The United States came out of the Second World War as the hegemonic power in the world economy. The war had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression by providing the needed effective demand in the form of endless orders for armaments and troops. Real output rose by 65 percent between 1940 and […]
Archive | Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles
Journal Articles (Other Major Scholarly)
Stagnation and Financialization
By John Bellamy Foster on May 2, 2014 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
More than six years after the beginning of the Great Recession in the United States, and nearly five years since it was officially declared over in this country, the core economies of the capitalist world system remain crisis-ridden. The jobs lost in the downturn in the United States have not yet been fully recovered and […]
The Plight of the U.S. Working Class
Modern capitalism, sociologist Max Weber famously observed early in the twentieth century, is based on “the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labor.” But the “rationality” of the system in this sphere, as Weber was to acknowledge elsewhere, was so restrictive as to be in reality “irrational.” Despite its formal freedom, labor under capitalism was substantively unfree.… This was in […]
Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature
By John Bellamy Foster on December 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The rediscovery over the last decade and a half of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift has come to be seen by many on the left as offering a powerful critique of the relation between nature and contemporary capitalist society. The result has been the development of a more unified ecological world view transcending the divisions […]
The Epochal Crisis
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
It is an indication of the sheer enormity of the historical challenge confronting humanity in our time that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, sometimes now called the Second Great Depression, is overshadowed by the larger threat of planetary catastrophe, raising the question of the long-term survival of innumerable species—including our own. An […]
The Fossil Fuels War
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Only a few years ago governments, corporations, and energy analysts were fixated on the problem of “the end of cheap oil” or “peak oil,” pointing to growing shortages of conventional crude oil due to the depletion of known reserves. The International Energy Agency’s 2010 report devoted a whole section to peak oil. Some climate scientists […]
The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital
By John Bellamy Foster on August 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The past half-century has been dominated by the rise of media to a commanding position in the social life of most people and nations, to the point where it is banal to regard this as the “information age.”
Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy
By John Bellamy Foster on April 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
A historical perspective on the economic stagnation afflicting the United States and the other advanced capitalist economies requires that we go back to the severe downturn of 1974–1975, which marked the end of the post-Second World War prosperity. The dominant interpretation of the mid–1970s recession was that the full employment of the earlier Keynesian era […]
Class War and Labor’s Declining Share
By John Bellamy Foster on March 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Given [the] background of high unemployment, lower-wage jobs, and smaller portions of the pie going to workers, it should come as no surprise that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 50 million people in the United States live in poverty (with income in 2011 below $23,021 for a family of four) while another 50 […]
James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The world at present is fast approaching a climate cliff. Science tells us that an increase in global average temperature of 2°C (3.6° F) constitutes the planetary tipping point with respect to climate change, leading to irreversible changes beyond human control. A 2°C rise is sufficient to melt a significant portion of the world’s ice […]
