John Bellamy Foster

Category: Journal Articles (Refereed)

Journal Articles (Refereed)

  • The Earth-System Emergency and Ecological Civilization: A Marxian View

    “The Earth-System Emergency and Ecological Civilization: A Marxian View”, International Critical Thought (2017), vol. 7, no. 4:439–458. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2017.1357483. [PDF]

    The Holocene epoch in geological history of the last 10,000–12,000 years has given way to a new geological epoch which natural scientists are calling the Anthropocene, marked by humanity’s emergence as the main driver of change in the Earth system as a whole, threatening the future of civilization, a majority of ecosystems on the planet, and the human species itself. From a historical-materialist perspective, this planetary emergency constitutes a crisis of civilization. Human civilization arose in the relatively benign environment of the Holocene. In contrast, the Anthropocene is an epoch of increased ecological constraints and dangers, marked by what has been called the Great climacteric, objectively requiring the creation of a new more sustainable society, or ecological civilization. The making of such an ecological civilization is closely linked to the long revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism.

  • 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 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.

     

  • Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class

    Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class

    “Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class: Beyond the Degradation of Labor,”[PDF],(coauthored with R. Jamil Jonna, Jonna listed first), Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, vol. 26 (2014), pp. 219-36. DOI: 10.1007/s10672-014-9243-4.

    The fortieth anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital is the occasion here for a reassessment of his work as a whole. Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of work is shown to have been only a part of a much larger argument he was developing on the structure of the U.S. working class. Building on his pioneering empirical research into occupational composition, a new empirical assessment of the structural evolution of the U.S. working class over the last four decades is provided, throwing light on current problems of unemployment, underemployment, and socially wasted labor—and the rights of labor.

    Translations:
    • Italian translation (of “Beyond the Degradation of Labor“) in La Sinistra Rivista (January 2015).
    Reprinted/ Revised:

    as “Beyond the Degradation of Labor: Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class,” [PDF] Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 5 (October 2014), pp. 1-24

  • The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange

    “The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange: A Marx-Odum Dialectic,” [PDF] (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, authors listed alphabetically) Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (2014), pp. 199-233. DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2014.889687.

    A world-system analysis of the ecological rift generated by capitalism requires as one of its elements a developed theory of the unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery. After reviewing the literature on unequal exchange (both economic and ecological) from Ricardo and Marx to the present, a new approach is provided, based on a critical appropriation of systems ecologist Howard Odum’s emergy (spelled with an m) analysis. Odum’s contribution offers key elements of a wider dialectical synthesis, made possible in part by his intensive studies of Marx’s political-economic critique of capitalism and by Marx’s own theory of metabolic rift.

  • The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism

    “The Planetary Rift and the New Human Exemptionalism: A Political-Economic Critique of Ecological Modernization Theory,” [PDF], Organization and Environment, vol. 25, no. 3 (October 2012), pp. 1-27. DOI:10.1177/1086026612459964

    Environmental sociology must address two challenges, emanating both from without and within. The world is faced with a growing planetary rift, as planetary boundaries are being crossed. At the same time a new exemptionalism in the form of ecological modernization theory has arisen within environmental sociology, resurrecting many aspects of the human exemptionalist model characteristic of post–Second World War modernization theory that environmental sociology in its formative years opposed. The answer to these two challenges, it is argued, lies in the development of a political-economic and rational-historical critique of the capitalist environmental regime in the traditions of Marx and Weber. This demands, however, the outright rejection of the new exemptionalism.

  • Weber and the Environment

    “Weber and the Environment: Classical Foundations for a Post-Exemptionalist Sociology” (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), American Journal of Sociology, vol. 117, no. 6 (May 2012), pp. 1625-1673. DOI: 10.1086/664617.

    In the last two decades classical sociology, notably Marx, has been mined for environmental insights in the attempt to surmount the “human exemptionalism” of post–Second World War sociology. Weber, however, has remained an enigma in this respect. This article addresses Weber’s approach to the environment, including its significance for his interpretive-causal framework and his understanding of capitalism. For Weber, sociological meanings were often anchored in biophysical realities, including climate change, resource consumption, and energy scarcity, while environmental influences were refracted in complex ways within cultural reproduction. His work thus constitutes a crucial key to constructing a meaningful postexemptionalist sociology.

    Awards
    • Winner of the 2013 Outstanding Publication Award of the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.

  • The Dialectic of Social and Ecological Metabolism

    “The Dialectic of Social and Ecological Metabolism: Marx, Mészáros, and the Absolute Limits of Capital” (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Socialism and Democracy, (2010), 12 pp. DOI:10.1080/08854300.2010.481447

    One of the most remarkable aspects of Marxist scholarship in recent decades has been the recovery and development of Marx’s argument on social and ecological metabolism, which was crucial to his metabolic terms. As he wrote in Capital: “Labour is … a process between man and nature, a process by which man … mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” Such and conception was two-sided. It captured both the social character of labor, associated with such metabolic reproduction, and its ecological character, requiring a continuing, dialectical relation to nature.

    Translations:
    • Original Portuguese language version, based on conference paper, published in Margem Esquerda: Ensaios Marxistas, no. 14 (2010), pp. 21-29.

  • Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century

    “Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century”(coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), World Review of Political Economy, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2010), pp. 142-56. JSTOR: 41931871.

    The most pressing problem confronting humanity in the 21st century is the ecological crisis. The “problem of nature” is really a problem of capital, as natural cycles are turned into broken linear processes geared to private accumulation. Important advances in ecosocialist theory illuminate the continuing importance of marx’s materialist and metabolic approach for studying the dialectical interchange between humans and nature and the creation of ecological rifts within ecosystems. Additionally, Marx’s ecology serves as a foundation for understanding environmental degradation, given his critique of capital as a whole and his focus on the contradiction between use value and exchange value (which facilitates the expansion of private riches at the expense of public wealth, i.e., the Lauderdale Paradox). In stark contrast to the market mechanisms proposed to address the ecological crisis, which place profit above protecting nature, Marx’s ecology stresses the necessity of establishing a social order that sustains the conditions of life for future generations.

    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Sun Yaoliang in Marxism and Reality, 2010.

  • The Midas Effect

    “The Midas Effect: A Critique of Climate Change Economics,”, (coauthored with Brett Clark and Richard York, Foster listed first), Development and Change, vol. 40, no. 6 (November 2009), pp. 1085-96. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7660.2009.01613.x.

    James Hansen, a leading US climatologist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warns that global climate change today constitutes a ‘planetary emergency’. Existing trends threaten to set in mo- tion irreversible climate transformations, proceeding ‘mostly under their own momentum’, thereby fundamentally transforming the conditions of life on earth.