John Bellamy Foster

Category: Book Chapters

  • Paul M. Sweezy (1910-2004)

    “Paul M. Sweezy (1910-2004),” Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post Marxism, ed. Alex Callincos, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Lucia Pradella, ed. (London: Routledge, 2020), 503-510.

    [Revised ,expanded, and updated version of previous dictionary/encyclopedia articles on Sweezy and his influence.]

    Paul Marlor Sweezy (1910–2004) was one of the most accomplished economists to come out of Harvard in the 1930s. His The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxist Political Economy (1942) is often considered the foremost work of its kind. After the war, he left his position at Harvard and co-founded with Leo Huberman the magazine Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, which he continued to edit until his death. He made important contributions to the analysis of monopoly capitalism, imperialism, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, value theory, economic crisis and stagnation, post-revolutionary society and many other areas.

  • Metabolic Rifts and the Ecological Crisis

    “Metabolic Rifts and the Ecological Crisis” (coauthored with Brett Clark and Stefano B. Longo, Clark listed first), The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 651-58, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.001.0001. [PDF]

    The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx provides an entry point for those new to Marxism. At the same time, its chapters, written by leading Marxist scholars, advance Marxist theory and research. Its coverage is more comprehensive than previous volumes on Marx in terms of both foundational concepts and empirical research on contemporary social problems. It also provides equal space to sociologists, economists, and political scientists, with substantial contributions from philosophers, historians and geographers.

    The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx consists of seven sections. The first section, Foundations, includes chapters that demonstrate that the core elements of Marx’s political economy of capitalism continue to be defended, elaborated and applied to empirical social science including historical materialism, class, capital, labor, value, crisis, ideology, and alienation. Additional sections include Labor, Class, and Social Divisions; Capitalist States and Spaces; Accumulation, Crisis and Class struggle in the Core Countries; Accumulation, Crisis and Class Struggle in the Peripheral and Semi-Peripheral Countries; and Alternatives to Capitalism.

  • Marx’s Universal Metabolism of Nature and the Frankfurt School: Dialectical Contradictions and Critical Syntheses

    “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), p. 101-35.

    Substantially revised version published as ‘Marx’s Ecology and the Left,” Monthly Review Issue 86, no. 2 (June 2016), p. 1-25.

    The Frankfurt School, as represented especially by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944, Dialectic of Enlightenment, was noted for developing a philosophical critique of the domination of nature. Critical theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt were heavily influenced by the writings of the early Karl Marx. Yet, their critique of the Enlightenment domination 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 (1970). Due largely to Schmidt’s book, the notion of Marx’s anti-ecological perspective came to be deeply rooted in Western Marxism. Moreover, such criticisms of Marx were closely related to questions raised regarding Fredrick Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, which was frequently said to have extended dialectical analysis improperly beyond the human-social realm. First generation ecosocialists, such as Ted Benton and Andre Gorz, furthered these criticisms, arguing that Marx and Engels had gone overboard in their alleged rejection of Malthusian natural limits.

  • Ecology

    “Ecology,” in Marcello Musto, ed., The Marx Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 20.

  • Polish Marxian Political Economy and U.S. Monopoly Capital Theory: The Influence of Luxemburg, Kalecki, and Lange on Baran and Sweezy and Monthly Review

    “Polish Marxian Political Economy and U.S. Monopoly Capital Theory: The Influence of Luxemburg, Kalecki, and Lange on Baran and Sweezy and Monthly Review,” in Ricardo Bellofiore, Ewa Karwoski, and Jan Toporowski, ed., The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange and Michael Kalecki, vol. 1 of Essays in Honour of Tadeusz Kowalik (London: Palgrave, 2014), 104-21.

    From the viewpoint of orthodox economists, macroeconomics has no significant historical antecedents prior to the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936. Theories of aggregate demand before Keynes, such as those associated with Lauderdale, Malthus, and Hobson, were generally weak theoretically. A number of important mainstream economic thinkers raised what would be considered macroeconomic questions in the context of business cycle analysis.1 But it required Keynes to construct a monetary theory of production that broke decisively with Say’s Law (the notion that supply creates its own demand) before economic orthodoxy was able to address macroeconomic questions in a significant way.

  • Metabolism, Energy and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

    “Stoffwechseel, Energie und Entropie In Marx’ Kritic der Politischen Ökonomie” (“Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinsky Myth”—edited and translated version of work based on previous articles, Burkett listed first) in Kijan Espahangizi und Barbara Orland, ed., Stoffe in Bewegun (Burlin: Diaphanes, 2014), 95-120.

    Until recently, most commentators, including ecological Marxists, have assumed that Marx’s historical materialism was only marginally ecologically sensitive at best, or even that it was explicitly anti-ecological. However, research over the last decade has demonstrated not only that Marx deemed ecological materialism essential to the critique of political economy and to investigations into socialism, but also that his treatment of the coevolution of nature and society was in many ways the most so- phisticated to be put forth by any social theorist prior to the late twentieth century. Still, criticisms continue to be leveled at Marx and Engels for their understanding of thermodynamics and the extent to which their work is said to conflict with the core tenets of ecological economics. In this respect, the rejection by Marx and Engels of the pio- neering contributions of the Ukrainian socialist Sergei Podolinsky, one of the founders of energetics, has been frequently offered as the chief ecological case against them. Building on an earlier analysis of Marx’s and Engels’s response to Podolinsky, this article shows that they relied on an open-system, metabolic-energetic model that adhered to all of the main strictures of ecological economics – but one that also (unlike ecological economics) rooted the violation of solar and other environmental-sustainability conditions in the class relations of capitalist society. The result is to generate a deeper understanding of classical historical materialism’s ecological approach to economy and society – providing an ecological-materialist critique that can help uncover the systemic roots of today’s “treadmill of production” and global environmental crisis.

  • Guano

    “Guano: The Global Metabolic Rift and the Fertilizer Trade” (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), in Alf Hornborg, Brett Clark, and Kenneth Hermele, ed., Ecology and Power (London: Routledge, 2012), 68-82.

    Power and social inequality shape patterns of land use and resource management. This book explores this relationship from different perspectives, illuminating the complexity of interactions between human societies and nature. Most of the contributors use the perspective of “political ecology” as a point of departure, recognizing that human relations to the environment and human social relations are not separate phenomena but inextricably intertwined. What makes this volume unique is that it sets this approach in a trans-disciplinary, global, and historical framework.

     

  • Advertising and the Genius of Commercial Propaganda

    “Advertising and the Genius of Commercial Propaganda” (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Inger L. Stole, and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed third), in Gerald Sussman, ed., The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 27-44.

  • Marx’s Ecology and its Historical Significance

    “Marx’s Ecology and its Historical Significance,” in Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, second edition (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2010), 106-20.

    (Revised, updated, and expanded version “Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective.”)

    John Bellamy Foster Introduction For the early Marx the only nature relevant to the understanding of history is human nature . . . Marx wisely left nature (other than human nature) alone. Lichtheim (1961: 245) Although Lichtheim was not a Marxist, his view here did not differ from the general outlook of Western Marxism at the time he was writing. Yet this same outlook would be regarded by most informed observers on the Left today as laughable. After decades of explorations of Marx’s contributions to ecological discussions and publication of his scientific–technical notebooks, it is no longer a question of whether Marx addressed nature, and did so throughout his life, but whether he can be said to have developed an understanding of the nature–society dialectic that constitutes a crucial starting point for understanding the ecological crisis of capitalist society.

    Due to mounting evidence, Marx’s ecological contributions are increasingly acknowledged. Yet not everyone is convinced of their historical significance. A great many analysts, including some self-styled ecosocialists, persist in arguing that such insights were marginal to his work, that he never freed himself from ‘Prometheanism’ (a term usually meant to refer to an extreme commitment to industrialization at any cost), and that he did not leave a significant ecological legacy that carried forward into later socialist thought or that had any relation to the subsequent development of ecology. In a recent discussion in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, a number of authors argued that Marx could not have contributed anything of…

  • The Financialization of the Capitalist Class

    “The Financialization of the Capitalist Class: Monopoly-Finance Capital and the New Contradictory Relations of Ruling Class Power,” in Henry Veltmeyer, ed., Imperialism, Crisis and Class Struggle: The Enduring Verities and Contemporary Face of Capitalism—Essays in Honour of James Petras (London: Brill, 2010), pp. 163-73.