If I were asked to sum up the significance of István Mészáros for our time, I would have to follow President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in referring to him as the “Pathfinder of Socialism.” His work…provides a strategic vision of the building of socialism, the absence of which, for many decades, constituted one of the […]
Archive | Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles
Journal Articles (Other Major Scholarly)
The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Three years ago, in December 2006, I wrote an article for Monthly Review entitled “Monopoly-Finance Capital.” The occasion was the anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, published four decades earlier in 1966.…The article…[discussed] “the dual reality” of stagnant growth (or stagnation) and financialization, characterizing the advanced economies in this phase of capitalism. […]
Why Ecological Revolution?
By John Bellamy Foster on January 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
It is now universally recognized within science that humanity is confronting the prospect—if we do not soon change course—of a planetary ecological collapse. Not only is the global ecological crisis becoming more and more severe, with the time in which to address it fast running out, but the dominant environmental strategies are also forms of […]
The Vulnerable Planet Fifteen Years Later
The original intent of The Vulnerable Planet,when it was first published fifteen years ago, was to provide a brief historical materialist analysis of the development of the global ecological crisis, beginning with the early civilizations and leading up to the monopoly capitalist society of the late twentieth century. Looking back now at the book as […]
The Paradox of Wealth
By John Bellamy Foster on November 1, 2009 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Today orthodox economics is reputedly being harnessed to an entirely new end: saving the planet from the ecological destruction wrought by capitalist expansion. It promises to accomplish this through the further expansion of capitalism itself, cleared of its excesses and excrescences. A growing army of self-styled “sustainable developers” argues that there is no contradiction between […]
Monopoly-Finance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulation
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2009 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
This month marks the eightieth anniversary of the 1929 Stock Market Crash that precipitated the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ironically, this comes at the very moment that the capitalist system is celebrating having narrowly escaped falling into a similar abyss. The financial crash and the decline in output a year ago, following the collapse […]
The Penal State in an Age of Crisis
By John Bellamy Foster on June 1, 2009 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
As a rule, crime and social protest rise in periods of economic crisis in capitalist society. During times of economic and social instability, the well-to-do become increasingly fearful of the general population, more disposed to adopt harsh measures to safeguard their positions at the apex of the social pyramid. The slowdown in the economic growth […]
Capitalism in Wonderland
By John Bellamy Foster on May 1, 2009 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
In a recent essay, “Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution,” in one of the leading scientific journals, Nature, physicist Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, a researcher for an investment management company, asked rhetorically, “What is the flagship achievement of economics?” Bouchaud’s answer: “Only its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises.” Although his discussion is focused on the current […]
The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital
By John Bellamy Foster on April 1, 2009 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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 […]
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, […]
