John Bellamy Foster

Category: Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles

Journal Articles (Other Major Scholarly)

  • The Fetish of Fordism

    The Fetish of Fordism

    “The Fetish of Fordism”, Monthly Review vol. 39, no. 10 (March 1988), pp. 14-33. DOI: 10.14452/MR-039-10-1988-03_2

    It may seem strange that Henry Ford, an automobile manufacturer during the early decades of the twentieth century who died in 1947, should suddenly become a major source of contention among those interested in analyzing the contemporary crisis of the U.S. economy. The last few years, however, have seen a vast expansion of the Ford legend, particularly by thinkers working within the left, who have elaborated a whole new mythology of “Fordism,” intended to sum up the political, economic, and cultural development of twentieth-century monopoly capitalism. Nowhere is this fetish of Ford and the ism now attached to his name more obvious than in Michael Harrington’s latest book, The Next Left (New York: Henry Holt, 1986).

    Translations:
    • Translated and published in German as “Fordismus als Fetish,” Prokla (Zeitschrift fur Politische Okonomie und Sozialistiche Politik), no. 76 (September 1989), pp. 71-85.

     

  • Is Monopoly Capitalism An Illusion?

    “Is Monopoly Capitalism An Illusion?”, Monthly Review vol. 33, no. 4 (September 1981), pp. 36-47. DOI: 10.14452/MR-033-04-1981-08_3

    The theory of capitalism’s monopoly stage has had such a long and distinguished history that one could be excused for thinking of it as an established and non-controversial component of Marxian political economy. Indeed, the “neo-Marxian” theory of secular stagnation which developed out of the analysis of monopoly capital—notably, in the work of Micha Kalecki, Josef Steindl, and Baran and Sweezy—seems to have its direct confirmation in the current crisis of American and world capitalism. Quite recently, some of the “free-thinkers” among liberal economists, such as Lester Thurow, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Robert Heilbroner, have somewhat reluctantly added their voices to the diagnosis that capitalism is facing the possibility of long-term economic stagnation (which is also seen as posing a major theoretical crisis for establishment economics). Yet, at a time when nearly all of the conclusions of monopoly capital theory are finding dramatic support in the winds of historical change, the very notion of monopoly capitalism, and the entire Marxian heritage associated with it, is increasingly being “struck down from the rear” by radical theorists who claim to be more orthodox than Engels or Lenin.