John Bellamy Foster

Category: Review Essays/Book Reviews

Review Essays and Book Reviews

  • Science in a Skeptical Age

    Science in a Skeptical Age

    “Science in a Skeptical Age,” Monthly Review, vol. 50, no. 2 (June 1998), pp. 39-52.

    Review of; Science and the Retreat From Reason by John Gillott and Manjit Kumar.
    DOI: 10.14452/MR-050-02-1998-06_4

    We live in a skeptical age. All of the basic concepts of the Enlightenment, including progress, science and reason are now under attack. At the center of this skepticism lie persistent doubts about science itself, emanating both from within and from without the scientific community. Recent titles by scientists give an idea of the extent of the crisis in confidence within science: Science: The End of the Frontier? (1991) by Nobel prize winner Leon Lederman; The End of Certainty (1996) by Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine; and The End of Science (1996) by Scientific American writer John Horgan.

     

  • Hesitations Before Ecology: David Harvey’s Dilemma

    “Hesitations Before Ecology: David Harvey’s Dilemma,” [PDF], Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 9, no. 3 (1998), pp. 55-59. (Review essay on David Harvey’s, Nature, Justice, and the Geography of Difference.) DOI: 10.1080/10455759809358816

    Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference is an ambitious work that considers everything from dialectics to globalization. It is a difficult book to assess because over the course of much if not most of the work Harvey deliberately avoids the closures – not just in concepts but in arguments and synthetic vision as well – that characterize most analytical work, almost as if he wants to preserve the kind of unresolved social, historical and ecological tensions that he so admires in Raymond William’s novels.

  • Free Market Democracy and Global Hegemony

    Free Market Democracy and Global Hegemony

    “Free Market Democracy and Global Hegemony,” (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review, vol. 49, no. 4 (September 1997), pp.51-64. DOI: 10.14452/MR-049-04-1997-08_5

    Review of Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony by William I. Robinson.

    Neoliberalism is usually thought of as a purely economic philosophy, stemming from the work of the arch-conservative economist Friedrich hayek and other twentieth century economist (particularly those associated with the University of Chicago), and involving an attempt to construct a much more complete justification for a pure, self-regulating market economy than could be found in the work of Adam Smith himself. Yet, neoliberalism—it is important to understand—also has its politcal component in the dominant model of liberal democracy, termed “polyarchy” by one of its leading proponents, Robert Dahl.

     

  • Logging the Globe

    ”Logging the Globe,” [PDF], Contemporary Sociology (Featured Essay), vol. 25, no. 5 (September 1996), pp. 598-99. (Review of Patricia Marchak, Logging the Globe.)

    Logging the Globe goes on to analyze the ecological implications of these changes. Marchak carefully documents the unsustainable exploitation of both temperate and tropical forests. In addition, she raises issues about the ecological consequences of plantation forestry, with its sterile monoculture, and highlights the toxic wastes associated with pulp and paper production.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Dock Strike

    “Dock Strike,” [PDF], The Northern Mariner, vol. III, no. 1 (January 1993), p. 78. (Review of Peter Turnbull, Charles Woolfson and John Kelly, Dock Strike: Conflict and Restructuring in Britain’s Ports.)

    In the 1989 national dock strike, British dockworkers, falling into a pattern already evident in the fate of coalminers, printers and seafarers, suffered an historic defeat. The National Dock Labour Scheme of 1947, which had enabled the Transport and General Workers Union (T&GWU) to exercise considerable control not only over the labour process but more importantly over the process of hiring and firing, was abolished; thousands of workers became redundant.

  • Two Ages of Waterfront Labor

    “Two Ages of Waterfront Labor,” [PDF] Labour/Le Travail, no. 26 (Fall 1990), pp. 1-9. (Review of Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront and William Finlay, Work on the Waterfront.)

    There are two crucial watersheds in the modem history of waterfront labour (1) the successful struggle, beginning with the Pacific Coast revolts of the 1930s, to set-up union-dominated hiring halls; and (2) the technological revolution in cargo handling and ship design associated with the introduction of containers in the 1960s and 70s. Bruce Nelson’s historical treatment of waterfront labour focuses on the first of these watersheds, with particular emphasis on the interactions between seamen and longshoremen during the “syndicalist renaissance” of the late 1930s. William Finlay’s sociological study is concerned with the effects of the second watershed — the technological revolution in cargo handling—on skill levels, job control and status hierarchies within the longshore labour express.

  • Marxism and the Uno School

    Marxism and the Uno School

    “Marxism and the Uno School,” (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review, vol. 41, no. 8 (January 1990), pp. 51-55. DOI: 10.14452/MR-041-08-1990-01_6

    Review of The Basic Theory of Capitalism: The Forms and Substance of the Capitalist Economy by Makoto Itoh.
    In an 1859 review of Marx’s Contribution to a Critique if Political Economy, Engels provided the following description of the economic method of historical materialism, frequently labeled the “logical- historical method”:

    [T]he critique of economics could .. , be exercised in two ways: historically or logically …. History moves often in leaps and bounds and in a zigzag line, and as this would have to be followed throughout, it would mean not only that a considerable amount of material of slight importance would have to be included, but also that the train of thought would frequently have to be interrupted; it would, moreover, be impossible to write the history of economy without that of bourgeois society, and the task would thus become immense, because of the absence of all preliminary studies. The logical method of approach was therefore the only suitable one. This, however, is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences …. [W]ith this method the logical exposi- tion need by no means be confined to the purely abstract sphere. On the contra?, it requires historical illustration and continuous contact with reality.