John Bellamy Foster

Category: Articles

Articles

  • Marx’s Ecological Value Analysis

    Marx’s Ecological Value Analysis

    “Marx’s Ecological Value A,” [PDF], (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review vol. 52, no. 4 (September 2000), pp. 39-47. DOI: 10.14452/MR-052-04-2000-08_4

    Review of: Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 312 pp., $45, hardcover.

    If there is a single charge that has served to unify all criticism of Marx in recent decades, it is the charge of “Prometheanism.” Although Marx’s admiration for Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and his attraction to Prometheus as a revolutionary figure of Greek mythology has long been known, the accusation that Marx’s work contained at its heart a “Promethean motif,” and that this constituted the principal weakness of his entire analysis, seems to have derived its contemporary influence mainly from Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. The first volume of this work was drafted in Polish in 1968 and appeared in English in 1978.

     

  • Marx and Internationalism

    Marx and Internationalism

    “Marx and Internationalism,” Monthly Review, vol. 52, vol. no. 3, pp. 11-22. DOI: 10.14452/MR-052-03-2000-07_2

    It is not uncommon within social science today to acknowledge that Karl Marx was one of the first analysts of globalization. But what is usually forgotten, even by those who make this acknowledgment, is that Marx was also one of the first strategists of working-class internationalism, designed to respond to capitalist globalization. The two major elements governing such internationalism, in his analysis, were the critique of international exploitation and the development of a working-class movement that was both national and international in its organization. A scrutiny of Marx’s views at the time of the First International offers useful insights into the struggle to forge a new internationalism in our own day.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Cosmo Politik, no. 3 (Summer 2002), pp. 168-74.

     

  • Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millenium

    Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millenium

    “Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millennium,” Monthly Review, vol. 51, no. 11 (April 2000), pp. 1-18. 10.14452/MR-051-11-2000-04_1

    This article is dedicated to Paul Sweezy on his 90th birthday. It is also meant as a personal expression of my conviction that Monopoly Capital (1966) by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, which provided a rich analysis of capital accumulation and crisis rooted in insights from Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, and Schumpeter, is still the most useful starting point from which to view the historical evolution of the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. My intention in this article is to use that general analysis to comment on some of the central empirical developments within the economy in our time—in a new millennium and under conditions of the globalization of monopoly capital.

    Translations:
    • Translated into Norwegian and published in Røde Fane, no. 4 (2000), pp. 32-38.
    • Hungarian translation in Ezmélet (Consciousness) vol. 12 no. 47 (Autumn 2000), pp. 96-112.
    • Greek translation in Socialist Ecology (November 2011).

     

  • Harry Magdoff 1913—

    “Harry Magdoff 1913—“ in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2000), pp. 385-94.

    Harry Magdoff was born on 21 August 1913 in the Bronx in New York. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; his father was a housepainter. As a youth he was swept up by the left political culture of his time. By the time he entered the City College of New York, where he commenced studies of physics and mathematics, he had already read a great deal of Marx.

  • The Canonization of Environmental Sociology

    “The Canonization of Environmental Sociology,” [PDF], Organization & Environment, vol. 12, no. 4 (December 1999), pp. 461-67. (Review essay on Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., The Sociology of the Environment, 3 volumes; and Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology).

    Environmental sociology first arose, as a distinct subfield of sociology, in the 1970s. The Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association was formally launched almost one quarter of a century ago, in 1976. The rise of the subfield was a direct response to the rapid growth of environmentalism in society at large in the 1970s. Sharing the fate of the environmental movement as a whole, environmental sociology seemed to peak in the mid-1970s and then to lose ground in the early 1980s, only to resurge once more with the renewed growth of concern about the global environment in the late 1980s.

  • Remarks on Paul Sweezy on the Occasion of his Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award

    Remarks on Paul Sweezy on the Occasion of his Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award

    “Remarks on Paul Sweezy on the Occasion of his Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award,” Monthly Review, vol. 51, no. 4, (September 1999) pp. 39-44 DOI: 10.14452/MR-051-04-1999-08_4

    I would like to quote at length from Paul Samuelson, who wrote a piece exactly thirty years ago for Newsweek magazine about a time thirty years before that “when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard”: When Diaghilev revived his ballet company he had the original Bakst sets redone in even more vivid colors, explaining, “so they would be as brilliant as people remember them.” Recent events on college campuses have recalled to my inward eye one of the great happenings of my own lifetime.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted from Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 33, no. 2 (June 1999), pp. 223-28.

     

  • Robbing the Earth of its Capital Stock

    “Robbing the Earth of its Capital Stock: An Introduction to George E. Waring’s ‘Agricultural Features of the Census of the United States for 1850,’” [PDF], Organization and Environment, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 1999), pp. 293-97. DOI: 10.1177/1086026699123004

    In his influential Letters to the President on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the United States, U.S. economist Henry Carey (1858) quoted at length from a talk by an “eminent agriculturist” who had provided rough calculations for the whole United States of the loss of soil nutrients resulting from the failure to recycle organic matter. In that statement, as quoted by Carey, the dire, long- term ecological consequences of the shipment of food and fiber in a one-way movement from country to town were raised:

    What with our earth-butchery and prodigality, we are each year losing the intrinsic essence of our vitality. . . . The question of the economy should be, not how much do we annually produce, but how much of our annual production is saved to the soil. Labor employed in robbing the earth of its capital stock of fertilizing matter, is worse than labor thrown away. In the latter case, it is a loss to the present generation—in the former it becomes an inheritance of poverty for our successors. Man is but a tenant of the soil and he is guilty of a crime when he reduces its value for other tenants who are to come after him. (quoted in Carey, 1858, pp. 54-55)

  • Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift

    “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology” [PDF], American Journal of Sociology, vol. 105, no. 2 (September 1999), pp. 366-405. DOI: 10.1086/210315

    This article addresses a paradox: on the one hand, environmental sociology, as currently developed, is closely associated with the thesis that the classical sociological tradition is devoid of systematic insights into environmental problems; on the other hand, evidence of crucial classical contributions in this area, particularly in Marx, but also in Weber, Durkheim, and others, is too abundant to be convincingly denied. The nature of this paradox, its origins, and the means of transcending it are illustrated primarily through an analysis of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, which, it is contended, offers important classical foundations for environmental sociology.

    Reprints
    • R. Scott Frey, The Environment and Society: A Reader (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000, 2003).
    • Reprinted in Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., New Developments in Environmental Sociology. (Aldershot, U.K., Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 2005), pp. 55-94.

  • Introduction to John Evelyn’s Fumifugium

    “Introduction to John Evelyn’s Fumifugium,” [PDF], Organization and Environment, vol. 12, no. 2 (June 1999), pp. 184-86.

    John Evelyn (1620-1706) is perhaps best known today as one of the greatest diarist of the 17th-century England. He is also remembered, however, as one the figures behind the formation of the Royal Society of London in 1662 and the greatest proponent of conservation in his age. In his Sylva, Or a Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions (1664), the first official publication of the Royal Society (a work that went through four editions in Evelyn’s lifetime), he complained of the “prodigious havoc” wreaked on the English forests by the demands of shipping, glasswork, iron furnaces, and the like. He observed,

    This devaluation is now become so Epidemical, that unless some favorable expedient offer it self, and a way be seriously, and speedily resolv’d upon, for the future repair of this important defect, one of the most glorious, and considerable Bulwarks of this Nation, will, within a short time be totally wanting to it. (Evelyn,1664, pp. 1-2)

  • Is Overcompetition the Problem?

    Is Overcompetition the Problem?

    “Is Overcompetition the Problem?,” [PDF] (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review vol. 51, no. 2 (June 1999), pp. 28-37. DOI: 10.14452/MR-051-02-1999-06_5

    Review of The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy, 1950-98 by Robert Brenner.

    It is tempting perhaps to attribute all the problems of capitalism to excessive competition. After all, capitalism is generally presented within contemporary ideology as a system which is nothing more than a set of competitive relations governed by the market. Is it not possible then that the economic contradictions of capitalism, and indeed the present world crisis, can be explained in terms of the globalization of competition which now knows no bounds, and is undermining all fixed positions, resulting in a kind of free fall? This seems to be the view of the distinguished Marxist historian and social theorist Robert Brenner in his ambitious attempt to account for the present global economic turbulence.