John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Coauthored

Has coauthors

  • Henry Salt, Socialist Animal Rights Advocate: An Introduction to Salt’s ‘A Lover of Animals

    “Henry Salt, Socialist Animal Rights Advocate: An Introduction to Salt’s ‘A Lover of Animals,” [PDF], (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 13, no. 4 (December 2000), pp. 487-92.

    Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) remains largely unknown today, despite his central role in social and humanitarian movements throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Salt is briefly mentioned in passing when discussing the history of animal rights activism, but serious consideration of his philosophical position has not been conducted. General interpretations of Salt often recognize that he was a socialist, and animal rights are seen as an additional interest of his. Likewise, animal rights advocates view him as an animal rights activist who happened to be a socialist. But for Salt, these positions were not separable. A philosophical understanding of materialism provided the foundation for Salt’s commitment to a wide range of humanitarian causes.

  • Hungry for Profit

    Hungry for Profit

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    “Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Food Farmers and the Environment,” (co-edited with Fred Magdoff and Fred Buttel (Foster listed second) (NewYork: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Revised and expanded version of July-August 1998 issue of Monthly Review. (Contains two essays co-authored by Foster.)

    The agribusiness/food sector is the second most profitable industry in the United States — following pharmaceuticals — with annual sales over $400 billion. Contributing to its profitability are the breathtaking strides in biotechnology coupled with the growing concentration of ownership and control by food’s largest corporations. Everything, from decisions on which foods are produced, to how they are processed, distributed, and marketed is, remarkably, dictated by a select few giants wielding enormous power. More and more farmers are forced to adopt new technologies and strategies with consequences potentially harmful to the environment, our health, and the quality of our lives. The role played by trade institutions like the World Trade Organization, serves only to make matters worse.

    Through it all, the paradox of capitalist agriculture persists: ever-greater numbers remain hungry and malnourished despite an increase in world food supplies and the perpetuation of food overproduction.

     

    Editions:

    • Japanese edition, (Tokyo, Otsuki Shoten, 2004).

     

  • Introduction to the Hungry for Profit Issue

    Introduction to the Hungry for Profit Issue

    “Introduction to the Hungry for Profit Issue,” [PDF] (John Bellamy Foster, Fred Magdoff and Frederick H. Buttel) Monthly Review, vol. 50, no. 3 (July 1998), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-050-03-1998-07_1

    The conventional view that agriculture was displaced by industry in two stages—by the industrial revolution in the late ninteenth century, and as a result of the rise of the agribusiness system in the mid-twentieth century—has left many observers of the contemporary political economy with the impression that to deal with agriculture is essentially to focus on political-economic history rather than contemporary political economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The purpose of this special issue of MR is to help compensate for the neglect that agriculture has often suffered in political-economic literature of the late twentieth century. In so doing we will continue with a line of argument that was introduced in MR more than a decade ago in the July-August 1986 special issue Science, Technology, and Capitalism, edited by Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, which included landmark essays on U.S. agriculture and agricultural research by Richard Lewontin and Jean-Pierre Berlan.

     

  • Liebig, Marx and the Depletion of the Natural Fertility of the Soil

    “Liebig, Marx and the Depletion of the Natural Fertility of the Soil: Implications for Sustainable Agriculture,” (co-authored with Fred Magdoff, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 50, no. 3 (July 1998), pp. 32-45. DOI: 10.14452/MR-050-03-1998-07_3

    During the period 1830-1870 the depletion of the natural fertility of the soil through the loss of soil nutrients was the central ecological concern of capitalist society in both Europe and North America (only comparable to concerns over the loss of forests, the growing pollution of the cities, and the Malthusian specter of overpopulation). This period saw the growth of “guano imperialism” as nations scoured the globe for natural fertilizers; the emergence of modem soil science; the gradual introduction of synthetic fertilizers; and the formation of radical proposal for the development of a sustainable agriculture, aimed ultimately at the elimination of the antagonism between town and country.

     

  • Introduction to the Archives of Organizational and Environmental Literature

    “Introduction to Archives of Organizational and Environmental Literature” [PDF], (co-authored with John M. Jermier, Foster listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 11, no. 1 (March 1998), pp. 80-81. DOI: 10.1177/0921810698111004

    With this issue, we are introducing and new feature section of O&E entitled Archives of Organizational and Environmental Literature. Consciousness of environmental degradation stretches back over millennia; concern about ecological imperialism associated with the growth of the capitalist world economy dates back five centuries; and alarm arising from the environmental effects of machine capitalism can be traced back to the industrial revolution in England two centuries ago. Over the course of history, many inportant insights into organization and environment, often of a theoretical nature, have emerged—only to be forgotten later on. Once forgotten, these important contributions have also become in many cases inaccessible— so that it is difficult to rediscover what has been lost.

  • Capitalism in the Information Age

    Capitalism in the Information Age

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    “Capitalism in the Information Age,” (co-edited with Robert McChesney and Ellen Meiksins Wood (Foster listed third) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 254 pp.
     Expanded version of July-August 1996 issue of Monthly Review. (Contains one essay co-authored by Foster.)

    Not a day goes by that we don’t see a news clip, hear a radio report, or read an article heralding the miraculous new technologies of the information age. The communication revolution associated with these technologies is often heralded as the key to a new age of “globalization.” How is all of this reshaping the labor force, transforming communications, changing the potential for democracy, and altering the course of history itself? Capitalism and the Information Age presents a rigorous examination of some of the most crucial problems and possibilities of these novel technologies. Taken together, the essays reveal how the new information technologies have been grafted onto a global capitalist system characterized by vast and growing inequality, economic stagnation, market saturation, financial instability, urban crisis, social polarization, graded access to information, and economic degradation.

    Editions:

    • Indian edition, (Kharagpur, India: Cornerstone Publications, 1998).
    Translations:
    • Turkish translation, (Ankara: EPOS, 2003).
    • Vietnamese translation, Hanoi, May 2001.

  • In Defense of History

    In Defense of History

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    “In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda,” co-edited with Ellen Meiksins Wood (Foster listed second) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 204 pp. Expanded version of July-August 1995 special issue of Monthly Review. (Contains two essays, including an afterword, authored by Foster.)

    Are we now in an age of “postmodernity”? Even as some on the right have proclaimed the “end of history” or the final triumph of capitalism, we are told by some left intellectuals that the “modern” epoch has ended, that the “Enlightenment project” is dead, that all the old verities and ideologies have lost their relevance, that the old principles of rationality no longer apply, and so on. Yet what is striking about the current diagnosis of postmodernity is that it has so much in common with older pronouncements of death, both radical and reactionary versions. What has ended, apparently, is not so much another, different epoch but the same one all over again.

    In response, the best of today’s new intellectuals on the left are returning to historical materialism, to class analysis. This collection reflects that move, pinning postmodernism in its place and time. It exposes the erroneous bases of “pomo” premises, by identifying the real problems to which the current intellectual fashions offer false or no solutions. In doing so, the contributors challenge the limits imposed on action and resistance by those who see liberating “new times” in the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. What is being celebrated in the postmodern agenda, argues Ellen Meiksins Wood, is the prosperity of the consumerist 1960s reflected in a distorting mirror. The instability and economic polarization of the 1990s demand a solid critique of the conditions of capitalism, not endless reexaminations of their “meanings” this is the standard and goal of In Defense of History.

    Editions:

    • Indian edition, (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006).
    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Hao Mingwei. (Beijing: Social Science Academic Press, 2009).
    • Portuguese translation published in Rio de Janeiro in 1999.
    • The afterword to this book by Foster, entitled “In Defense of History,” was translated into Farsi and published in the Iranian journal Negah, September 2000.

     

  • Virtual Capitalism

    “Virtual Capitalism: The Political Economy of the Information Highway,” (co-authored with Michael Dawson, Foster listed second), Monthly Review vol. 48, no. 3 (July 1996), pp. 40-58. DOI: 10.14452/MR-048-03-1996-07_3

    One of the great technological myths of our time is that the entire system of organized capitalism dating back to the Industrial Revolution (and even earlier), is being displaced by a new age of “the electronic republic” rooted in the technology of the Information Revolution.

    Translations:
    • Translated and published in German as “Virtueller Kapitalismus: Die Politische Ökonomie der Datenautobahn,” Supplement der Zeitschrift Sozialismus, December 1996, pp. 12-20.

     

  • For a Zapatista Style Postmodernist Perspective

    “For a Zapatista Style Postmodernist Perspective; Marxism and Postmodernism: A Reply to Roger Burbach; On Hobsbawm’s Pessimism: A Reply to Justin Rosenberg,” (Roger Burbach, Ellen Meiksins Wood, John Bellamy Foster and David Englestein) Monthly Review, vol. 47, no. 10 (March 1996), pp. 34-48.

    The left is on the brink of collapse. It has very little influence in the arena of mass politics while fewer and fewer people are interested in Marxist journals, books, and intellectual discourses. In 1982 Michael Ryan, in a book written to find common ground between Marxism and postmodernism, noted that “millions have been killed because they were Marxists; no one will be obliged to die because s/he is a deconstructionist.”

  • Is There an Allocation Problem?: A Comment on Murray Smith’s Analysis of the Falling Profit Rate

    “Is There an Allocation Problem?: A Comment on Murray Smith’s Analysis of the Falling Profit Rate,” [PDF], (co-authored with Michael Dawson, Foster listed first), Science & Society, vol. 58, no. 3 (Fall 1994), pp. 315-24.

    In the Fall 1993 issue of Science & Society the editors observed that Murray Smith’s articles on the falling rate of profit, which formed the opening contribution to that issue, constituted an important new study that “should be compared with the work of [Thomas] Weisskopf, [Edward] Wolff and [Fred] Moseley’- all of whom have carried his empirical results not so much with the work of these radical economists (two of whom he never mentioned) as with the traditional thought that he classified as ‘underconsumptionist,” associated with the work of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Joseph Phillips, Harry Magdoff, and the present authors. Indeed, Smith contended that a recent statistical assessment of the economic surplus that we authored (Dawson and foster, 1991; Dawson and Foster 1992) contradicted the main theoretical thrust of the tradition we represent, demonstrating that “the (profitability) crises of the 1970’s and 1980’s cannot be adequately explained on the basis of an underconsumptionist mode of analysis” (Smith, 1993, 282).