Allan Schnaiberg’s “treadmill of production” model has formed the single most influential framework of analysis within environmental sociology in the United States. Schnaiberg’s work is often characterized as “neo-Marxist,” but its actual relation to Marxian political economy has been left obscure. The following article examines Marx’s treatment of the treadmill as the crudest historical expression […]
Empire of Barbarism
By John Bellamy Foster on December 1, 2004 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
“A new age of barbarism is upon us.” These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, […]
Ecology, Capitalism, and the Socialization of Nature
DENNIS SORON: Many environmentalists came away from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 with a great deal of optimism, believing that the cause of global environmental reform had finally been seriously placed on the political agenda. Today, with environmental conditions continuing to worsen and governments refusing to take effective action, it seems that little of […]
The Commitment of an Intellectual
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2004 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The following brief intellectual biography of Paul Sweezy was drafted in September 2003 shortly before I saw Paul for the last time. It conveys many of the basic facts of his life. But as with all biographies of leading intellectuals it fails to capture the brilliance of his work, which must be experienced directly through […]
Political Economy and the Environmental Crisis: Introduction to Special Issue
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2004 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints, Contributions, Introductions
According to Frederick Buell (2003) in his book ‘From Apocalypse to Way of Life’, perceptions of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s were both narrower in scope and more apocalyptic (usually Malthusian) in tone than those of today. Rather than diminishing, the problem of the environment has only expanded in the years since Rachel […]
The American Empire
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2004 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
On June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C., in which he declared that the peace that the United States sought was “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” His remarks were a response to criticisms of the United States […]
Pox Americana
This volume brings together the work of leading Marxist analysts of imperialism to examine the burning question of our time—the nature and prospects of the U.S. imperial project currently being given shape by war and occupation in the Middle East.
China and Socialism
We depart this year from our usual practice for MR’s July–August double issue. Instead of a collection of articles on a common theme, we are devoting the issue to a single manuscript—a study of China and economic development theory by Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett that was published in book form by Monthly Review Press. […]
Ecological Economics and Classical Marxism
This introduction to “Socialism and the Unity of Physical Forces” reassesses Sergei Podolinsky’s place in the history of ecological economics together with Marx and Engels’s reaction to Podolinsky’s work. The authors show that contrary to conventional wisdom, Podolinsky did not establish a plausible thermodynamic basis for the labor theory of value that could have been […]
Ecological Imperialism
“Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” (coauthored with Brett Clark), In Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, ed., The Socialist Register, 2004 (London: Merlin Press, 2004), pp. 230-46. Translations: Catalan translation in Corrent Roig, June 6, 2010, http://www.correntroig.org. Spanish translation in El Nuevo Desafío Imperial: Socialist Register 2004 (Clasco, February 2005). Portugese translation in O Novo Desafio […]
