John Bellamy Foster

Author: John Bellamy Foster

  • 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.

  • “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