John Bellamy Foster

Author: John Bellamy Foster

  • What is Stagnation?

    “What is Stagnation?” in Robert Cherry, et. al., eds. The Imperiled Economy: Macroeconomics from a Left Perspective (New York: Union for Radical Political Economics, 1987), pp. 59-70. [PDF]

    INTRODUCTION:

    For a majority of mainstream and radical economists, the answer to the question “What is Stagnation”? is fairly simple and straightforward and devoid of any real theoretical significance in and of itself. Either it is seen as a period of longer and deeper than average recessions, or it stands for a long-cycle downturn, which will be followedmore or less automatically, after some 25 years duration, by a long-cycle upturn. However, in the case of most of those thinkers on the left who continue to emphasize theprimacy of demand- side constraints on the accumulation process in “the present as history,” the search for an answer to the above question is nothing less than an attempt toaddress the central contradiction of the mature monopoly capitalist system.

    The purpose of this article is to uncover the complex historical logic through which the phenomenon of stagnation is manifested in modern capitalism , as explained in the work of such radical demand-side theorists as Michal Kalecki, Josef Steindl, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. Beginning with the reasons why a condition of stagnation (the main traits of which are widening underemployment, stop-and-start investment and slow growth) has come to represent the normal trend-line of the modem economy around which the recurrent fluctuations of the business cycle occur, the analysis will then shift to a consideration of the various self-limiting forces that sparked the expansionary wave of the 1960s; and how a waning of these forces, or of their positive effects, has led in the 1970s and 1980s to a resurfacing of stagnation and a doubling-over of economiccontradictions. The seriousness of the multi-layered crisis that emerges from such a conception of political economic evolution, will then be contrasted, in the conclusion, to the relative complacency engendered by the dominant supply-side strategy for the renewal of American capitalism.

  • Sweezy, Paul Marlor

    “Sweezy, Paul Marlor,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economic Theory and Doctrine (New York: Stockton Press, 1987), vol. 4 (Q-Z), pp. 580-82. DOI: 10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5.

    Harvard-trained economist and co-editor of Monthly Review, Paul Sweezy was among the most influential economists and Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century. His contributions extended over six decades from the early 1930s to the early 1990s. He played a role in the development of imperfect-competition analysis and in debates surrounding the Great Depression. His Theory of Capitalist Development (1942) provided the premier exposition of Marxian economics, after Marx. Monopoly Capital (1966, with Paul Baran) was the most influential economic analysis emanating from the US New Left. With Harry Magdoff he extended this analysis into the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s.

    Reprints

    • Reprinted in John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman, ed., Marxian Economics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), pp. 350-55. Revised, expanded and updated for second edition of New Palgrave, 2007.

  • On the Waterfront: Longshoring in Canada

    “On the Waterfront: Longshoring in Canada,” in Craig Heron and Bob Storey, ed. On the Job: The Labour Process in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens Press, 1985), pp. 281-308.

    The words, “On the Waterfront,” for most people carry an air of mystery and suspense, vaguely evoking images of Marlon Brando and the New York harbor of the early 1950’s. But the sense of otherworldliness that clings to the longshore labour process goes far beyond its history of exploitation and violence, and arises instead out of the very nature of work relations. As one authority has put it, “the conditions of ‘boom and bust’ that determine the daily life of the world’s ports have produced a labour jungle that few laymen have ever penetrated.” To a greater extent than in most industries, long shoring has been shaped not by managerial imperatives, but by the imperatives of the workers themselves. It has, therefore, been characterized by a pattern of development that sets it apart from all other workplace environments. What has been true in the past, however, may or may not be true in the future.

  • Sustainability and Metabolic Revolution in the Work of Henri Lefebvre

    “Sustainability and Metabolic Revolution in the Works of Henri Lefebvre” (coauthored with Brian Napoletano, Brett Clark, and Pedro Urquijo, Foster listed third) World (December 2020), pp. 300-317.

    Humanity’s present social–ecological metabolic configuration is not sustainable, and the need for a radical transformation of society to address its metabolic rifts with the rest of nature is increasingly apparent. The work of French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, one of the few thinkers to recognize the significance of Karl Marx’s theory of metabolic rift prior to its rediscovery at the end of the twentieth century, offers valuable insight into contemporary issues of sustainability. His concepts of the urban revolution, autogestion, the critique of everyday life, and total (or metabolic) revolution all relate directly to the key concerns of sustainability. Lefebvre’s work embodies a vision of radical social–ecological transformation aimed at sustainable human development, in which the human metabolic interchange with the rest of nature is to be placed under substantively rational and cooperative control by all its members, enriching everyday life. Other critical aspects of Lefebvre’s work, such as his famous concept of the production of space, his temporal rhythmanalysis, and his notion of the right to the city, all point to the existence of an open-ended research program directed at the core issues of sustainability in the twenty-first century.