“Foreword” to Paul M. Sweezy, Globalization is Nothing New; Selected Essays in Bengali (Dhaka, Bangladesh: Shrabon Prokoshani, 2008). English version published as “Sweezy in Perspective,” Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 1 (May 2008), pp. 45-49. Translation(s): Portuguese translation of this piece published in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition, 2008.
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Articles
The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis
By John Bellamy Foster on April 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
With the benefit of hindsight, few now doubt that the housing bubble that induced most of the recent growth of the U.S. economy was bound to burst or that a general financial crisis and a global economic slowdown were to be the unavoidable results. Warning signs were evident for years to all of those not […]
Classical Marxism and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Ever since Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) wrote his magnum opus, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, the entropy law (or the second law of thermodynamics) has been viewed as a sine qua non of ecological economics. Georgescu-Roegen argued strongly that both the entropy law and the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of matter–energy) were incompatible […]
Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2008 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Rachel Carson was born just over 100 years ago in 1907. Her most famous book Silent Spring, published in 1962, is often seen as marking the birth of the modern environmental movement. Although an immense amount has been written about Carson and her work, the fact that she was objectively a “woman of the left” […]
The Critique of Intelligent Design
A new version of the age-old controversy between religion and science has been launched by today’s intelligent design movement. Although ostensibly concerned simply with combating Darwinism, this new creationism seeks to drive a “wedge” into the materialist view of the world, originating with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and manifested in modern times by Darwin, […]
A New Stage in Capitalism’s War on the Planet
By John Bellamy Foster on November 1, 2007 in Articles, Introductions, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles
The introduction to this book, the last part to be completed, was sent to the printer in New York City only days before the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and was first published in October 2001 in Monthly Review. Since then the world has witnessed a continuing war by the […]
The Latin American Revolt
By John Bellamy Foster on July 1, 2007 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The revolt against U.S. hegemony in Latin America in the opening years of the twenty-first century constitutes nothing less than a new historical moment. Latin America, to quote Noam Chomsky, is “reasserting its independence” in an attempt to free itself from centuries of imperialist domination. The gravity of this threat to U.S. power is increasingly […]
Nature, Technology and the Sacred
The classical sociologists, including Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, all argued that society was experiencing a rapid secularization, arising from the Enlightenment, industrialization, and capitalism. While Marx famously argued that under capitalism “all that is holy is profaned,” Weber just as famously referred to the “disenchantment of nature” associated with formal rationalization. Although by no means […]
The Imperialist World System
By John Bellamy Foster on May 1, 2007 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The concept of the imperialist world system in today predominant sense of the extreme economic exploitation of periphery by center, creating a widening gap between rich and poor countries, was largely absent from the classical Marxist critique of capitalism. Rather this view had its genesis in the 1950s, especially with the publication fifty years ago […]
The Financialization of Capitalism
By John Bellamy Foster on April 1, 2007 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Changes in capitalism over the last three decades have been commonly characterized using a trio of terms: neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. Although a lot has been written on the first two of these, much less attention has been given to the third. Yet, financialization is now increasingly seen as the dominant force in this triad. […]
