John Bellamy Foster

Category: Short Articles

  • ‘No Radical Change in the Model’

    ‘No Radical Change in the Model’

    “No Radical Change in the Model“, foreword to “Brazil Under Lula: An MR Survey,” Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 9 (February 2007), pp. 15-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-09-2007-02_2

    In the 2006 presidential election campaign in Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula), leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT or Workers’ Party), was interviewed at length on July 11, 2006, by the Financial Times (which also interviewed Lula’s main rightist challenger Geraldo Alckmin). The interview touched on many topics but mainly concentrated on Lula’s adherence in his first term of office to the global neoliberal policies of monopoly-finance capital, particularly repayment of debt and “fiscal responsibility.” At two points in the interview the Financial Times bluntly asked whether Lula was looking toward a “radical change in the model,” i.e., whether he and his Workers’ Party intended to break with financial capital and neoliberalism in his second term of office. Lula gave them the answer they wanted: “There is no radical change in the model….What we need now, in economics and in politics, is to strengthen Brazil’s internal and external security.”

     

  • The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class: An Introduction to Selections from Fredrick Engles’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

    “The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class: An Introduction to Selections from Frederick Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,” (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Organization & Environment, vol. 19, no. 3 (September 2006), pp. 375-88. DOI: 10.1177/1086026606292483

    Both urban sociology in general and urban environmental justice studies began with Frederick Engels’s seminal work “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844“. Engels provided a walking tour of the environmental conditions in the manufacturing establishments and slums of the factory towns of England, together with a similar view of London. He addressed conditions of widespread pollution and helped lay the grounds for the development of social epidemiology. He connected this to his “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” that influenced his even more famous collaborator Karl Marx. For Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844″ was to be the first of a series of connected analyses of ecology that stretched through more than half a century and included “The Housing Question” and “Dialectics of Nature,” making him one of the most important but underappreciated contributors to the development of environmental thought.

  • Land, the Color Line and the Quest of the Silver Fleece

    “Land, the Color Line and the Quest of the Silver Fleece: An Introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folkand The Quest of the Silver Fleece (selections),” (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first) Organization and Environment, vol. 16, no. 4 (December 2003), 459-69. DOI: 10.1177/1086026603259095

    Manning Marable (1999) writes that William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) “was without question the most influential black intellectual in American history” (p.v). Even more, he was a citizen of the world, gaining and international stature rarely achieved (Gates, 1903/1989, p. xii). This year is the centennial of The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois, 1903/1989), in which Du Bois famously declared, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (p. xxxi). The color line divides people within the countryside, cities, and the globe. People of color are denied the same opportunities, privileges, and rights as Whites. During a life snapping 95 years, Du Bois’s scholarly work and commitment to activism were unsurpassed. He engaged in critical examinations of social and racial relations within the United States, as well as on the global level, always incorporating a rich historical context for situating his studies.

  • Marx and the Dialectic of Orgainc/Inorganic Relations

    “Marx and the Dialectic of Orgainc/Inorganic Relations: A Rejoinder to Salleh and Clark” [PDF] (coauthored with Paul Burkett, Foster listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 14, no. 4 (December 2001), pp. 451-62. DOI: 10.1177/1086026601144006

    Our article “The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature” (Foster & Burkett, 2000) appeared in Oraganization & Environment exactly a 1 year ago. Our purpose in that article was a very specific one made very clear from the beginning. We were concerned with addressing one of the most persistent and seemingly peretrating criticisms of Marx for his supposed insensitivity to ecological issues, namely, the claim that in referring to nature as “the inorganic body of a man” in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884, a work otherwise known for its ecological values, thus, sinning irredeemable against ecology and no less so against dialectics (Marx, 1974, p. 328).

  • William Stanley Jevons and The Coal Question

    “William Stanley Jevons and The Coal Question: An Introduction to Jevons’ ‘Of the Economy of Fuel‘,’” [PDF] (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 14, no. 1 (March 2001), pp. 93-98. DOI: 10.1177/1086026601141005

    William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) is best known as a British economist who was one of the pioneers of contemporary neoclassical economic analysis, with its subjective value theory rooted in marginal utility. His applied economics and theoretical insights marked new points of departure for later economist who would more fully shape the neoclassical tradition. But Jevons is also remembered as an early contributor to ecological economics and energetics as a result of his pioneering work The Coal Question (1865-1906), Which raised fundamental issues regarding energy efficiency and the economy of fuel (Martinez-Alier, 2987).

  • E. Ray Lankester, Ecological Materialist

    “E. Ray Lankester, Ecological Materialist: Introduction to ‘The Effacement of Nature by Man,” Organization and Environment, vol. 13, no. 2 (June 2000), 233-35. DOI: 10.1177/1086026600132004

    E. Ray Lankester (1847 to 1929) is largely forgotten today—his impor- . tance is only just now being rediscovered. Yet, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Lankester was at the very pinnacle of the British scientific establishment and a well-known, even larger-than-life, public fig- ure. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1993) The Lost World, the central protagonist is a brilliant but bellicose evolutionary biologist and comparative anatomist, Professor Challenger, who was most certainly modeled after Lankester, with whom Doyle was well acquainted. That Doyle had Lankester in mind at the time that he was writ- ing The Lost World cannot be doubted because in introducing the question of van- ished dinosaurs, Challenger refers to “an excellent monograph [Extinct Animals] by my gifted friend Ray Lankester” (Doyle, 1993, p. 35).
    A member of the Royal Society, Lankester was the most famed Darwinian evolutionist in the generation following Darwin and Huxley, and from 1898 to 1907, he was the director of the British Museum of Natural History—a position that stood at the apex of his profession. Lankester had been Thomas Huxley’s protégé, trained to carry on the evolutionary cause. Later, he became a close friend of Karl Marx in the last few years of Marx’s life and was to be one of the mourners at Marx’s funeral. He was also a close friend of H.G. Wells, an admirer of William Morris, and a mentor to J.B.S. Haldane, one of the great scientists of the next generation, central to the development of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Lankester was to gain considerable public fame as an essayist on natural history, in a tradition established by such great scientists as Huxley and Tyndall. It was in this context that he wrote some of the most powerful essays on ecological degradation ever authored—the most important of which is “The Effacement of Nature by Man” (Lankester, 1913, pp. 365- 372), reprinted in this issue.

  • Market Fetishism and the Attack on Social Reason

    “Market Fetishism and the Attack on Social Reason: A Comment on Hayek, Polanyi and Wainwright,” [PDF], Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 6, no. 4 (December 1995), pp. 101-107. DOI:10.1080/10455759509358654

    In an age when the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment is under attack, it is perhaps worth recalling that the arch-conservative economist, Friedrich Hayek, the leading intellectual figure of the free market right, made one of the sharpest attacks ever to be directed at the idea that reason can play a useful role in shaping human affairs. In The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, Hayek writes:

    The basic point of my argument — that morals, including, especially, our institutions of property, freedom, and justice, are not a creation of man’s reason but a distinct second endowment conferred on him by cultural evolution — runs counter to the main intellectual outlook of the twentieth century. The influence of rationalism has indeed been so profound and pervasive that, in general, the more intelligent an educated person is, the more likely he or she now is not only to be a rationalist, but also to hold socialist views (regardless

    of whether he or she is sufficiently doctrinal to attach to his or her views any label, including ‘socialist’). The higher we climb up the ladder of intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are to encounter socialist convictions. Rationalists tend to be intelligent and intellectual; and intelligent intellectuals tend to be socialists….One’s initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminishes when one realizes that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we

    must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilization offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate all remaining undesired features by still more intelligent reflection, and still more appropriate design and “rational coordination” of our undertakings. This leads one to be favorably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism.

  • Crises Lasting for Decades

    “Crises Lasting for Decades,” [PDF] Science & Society, vol. 54, no. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 73-81

    Sometimes a theoretical debate will degenerate into a tower of babel because the participants, without being aware of the fact, are answering not the same question but different questions. It is therefor essential to be clear about what is being asked. In the case of my essay in The Imperiled Economy (Foster, 1987), which Hower Sherman criticizes in a recent article in Science & Society (Sherman, 1989), the question was given in the title: “what is Stagnation?” Moreover, stagnation is distinguished from the business cycle in a sentence that refers to the former as a “trend-line” of slow growth “around which the recurrent fluctuations of the business cycle occur” (Foster, 1987, 59). Similarly, in the other article that Sherman criticizes along with my own – “Power, Accumulation, and Crisis” by Gordon, Weisskopf and Bowles – the authors also make it clear that what they are trying to address at that point is ” the stagnation of the United States economy over the last two decades…” (GWB, 1987, 53).