The United States came out of the Second World War as the hegemonic power in the world economy. The war had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression by providing the needed effective demand in the form of endless orders for armaments and troops. Real output rose by 65 percent between 1940 and […]
Tag Archives | French
The Ecological Rift
Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the […]
The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2010 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints
The Great Financial Crisis began in the summer of 2007 and three years later, despite a putative “recovery,” it is still having profound effects in the United States, Europe, and in much of the world.
The Financialization of Accumulation
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
In 1997, in his last published article, Paul Sweezy referred to “the financialization of the capital accumulation process” as one of the three main economic tendencies at the turn of the century (the other two were the growth of monopoly power and stagnation). Those familiar with economic theory will realize that the phrase was meant […]
The Ecology of Consumption
By John Bellamy Foster on September 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Environmentalists, especially in wealthy countries, have often approached the question of environmental sustainability by stressing population and technology, while deemphasizing the middle term in the well-known IPAT (environmental Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology) formula. The reasons for this are not difficult to see. Within capitalist society, there has always been a tendency to […]
The Financial Power Elite
By John Bellamy Foster on May 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Has the power of financial interests in U.S. society increased? Has Wall Street’s growing clout affected the U.S. state itself? How is this connected to the present crisis? We will argue that the financialization of U.S. capitalism over the last four decades has been accompanied by a dramatic and probably long-lasting shift in the location […]
Why Ecological Revolution?
By John Bellamy Foster on January 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
It is now universally recognized within science that humanity is confronting the prospect—if we do not soon change course—of a planetary ecological collapse. Not only is the global ecological crisis becoming more and more severe, with the time in which to address it fast running out, but the dominant environmental strategies are also forms of […]
A New New Deal under Obama?
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2009 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
With U.S. capitalism mired in an economic crisis of a severity that increasingly brings to mind the Great Depression of the 1930s, it should come as no surprise that there are widespread calls for “a new New Deal.” Already the new Obama administration has been pointing to a vast economic stimulus program of up to […]
The Ecology of Destruction
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2007 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
I would like to begin my analysis of what I am calling here “the ecology of destruction” by referring to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Burn!. Pontecorvo’s epic film can be seen as a political and ecological allegory intended for our time. It is set in the early nineteenth century on an imaginary Caribbean island called […]
A Warning to Africa
By John Bellamy Foster on June 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Imperialism is constant for capitalism. But it passes through various phases as the system evolves. At present the world is experiencing a new age of imperialism marked by a U.S. grand strategy of global domination. One indication of how things have changed is that the U.S. military is now truly global in its operations with […]
