It is an inescapable truth of the capitalist economy that the uneven, class-based distribution of income is a determining factor of consumption and investment. How much is spent on consumption goods depends on the income of the working class. Workers necessarily spend all or almost all of their income on consumption. Thus for households in […]
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West Coast Longshore Strikes, 1923 and 1935
West Coast Longshore Strikes, 1923 and 1935 On 8 Oct 1923 the 1400 members of the International Longshoremen’s Assn (ILA) in Vancouver struck for higher wages. The Shipping Federation imported strikebreakers, housed in the CPR ship Empress of Japan, while an armed launch and 350 armed men guarded the waterfront. The longshoremen gave up on […]
Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinsky Myth
Until recently, most commentators, including ecological Marxists, have assumed that Marx’s historical materialism was only marginally ecologically sensitive at best, or even that it was explicitly anti-ecological. However, research over the last decade has demonstrated not only that Marx deemed ecological materialism essential to the critique of political economy and to investigations into socialism, but […]
The New Geopolitics of Empire
By John Bellamy Foster on January 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Today’s imperial ideology proclaims that the United States is the new city on the hill, the capital of an empire dominating the globe. Yet the U.S. global empire, we are nonetheless told, is not an empire of capital; it has nothing to do with economic imperialism as classically defined by Marxists and others. The question […]
Organizing Ecological Revolution
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2005 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
My subject—organizing ecological revolution—has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.
The Great Financial Crisis
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2005 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The Great Financial Crisis began in the summer of 2007 and three years later, despite a putative “recovery,” it is still having profound effects in the United States, Europe, and in much of the world. Austerity is being forced on working people in many countries. Matters are especially difficult in Greece, a country that is […]
Naked Imperialism
By John Bellamy Foster on September 5, 2005 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The global actions of the United States since September 11, 2001, are often seen as constituting a “new militarism” and a “new imperialism.” Yet, neither militarism nor imperialism is new to the United States, which has been an expansionist power—continental, hemispheric, and global—since its inception. What has changed is the nakedness with which this is […]
The End of Rational Capitalism
By John Bellamy Foster on March 1, 2005 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The twentieth century’s dominant myth was that of a “rational capitalism.” The two economists who did the most to promote this idea were John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Both were responding to the great historical crisis of capitalism manifested in the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. In the […]
The Treadmill of Production: Extension, Refinement and Critique
By John Bellamy Foster on March 1, 2005 in Articles, Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints
Philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1978) argued that the key to evaluating merit in the sciences lies in the distinction between progressive and degenerative research programs. A research program is progressive if its theoretical growth anticipates its empirical growth (i.e., if it predicts novel facts with some frequency rather than merely explaining facts discovered by […]
The Treadmill of Accumulation
Allan Schnaiberg’s “treadmill of production” model has formed the single most influential framework of analysis within environmental sociology in the United States. Schnaiberg’s work is often characterized as “neo-Marxist,” but its actual relation to Marxian political economy has been left obscure. The following article examines Marx’s treatment of the treadmill as the crudest historical expression […]
