The great financial crisis of 2007–9 has given rise to a small industry of academic studies, some directed at the wider systemic tendencies of capital, class and crisis, others at narrower regulatory or managerial issues. Cornelia Woll’s The Power of Inaction is a work of the latter kind. It is a study of the state-finance […]
Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis
Soviet ecology presents us with an extraordinary set of historical ironies. On the one hand, the USSR in the 1930s and ’40s violently purged many of its leading ecological thinkers and seriously degraded its environment in the quest for rapid industrial expansion. The end result has often been described as a kind of “ecocide,” symbolized […]
The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left
On September 21, 2014, the largest climate march in U.S. history took place in New York City, as more than 300,000 protestors signaled to UN delegates arriving for climate talks that more desperate measures were needed to protect humanity and other species. The massive demonstration, though representing a wide array of social and political viewpoints, […]
Chávez and the Communal State
On October 20, 2012, less than two weeks after being reelected to his fourth term as Venezuelan president and only months before his death, Hugo Chávez delivered his crucial El Golpe de Timón (“Strike at the Helm”) speech to the first meeting of his ministers in the new revolutionary cycle. Chávez surprised even some of […]
Crossing the River of Fire
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2015 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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, […]
“Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control
“Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming December 2014), 15 pp. Reprinted as “Mészáros and the Critique of the Capital System,” Monthly Review 66, no. 7: 1-15.
Mathusianism
“Mathusianism” in Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch Des Marximus, 7/II ((Berlin: Argument-Verlag, forthcoming 2015). 3500 words.
“Foreword” to Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature
“Foreword” to Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 7-13. Reprinted as “Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature Fifteen Years After,” Monthly Review, vol. 66, no. 7 (December 2014), pp. 56-62.
Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics
By John Bellamy Foster on November 1, 2014 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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, […]
Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class
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 […]
