Only a few years ago it was widely suggested that the capitalist economy had entered a new economic era. The rapid economic growth experienced during the brief period of the late 1990s, we were told, would become virtually endless, spurred on by rising productivity led by high technology and the New Economy. The circumstances that […]
Author Archive | John Bellamy Foster
The Commercial Tidal Wave
For a long time now it has been widely understood within economics that under the capitalism of giant firms, corporations no longer compete primarily through price competition. They engage instead in what economists call “monopolistic competition.” This consists chiefly of attempts to create monopoly positions for a particular brand, making it possible for corporations to […]
A Planetary Defeat
By John Bellamy Foster on January 1, 2003 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 generated hopes that the world would at long last address its global ecological problems and introduce a process of sustainable development. Now, with a second summit being held ten years later in Johannesburg, that dream has to a large extent faded. Even the principal […]
Crises: One After Another for the Life of the System
By John Bellamy Foster on November 1, 2002 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints, Exchanges
Our disagreement with our friends, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, is over three interrelated issues: (1) how and why to analyze a crisis-prone capitalism, (2) the capacity of the state to manage or “contain” crises, and (3) the near-term prospects for capital accumulation. In addition there are significant divergences in empirical assessment between us related […]
The Rediscovery of Imperialism
By John Bellamy Foster on November 1, 2002 in Articles, Introductions, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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. […]
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 […]
