John Bellamy Foster

Category: Translated

  • Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology

    Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology

    “Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology,” (John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 68, no. 5 (October 2016), pp. 1-17.

    The recovery of the ecological-materialist foundations of Karl Marx’s thought, as embodied in his theory of metabolic rift, is redefining both Marxism and ecology in our time, reintegrating the critique of capital with critical natural science. This may seem astonishing to those who were reared on the view that Marx’s ideas were simply a synthesis of German idealism, French utopian socialism, and British political economy. However, such perspectives on classical historical materialism, which prevailed during the previous century, are now giving way to a broader recognition that Marx’s materialist conception of history is inextricably connected to the materialist conception of nature, encompassing not only the critique of political economy, but also the critical appropriation of the natural-scientific revolutions occurring in his day.

    What Georg Lukács called Marx’s “ontology of social being” was rooted in a conception of labor as the metabolism of society and nature. In this view, human-material existence is simultaneously social-historical and natural-ecological. Moreover, any realistic historical understanding required a focus on the complex interconnections and interdependencies associated with human-natural conditions. It was this overall integrated approach that led Marx to define socialism in terms of a process of sustainable human development—understood as the necessity of maintaining the earth for future generations, coupled with the greatest development of human freedom and potential. Socialism thus required that the associated producers rationally regulate the metabolism of nature and society. It is in this context that Marx’s central concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” “social metabolism,” and the metabolic “rift” have come to define his critical-ecological worldview.

    Translation:

    Spanish translation in Derrota y Navegación, November 13, 2016

  • Marxism and Ecology

    Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts on a Great Transition,” Monthly Review, vol. 67, no. 7 (Deember 2015), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-07-2015-11_1
    This article was originally published (along with comments on it by nine other authors, including MR contributors David Barkin, Hannah Holleman, and Fred Magdoff) on the Great Transition Initiative website in October 2015: http://greattransition.org/publication/marxism-and-ecology.
    To link Marxism and ecological transition may seem at first like trying to bridge two entirely different movements and discourses, each with its own history and logic: one having mainly to do with class relations, the other with the relation between humans and the environment. However, historically socialism has influenced the development of ecological thought and practice, while ecology has informed socialist thought and practice. Since the nineteenth century, the relationship between the two has been complex, interdependent, and dialectical.
    Versions and Publishers:
    • Earlier version published online by the Great Transition Initiative, October 19, 2015, 5800 words, greattransition.org. Published along with comments of 750-1000 words by majors scholars, part of the Great Transition Network, and with a response to the comments by the author.
    Translations:
    • Portuguese-language translation forthcoming in O Comuneiro (2016). Portugues-language version also forthcoming in Lutas Sociais (Sao Paulo, 2016).
    • German translation forthcoming in Analyse & Kritik (2016).

     

  • Crossing the River of Fire

    “Crossing the River of Fire: The Liberal Attack on Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything” [PDF] (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first) Monthly Review, vol. 66, no. 9 (February 2015), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-09-2015-02_1

    Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything [argues that the source of the looming crisis from climate change] is not the planet, which operates according to natural laws, but rather the economic and social system in which we live, which treats natural limits as mere barriers to surmount. It is now doing so on a planetary scale, destroying in the process the earth as a place of human habitation.… In the age of climate change, Klein argues, a system based on ever-expanding capital accumulation and exponential economic growth is no longer compatible with human well-being and progress—or even with human survival over the long run.… In this way Klein…signals that she has now, in William Morris’s famous metaphor, crossed “the river of fire” to become a critic of capital as a system.… [This] has led to a host of liberal attacks on This Changes Everything, often couched as criticisms emanating from the left. These establishment criticisms of her work, we will demonstrate, are disingenuous, having little to do with serious confrontation with her analysis. Rather, their primary purpose is to rein in her ideas, bringing them into conformity with received opinion. If that should prove impossible, the next step is to exclude her ideas from the conversation.

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Noticas de Abajo, June 14, 2015.

     

  • Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics

    Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics

    “Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics,” [PDF], with Michael D Yates. Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 6 (November 1, 2014): 1–24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-06-2014-10_1

    Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has it been so apparent that the core capitalist economies are experiencing secular stagnation, characterized by slow growth, rising unemployment and underemployment, and idle productive capacity. Consequently, mainstream economics is finally beginning to recognize the economic stagnation tendency that has long been a focus in these pages, although it has yet to develop a coherent analysis of the phenomenon. Accompanying the long-term decline in the growth trend has been an extraordinary increase in economic inequality, which one of us labeled “The Great Inequality,” and which has recently been dramatized by the publication of French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Taken together, these two realities of deepening stagnation and growing inequality have created a severe crisis for orthodox (or neoclassical) economics.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation by Mustafa Stopped in Alternatif Siyaset (December 2014).

     

  • Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class

    Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class

    “Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class: Beyond the Degradation of Labor,”[PDF],(coauthored with R. Jamil Jonna, Jonna listed first), Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, vol. 26 (2014), pp. 219-36. DOI: 10.1007/s10672-014-9243-4.

    The fortieth anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital is the occasion here for a reassessment of his work as a whole. Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of work is shown to have been only a part of a much larger argument he was developing on the structure of the U.S. working class. Building on his pioneering empirical research into occupational composition, a new empirical assessment of the structural evolution of the U.S. working class over the last four decades is provided, throwing light on current problems of unemployment, underemployment, and socially wasted labor—and the rights of labor.

    Translations:
    • Italian translation (of “Beyond the Degradation of Labor“) in La Sinistra Rivista (January 2015).
    Reprinted/ Revised:

    as “Beyond the Degradation of Labor: Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class,” [PDF] Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 5 (October 2014), pp. 1-24

  • Surveillance Capitalism

    Surveillance Capitalism

    “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age” [PDF] (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 11 (July-August 2014), pp. 1-32. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-03-2014-07_1

    The United States came out of the Second World War as the hegemonic power in the world economy. The war had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression by providing the needed effective demand in the form of endless orders for armaments and troops. Real output rose by 65 percent between 1940 and 1944, and industrial production jumped by 90 percent.

    1, At the immediate end of the war, due to the destruction of the European and Japanese economies, the United States accounted for over 60 percent of world manufacturing output.
    2, The very palpable fear at the top of society as the war came to a close was that of a reversion to the pre-war situation in which domestic demand would be insufficient to absorb the enormous and growing potential economic surplus generated by the production system, thereby leading to a renewed condition of economic stagnation and depression.

    Translations
    • Chinese-language translation in Social Science Abroad, 2015.
    • Spanish language translation by Miguel de Punoenrosto in Sin Permiso (July 2014) http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/index.php?id=7154.
    • French Translation by Miguel de Puñoenrostro in Marx Nangara (February 2015).

     

  • Stagnation and Financialization

    Stagnation and Financialization

    “Stagnation and Financialization: The Nature of the Contradiction” [PDF] (coauthored with Fred Magdoff, Magdoff listed first) Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 1 (May 2014), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-01-2014-05_1

    More than six years after the beginning of the Great Recession in the United States, and nearly five years since it was officially declared over in this country, the core economies of the capitalist world system remain crisis-ridden. The jobs lost in the downturn in the United States have not yet been fully recovered and the economy remains sluggish. In Europe the crisis has hardly abated at all and a number of the peripheral European Union countries are in what can only be called a depression—especially Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The last member of the triad of advanced capitalist centers, Japan, has gone through what have been called two “lost decades” of slow growth and deflation and is attempting once again to jump-start the economy through a combination of devaluation of the yen and deficit spending.

    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Zhou Ying in Young China 6790 (June 2014).

     

  • The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition)

    The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition)

    The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism“The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy,” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 320 pp.

    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. They recognized that Marx’s work was unfinished and itself historically conditioned, and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolving phenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account. Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic) firms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at the center of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such firms accumulated—as a result of their pricing power, massive sales efforts, and other factors—could not be profitably invested back into the economy. Absent any “epoch making innovations” like the automobile or vast new increases in military spending, the result was a general trend toward economic stagnation—a condition that persists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysis was also extended to issues of imperialism, or “accumulation on a world scale,” overlapping with the path-breaking work of Samir Amin in particular.

    John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspective today, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explication of this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporating an analysis of recently discovered “lost” chapters from Monopoly Capital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It also discusses Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis of the financialization of the economy in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, leading up to the Great Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Foster presents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capital theory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in a way that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamant that the deep-seated problems of today’s monopoly-finance capitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcoming the system itself.

    Foster’s book is brilliantly successful elaborating Marxian political economy and the tendency of monopoly-finance-imperialist capitalism toward stagnation. The book deserves a wide (re-)readership and a new generation of theorists to appreciate the explanatory power of Marxian political economy.

    —Hans G. Despain, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

    A clear and powerful explanation of the Marxian political economy, this book is a welcome addition for those who are interested in, or have serious concerns about, monopoly capital as well as economic stagnation, financial instability, and the futures of both capitalism and socialism.

    —CHOICE

    Essential reading for those attracted by the monopoly capital school.

    —The Economic Journal

    A clear and forceful elaboration of basic Marxist concepts such as economic surplus, capital accumulation, imperialism, and value.

    —Labour/Le Travail

    A literate defense of the … Marxian analytical framework of Baran, Sweezy, Kalecki, and Steindl …. Foster develops an improved version of Baran and Sweezy’s … model of of accumulation by adding theoretical refinements.

    —Cooperative Economic News Service

    Editions:

    • Second edition (2013), includes new introduction to second edition by author, pp. 22
    • “Introduction to Second Edition” published in Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July-August 2013), pp. 107-34.
    • Japanese language edition, (Tokyo: Uni Agency, 1988).
    Translations:
    • Chinese Translation of “Introduction to Second Edition” forthcoming in Foreign Theoretical Trends.

  • 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.

  • Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature

    Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature

    “Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” [PDF], Monthly Review, vol. 65, no. 7 (December 2013), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-065-07-2013-11_1

    The rediscovery over the last decade and a half of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift has come to be seen by many on the left as offering a powerful critique of the relation between nature and contemporary capitalist society. The result has been the development of a more unified ecological world view transcending the divisions between natural and social science, and allowing us to perceive the concrete ways in which the contradictions of capital accumulation are generating ecological crises and catastrophes.… Yet, this recovery of Marx’s ecological argument has given rise to further questions and criticisms.

    Translations: