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Author Archive | John Bellamy Foster

Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene

“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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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