A striking paradox animates political economy in our times. On the one hand, mainstream economics and much of left economics discuss our era as one of intense and increased competition among businesses, now on a global scale. It is a matter so self-evident as no longer to require empirical verification or scholarly examination. On the […]
The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism
By John Bellamy Foster on March 1, 2011 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The United States and the world are now a good two decades into the Internet revolution, or what was once called the information age. The past generation has seen a blizzard of mind-boggling developments in communication, ranging from the World Wide Web and broadband, to ubiquitous cell phones that are quickly becoming high-powered wireless computers […]
Advertising and the Genius of Commercial Propaganda
“Advertising and the Genius of Commercial Propaganda” (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Inger L. Stole, and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed third), in Gerald Sussman, ed., The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 27-44.
Capitalism and Degrowth
By John Bellamy Foster on January 1, 2011 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
[A]lmost four decades after the Club of Rome raised the issue of “the limits to growth,” the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a formidable challenge. What is known as “degrowth economics,” associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with […]
Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency
By John Bellamy Foster on November 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The curse of energy efficiency, better known as the Jevons Paradox—the idea that increased energy (and material-resource) efficiency leads not to conservation but increased use—was first raised by William Stanley Jevons in the nineteenth century. Although forgotten for most of the twentieth century, the Jevons Paradox has been rediscovered in recent decades and stands squarely […]
The Ecological Rift
Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the […]
The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2010 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints
The Great Financial Crisis began in the summer of 2007 and three years later, despite a putative “recovery,” it is still having profound effects in the United States, Europe, and in much of the world.
The Financialization of Accumulation
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
In 1997, in his last published article, Paul Sweezy referred to “the financialization of the capital accumulation process” as one of the three main economic tendencies at the turn of the century (the other two were the growth of monopoly power and stagnation). Those familiar with economic theory will realize that the phrase was meant […]
The Ecology of Consumption
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Environmentalists, especially in wealthy countries, have often approached the question of environmental sustainability by stressing population and technology, while deemphasizing the middle term in the well-known IPAT (environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology) formula. The reasons for this are not difficult to see. Within capitalist society, there has always been a tendency to […]
The Dialectic of Social and Ecological Metabolism
One of the most remarkable aspects of Marxist scholarship in recent decades has been the recovery and development of Marx’s argument on social and ecological metabolism, which was crucial to his metabolic terms. As he wrote in Capital: “Labour is … a process between man and nature, a process by which man … mediates, regulates […]
