John Bellamy Foster

Category: Review Essays/Book Reviews

Review Essays and Book Reviews

  • Re-working the Work Ethic’ and ‘Democracy at Work

    “Re-working the Work Ethic’ and ‘Democracy at Work,” [PDF], Contemporary Sociology, vol. 16, no. 4 (July 1987), pp. 497-98. (Reviews of Re-working the Work Ethic by Michael Rose and Democracy at Work by Tom Schuller.)

    Although each of these books is concerned with the role of values in the workplace, one belongs to the tradition of anomie, the other of alienation. Michael Rose’s study could only have been written in the contemporary atmosphere of economic crisis and perceived break-down in values. Its purpose is to provide a critical assessment of the commonplace assertion that the current economic difficulties of Britain and the United States can be traced to a decline of the Protestant work ethic; in addition, Rose questions the closely related claims of self-proclaimed “conviction politicians” like Margaret Thatcher that working people are finally beginning to respond to the call for a restoration of Victorian values by adopting a “new realism” in their expectations about labor and its rewards.

  • The Working Class: Is It Dead?

    The Working Class: Is It Dead?

    “The Working Clas: Is it Dead?” (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review vol. 38, no. 7 (December 1986), pp.55-64. DOI: 10.14452/MR-038-07-1986-11_7

    Review of Longshoremen: Community and Resistance on the Brooklyn Waterfront by William DiFazio.

    Among those who are convinced of the need for radical social change in the advanced capitalist countries as the world nears the year 2000 there are two broad streams of thought. One of these adheres to the traditional left view that the working class is (almost by definition) the only social force capable of carrying out a genuine socialist transformation within the center of the capitalist system. Although not denying the fact that workers in the developed countries are far from revolutionary at present, those who adhere to this perspective tend to emphasize the continuing radical significance of class struggles on the job, and would find themselves in general agreement with David Montgomery’s stance that when I thought about the question of socialism, and heard people asking whether the working class was an agent for social change, I found it very hard to even relate to the question. If the working class isn’t going to change its own life and make a new world, why bother? To change one boss for another is not something i’m going to go out and put myself on the line for.

  • A Turn to Reality

    A Turn to Reality

    “A Turn to Reality,” (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review, vol. 38, no. 5 (October 1986), pp. 56-64. DOI: 10.14452/MR-038-05-1986-09_7

    Review of Economics Without Equilibrium by Nicholas Kaldor.

    It would be impossible to discover a much greater gap between what poses as a modern scientific tradition and the underlying reality that it purports to explain than that which is currently dis- closed by neoclassical economics. Indeed, “within today’s standard economic theory, which is commonly called the neoclassical synthesis,” as Hyman Minsky has observed in his new book, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, “the question ‘why is our economy so unstable?’ is … a nonsense question. Standard economic theory not only does not lead to an explanation of instability as a system attribute, it really does not recognize that endogenous instability is a problem that a satisfactory theory must explain.”

     

  • The Political Economy of the United States Left

    The Political Economy of the United States Left

    “The Political Economy of The United States Left,” Monthly Review, vol. 38, no. 4 (September 1986), pp. 42-50. DOI: 10.14452/MR-038-04-1986-08_5

    Review of Radical Political Economy Since the Sixties: A Sociology of Knowledge Analysis by Paul Attewell.

    Twenty years ago, when Monopoly Capital by Baran and Sweezy first appeared, there were only a handful of Marxian political economists in the U.S. But the escalating invasion of Vietnam, the popular resistance movement that grew up in response, and the worsening conditions of economic crisis that came with the winding down of the war changed all of that. By the mid-1970s radical political economy had grown into a vast and sprawling multi-disciplinary effort, cutting across the boundaries of economics, political science, sociology and history. Yet such rapid growth was not without its contradictions. Indeed, in the 1980s it seems clear that the “new political economy” of the U.S. left is torn by contradictory developments, while showing comparatively few signs at present of further development through contradiction.