Category: Translated

  • Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

    Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

    Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism“, Monthly Review vol. 60, no. 6 (November 2008), pp.1-12. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-06-2008-10_1

    The transition from capitalism to socialism is the most difficult problem of socialist theory and practice. To add to this the question of ecology might therefore be seen as unnecessarily complicating an already intractable issue. I shall argue here, however, that the human relation to nature lies at the heart of the transition to socialism. An ecological perspective is pivotal to our understanding of capitalism’s limits, the failures of the early socialist experiments, and the overall struggle for egalitarian and sustainable human development.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted in abridged form, Briarpatch magazine, 2009.
    Translations:

     

  • Postscript to “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis” (Monthly Review, April 2008)

    Postscript to ‘The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis’ (Monthly Review, April 2008),” MRzine, October 25, 2008.

    Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis — the roots of which were explained in this article.   Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world.  We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history of capitalism.  More than a mere financial panic, what is taking place is a major devaluation of capital of still undetermined dimensions.  Marx explained that capital was invariably over-extended in a boom and that in the crisis that followed a part of that capital was devalued, enabling the rest to return to profitability and to the process of accumulation and expansion.  However, we are now to some extent in uncharted territory: a phase of monopoly-finance capital that is in many ways unprecedented.  Even at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes explained that after a crisis modern capitalism might return to profitability without a return to full employment, full utilization of existing capacity, and strong growth.  Our experience of the last half-century has shown that capitalism at its core was able to avoid stagnation only by vast military expenditures and, when that proved insufficient, by an enormous inflation of asset values and speculation, i.e. “financialization.”  This growth multiplied by the boom psychology on the way up (the “wealth effect”) turned out to also have a contracting multiplier effect on the way down.  These factors help to explain why the economic crisis in the real economy is so severe at present, and why there is no chance of an immediate restarting of the growth process.

    Many people first woke up to the seriousness of the crisis only on September 18, 2008, when U.S. Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson told Congress that the U.S. financial sector was within days of a complete meltdown and that a $700 billion bailout for the banks was urgently needed.  Since then (and indeed even before) vast amounts of government dollars have been poured into the financial structure (all told the financial exposure of the U.S. government alone in the entire crisis has exceeded $5 trillion at this writing), including direct injection of capital into major banks and partial nationalizations.1  Yet, still there is little sign of the crisis abating.  Insolvency is spreading through the economy from consumers to banks, to non-financial firms, back to consumers, in a vicious cycle.  The fact that the economy in recent decades was being lifted mainly by financialization makes the problem all that much more severe.

    The entire world economy is now affected.  Already one economy in the European sphere itself — Iceland — has experienced a meltdown, requiring rescue from outside, and some have called Iceland the “canary in the coalmine.”  Over this last neoliberal epoch, the United States and its European allies have forced upon the entire globe a model of the free flow of capital across borders.  The result today is the free flow of catastrophe.  Only by the imposition, first, of capital controls and the establishment, second, of non-market based “South-South” cooperation can “emerging” economies avoid becoming the worse victims of the crash.

    In these dire economic circumstances we should of course be careful not to fall into an exaggerated frame of mind.  It is important to remember that a breakdown of capitalism as a whole will not occur by mere economics alone.  Given time to work things out on its own terms the system will no doubt recover — though a full recovery could be many years away, if possible at all.

    The real historical issue before us is to what extent the world’s population is willing to wait for this crisis to be resolved on capitalist terms, so that the whole irrational process of exploitation and boom and bust can gain steam again — or whether they shall decide to insert themselves into the process to say Enough!  It is thispolitical insertion from below that the powers that be most fear.  From their Olympian position at the top of the system they know perhaps better than anyone else that the conditions exist for the possible renewal of socialism on a global scale.  Capitalism has reached its limits as a progressive force and its famous “creative destruction” has turned into a destructive creativity in which both the world’s people and the planet are now in jeopardy.  Indeed, for the world’s population and the earth taken a whole there is today no real alternative — to socialism.

    Translations:

    Spanish translation by Corporación Viva la Ciudadanía posted by the Instituto de Estudios Ecologistas del Tercer Mundo, http://www.estudiosecologistas.org/.

  • The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending

    The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending

    The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending“, (coauthored with Hannah Holleman and Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 5 (October 2008), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-05-2008-09_1

    Note: due to an unfortunate error in the publication of the Turkish edition, in which the bylines of two different articles were confused, the authors are mistakenly listed as Richard York, Brett Clark, and John Bellamy Foster.

    The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post–Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. national defense spending has increased by almost 60 percent in real dollar terms to a level in 2007 of $553 billion. This is higher than at any point since the Second World War (though lower than previous decades as a percentage of GDP). Based on such official figures, the United States is reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as accounting for 45 percent of world military expenditures. Yet, so gargantuan and labyrinthine are U.S. military expenditures that the above grossly understates their true magnitude, which, as we shall see below, reached $1 trillion in 2007.

    Translations:
    • Bangla translation in Natun Diganta (a Bangla quarterly from Dhaka), July-September 2009.
    • Translated by Farooque Chowdhury. Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (Istanbul: Kalkeodon), no. 22, pp. 7-28.

     

  • Marx’s Critique of Heaven and Earth

    Marx’s Critique of Heaven and Earth

    Marx’s Critique of Heaven and Earth“, Monthly Review vol. 60, no. 5 (October 2008), pp. 22-42. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-05-2008-09_3

    In recent years the intelligent design movement, or creationism in a more subtle guise, has expanded the attack on the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools, while promoting an ambitious “Wedge strategy” aimed at transforming both science and culture throughout society. As explained in our book Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2008), this has reignited a 2,500-year debate between materialism and creationism, science and design. The argument from design (the attempt to discern evidence of design in nature, thereby the existence of a Designer) can be dated back to Socrates in the fifth century BCE. While the opposing materialist view (that the world is explained in terms of itself, by reference to material conditions, natural laws, and contingent, emergent phenomena, and not by the invocation of the supernatural) to which Socrates was responding also dates back to the fifth century BCE in the writings of the atomists Leucippus and Democritus. The latter perspective was developed philosophically into a full-fledged critique of design by Epicurus in the third century BCE, which later influenced the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 22 (Istanbul: Kalkedon), pp. 109-32.

     

  • 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.
  • Ecology

    Ecology

    Ecology: The Moment of Truth—An Introduction“, (coauthored with Brett Clark and Richard York, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 3 (July 2008), pp. 1-11. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-03-2008-07_1

    It is impossible to exaggerate the environmental problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Nearly fifteen years ago one of us observed: “We have only four decades left in which to gain control over our major environmental problems if we are to avoid irreversible ecological decline.” Today, with a quarter-century still remaining in this projected time line, it appears to have been too optimistic. Available evidence now strongly suggests that under a regime of business as usual we could be facing an irrevocable “tipping point” with respect to climate change within a mere decade. Other crises such as species extinction (percentages of bird, mammal, and fish species “vulnerable or in immediate danger of extinction” are “now measured in double digits”);3 the rapid depletion of the oceans’ bounty; desertification; deforestation; air pollution; water shortages/pollution; soil degradation; the imminent peaking of world oil production (creating new geopolitical tensions); and a chronic world food crisis—all point to the fact that the planet as we know it and its ecosystems are stretched to the breaking point. The moment of truth for the earth and human civilization has arrived.

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Biblioteca Virtual Umegalfa, February 2014
    • Chinese translation by Dong Hui, in Seeking Truth (China), no. 5, 2009
    • Portuguese translation in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition (Brazil), July 2009.

     

  • Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism

    Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism

    Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism“, Monthly Review vol.60, no. 3 (July 2008), pp. 12-33. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-03-2008-07_2

    The rise in overt militarism and imperialism at the outset of the twenty-first century can plausibly be attributed largely to attempts by the dominant interests of the world economy to gain control over diminishing world oil supplies. Beginning in 1998 a series of strategic energy initiatives were launched in national security circles in the United States in response to: (1) the crossing of the 50 percent threshold in U.S. importation of foreign oil; (2) the disappearance of spare world oil production capacity; (3) concentration of an increasing percentage of all remaining conventional oil resources in the Persian Gulf; and (4) looming fears of peak oil.

    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Mao Jiaqiang and Xing Yingli, Foreign Theoretical Trends (China)no. 12, 2008.
    • Norwegian translation in Ødeleggelsens Økonomi (Tidsskrifter Rødt!, 2008), 75-99.
    • Portuguese translation in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition (Brazil), July 2009.
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (December 2008).
    • Translated by Farooque Chowdhury; Turkish translation in Monthly ReviewTurkish edition, no. 19 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2008).

     

  • Sweezy in Perspective

    Sweezy in Perspective

    Sweezy in Perspective“, Monthly Review vol. 60, no. 1 (May 2008), pp. 45-49. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-01-2008-05_4

    Paul M. Sweezy was, in the words of his contemporary John Kenneth Galbraith, “the most distinguished of present-day American Marxists.” A Harvard-trained economist, his writings spanned some seven decades from the early 1930s to the closing years of the twentieth century. For more than half a century he was coeditor of Monthly Review, subtitled An Independent Socialist Magazine, which he founded along with Leo Huberman in 1949. Although first and foremost an economist, Sweezy was also a social scientist in a much broader sense. His impact on political science, sociology, history, and other disciplines was profound. He took the entire globe as his field of analysis, helping to enlarge our understanding of imperialism and of the necessity of revolution, particularly in the third world.

    Translations:
    • Portuguese translation of this piece published in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition, 2008.

     

  • “Foreword” to Paul M. Sweezy, Globalization is Nothing New; Selected Essays

    “Foreword” to Paul M. Sweezy, Globalization is Nothing New; Selected Essays in Bengali (Dhaka, Bangladesh: Shrabon Prokoshani, 2008).

    English version published as “Sweezy in Perspective,” Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 1 (May 2008), pp. 45-49.

    Translation(s):
    • Portuguese translation of this piece published in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition, 2008.
  • The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis

    The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis

    The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis“, Monthly Review vol. 59, no. 11 (April 2008), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-059-11-2008-04_1

    With the benefit of hindsight, few now doubt that the housing bubble that induced most of the recent growth of the U.S. economy was bound to burst or that a general financial crisis and a global economic slowdown were to be the unavoidable results. Warning signs were evident for years to all of those not taken in by the new financial alchemy of high-risk debt management, and not blinded, as was much of the corporate world, by huge speculative profits. This can be seen in a series of articles that appeared in this space: “The Household Debt Bubble” (May 2006), “The Explosion of Debt and Speculation” (November 2006), “Monopoly-Finance Capital” (December 2006), and “The Financialization of Capitalism” (April 2007).

    Translations:
    • Polish translation in Le Monde Diplomatique, Polish Edition (July 2008), http://monde-diplomatique.pl/LMD29/.
    • Chinese translation Wu Wei in Marxism and Reality (China), no. 4, 2008.
    • Turkish translation by Özkan Özgur, http:///www.toplumsalbilinc.org, October 22, 2008.
    • Portuguese translation in Resistir.info, http://resistir.info, 2008.
    • Spanish translation in Sin Permiso, issue 4 (December 2008).