The year now ending marks the fortieth anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s classic work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966). Compared to mainstream economic works of the early to mid-1960s (the most popular and influential of which were John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Industrial State […]
Author Archive | John Bellamy Foster
The Optimism of the Heart
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The following intellectual biography of Harry Magdoff is a slightly revised and expanded version of a piece that was posted on MRzine a few days after Harry’s death on January 1, 2006. It evolved out of an earlier biography I wrote for the Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists in 2000. Since the aim of this […]
The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class: An Introduction to Selections from Fredrick Engles’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
Both urban sociology in general and urban environmental justice studies began with Frederick Engels’s seminal work The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Engels provided a walking tour of the environmental conditions in the manufacturing establishments and slums of the factory towns of England, together with a similar view of London. He […]
Aspects of Class in the United States
By John Bellamy Foster on August 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
If class war is continual in capitalist society, there is no doubt that in recent decades in the United States it has taken a much more virulent form. In a speech delivered at New York University in 2004 Bill Moyers pointed out that the effects of this relentless offensive by the vested interests against the […]
A Warning to Africa
By John Bellamy Foster on June 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Imperialism is constant for capitalism. But it passes through various phases as the system evolves. At present the world is experiencing a new age of imperialism marked by a U.S. grand strategy of global domination. One indication of how things have changed is that the U.S. military is now truly global in its operations with […]
Florence Kelley and the Struggle Against the Degradation of Life: An Introduction to a Selection from Modern Industry
By John Bellamy Foster on June 1, 2006 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints, Contributions, Introductions
Florence Kelley illuminated how degraded environments stemmed from the social relations and operations of industrial capitalism. As a social reformer, she worked to document the various dangers that workers confronted. She presented how laborers were exposed to noxious gases, toxic substances, and poisonous chemicals and dyes. Dangerous materials, such as arsenic, were introduced into the […]
Naked Imperialism
During the Cold War years, mainstream commentators were quick to dismiss the idea that the United States was an imperialist power. Even when U.S. interventions led to the overthrow of popular governments, as in Iran, Guatemala, or the Congo, or wholesale war, as in Vietnam, this fiction remained intact. During the 1990s and especially since […]
The Household Debt Bubble
By John Bellamy Foster on May 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
It is an inescapable truth of the capitalist economy that the uneven, class-based distribution of income is a determining factor of consumption and investment. How much is spent on consumption goods depends on the income of the working class. Workers necessarily spend all or almost all of their income on consumption. Thus for households in […]
West Coast Longshore Strikes, 1923 and 1935
West Coast Longshore Strikes, 1923 and 1935 On 8 Oct 1923 the 1400 members of the International Longshoremen’s Assn (ILA) in Vancouver struck for higher wages. The Shipping Federation imported strikebreakers, housed in the CPR ship Empress of Japan, while an armed launch and 350 armed men guarded the waterfront. The longshoremen gave up on […]
Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinsky Myth
Until recently, most commentators, including ecological Marxists, have assumed that Marx’s historical materialism was only marginally ecologically sensitive at best, or even that it was explicitly anti-ecological. However, research over the last decade has demonstrated not only that Marx deemed ecological materialism essential to the critique of political economy and to investigations into socialism, but […]
