“The Return of the Dialectics of Nature” (video lecture), Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize, Historical Materialism Coference, London, November 12, 2021, 70 minutes. This is a prerecording of the 2020 Deutscher Prize Lecture by John Bellamy Foster. The title of the lecture is: “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: Marxian Ecology and the Struggle […]
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Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming 2022), 693 pp. Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale […]
The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift
Consists of eleven chapters mostly based on articles previously published in Monthly Review 2016-2018, all developed around a central theme and developed into an argument in book form. Nine of the articles/chapters have been previously published, two will first appear in this book. Seven of the chapters in the book were written (or are being written) by […]
The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology
The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, New York: Monthly Review Press. Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Natureintroduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist […]
Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce
Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality—as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to […]
The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran’s death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from […]
Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique
A decade and a half ago John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett introduced a new, revolutionary understanding of the ecological foundations of Marx’s thought, demonstrating that Marx’s concepts of the universal metabolism of nature, social metabolism, and metabolic rift prefigured much of modern systems ecology. Ecological relations were shown to be central to Marx’s critique […]
The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition)
In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital, a monumental work of economic theory and social criticism that sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of their time. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, influenced generations of radical and heterodox economists. […]
The Endless Crisis
The days of boom and bubble are over, and the time has come to understand the long-term economic reality. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, hopes for a new phase of rapid economic expansion were quickly dashed. Instead, growth has been slow, unemployment has remained high, wages and benefits have seen little […]
What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism
What Every Environmentalist Needs To Know about Capitalism tackles the two largest issues of our time, the ecological crisis and the faltering capitalist economy, in a way that is thorough, accessible, and sure to provoke debate in the environmental movement.