John Bellamy Foster

Category: Articles

Articles

  • Marx and Alienated Speciesism

    “Marx and Alienated Speciesism” (coauthered with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 7 (December 2018), pp. 1-20. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-07-2018-11_1. [HTML]

    In many animal-rights circles, Karl Marx and a long tradition of Marxian theorists are to be faulted for their speciesist treatment of nonhuman animals and the human-nonhuman animal relationship. These criticisms typically neglect the larger historical conditions, intellectual influences, and debates out of which Marx’s treatment of the human-animal dialectic arose—even though this is crucial to any meaningful understanding of his thought in this area. In response, this article assesses the historical-intellectual background behind Marx’s arguments on humans and animals, placing it in the context of the influence exercised on his thought by Epicurus, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Ludwig Feuerbach, Charles Darwin, and others. In the process, they explain how Marx’s view of animals in the world came to be integrated with his theory of metabolic rift and his critique of capitalism.

  • Value Isn’t Everything

    “Value Isn’t Everything” (coauthored with Paul Burkett, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 6 (November 2018), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-06-2018-10_1 [HTML]

    The rapid advances in Marxian ecology in the last two decades have given rise to extensive debates within the left, reflecting competing conceptions of theory and practice in an age of planetary ecological and social crisis. One key area of dispute is the attempt by a growing number of radical environmental thinkers to deconstruct the labor theory of value in order to bring everything in existence within a single commodity logic. For many in Green circles, Karl Marx and a long tradition of Marxian theorists are to be faulted for not directly incorporating the expenditure of physical work/energy by extra-human nature into the theory of value. In response, this article argues that any form of analysis that seeks to eliminate the deep-seated dialectical contradictions between the natural form and the value form, as well as between the capitalist economy and the larger socioecological metabolism, fails to comprehend the complex, interdependent dialectics of nature and humanity.

    •  Earlier version was published in International Socialism 160 (Autumn 2018): 39-58.

     

     

  • Geoengineering

    “Geoengineering: Making War on the Planet,” copublished by Science for the People Magazine (Summer 2018) and Monthly Review, vol. 70, no. 4 (September 2018), pp. 1-10.DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-04-2018-08_1 [HTML]

    The dangers posed by climate change have inspired a desperate search for technological fixes in the form of geoengineering—massive human interventions to manipulate the entire climate or planet. But as long as the dominant strategy for addressing global warming remains subordinated to the ends of capital accumulation, any attempt to implement such schemes will prove fatal to humanity.

  • Marx, Value, and Nature

    “Marx, Value, and Nature,” Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 3 (July-August 2018), pp. 122-36. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_6 [HTML]

    In recent years ecological critiques of capitalism have deepened and multiplied, resulting in new debates over the conception, scope, and purpose of Marx’s value theory and its relation to the natural world.

  • The Robbery of Nature

    “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Metabolic Rift” (co-authored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 3 (July-August 2018), pp. 1-20. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_1 [HTML]

    Marx’s notion of “the robbery of the soil” is intrinsically connected to the rift in the metabolism between human beings and the earth. To get at the complexities of his metabolic rift theory, it is useful to look separately at the issues of the robbery and the rift, seen as separate moments in a single development.

  • Marx’s Open-Ended Critique

    “Marx’s Open-Ended Critique,” Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 1 (May 2018), pp. 1-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-01-2018-05_1 [HTML]

    Against attempts to characterize Marx as a dogmatic and deterministic thinker, it is precisely the open-endedness of his criticism that accounts for historical materialism’s staying power. This openness has allowed Marxism to continually reinvent itself, expanding its empirical and theoretical content and embracing ever larger aspects of historical reality.

     

  • The Expropriation of Nature

    “The Expropriation of Nature” (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 10 (March 2018), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-10-2018-03_1 [HTML]

    To understand the present ecological crisis, it is necessary to dig much deeper into capitalism’s logic of expropriation, as first delineated by Marx during the Industrial Revolution. At the root of the problem is a spoliation of the natural environment—the expropriation of the earth itself.

  • What Is Monopoly Capital?

    “What Is Monopoly Capital?” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 8 (January 2018), pp. 56-62. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-08-2018-01_5  [HTML]

    “Monopoly capital” is a term for the new form of capital, embodied in the modern giant corporation, that in the late nineteenth century began to displace the small family firm as the dominant economic unit, marking the end of the freely competitive stage of capitalism.

    • Published in Polish in Realny Kapitalizm. Wokót teorii kapitału monopolistycnego (Real Capitalism: Exploring Monopoly Capital Theory), edited by Grzegorz Knoat and Przemysław Eielgoz (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2017), 15-31.

  • Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution

    “Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution” (coauthroed with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 8 (January 2018), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-08-2018-01 [HTML]

    Examining the historical specificity of women’s lives and labor in England during the Industrial Revolution allows us to better analyze the assumptions regarding gender, family, and work that informed the writings of Marx and Engels—and ultimately to understand how capital as a system threatens the social and ecological bases of human life.

  • William Morris’s Romantic Revolutionary Ideal

    “William Morris’s Romantic Revolutionary Ideal: Nature, Labour and Gender in News from Nowhere,” Journal of William Morris Studies, Special Issue: Morris and Revolution, Vol. XXII No. 2 (2017). [PDF]

    William Morris’s celebrated utopian romance News from Nowhere or An Epoch of Rest (1890) constituted his most singular attempt to present a revolutionary ideal aimed at inspiring a “movement towards Socialism” in his day. Centering on the overcoming of human alienation in relation to the three primary forms of the division of labour—social production, town and country and gender relations—it provided a holistic, ecological outlook extending far beyond most nineteenth-century socialist views. Although News from Nowhere was subtitled Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, it followed a pattern that left it free from the criticisms that Marxian thinkers, including Morris himself, had levelled at utopian socialism, since its role was didactic rather than prophetic. The object was not to forecast the victory of socialism as a superior way of organising the mechanism of production, but rather one of radically refashioning the movement toward socialism in the present by widening the whole conception of the revolutionary project, building on the romantic tradition.