On the eightieth anniversary of the 1929 Stock Market Crash that led to the Great Depression, the United States is once again caught in a Great Financial Crisis and deep downturn of an order of magnitude comparable to the 1930s. At the center of this crisis is plunging consumer spending, caused by the destruction of […]
Archive | Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles
Journal Articles (Other Major Scholarly)
A Failed System
By John Bellamy Foster on March 1, 2009 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
In referring in my title here to “A Failed System” I do not of course mean that capitalism as a system is in any sense at an end. Rather I mean by “failed system” a global economic and social order that increasingly exhibits a fatal contradiction between reality and reason—to the point, in our time, […]
A New New Deal under Obama?
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2009 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
With U.S. capitalism mired in an economic crisis of a severity that increasingly brings to mind the Great Depression of the 1930s, it should come as no surprise that there are widespread calls for “a new New Deal.” Already the new Obama administration has been pointing to a vast economic stimulus program of up to […]
Financial Implosion and Stagnation
By John Bellamy Foster on December 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
“The first rule of central banking,” economist James K. Galbraith wrote recently, is that “when the ship starts to sink, central bankers must bail like hell.” In response to a financial crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve and other central banks, backed by their treasury departments, have been […]
Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
By John Bellamy Foster on November 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The transition from capitalism to socialism is the most difficult problem of socialist theory and practice. To add to this the question of ecology might therefore be seen as unnecessarily complicating an already intractable issue. I shall argue here, however, that the human relation to nature lies at the heart of the transition to socialism. […]
The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post–Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. […]
Marx’s Critique of Heaven and Earth
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
In recent years the intelligent design movement, or creationism in a more subtle guise, has expanded the attack on the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools, while promoting an ambitious “Wedge strategy” aimed at transforming both science and culture throughout society. As explained in our book Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from […]
Ecology
By John Bellamy Foster on July 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
It is impossible to exaggerate the environmental problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Nearly fifteen years ago one of us observed: “We have only four decades left in which to gain control over our major environmental problems if we are to avoid irreversible ecological decline.” Today, with a quarter-century still remaining in this projected […]
Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism
By John Bellamy Foster on July 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The rise in overt militarism and imperialism at the outset of the twenty-first century can plausibly be attributed largely to attempts by the dominant interests of the world economy to gain control over diminishing world oil supplies. Beginning in 1998 a series of strategic energy initiatives were launched in national security circles in the United […]
Sweezy in Perspective
By John Bellamy Foster on May 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Paul M. Sweezy was, in the words of his contemporary John Kenneth Galbraith, “the most distinguished of present-day American Marxists.” A Harvard-trained economist, his writings spanned some seven decades from the early 1930s to the closing years of the twentieth century. For more than half a century he was coeditor of Monthly Review, subtitled An […]
