John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Coauthored

Has coauthors

  • Financial Implosion and Stagnation

    Financial Implosion and Stagnation

    “Financial Implosion and Stagnation; Back to the Real Economy“, (coauthored with Fred Magdoff, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 60, no. 7 (December 2008), pp. 1-29. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-07-2008-11_1

    “The first rule of central banking,” economist James K. Galbraith wrote recently, is that “when the ship starts to sink, central bankers must bail like hell.” In response to a financial crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve and other central banks, backed by their treasury departments, have been “bailing like hell” for more than a year. Beginning in July 2007 when the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds that had speculated heavily in mortgage-backed securities signaled the onset of a major credit crunch, the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Treasury Department have pulled out all the stops as finance has imploded. They have flooded the financial sector with hundreds of billions of dollars and have promised to pour in trillions more if necessary—operating on a scale and with an array of tools that is unprecedented.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted in Michael Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, ed., The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century (Montreal: Global Research, 2010), pp. 72-101.
    Translations:
    • German translation published as a Supplement der Zeitschrift Sozialismus, no. 2, 2009 (separate pamphlet).
    • Spanish translation in Monthly Review, Selecciones en Castellano, no. 10 (2009), 37-70.
    • Italian translation by Elisabett Horvat, in Quale Stato (Anthologia Della Crisi Globale), no. 1-2 (January-June 2009), http://www.fpcgil.it.
    • Portuguese translation in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition, no. 8, 2008.
    • Turkish translation appears in Kapitalizmin Finansal Krizi, edited by Prof. Dr. Abdullah Ersoy (Ankara, Turkey: Imaj Publishing, 2011), 330 pp.

     

  • 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 U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending

    The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending

    “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending“, (coauthored with Hannah Holleman and Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 5 (October 2008), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-05-2008-09_1

    Note: due to an unfortunate error in the publication of the Turkish edition, in which the bylines of two different articles were confused, the authors are mistakenly listed as Richard York, Brett Clark, and John Bellamy Foster.

    The United States is unique today among major states in the degree of its reliance on military spending, and its determination to stand astride the world, militarily as well as economically. No other country in the post–Second World War world has been so globally destructive or inflicted so many war fatalities. Since 2001, acknowledged U.S. national defense spending has increased by almost 60 percent in real dollar terms to a level in 2007 of $553 billion. This is higher than at any point since the Second World War (though lower than previous decades as a percentage of GDP). Based on such official figures, the United States is reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) as accounting for 45 percent of world military expenditures. Yet, so gargantuan and labyrinthine are U.S. military expenditures that the above grossly understates their true magnitude, which, as we shall see below, reached $1 trillion in 2007.

    Translations:
    • Bangla translation in Natun Diganta (a Bangla quarterly from Dhaka), July-September 2009.
    • Translated by Farooque Chowdhury. Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (Istanbul: Kalkeodon), no. 22, pp. 7-28.

     

  • 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. DOI: 10.1177/1086026608321632

    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.

     

  • Classical Marxism and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

    “Classical Marxism and the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Marx/Engels, the Heat Death of the Universe Theory, and the Origins of Ecological Economics” [PDF], (coauthored with Paul Burkett, Foster listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 21, no. 1 (March 2008), pp. 1-35.  DOI: 10.1177/1086026607313580

    Ever since Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) wrote his magnum opus, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, the entropy law (or the second law of thermodynamics) has been viewed as a sine qua non of ecological economics. Georgescu-Roegen argued strongly that both the entropy law and the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of matter–energy) were incompatible with ortho- dox neoclassical economics. The relation of ecological economics to Marxian economics, however, was much more ambiguous. Attempts to explore the history of ecological–economic ideas, following Georgescu-Roegen’s contributions, immediately brought to the fore the close relationship between those thinkers who had pioneered in ecological–economic thinking and classical Marxism.

  • 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 Podolinsky Myth

    “The Podolinsky Myth: An Obituary Introduction to ‘Human Labour and Unity of Force‘,” (co-authored by John Foster and Paul Burkett,  by Sergei Podolinsky, Historical Materialism, Volume 16, Issue 1, pages 115 – 161, (2008) DOI: 10.1163/156920608X276323

    The relationship between Marxism and ecology has been sullied by Martinez-Alier’s influential interpretation of Engels’s reaction to the agricultural energetics of Sergei Podolinsky. is introduction to the first English translation of Podolinsky’s 1883 Die Neue Zeit piece evaluates Martinez-Alier’s interpretation in light of the four distinct but closely related articles Podolinsky published over the years 1880–3. is evaluation also emphasises the important but previously underrated role of energy analysis in Marx’s Capital. Engels’s criticisms of Podolinsky are found to be quite justified from both political-economy and ecological perspectives. From the standpoint of Marx and Engels’s metabolic and class-relational approach to production, Podolinsky’s attempt to reduce use-value to energy is fraught with problems. Podolinsky’s energy reductionism does not even come close to representing an alternative value analysis – let alone a groundbreaking perspective on ecological history – as was suggested by Martinez-Alier. Far from Marx and Engels’s vision of communism as an ecologically sustainable and coevolutionary human development, Podolinsky’s conception of human labor as an energy accumulation machine seems to uncritically mimic the standpoint of the capitalist interested in using nature only to extract as much energy throughput (work) as possible from the labour-power (potential work) of the worker.

  • 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. DOI: 10.1177/1086026606292483

    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.