topmenu

Author Archive | John Bellamy Foster

Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce

Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality—as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to […]

Continue Reading

The Long Ecological Revolution

“The Long Ecological Revolution,” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 6 (November 2017), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-06-2017-10_1 [HTML] From an ecological perspective, the Anthropocene marks the need for a more creative, constructive, and coevolutionary relation to the earth. In ecosocialist theory, this demands the reconstitution of society at large—over decades and centuries. However, given the threat […]

Continue Reading

The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society

“The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society,” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 4 (September 2017), pp. 1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-04-2017-08_1 [HTML] The idea of total liberation from work, in its one-sidedness and incompleteness, is ultimately incompatible with a genuinely sustainable society. The real promise of a system of labor beyond capitalism rests not so much […]

Continue Reading

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917-2017

“Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917-2017,” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 3 (July-August 2017), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-03-2017-07_1 [HTML] If counterrevolution ultimately triumphed over the revolutionary waves of the twentieth century, how are we to understand this, and what does it mean for the future of world revolution? The answer requires a survey of the whole history […]

Continue Reading

The Earth-System Emergency and Ecological Civilization: A Marxian View

The Holocene epoch in geological history of the last 10,000–12,000 years has given way to a new geological epoch which natural scientists are calling the Anthropocene, marked by humanity’s emergence as the main driver of change in the Earth system as a whole, threatening the future of civilization, a majority of ecosystems on the planet, […]

Continue Reading

The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy

Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran’s death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from […]

Continue Reading

This Is Not Populism

“This Is Not Populism,” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 2 (June 2017), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-02-2017-06_1 [HTML] Since Trump’s election, mainstream commentary has generally avoided the question of fascism or neofascism, preferring instead to apply the vaguer, safer notion of “populism.” In today’s political context, however, it is crucial to understand not only how the […]

Continue Reading

Trump and Climate Catastrophe

The alarm bells are ringing. The climate-change denialism of the Trump administration, coupled with its goal of maximizing fossil-fuel extraction and consumption at all costs, constitutes, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “almost a death knell for the human species.” As noted climatologist Michael E. Mann has declared, “I fear that this may be game […]

Continue Reading