights in the attempt to surmount the “human exemptionalism” of post–Second World War sociology. Weber, however, has remained an enigma in this respect. This article addresses Weber’s approach to the environment, including its significance for his interpretive-causal framework and his understanding of capitalism. For Weber, sociological meanings were often anchored in biophysical realities, including climate change, resource consumption, and energy scarcity, while environmental influences were refracted in complex ways within cultural reproduction. His work thus constitutes a crucial key to constructing a meaningful postexemptionalist sociology.

    Awards
    • Winner of the 2013 Outstanding Publication Award of the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.

  • Marx and Engels and ‘Small is Beautiful’- A Reply

    “Marx and Engels and ‘Small is Beautiful’—A Reply” [PDF] (coauthored with Samar Bagchi, Fred Magdoff), Monthly Review, vol. 63, no. 9 (February 2012), pp. 53-55.
    [Bangla language edition printed in Bangla Monthly Review, September 2012.]

    I am a regular reader of Monthly Review. I read with interest the recent articles on ecology and Marxism (Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism,” MR, March 2010, and Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,” MR, January 2011). It is true that Marx and Engels conceive that capitalism engenders a “metabolic rift” in nature and society. But both of them emphasize that the industrial growth that socialism would produce is beyond imagination under capitalism. Engels writes in Principles of Communism: “Once liberated from the pressure of private ownership, large-scale industry will develop on a scale that will make its present level of development seem as paltry as seems the manufacturing system compared with the large-scale industry of our time. This development of industry will provide society with a sufficient quantity of products to satisfy the needs of all.”

    In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels note: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” Soviet leadership took these words literally and wanted to outrace the United States in per capita production and collapsed.

    In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was impossible for Marx and Engels to envisage the ecological catastrophe that a constantly expanding industrial society can ensue.

    India’s Gandhi understood this. He writes in the beginning of the twentieth century: “God forbid India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” We can understand this today. If India and China, with a population of more than 2.5 billion, develops an ecological footprint of ten hectares per person as in the United States, which the rich and middle class of India are trying to emulate, the whole world will be stripped bare like locusts within a few decades. We have to redefine what is “development” or “civilization.” The creative outpourings of Mediterranean civilization, the ancient Indians, the Islamic civilization, and the renaissance in Europe are highly valued even today, compared to which, “We are hollow men / We are stuffed men / Our headpiece filled with straw,” as T.S Eliot said. But they did not have Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Internet, and rockets. The only advantage thatHomo sapiens has over other species is its immense capacity to create literature, music, arts, science, etc. which other species do not possess. A civilized society will foster creative potential and not the gluttonous consumerism of the industrial society.

    I think it is only a classless, egalitarian society with equity and justice, a simple-living society with decentralization of economy and polity, and gender equality that can bring an ecological civilization. More than 80 percent of the population in third world countries like India lead a very simple life. We have to remember Gandhi’s saying: “Nature has given man enough to satisfy his need but not enough to satisfy his greed.” It is perhaps very simple for a country like India to start an ecological society. But it is difficult for the Western society whose enchanting glamour is based on the sucking of blood and sweat of the periphery for more than 150 years. The dispossessed of the world have to engage in struggle and a process of construction to bring into existence an ecological society.

    I would very much like my views to be printed in MR and a debate generated. Best wishes and regards from a 79-year-oldie!

    A Response

    John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff

    Thank you for your letter. Your argument with regard to Marx and Engels is one that we have frequently heard, but with which we cannot agree in entirety. You begin by acknowledging the importance of the concept of “metabolic rift” as presented by the 49-year-old Marx of Capital, and then you suggest that this outlook was contradicted by the views of the 29-year-old Marx and the 27-year-old Engels of The Communist Manifesto. But do not their later, more mature assessments take precedence over their earlier ones?

    Marx and Engels’s thinking was not frozen in place in 1848. They continued to expand their knowledge as they progressed in their study of capitalism (as indicated by the concept of the metabolic rift). Theirs was an age of growing environmental awareness, and to their credit, they learned extensively from this, developing their own ecological assessment and building it into their overall critique of capitalism. In this, Marx’s Capital went considerably beyond theCommunist Manifesto—which was written well before Marx carried out his full critique of political economy. Where Capital and the Manifesto conflict, then, it is Capital that we should see as representing Marx’s developed view.

    Marx and Engels were acutely aware of the waste and environmental destruction that capitalism brought, as they indicated in numerous passages, though, as you say, they could not “envisage the [full] ecological catastrophe that a constantly expanding industrial society can ensue.” Marx found Tyndall’s experiments on the sun’s rays fascinating, sometimes attended the latter’s lectures in London in the early 1860s, and may even have been there when Tyndall first demonstrated his discovery that carbon dioxide, along with other gases, generated a greenhouse effect. Yet no one at that time could have foreseen the kind of planetary climate change that we are facing today as a result of this same greenhouse effect and climate forcing by human beings. But what of that? Marx’s real importance to the ecological discussion lies elsewhere, in his recognition of the deep, systematic, and enormously destructive conflict between capitalism and the environment. Marx, after Liebig, depicted industrial capitalism as a robbery-system (Raubbau) in its relation to nature. On that he left no doubt.

    What appears at first glance to be your strongest piece of evidence that Marx and Engels were uncritical proponents of industrialization is the quote from Engels’s Principles of Communism—a work that was written as a preliminary draft for what later became The Communist Manifesto. But it is significant that Marx, who at this point had more critical reservations about the ecological underside of industrialization than Engels did, chose not to incorporate that statement into the Manifesto itself.

    To be sure, the Manifesto declared that in the context of a revolution against capitalism the proletariat would have “to increase the total productive forces of society as rapidly as possible.” Marx and Engels were no enemies of industrialization per se, and by today’s standards these were still quite undeveloped economies. But the founders of historical materialism never saw this expansion of productive forces as the ultimate end of society. Rather, socialism/communism as an end goal, as Marx was later to explain in Capital, had to do with the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolic relations between nature and humanity, and therefore of the productive relations of human beings themselves. The object was to change the social relations—not in order to expand production, but in order to create a more human and sustainable community that fulfilled genuine needs. (Even in Engels’ quote from Principles of Communism he does not advocate perpetual growth, but industrialization to the point at which it would be possible “to satisfy the needs of all.”) There is no evidence of an empty worship of productivism in Marx’s thought. To the contrary, Paul Burkett has provided a fascinating description of “Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development” (MR, October 2005).

    It is commonplace for critics of Marx and Engels on ecology to point their finger—as you do here—at the tragedy of the Soviet Union and the damage it inflicted on its environment (in which the Soviet Union, unfortunately, was hardly unique). But the Soviet Union in the 1920s had the most developed ecological science in the world and was extremely advanced in introducing ecological practices. All of this, however, was obliterated in the subsequent purge under Stalin. This was a tragedy of Marxism no doubt, but not one that could be easily laid at the feet of its classical founders. Some of the key victims of the purges, such as Bukharin, Vavilov, Hessen, and Uranovsky, were leading ecological thinkers as well as Marxists.

    As for the rest of your letter, we are in broad agreement. Gandhi’s eloquent statement was one of the earliest expressions of what is today called “the impossibility theorem” of ecology. As we observed in the opening sentences of our book, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 2011—expanded from our earlier article):

    Ecological economist Herman Daly is well known for emphasizing what he called the “Impossibility Theorem” of unlimited economic growth in a limited environment. Put, concretely, an extension of a U.S.-style high consumption economy to the entire world of 7 billion people—much less the 9 billion-plus world population projected for the middle of the present century—is a flat impossibility. In this book we are concerned with extending Daly’s Impossibility Theorem by introducing what we regard to be its most important corollary: the continuation for any length of time of capitalism, as a grow-or-die system dedicated to unlimited capital accumulation, is itself a flat impossibility.

    Like you we believe that the ecological and social revolution that is necessary to change this situation has its basis first and foremost in the global periphery and what we have called in our book the “environmental proletariat.” But all peoples of the world will need to join in struggle to this same end—if we are to succeed. And to accomplish this they will need a developed critique of capitalism, and a strong commitment to socialism, i.e., a society of substantive equality and sustainable human development.

  • The Global Stagnation and China

    The Global Stagnation and China

    “The Global Stagnation and China”, (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 63, no 9 (February 2012), pp. 1-28. DOI: 10.14452/MR-063-09-2012-02_1

    Five years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09 began there is still no sign of a full recovery of the world economy. Consequently, concern has increasingly shifted from financial crisis and recession to slow growth or stagnation, causing some to dub the current era the Great Stagnation. Stagnation and financial crisis are now seen as feeding into one another.… To be sure, a few emerging economies have seemingly bucked the general trend, continuing to grow rapidly—most notably China, now the world’s second largest economy after the United States. Yet, as [IMF Managing Director Christine] Lagarde warned her Chinese listeners, “Asia is not immune” to the general economic slowdown, “emerging Asia is also vulnerable to developments in the financial sector.” So sharp were the IMF’s warnings, dovetailing with widespread fears of a sharp Chinese economic slowdown, that Lagarde in late November was forced to reassure world business, declaring that stagnation was probably not imminent in China (the Bloomberg.com headline ran: “IMF Sees Chinese Economy Avoiding Stagnation.”)

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Marxismo Critico, November 16, 2012.
    • Italian translation in Pantarossa, October 5, 2015.