The concept of “imperialism” was considered outside the acceptable range of political discourse within the ruling circles of the capitalist world for most of the twentieth century. Reference to “imperialism” during the Vietnam War, no matter how realistic, was almost always a sign that the writer was on the left side of the political spectrum. […]
Author Archive | John Bellamy Foster
Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective
By John Bellamy Foster on October 31, 2002 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
‘For the early Marx the only nature relevant to the understanding of history is human nature … Marx wisely left nature (other than human nature) alone.’
It’s Not a Postcapitalist World, Nor is it a Post-Marxist One
Evrensel Kultur: Postmodernism’s advice to us was to have doubts towards all kinds of information acquired. The “security syndrome” following September 11 has spread these doubts to daily life. In other words, the twenty-first century has begun as an age of doubts/suspicions. How does the suspiciousness of the new century differ from that of past […]
Helen Keller and the Touch of Nature: An Introduction to Keller’s The World I live In
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2002 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints, Contributions, Introductions
Mark Twain asserted that Helen Keller (1880-1968) was immortal—fellow to Caesar, Homer, and Shakespeare—and would “be as famous a thousand years from now as she is to-day” (Twain, 1924, Vol. 2, p. 297). Elementary school teachers have told the story of Keller’s childhood for more than a hundred years, whereas her activist and intellectual developments […]
Why Movements Matter
In the early 1980s a trans-Atlantic antinuclear movement consisting of millions of protestors emerged seemingly out of nowhere to threaten the prerogatives of power.
Capitalism and Ecology
The social relation of capital, as we all know, is a contradictory one. These contradictions, though stemming from capitalism’s internal laws of motion, extend out to phenomena that are usually conceived as external to the system, threatening the integrity of the entire biosphere and everything within it as a result of capital’s relentless expansion. How […]
George Perkins Marsh and the Transformation of the Earth: An Introduction to Marsh’s Man and Nature
By John Bellamy Foster on June 1, 2002 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints, Contributions, Introductions
George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882) stated that his book, Man and Nature, was “a little volume showing the whereas [Carl] Ritter and [Arnold] Guyot think that the earth made man, man in fact made earth” (as cited in Lowenthal, 2000, p. 267). With this position, Marsh inverted a dominant theoretical transformation— both destruction and revitalization— of […]
Environmental Sociology and the Environmental Revolution: A 25th Anniversary Assessment
By John Bellamy Foster on March 1, 2002 in Articles, Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints
It is a great honor to be asked to respond to articles by individuals who can all be rightly considered to be founders of environmental sociology, legendary figures in the field. If I have something distinctive to add to this symposium, it mostly arises out of my own standpoint as a respresentative of what I […]
Paul Sweezy and Monopoly Capitalism
”Paul Sweezy and Monopoly Capitalism,” in Doug Dowd, ed., Understanding Capitalism: Critical Analysis from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 132-50. Translations: Spanish translation in Doug Dowd, ed., Entender el capitalismo Hacienda, 2006.
The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line
In recent decades environmentalists have directed a persistent ecological critique at economics, contending that economics has failed to value the natural world. Lately economists have begun to respond to this critique, and a rapidly growing sub discipline of environmental economics has emerged that is dedicated to placing economic values on nature and integrating the environment […]
