John Bellamy Foster

Category: Articles

Articles

  • Virtual Capitalism

    “Virtual Capitalism: The Political Economy of the Information Highway,” (co-authored with Michael Dawson, Foster listed second), Monthly Review vol. 48, no. 3 (July 1996), pp. 40-58. DOI: 10.14452/MR-048-03-1996-07_3

    One of the great technological myths of our time is that the entire system of organized capitalism dating back to the Industrial Revolution (and even earlier), is being displaced by a new age of “the electronic republic” rooted in the technology of the Information Revolution.

    Translations:
    • Translated and published in German as “Virtueller Kapitalismus: Die Politische Ökonomie der Datenautobahn,” Supplement der Zeitschrift Sozialismus, December 1996, pp. 12-20.

     

  • Ecology and Human Freedom

    “Ecology and Human Freedom”, Monthly Review vol. 47, no. 6 (November 1995), pp. 22-31. DOI: 10.14452/MR-047-06-1995-10_3

    We live at a time when it is reasonable to speak of the possibility of complete ecological destruction, in virtually the same sense that critics of nuclear armaments have often referred to the possibility of complete nuclear destruction. Both human society and the survival of the planet as we know it are now at risk.

     

  • Rationality and Nature

    “Rationality and Nature,” [PDF], Contemporary Sociology, vol. 24, no. 6 (November 1995), pp. 784-86. (Review of Raymond Murphy, Rationality and Nature; Richard Norgaard, Development Betrayed; and Michael Redclift and Ted Benton, ed. Social Theory and the Global Environment.)

    The emergence in the 1980s and ’90s of an increasingly global approach to ecological problems-marked by the ascendance of such issues as the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, tropical deforestation, and an annual loss of species possibly in the tens of thousands-has altered forever the relation of ecology to the social sciences. Recognizing that the entire planet is increas- ingly subject to ecological depredations and that the time available for addressing these problems is extremely short, social scientists concerned with ecological issues are becoming more aggressive in their demands for the ecological transformation of their disciplines. “Sociology,” as Raymond Murphy declares in the preface to Rationality and Nature, “has been constructed as if nature didn’t matter. It has failed to take the processes of nature into account, perceiving only the social construction of reality. Environmental problems are beginning to send shock waves through this myopic sociological structure. Sociology fabricated as if nature didn’t matter constitutes pre-ecological sociology” (p. x).

  • Nature, Technology and Society

    “Nature, Technology and Society,” [PDF], Science & Society, vol. 59, no. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 225-28. (Review of Victor Ferkiss, Nature, Technology and Society: Cultural Roots of the Current Environmental Crisis.)

    Nature, Technology and Society is a book that promises much. Purporting to be a study of the cultural roots of todays global environmental crisis, it consists of three parts. The first deals with the history of ideas on nature and technology, beginning with Mesopotamian civilization and ending with the conservation movement in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. The second part explores ideas on nature and technology that lie outside the mainstream Western tradition, with successive chapters on Marxism, Islam, Nazism, and “the Orient.” The third part deals with contemporary environmental perspectives in the West, including technology critics, ecofeminism, ecotheology, the Greens, and radical environmentalism.

  • Marx and the Environment

    “Marx and the Environment”, Monthly Review vol. 47, no. 3 (July 1995), pp. 108-123. DOI: 10.14452/MR-047-03-1995-07_8

    It has become fashionable in recent years, in the words of one critic, to identify the growth of ecological consciousness with “the current postmodernist interrogation of the metanarrative of the Enlightenment.” Green thinking, we are frequently told, is distinguished by its postmodern, post-Enlightenment perspective. Nowhere is this fashion more evident than in certain criticisms directed at Marx and Engels. Historical materialism, beginning with the work of its two founders, is often said to be one of the main means by which the Baconian notion of the mastery of nature was transmitted to the modern world. The prevalence of this interpretation is indicated by its frequent appearance within the analysis of the left itself. “While Marx and Engels displayed an extraordinary understanding of and sensitivity toward the ‘ecological’ costs of capitalism,” socialist ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant writes, “… they nevertheless bought into the Enlightenment’s myth of progress via the domination of nature.”

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted in John F. Sitton, ed., Marx Today: Selected Works and Recent Debates (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), 229-40.
    • Reprinted in Bob Jessop and Russell Wheatley, ed., Marx’s Social and Political Thought, volume 8(London: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 44-56.
    Translations:
    • Translated and published in German as “Marx, der Produktivismus und die Ökologie,” Sozialistische Zeitung, vol. 11, no. 13 (June 27, 1996), pp. 14-19.
    • Spanish translation by Renán Vega Cantor, 1998.

     

  • Global Ecology and the Common Good

    “Global Ecology and the Common Good”, Monthly Review vol. 46, no. 9 (February 1995), pp. 1-10. DOI: 10.14452/MR-046-09-1995-02_1

    Over the course of the twentieth century human population has increased more than threefold and gross world product perhaps twentyfold. Such expansion has placed increasing pressure on the ecology of the planet. Everywhere we look—in the atmosphere, oceans, watersheds, forests, soil, etc.—it is now clear that rapid ecological decline is setting in.

    Reprints:
    • Kevin Danaher, ed., Corporations are Gonna Eat Your Mama: Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1996), pp. 133-41.
    • William F. Grover and Joseph G. Peschek, ed., Voices of Dissent: Critical Readings in American Politics (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1999, 2003), pp. 33-37.
    Translations:
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008).

     

  • “Introduction to Special Issue Commemorating the Twentieth Anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital”

    “Introduction to Special Issue Commemorating the Twentieth Anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review, vol. 46, no. 6 (November 1994), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-046-06-1994-10_1

    It is a measure of the influence of Harry Braverman and radical labor process analysts generally that only two decades after the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) it is difficult to recall the absolute confidence with which the orthodox view of work relations was espoused in the early post-Second World War years. At that time the preeminent interpretation of work in modern society was the one presented by Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, and others in a book entitled Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960).

    Translations:
    • Portugese translation in Revista Principios 43 (1996).

     

  • Is There an Allocation Problem?: A Comment on Murray Smith’s Analysis of the Falling Profit Rate

    “Is There an Allocation Problem?: A Comment on Murray Smith’s Analysis of the Falling Profit Rate,” [PDF], (co-authored with Michael Dawson, Foster listed first), Science & Society, vol. 58, no. 3 (Fall 1994), pp. 315-24.

    In the Fall 1993 issue of Science & Society the editors observed that Murray Smith’s articles on the falling rate of profit, which formed the opening contribution to that issue, constituted an important new study that “should be compared with the work of [Thomas] Weisskopf, [Edward] Wolff and [Fred] Moseley’- all of whom have carried his empirical results not so much with the work of these radical economists (two of whom he never mentioned) as with the traditional thought that he classified as ‘underconsumptionist,” associated with the work of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Joseph Phillips, Harry Magdoff, and the present authors. Indeed, Smith contended that a recent statistical assessment of the economic surplus that we authored (Dawson and foster, 1991; Dawson and Foster 1992) contradicted the main theoretical thrust of the tradition we represent, demonstrating that “the (profitability) crises of the 1970’s and 1980’s cannot be adequately explained on the basis of an underconsumptionist mode of analysis” (Smith, 1993, 282).

  • Radical Ecology

    “Radical Ecology,” [PDF], Science & Society, vol. 58, no. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 120-23. (Review of Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology.)

    Carolyn Merchant is known principally as the author of two landmark studies in Ecological History and the Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980) and Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (1989). In The Death of Nature Merchant provided a devastating critique of the mechanistic world view that originated with 17-century science. The mechanistic scientific outlook of such thinkers as Bacon, Descartes and Locke, she demonstrated, was intrinsically connected to the rise of capitalism, the death of the earlier organic world view, and the growing domination over women. In Ecological Revolutions she developed a general model of the interactions of production, reproduction and consciousness in the context of specific ecological revolutions, exploring in particular the colonial and capitalist ecological revolutions that took place in New England in the 17th through the 19th centuries.

  • Multiculturalism and the American Revolution of 1776

    Multiculturalism and the American Revolution of 1776

    “The Balance of Injustice and the War for Independence; Multiculturalism and the American Revolution of 1776: A Response to David Lyons,” Monthly Review vol. 45, no. 11 (April 1994), pp. 27-37. DOI: 10.14452/MR-045-11-1994-04_2

    Many Americans of European ancestry, like me, now see the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere as invasion, conquest, and genocide. Many have grave misgivings about the constitutional settlement that protected trade in slaves, committed government to helping slave catchers, and gave extra votes in Congress to slave owners. The moral perceptions that underlie those reappraisals oblige us to go further. There is good reason to question whether the American Revolution—the British colonies’ fight for freedom from the Crown—was morally justifiable.