John Bellamy Foster

Category: Articles

Articles

  • The Anthropocene Crisis

    The Anthropocene Crisis

    “Foreword,” to Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Reviwe Press, 2016), 9-17.

    The Anthropocene, viewed as a new geological epoch displacing the Holocene epoch of the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, represents what has been called an “anthropogenic rift” in the history of the planet.2 Formally introduced into the contemporary scientific and environmental discussion by climatologist Paul Crutzen in 2000, it stands for the notion that human beings have become the primary emergent geological force affecting the future of the Earth system. Although often traced to the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, the Anthropocene is probably best seen as arising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the period from around 1950 on exhibits a major spike, marking a Great Acceleration in human impacts on the environment, with the most dramatic stratigraphic trace of the anthropogenic rift to be found in fallout radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing.

  • Multinational Corporations and the Globalization of Monopoly Capital

    “Multinational Corporations and the Globalization of Monopoly Capital: From the 1960s to the Present” (co-authored with Intan Suwandi, Suwandi listed first), Monthly Review vol. 68, no. 3 (July-August 2016), pp. 114-31. DOI: 10.14452/MR-068-03-2016-07_9 [HTML]

    In 1964, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy wrote an essay entitled “Notes on the Theory of Imperialism” for a festschrift in honor of the sixty-fifth birthday of the great Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki.… [T]he essay offered the first major analysis of multinational corporations within Marxian theory. Parts of it were incorporated into Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital in 1966, two years after Baran’s death. Yet for all that book’s depth, “Notes on the Theory of Imperialism” provided a more complete view of their argument on the growth of multinationals. In October and November 1969, Harry Magdoff and Sweezy wrote their article “Notes on the Multinational Corporation,” picking up where Baran and Sweezy had left off. That same year, Magdoff published his landmark The Age of Imperialism, which systematically extended the analysis of the U.S. economy into the international domain.… In the analyses of Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff, as distinct from the dominant liberal perspective, the multinational corporation was the product of the very same process of concentration and centralization of capital that had created monopoly capital itself.

  • Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical Rifts on the Left

    “Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical Rifts on the Left,” International Critical Thought vol.6, no. 3 (2016): 393-421. DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2016.1197787. [PDF]

    Natural scientists have pointed to the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, with the precise dating not yet decided, but often traced to the Great Acceleration of the human impact on the environment since 1945. Thus understood, the Anthropocene largely coincides with the rise of the modern environmental movement and corresponds to the age of planetary crisis. This paper looks at the evolution of Marxian and left contributions to environmental thought during this period. Although Marx’s ecological materialism is now widely recognized, with the rediscovery of his theory of metabolic rift, the debate has recently shifted to ecological dialectics, including dualism, monism, totality, and mediation, generating a conflict between ecological Marxism and radical ecological monism. It is argued here that only an ecological Marxism, rooted in a materialist dialectic of nature and society, is able to engage effectively with the Great Climacteric that increasingly governs our times.

     

  • Marx’s Ecology and the Left

    Marx’s Ecology and the Left

    “Marx’s Ecology and the Left” (co-authored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 68, no. 2 (June 2016): 1-25. DOI: 10.14452/MR-068-02-2016-06_1

    One of the lasting contributions of the Frankfurt School of social theorists, represented especially by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, was the development of a philosophical critique of the domination of nature. Critical theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt were deeply influenced by the early writings of Karl Marx. Yet their critique of the Enlightenment exploitation of nature was eventually extended to a critique of Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure, especially in relation to his mature work in Capital. This position was expressed most notably in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s student, Alfred Schmidt, author of The Concept of Nature in Marx. Due largely to Schmidt’s book, the notion of Marx’s anti-ecological perspective became deeply rooted in Western Marxism. Such criticisms were also closely related to questions raised regarding Frederick Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which was said to have improperly extended dialectical analysis beyond the human-social realm. First-stage ecosocialists such as Ted Benton and André Gorz added to these charges, contending that Marx and Engels had gone overboard in their alleged rejection of Malthusian natural limits.

    Revised Version from:

    “Marx’s Universal Metabolism of Nature and the Frankfurt School: Dialectical Contradictions and Critical Syntheses,” in James S. Ormrod, ed., Changing Our Environment, Changing Ourselves (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 101–35.

     

  • Nature

    “Nature,” in Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor, and A.K. Thompson, ed., Keywords for Radicals, (Oakland: AK Press, 2016), pp. 279-86.

    “Nature,” wrote Raymond Williams in Keywords, “is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” It is derived from the Latin natura, as exemplified by Lucretius’s great didactic poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) from the first century BCE. The word “nature” has three primary, interrelated meanings: (1) the intrinsic properties or essence of things or processes; (2) an inherent force that directs or determines the world; and (3) the material world or universe, the object of our sense perceptions—both in its entirety and variously understood as including or excluding God, spirit, mind, human beings, society, history, culture, etc.

    Additional Publication(s)

  • Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness

    “Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness: Its Relevance Today,” (coauthored with R. Jamil Jonna, Jonna listed first) Monthly Review vol. 67, no. 11 (April 2016). DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-11-2016-04_1

    First published as “Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness—And Its Relevance Today,” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 27 (2016), pp. 21-45. [PDF]

    As a concept, worker precariousness is far from new. It has a long history in socialist thought, where it was associated from the start with the concept of the reserve army of labor. Frederick Engels introduced the idea of precariousness in his treatment of the industrial reserve army in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marx and Engels employed it in this same context in The Communist Manifesto, and it later became a key element in Marx’s analysis of the industrial reserve army in volume I of Capital.… In recent years, however, the notion of precariousness as a general condition of working-class life has been rediscovered. Yet the idea is commonly treated in the eclectic, reductionist, ahistorical fashion characteristic of today’s social sciences and humanities, disconnected from the larger theory of accumulation derived from Marx and the socialist tradition. The result is a set of scattered observations about what are seen as largely haphazard developments.… In the face of such a confusion of views—most of them merely ad hoc responses to what is presumed to be an isolated social problem—it is necessary to turn back to the classical Marxian tradition, where the issue of precariousness was first raised.

     

  • The Opt Out Revolt

    The Opt Out Revolt

    In the United States today, the age of monopoly-finance capital and neoliberal politics, all aspects of social life are being financialized at breakneck speed, while the economy as a whole and employment remain lackluster. Financial flows of whatever kind are converted into “securitized” assets to be leveraged by Wall Street speculators. The data of private communications are mined. Health care is converted into a realm of super profits. Public water and electric facilities are sold to the highest bidder. The political system is turned into an open-air auction. Even pollution is treated as a market.… At the center of this juggernaut is elementary and secondary education, which receives over $550 billion in annual public spending, equal to the GDP of Belgium, ranked twenty-fifth worldwide in national income. The new copyrighted Common Core State Standards, and the accompanying standardized tests run by two multi-state consortia in conjunction with testing companies, are “high stakes” not merely for schools, teachers, and students, but also for the vested interests of capital.

  • Marxism and Ecology

    Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts on a Great Transition,” Monthly Review, vol. 67, no. 7 (Deember 2015), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-07-2015-11_1
    This article was originally published (along with comments on it by nine other authors, including MR contributors David Barkin, Hannah Holleman, and Fred Magdoff) on the Great Transition Initiative website in October 2015: http://greattransition.org/publication/marxism-and-ecology.
    To link Marxism and ecological transition may seem at first like trying to bridge two entirely different movements and discourses, each with its own history and logic: one having mainly to do with class relations, the other with the relation between humans and the environment. However, historically socialism has influenced the development of ecological thought and practice, while ecology has informed socialist thought and practice. Since the nineteenth century, the relationship between the two has been complex, interdependent, and dialectical.
    Versions and Publishers:
    • Earlier version published online by the Great Transition Initiative, October 19, 2015, 5800 words, greattransition.org. Published along with comments of 750-1000 words by majors scholars, part of the Great Transition Network, and with a response to the comments by the author.
    Translations:
    • Portuguese-language translation forthcoming in O Comuneiro (2016). Portugues-language version also forthcoming in Lutas Sociais (Sao Paulo, 2016).
    • German translation forthcoming in Analyse & Kritik (2016).

     

  • The Great Capitalist Climacteric

    “The Great Capitalist Climacteric: Marxism and “System Change Not Climate Change,” Monthly Review, vol. 67, no. 6 (November 2015), pp. 1-18.
    DOI:10.14452

    This article is from a keynote address presented at Manifesta in Ostend, Belgium on September 19, 2015. This year’s Manifesta was organized around the theme of climate change in preparation for the COP21 climate negotiations (and protests) in Paris in December 2015.

    Humanity today is confronted with what might be called the Great Capitalist Climacteric. In the standard definition, a climacteric (from the Greek klimaktēr or rung on the ladder) is a period of critical transition or a turning point in the life of an individual or a whole society. From a social standpoint, it raises issues of historical transformation in the face of changing conditions.

  • Afterword: The Making of Scandinavian Ecosocialism

    “Afterword: The Making of Scandinavian Ecosocialism,”[PDF] in The Politics of Ecosocialism, ed. Kajsa Borgnäs, Teppo Eskelinen, Johanna Perkiö, and Rikard Warlenius (London: Routledge, 2015), 195-203.