John Bellamy Foster

Category: Review Essays/Book Reviews

Review Essays and Book Reviews

  • The Power of Inaction – A Review

    Review of Cornelia Woll, ‘The Power of Inaction‘, [PDF], American Journal of Sociology, vol. 121, no. 1 (July, 2015): 313-15.

    The great financial crisis of 2007–9 has given rise to a small industry of academic studies, some directed at the wider systemic tendencies of capital, class and crisis, others at narrower regulatory or managerial issues. Cornelia Woll’s ‘The Power of Inaction,’ is a work of the latter kind. It is a study of the state-finance nexus viewed through the lens of paired comparisons of bank bailouts in six countries: (1) the United States and the United Kingdom (the Anglo-American model), (2) Germany and France (large, regulated Eurozone economies), and (3) Denmark and Ireland (smaller European economies).

  • The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left

    “The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left,” [PDF], vol. 44, no. 3 (May 2015), pp. 314-21. DOI: 10.1177/0094306115579190a

    On September 21, 2014, the largest climate march in U.S. history took place in New York City, as more than 300,000 protestors signaled to UN delegates arriving for climate talks that more desperate measures were needed to protect humanity and other species. The massive demonstration, though representing a wide array of social and political viewpoints, had its origins on the Left. The radical intellectual thrust of the movement was apparent the day prior to the march, when a vast ‘‘People’s Summit/ Teach-In’’ was led by two organizations- Global Climate Convergence and System Change Not Climate Change- that have arisen out of the left, particularly from the ecosocialist movement, and have been influenced to a considerable extent by U.S. environmental sociology.

     

  • Nature, Technology and the Sacred

    “Nature, Technology and the Sacred,” [PDF], American Journal of Sociology, vol. 112, no. 6 (May 2007). (Review of Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred), pp. 1937–1939. DOI: 10.1086/519706.

    The classical sociologists, including Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, all argued that society was experiencing a rapid secularization, arising from the Enlightenment, industrialization, and capitalism. While Marx famously argued that under capitalism “all that is holy is profaned,” Weber just as famously referred to the “disenchantment of nature” associated with formal rationalization. Although by no means the first work to question this secularization thesis, Nature, Technology and the Sacred does so to a degree perhaps unequaled by any other analysis.

  • Why Movements Matter

    “Why Movements Matter,” [PDF], American Journal of Sociology, vol. 108, no. 2 (September 2002), pp. 509-10. (Review of Steve Breyman, Why Movements Matter: The West German Peace Movement and U.S. Arms Control Policy.)

    In the early 1980s a trans-Atlantic antinuclear movement consisting of millions of protestors emerged seemingly out of nowhere to threaten the prerogatives of power. In Europe this took the form of massive protests against the deployment of Euromissiles—intermediate-range nuclear missiles placed on European soil. In the United States there arose the nuclear freeze movement, aimed at stopping the escalation of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons. It is often claimed that both wings of this trans-Atlantic antinuclear movement failed. The European antimissile movement was unable to prevent the deployment of Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Europe. Likewise the nuclear freeze movement in the United States did not stop the Reagan administration (its main political target) from escalating its nuclear arms race with the “evil empire.”

  • Marx’s Ecological Saving Grace: His Materialism

    “Marx’s Ecological Saving Grace: His Materialism,” [PDF], Imprints, vol. 5, no. 2 (Winter 2000-2001), pp. 173-87. (Review of Jonathan Hughes, Ecology and Historical Materialism.)

    Criticisms of Marx for his alleged anti-environmentalist views are commonly voiced today not only by liberals and Green thinkers, but also within the eco-socialist discourse that has arisen over the last two decades. Such criticisms have been leveled, ofter with little evidence to back them up, by such diverse figures as Laszek Kolakowski, Anthony Soper and Alain Lipiets, In an article recently published in the eco-socialist journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Lipietz, a leading representatives of the French regulation school, declared that Marx underestimated ‘the irreducible character of … ecological constraints’ and adopted ‘the Biblico-Christian ideology of the conquest of nature.’ At the same time he insisted that Marx tended to reduce ‘the natural history of umanity to the transformative activities of men,’ thereby ignoring nature’s own ‘ecoregulatory activities’ (a criticism first raised by Benton). Finally, Marx is faulted for claiming that ‘nature is the inorganic body of man,’ and ignoring that it is ‘just as well that of the bee or the royal eagle.’

  • Environmental Politics: Analyses and Alternatives


    Review Essay on special Autumn 2000 issue of Capital and Class on environmental politics, [PDF], Historical Materialism, no. 8 (Summer 2001), pp. 461-77.

    Writing about the relative neglect of Volumes Two and Three of Capital within the socialist movement of her day, Rosa Luxemburg observed that Marx’s critique of capital and his contribution to social science as a whole constituted one ‘titanic whole’ with an ‘immeasurable field of application’. It propelled him far beyond the immediate needs of the class struggle (exemplified by the theory of exploitation in Volume I), and caused him to explore other aspects of capitalism in Volumes II and III, such as the reproduction schemes, competition between capitals, the distribution of surplus value, etc. – issues that seemed to transcend the most pressing struggles of the social movement. Yet, history and the development of the movement, Luxemburg contended, would lead to renewed appreciation of Marx’s intellectual corpus: ‘Only in proportion as our movement progresses and demands the solution of new practical problems, do we dip once more into the treasury of Marx’s thought in order to extract therefrom and to utilize new fragments of his doctrine.’

  • 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.

     

  • 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.

  • 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.

     

  • Rebuilding Marxism

    Rebuilding Marxism

    “Rebuilding Marxism,” (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review vol. 50, no. 10 (March 1999), pp. 38-45. DOI: 10.14452/MR-050-10-1999-03_4

    Review of Reinventing Marxism by Howard Sherman.