Tag: Brett Clark

  • Capitalism in Wonderland

    Capitalism in Wonderland

    Capitalism in Wonderland” [PDF], (coauthored with Richard York and Brett Clark, Foster listed third), Monthly Review vol. 61, no. 1 (May 2009), pp. 1-18. DOI: 10.14452/MR-061-01-2009-05_1

    In a recent essay, “Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution,” in one of the leading scientific journals, Nature, physicist Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, a researcher for an investment management company, asked rhetorically, “What is the flagship achievement of economics?” Bouchaud’s answer: “Only its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises.” Although his discussion is focused on the current worldwide financial crisis, his comment applies equally well to mainstream economic approaches to the environment—where, for example, ancient forests are seen as non-performing assets to be liquidated, and clean air and water are luxury goods for the affluent to purchase at their discretion. The field of economics in the United States has long been dominated by thinkers who unquestioningly accept the capitalist status quo and, accordingly, value the natural world only in terms of how much short-term profit can be generated by its exploitation. As a result, the inability of received economics to cope with or even perceive the global ecological crisis is alarming in its scope and implications.

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Herramienta 3 (Argentina, November 2010), http://www.herramienta.com.ar.
    • Chinese translation by Xia Yong, Marxism and Reality (China), no. 5, 2009.
    • Russian translation in Vpered, July 6, 2009, vpered.org.ru.
    • Turkish translation in Monthly ReviewTurkish edition, no. 21 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2009), pp. 7-25.

     

  • The Ecological Revolution

    The Ecological Revolution

    The Ecological RevolutionThe Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet,” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 319 pp.

    Awards:

    • Winner of the Greald L. Young Book Award of the Society for Human Ecology, 2010.

    Editions:

    • Edited French-language editon, entitled Marx Écologiste. Amsterdam Press, 2011, includes chapters 8-11.

    Translations:

    • German translation Hamburg: Laika-Verlag, 2012.
    • Bangla translation being published in India by Cornerstone Books, Kharagpur.
    • Final chapter reprinted in Briarpatch magazine, July/August 2009.
    • Korean translation being translated by Dae-Han Song for the Korean Alliance of Progressive Movements.
    • Chinese translation forthcoming from Renmin Press.

    Since the atomic bomb made its first appearance on the world stage in 1945, it has been clear that we possess the power to destroy our own planet. What nuclear weapons made possible, global environmental crisis, marked especially by global warming, has now made inevitable—if business as usual continues.

    The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital’s rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet. Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe, especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most ambitious experiments are taking place.

    This bold new work addresses the central issues of the present crisis: global warming, peak oil, species extinction, world water shortages, global hunger, alternative energy sources, sustainable development, and environmental justice. Foster draws on a unique range of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, William Morris, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Vandana Shiva, and István Mészáros. The result is a startlingly radical synthesis, which offers new hope for grappling with the greatest challenge of our age: what must be done to save the earth for humanity and all living species.

    Reviews:

    In this time of growing ecological and economic crisis, John Bellamy Foster’s voice stands out like no other. In his new book, The Ecological Revolution, he demonstrates that questions of ecology cannot be separated from questions of economics, and that building a truly sustainable future means putting people and the planet before profit.

    —Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

    Foster is the most systematic thinker on red-green politics writing today—and he is quite clear about What is to be done! In these essays, he applies Marx’s theory of metabolic rift to elucidate a variety of contexts—the Pentagon’s pursuit of oil, neoliberalism and the Jo’burg Manifesto, the poverty of contemporary sociology, imperialism and ecological debt, critique of the New Sustainability Paradigm—all the while keeping his synthesis of historical scholarship, natural scientific detail, and Marxist theory readily accessible to a wide readership. Here is reason and discipline driven by passion and care.

    —Ariel Salleh, Research Associate in Political Economy, at the University of Sydney

    Author of Ecofeminism as Politics, Editor of Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice, and Co-editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism

    In The Ecological Revolution, John Bellamy Foster rightly shows the inadequacy of the technological approaches to which the capitalist response to the ecological crisis is limited, raising the question of a wider revolution in ecology and community. In the process he puts to rest the widely held assumption that Marx and Marxists have little to contribute on the ecological crisis. His book demonstrates that Marx addressed the ecological issues with keen insight and that the historical materialist ecological tradition is alive and relevant today.

    —John B. Cobb, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology

    Co-author with Herman Daly of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, The Environment, and a Sustainable Future

    For fifteen years, in the books The Vulnerable Planet, Marx’s Ecology, and Ecology Against Capitalism, Foster has warned us of capitalist ecological catastrophe. With accessibility, grace, and a powerful intellectual punch, this new collection tackles the neoconservative petro-military complex of the Bush years sandwiched between Clinton-Gore-Obama’s pernicious eco-neoliberalism. Foster’s searing denunciations of environmental commodification give us confidence to fight bourgeois economic ideology—from the likes of Thomas Friedman, William Nordhaus, Larry Summers, and Nick Stern—and to demand an eco-socialist future.

    —Patrick Bond, senior professor of development studies

    University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

    This book is a major achievement. It combines enormous breadth of scholarship with consummate theoretical integration to produce a powerful political argument. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about the future of humanity and the planet – that is, everyone!

    —Ted Benton, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

  • Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift

    Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift: Unequal Exchange and the Guano/Nitrates Trade,” (coauthored with Brett Clark (Clark listed first), International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 50, no. 3-4 (2009), pp. 311-34.
    DOI10.1177/0020715209105144

    The concept of ecological imperialism is seemingly unavoidable in our time. Obvious cases are all around us. One is the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which is at least partly over oil. Instances of ecological imperialism do not, however, stop with Iraq. Whether it is the renewed scramble for Africa, the flooding of the global commons with carbon dioxide, or biopiracy aimed at Third World germplasm, ecological imperialism is operating within a global economy predicated on accumulation. While the appropriation of resources from distant lands has taken place throughout human history, the origins and ongoing growth of capitalism are dependent upon further ecological exploitation and ecological unequal exchange.

  • Critique of Intelligent Design

    Critique of Intelligent Design

    Buy at Monthly Review Press

    Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present,” (co-authored with Brett Clark and Richard York, Foster listed first, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 240 pp.

    Critique of Intelligent Design is a direct reply to the criticisms of intelligent design proponents and a compelling account of the long debate between materialism and religion in the West. It provides an overview of the contemporary fight concerning nature, science, history, morality, and knowledge. Separate chapters are devoted to the design debate in antiquity, the Enlightenment and natural theology, Marx, Darwin, and Freud, and to current scientific debates over evolution and design. It offers empowering tools to understand and defend critical and scientific reasoning in both the natural and social sciences and society as a whole.

    Reprints:

    • Reprint of chapter 5, “Marx’s Critique of Heaven and Critique of Earth,” Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 5 (October 2008), pp. 22-42; Chapter 5.
    Translations:
    •  Arabic translations in Civilized Dialogue, issue 2498 (December 17, 2008), http://www.ahewar.org/ and Free Thought, March 3, 2010.
  • The Sociology of Ecology

    The Sociology of Ecology: Ecological Organicism versus Ecosystem Ecology in the Social Construction of Ecological Science, 1926-1935” [PDF], (coauthored with Brett Clark (Foster listed first), Organization & Environment, vol. 21, no. 3 (September 2008), pp. 311-52. DOI10.1177/1086026608321632

    Environmental sociology has been divided in recent years by a debate between realists and constructionists centering on the knowledge claims of ecological science. Following a consid- eration of this debate and its relation to both environmental sociology and the “sociology of ecology,” a “realist constructionism” is advanced, taking as its concrete case the conflict in the 1920s and 1930s between Jan Christian Smuts’s organicist ecology and Arthur Tansley’s ecosystem ecology. A central analytical issue (derived from Marx and Engels) is the “double transfer” of ideas from society to nature and back again and how this was manifested in the early 20th-century ecology in the form of a justification for ecological racism/apartheid.

  • 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.

     

  • Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique

    Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique

    Rachel Carson’s Ecological Critique“, (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 59, no. 9 (February 2008), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-059-09-2008-02_1

    Rachel Carson was born just over 100 years ago in 1907. Her most famous book Silent Spring, published in 1962, is often seen as marking the birth of the modern environmental movement. Although an immense amount has been written about Carson and her work, the fact that she was objectively a “woman of the left” has often been downplayed. Today the rapidly accelerating planetary ecological crisis, which she more than anyone else alerted us to, calls for an exploration of the full critical nature of her thought and its relation to the larger revolt within science with which she was associated.

    Translations:
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, no. 3 (July 2008).
    • Translated by Protiva Mondol; Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 19 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2008), pp. 165-82

     

  • The Critique of Intelligent Design

    The Critique of Intelligent Design: Epicurus, Marx, Darwin and Freud and the Materialist Defense of Science,” [PDF], (coauthored with Brett Clark and Richard York, Foster listed second), Theory and Society, vol. 36 (December 2007), pp. 515. DOI: 10.1007/s11186-007-9046-9.

    A new version of the age-old controversy between religion and science has been launched by today’s intelligent design movement. Although ostensibly concerned simply with combating Darwinism, this new creationism seeks to drive a “wedge” into the materialist view of the world, originating with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and manifested in modern times by Darwin, Marx, and Freud.

  • The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class: An Introduction to Selections from Fredrick Engles’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

    The Environmental Conditions of the Working Class: An Introduction to Selections from Frederick Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,” (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Organization & Environment, vol. 19, no. 3 (September 2006), pp. 375-88. DOI10.1177/1086026606292483

    Both urban sociology in general and urban environmental justice studies began with Frederick Engels’s seminal work “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844“. Engels provided a walking tour of the environmental conditions in the manufacturing establishments and slums of the factory towns of England, together with a similar view of London. He addressed conditions of widespread pollution and helped lay the grounds for the development of social epidemiology. He connected this to his “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” that influenced his even more famous collaborator Karl Marx. For Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844″ was to be the first of a series of connected analyses of ecology that stretched through more than half a century and included “The Housing Question” and Dialectics of Nature,” making him one of the most important but underappreciated contributors to the development of environmental thought.

  • Empire of Barbarism

    Empire of Barbarism

    Empire of Barbarism,” coauthored with Brett Clark (Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 56, no. 7 (December 2004), pp. 1-15. DOI: 10.14452/MR-056-07-2004-11_1

    “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, and Nepalese workers in Iraq, and the killing of hundreds on a Spanish commuter train and hundreds more in Bali, Business Week declared: “America, Europe, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and governments everywhere are under attack by Islamic extremists. These terrorists have but one demand—the destruction of modern secular society.” Western civilization was portrayed as standing in opposition to the barbarians, who desire to destroy what is assumed to be the pinnacle of social evolution.

    Translations:
    • Original published version appeared in Portuguese translation in Commnicações, vol. 1, Civilização ou Barbárie (Serpa, Portugal: Encontro Internacional, September 2004), pp. 46-53.
    • German translation in Utopiekreativ: Diskussion Sozialistischer Alternativen, June 2005, vol. 176, 491-503;
    • Spanish translation in Marx Ahora (Cuba), no. 19 (2005), 7-19.
    • Polish translation in Rewolucja, no. 4, 2006.
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 9 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2006).
    • Japanese translation, February 1, 2005, at http://www.ne.jp/asahi/institute/association/old/newsletter/20050201/article_2.htm.