“Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review vol.72, no. 6 (November 2020), pp. 1-17. [Spanish translation in Izquierda Diario.es, Contrapunt, November 29, 2020; Italian transltion in Di Antiper, December 3, 2020] In “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” from his Dialectics of Nature, Frederick Engels declared: “Everything […]
Author Archive | John Bellamy Foster
China 2020: An Introduction
“China 2020: An Introduction,” Monthly Review vol. 72, no. 5. (October 2020), pp. 1-5. The history of capitalism has been punctuated by periodic struggles for hegemony over the world economy, leading to a centuries-long series of world wars.1 In the twenty-first century, all signs are pointing to another such period of hegemonic struggle, this time […]
The Renewal of the Socialist Ideal
“The Renewal of the Socialist Ideal,” Monthly Review vol. 72, no. 4 (September 2020), pp. 1-13. [Turkish translation at ÖzgürDenizli.com, September 16, 2020; Chinese translation at HYPERLINK “https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/240093171” https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/240093171; Portuguese translation, Insurgencia, November 1, 2020] Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism’s creative destruction of the bases of all […]
Marx and Slavery
The rise to prominence of analyses of racial capitalism represents a breakthrough in Marxian theory. This has necessarily been accompanied by a critique of previous Marxian analyses, which all too often ignored or minimized the relation of slavery to capitalism.
COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism
COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism: Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises (coauthored with Intan Suwandi), Monthly Review vol. 72, no. 2 (June 2020), pp. 1-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-072-02-2020-06_1 [HTML] Since the late twentieth century, capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted the form of interlinked commodity chains controlled by multinational corporations, connecting various production zones, primarily in the Global South, with the […]
The Rift of Éire
The Rift of Éire (coauthored with Brett Clark), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 11 (April 2020), pp. 1-11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_1 [HTML] Karl Marx’s (and Frederick Engels’s) analysis of nineteenth-century Irish history revealed what is referred to as “the rift of Éire” in the colonial period. Indeed, it is in relation to the analysis of the […]
Marx and the Indigenous
Marx and the Indigenous (coauthored with Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 9 (February 2020), pp. 1-19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-071-09-2020-02_1 [HTML] The “turn toward the indigenous” in social theory in the last couple of decades, associated with the critique of white settler colonialism, has reintroduced themes long present in […]
Capitalism and Robbery
“Capitalism and Robbery: The Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life” (coauthored with Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 7 (December 2019), pp. 1-23. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-07-2019-11_1 [HTML] Historical capitalism cannot be understood aside from its existence as a colonial/imperialist world system in which the violent exercise of power […]
Henri Lefebvre’s Marxian Ecological Critique
French Marxist sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, was one of the foremost social theorists of the twentieth century, celebrated for his critiques of everyday life, urban revolution, and the production of space. We argue here that his mature work also encompassed a theory of ecological crisis, drawing directly on Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. In this conception, […]
On Fire This Time
“On Fire This Time,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 6 (November 2019), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_1 [HTML] We are seeing today what appear to be the beginnings of an ecological revolution, a new historical moment unlike any humanity has experienced. Not only is the planet burning, but a revolutionary climate movement is rising up and […]
