John Bellamy Foster

Category: Book Chapters

  • Marx’s Grundrisse and the Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism

    “Marx’s Grundrisse and The Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism,” in Marcello Musto, ed. Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy One Hundred and Fifty Years Later (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 93-106.

    In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx famously wrote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circum- stances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1979: 103). The material circumstances or conditions that he was referring to here were the product of both natural and social history. For Marx production was a realm of expanding needs and powers. But it was subject at all times to material limits imposed by nature. It was the tragedy of capital that its narrow logic propelled it in an unrelenting assault on both these natural limits and the new social needs that it brought into being. By constantly revolutionizing production capital transformed society, but only by continually alienating natural necessity (conditions of sustainability and reproduction) and human needs.

     Translations:
    • Japanese translation by Horshi Uchida, 2012.

  • The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology

    “The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology,” in Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith ed., Dialectics for a New Century (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 50-82.

    For ‘Western Marxism’ — a term introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in 1955 in his Adventures of the Dialectic (1973) to describe the philosophical tendency stemming from Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (1971; originally published in 1923) — no concept internal to Marxism has been more antithetical to the genuine development of historical materialism than the ‘dialectics of nature’. Commonly attributed to Engels rather than Marx, this concept is often seen as thedifferentia specifica that beginning in the 1920s separated the official Marxism of the Soviet Union from Western Marxism. Yet, as Lukács, who played the leading role in questioning the concept of the dialectic of nature, was later to admit, Western Marxism’s rejection of it struck at the very heart of the classical Marxist ontology — that of Marx no less than Engels.

  • Ecological Imperialism

    “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” (coauthored with Brett Clark), In Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, ed., The Socialist Register, 2004 (London: Merlin Press, 2004), pp. 230-46.

    Translations:
    • Catalan translation in Corrent Roig, June 6, 2010, http://www.correntroig.org.
    • Spanish translation in El Nuevo Desafío Imperial: Socialist Register 2004 (Clasco, February 2005).
    • Portugese translation in O Novo Desafio Imperial: Socialist Register 2004 (Sao Paolo, Brazil: Clasco, 2006).

  • Paul Sweezy and Monopoly Capitalism

    ”Paul Sweezy and Monopoly Capitalism,” in Doug Dowd, ed., Understanding Capitalism: Critical Analysis from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 132-50.

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Doug Dowd, ed., Entender el capitalismo Hacienda, 2006.

  • The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line

    “The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line: The Environmental and Social Consequences of Economic Reductionism,” Richard Hofrichter, ed, Reclaiming the Environmental Debate; The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 135-53.

    In recent decades environmentalists have directed a persistent ecological critique at economics, contending that economics has failed to value the natural world. Lately economists have begun to respond to this critique, and a rapidly growing sub discipline of environmental economics has emerged that is dedicated to placing economic values on nature and integrating the environment more fully into the market system. However, the question arises: Is the cure more dangerous than the disease? Does the attempt to internalize the natural environment within the capitalist market system-without a radical transformation of the latter-lead to a new empire of the economy over ecology, a sort of neocolonialism where the old colonialism is no longer seen as sufficient? And what are the ultimate consequences of this?

  • The Communist Manifesto and the Environment

    ”The Communist Manifesto and the Environment,” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, ed., The Socialist Register, 1998 (London: Merlin Press), pp. 169-89.

    Most of the debate about Marx’s relation to environmental thought has focused on the early philosophical critique of capitalism in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and on his later economic critique embodied in Capital in the 1860s – since in both of these works he had a great deal to say about human interactions with nature. Nevertheless, the Communist Manifesto has often been invoked as presenting a view that was anti-ecological – some would say the very definition of anti-ecological modernism.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted in Dave Holmes, Terry Townsend, and John Bellamy Foster, Change the System, Not the Planet (pamphlet), Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 2007, 27-43.

  • The Tendency of the Surplus to Rise, 1963–1988

    “The Tendency of the Surplus to Rise, 1963–1988” [PDF], (co-authored, second author with Michael Dawson), in John B. Davis, ed. The Economic Surplus in Advanced Economies (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing Company, 1992), pp. 42-70.

    In the increasingly universal monopoly-capitalist economy and culture of the late twentieth century, people no longer need what they want or want what they need. Wants are artificially manufactured while the most desperate needs of innumerable individuals remain unfulfilled. Although labor productivity has steadily risen, the overall efficiency and rationality of society has in many ways declined. Indeed, it is almost impossible to arrive at any other conclusion if one considers the lavish office structures in cities like New York, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, where employees use the most technologically advanced means to “develop” yet another laundry detergent, television commercial, or leveraged buyout, while on the ground below large numbers of people lack decent housing, food, clothing, medical care, and education; if one considers automated assembly plants existing in the same social space as millions of unemployed, partially employed, “discouraged,” and poorly paid workers; or if one contemplates what it means to launch still another aircraft carrier, the total costs of which are equal to half the annual federal budget for elementary and secondary education.

    Reprints

  • Liberal Practicality and the U.S. Left

    “Liberal Practicality and the U.S. Left,” in Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch and John Saville, ed., Socialist Register, 1990: The Retreat of the Intellectuals. (London: Merlin Press, 1990), pp. 265-89.

  • The Uncoupling of the World Order

    “The Uncoupling of the World Order: A Survey of Global Crisis Theories,” in Mark Gottdiener and Nikos Kominos, ed. Capitalist Development and Crisis Theory: Accumulation, Regulation and Spatial Restructuring (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), pp. 99-122.

    In every discussion of the current global crisis one single fact eclipses all others – the demise of undisputed US hegemony within the world hierarchy of nation states. Despite differing al political persuasions, there seems to be widespread agreement among social scientists that it is only in this context that the chief threats of our time – namely, the heightened conflict between centre and periphery, the international debt crisis, and the drift toward world war – can be properly understood and surmounted.

  • The Age of Restructuring

    “The Age of Restructuring,” in Arthur MacEwan and William K. Tabb, ed. Instability and Change in the International Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), pp. 281-97.