Tag: French

  • Surveillance Capitalism

    Surveillance Capitalism

    Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age” [PDF] (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 11 (July-August 2014), pp. 1-32. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-03-2014-07_1

    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 1944, and industrial production jumped by 90 percent.

    1, At the immediate end of the war, due to the destruction of the European and Japanese economies, the United States accounted for over 60 percent of world manufacturing output.
    2, The very palpable fear at the top of society as the war came to a close was that of a reversion to the pre-war situation in which domestic demand would be insufficient to absorb the enormous and growing potential economic surplus generated by the production system, thereby leading to a renewed condition of economic stagnation and depression.

    Translations
    • Chinese-language translation in Social Science Abroad, 2015.
    • Spanish language translation by Miguel de Punoenrosto in Sin Permiso (July 2014) http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/index.php?id=7154.
    • French Translation by Miguel de Puñoenrostro in Marx Nangara (February 2015).

     

  • The Ecological Rift

    The Ecological Rift

    The Ecological RiftThe Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War with the Earth,” (co-authored with Brett Clark and Richard York, Foster listed first, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 544 pp.

    Editions:

    • German edition, (Hamburg: Laika-Verlag, 2011).

    Translations:

    • Portuguese translation from Expressao Popular 2015.
    • Swedish translation of introduction available at Lalit magazine.
    • French translation of the chapter, “The Ecology of Consumption,” in Ecologie et Politique 43 (2012), pp. 109-30.

    Winner of the 2010 Gerald L. Young Book Award, bestowed by the Society for Human Ecology

    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 delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision—if we don’t alter course.

    In The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, environmental sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York offer a radical assessment of both the problem and the solution. They argue that the source of our ecological crisis lies in the paradox of wealth in capitalist society, which expands individual riches at the expense of public wealth, including the wealth of nature. In the process, a huge ecological rift is driven between human beings and nature, undermining the conditions of sustainable existence: a rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature that is irreparable within capitalist society, since integral to its very laws of motion.

    Critically examining the sanguine arguments of mainstream economists and technologists, Foster, Clark, and York insist instead that fundamental changes in social relations must occur if the ecological (and social) problems presently facing us are to be transcended. Their analysis relies on the development of a deep dialectical naturalism concerned with issues of ecology and evolution and their interaction with the economy. Importantly, they offer reasons for revolutionary hope in moving beyond the regime of capital and toward a society of sustainable human development.

    Reviews:

    This book is desperately needed, because it ends any illusion that we can solve our pressing environmental crises within the same system that created them. With tweaking the system—using incremental market-based strategies—off the table, we can put our efforts into genuine, lasting solutions.

    —Annie Leonard, author and host, Story of Stuff

    Marx’s concept of ‘metabolic rift’ in the circulation of soil nutrients between countryside and town is generalized by Foster, Clark, and York to an insightful Marxist analysis of the current ecological rift between modern capitalism and the ecosystem. It is a scholarly, well-referenced, and important contribution.

    —Herman E. Daly, Professor Emeritus, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland and author, Beyond Growth

    This important book treats industrial capitalism as the globally destructive force that it is, and powerfully points the way toward, as the authors put it, ‘universal revolts against imperialism, the destruction of the planet, and the treadmill of accumulation.’ We need these revolts if we are to survive. This book is a crucial part of that struggle.

    —Derrick Jensen, author, Endgame and The Culture of Make Believe

    This timely new work promises to become a basic resource in understanding the incompatibility between capitalism and ecology, and also in arguing for the ecological dimensions of any future socialism.

    —Fredric Jameson, Professor, Duke University; author, Valences of the Dialectic

    The Ecological Rift deserves to—and needs to—become a classic in its field.

    —Simon Butler, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

  • The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On

    “The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On” (coauthored with Fred Magdoff), Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 5 (October 2010): 52-55.

    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. Austerity is being forced on working people in many countries. Matters are especially difficult in Greece, a country that is being compelled by the demands of bankers, including the International Monetary Fund, to squeeze its workers in return for loans from abroad to help pay down government debts. Official unemployment in the United States is still around 10 percent, and real unemployment is much higher. An unprecedented 44 percent of the officially unemployed have been without work for over six months. A record number of people are receiving government food assistance as well as meals and groceries from charities. Many U.S. states and cities, facing large shortfalls in their budgets due to falling tax revenues, are cutting jobs and reducing funding for schools and social programs.Much of the attention devoted to determining the cause of the crisis has been directed at the role of “subprime” mortgages in the United States that were sold to low-income people who had little chance of being able to pay the mortgages on their homes. Many of these subprime loans were given out under predatory terms that were especially unfavorable to the unsuspecting borrowers. The bundling of these loans together to be sold to institutions around the world served to spread significant risk far and wide.Yet, despite the instability generated by such loans, and a whole host of exotic financial instruments associated with them, the very severity of the Great Financial Crisis suggests that it was not primarily a product of such speculative practices. Rather, it was the outcome in the main of long-term structural factors, reflected in the secular decline in economic growth rates and the long-run increase of financial fragility and instability.The economic growth rates of the rich countries at the center of the capitalist world system have been shifting into low gear for decades. In the United States, average GDP growth, corrected for inflation, dropped from 4.4 percent in the 1960s, to 3.3 in the 1970s, 3.1 in the 1980s and 1990s, and 1.9 in the 2000s (2000 to 2009). In response to these conditions of deepening economic stagnation within the “real economy,” excess money capital flowed into the financial sector seeking quick returns, leading to the creation of a massive financial superstructure on top of a weakening economic base. This resort to speculative finance as a wealth-generation strategy gave rise to huge artificial profits (and capital gains) seemingly out of thin air—with no real relation to the commodity economy.In this situation, larger and larger infusions of debt—household, corporate, and government—were needed to generate a given level of growth. At the same time, the whole debt balloon, which more and more took on the character of Ponzi finance, required constant infusions of cash merely to stave off the inevitable crash. The result was a literal explosion of debt, which reached an astronomical 350 percent of U.S. GDP by 2007.

    Financial bubbles are invariably symptoms of deeper underlying problems. To focus simply on subprime loans, or even the housing bubble itself, as the real cause of the crisis—as most orthodox economic commentators have done—is thus to mistake the symptom for the disease. If it hadn’t been for the housing bubble in the United States, there would have been another bubble that would have likely led to essentially the same results. Since the 1970s, the economy has seen more and more “credit crunches,” with central banks each time rushing in at the first sign of trouble to bail out failing financial institutions. This, however, has contributed to the growing financial fragility, while the underlying problem of stagnation has remained unaddressed.

    Three years since the onset of the Great Financial Crisis, matters have become so serious that Paul Krugman, winner of the Bank of Sweden’s Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences, has declared that we are now in (or entering) a Third Depression, i.e., a third period of economic stagnation. This Third Depression, he suggests, resembles both the stagnation that began in Europe and the United States in the 1870s, which he labels the Long Depression, and the stagnation of the 1930s, or the Great Depression. As Krugman writes: “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost—to the world economy, and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs—will nonetheless be immense.” Krugman contends that “this third depression will be primarily the result of a failure of policy”—the continuation, even in a severe downturn of the neoliberal policy of austerity aimed at erasing government deficits, as opposed to adopting a strong Keynesian stimulus policy as a way out of the crisis.1

    It is true that misguided neoliberal deficit-fighting economic policies during a slump will cause further damage to economic prospects. But Keynesian stimulus offers no genuine solution. The real problem, we argue, is not economic policy but capitalist development itself. Our thesis, in the briefest possible terms, is that the advanced capitalist economies are caught in a tendency to stagnation resulting from the dual processes of industrial maturation and monopolistic accumulation. Financialization (the shift in the center of gravity of the capitalist economy from production to finance) is to be regarded as a compensatory mechanism that has helped to lift the economic system under these circumstances, but at the expense of increased fragility. Capitalism is thus caught in what we call a “stagnation-financialization trap.”

    All of this is connected to the class structure of monopoly-finance capital, which has produced levels of inequality without precedent in the advanced capitalist world. The so-called “Forbes 400,” the 400 richest Americans, now own about as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, some 150 million people. A number of Citigroup analysts have recently argued that the United States and other rich economies are now so top heavy from the standpoint of wealth and income distribution that they are best described as “plutonomies,” in which small class fractions control increasingly large portions of social wealth.2

    To be sure, emerging economies, notably China and India, have not yet acquired the diseases of maturity and monopolization in the sense of the advanced capitalist states and thus are relatively free from the chronic illness that has crippled the countries at the center of the system. But emerging countries are far from being immune to the problems generated. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that they too will be impacted in multiple ways in today’s globalized economy as a result of the weakening of the system at its core. It is worth noting that the Long Depression was followed by a great wave of imperialist expansion leading up to the First World War, while the Great Depression led to the inter-imperialist conflict of the Second World War. The current Third Depression is already pointing ominously to heightened imperial conflict, centered especially in the Persian Gulf, which could potentially lead to devastating consequences for humanity as a whole.

    If all this were not enough, the world is now facing an even more serious peril: a rapidly accelerating planetary ecological crisis that threatens, if radical changes are not made in the next decade or two, the eventual collapse of most of the world’s ecosystems, together with human civilization itself.

    There is only one possible solution to this all-encompassing planetary crisis, and that is the euthanasia of capitalism, replacing it with a new economy geared to sustainable human development, ecological plenitude, and the cultivation of genuine human community. The sooner we begin to construct this qualitatively new system through our mass struggles, the better the long-term prospects for humanity and the earth will be.

    Eugene, Oregon
    Burlington, Vermont
    June 30, 2010

    [English language version of preface to the Bangla edition of The Great Financial Crisis. Spanish language translation by Alberto Nadal in El Diario Internacional (December 2010). Italian version published by Attac Italia, January 7, 2011, at HYPERLINK” http://www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip.php?article3525″
    http://www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip.php?article3525. French translation printed by Le  HYPERLINK “http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?anno=2&hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http://www.cadtm.org/&usg=ALkJrhhASr3MtAqVLKrb5KmngEWMpdgxrA” Comité pour l’Annulation de la Dette du Tiers Monde, December 29, 2010. Galician translation published by Avantar, December 21, 2010, http://www.galizacig.com/avantar/autor/john-bellamy-foster-e-fred-magdoff. Spanish translation by Alberto Nadal in Viento Sur, November 11, 2010. Catalan translation published by En Lluita,  HYPERLINK “http://www.enlluita.org/site/?q=node/3150” http://www.enlluita.org/site/?q=node/3150. Turkish translation appears in Kapitalizmin Finansal Krizi, edited by Prof. Dr. Abdullah Ersoy (Ankara, Turkey: Imaj Publishing, 2011), 330pp.]

    Notes

    1.  Paul Krugman, “The Third Depression,” New York Times, June 28, 2010.
    2.  Matthew Miller and Duncan Greenberg, ed., “The Richest People in America” (2009), Forbes, http://forbes.com; Arthur B. Kennickell, “Ponds and Streams: Wealth and Income in the U.S., 1989 to 2007,” Federal Reserve Board Working Paper 2009-13, 2009, 55, 63; Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances,” Citigroup Research, October 16, 2005; and “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Get Richer,” Citigroup Research, March 5, 2006.

     

  • The Financialization of Accumulation

    The Financialization of Accumulation

    The Financialization of Accumulation“, Monthly Review vol. 62, no. 5 (October 2010), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-05-2010-09_1

    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 to be paradoxical. All traditions of economics, to varying degrees, have sought to separate out analytically the role of finance from the “real economy.” Accumulation is conceived as real capital formation, which increases overall economic output, as opposed to the appreciation of financial assets, which increases wealth claims but not output. In highlighting the financialization of accumulation, Sweezy was therefore pointing to what can be regarded as “the enigma of capital” in our time

    Translations:
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, issue 25 (Istanbul, Turkey: Kalkedon Publications, January 2011).
    • French translation at Changement de société(blog), http://socio13.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/la-financiarisation-de-l’accumulation-par-john-bellamy-foster-version-complete/.

     

  • The Ecology of Consumption

    The Ecology of Consumption: A Critique of Economic Malthusianism,” [PDF], (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics, no. 22 (2010), pp. 113-32.

    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 blame anything but the economic system itself for ecological overshoot. Yet if the developing ecological crisis has taught us anything, it is that even though population growth and inappropriate technologies have played important roles in accelerating environmental degradation, the ecological rift we are now facing has its principal source in the economy.

    Translations:
    • French translation in Écologie & Politique, no. 43 (2011), pp. 109-30.
  • The Financial Power Elite

    The Financial Power Elite

    The Financial Power Elite“, (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 62, no. 1 (May 2010), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-01-2010-05_1

    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 of the capitalist class, a growing proportion of which now derives its wealth from finance as opposed to production. This growing dominance of finance can be seen today in the inner corridors of state power.

    Translations:

     

  • Why Ecological Revolution?

    Why Ecological Revolution?“, Monthly Review vol. 61, no. 8 (January 2010), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-061-08-2010-01_1

    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 denial, demonstrably doomed to fail, judging by their own limited objectives. This tragic failure, I will argue, can be attributed to the refusal of the powers that be to address the roots of the ecological problem in capitalist production and the resulting necessity of ecological and social revolution.

    Reprints:

    Reprinted in Leslie King and Deborah McCarthy Auriffeille, ed., Environmental Sociology: From Analysis to Action, Third Edition (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), pp. 37-52.

    Translations:
    • German translation in Sozialistische Zeitung, March 2010.
    • French translation by Jean Pestieua in Études Marxistes, no. 86, 2009, 63-76.
    • Latvian translation by Ieva Zalite, Green Liberty, http://zb-zeme.lv, 2010.
    • Chinese translations in Foreign Theoretical Trends, no. 3, 2010 and at www.leftlibrary.com/foster.htm, 2010.
    • Spanish translation in Brumaria 22 (Madrid, 2010), pp. 257-70.

     

  • A New New Deal under Obama?

    A New New Deal under Obama?

    A New New Deal under Obama?“, (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 9 (February 2009), pp. 1-11. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-09-2009-02_1

    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 $850 billion over two years aimed at lifting the nation out of the deep economic slump.

    Reprints:
    Translations:
    • French translation in Etudes Marxistes, no. 86, December 1, 2009.
    • Spanish translation in Monthly Review, Selecciones en Castellano, no. 10, 131-40.
    • Galician translation published by Avantar, February 25, 2009.
    • Portuguese translation by Zion Edições in Association Resistir.Info , February 1, 2009, http://reistir.info.
    • Korean translation by Social Policy Committee, People’s Solidarity for Social Progress, http://www.pssp.org/main/index.php
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, vol. 1, no. 3, June 2009. Translated by Pachu Ray.
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 21 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2009), pp. 63-74.

     

  • The Ecology of Destruction

    The Ecology of Destruction

    The Ecology of Destruction“, Monthly Review vol. 58, no. 9 (February 2007), pp.1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-09-2007-02_1

    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 “Burn.” Burn is a Portuguese slave colony with a sugar production monoculture dependent on the export of sugar as a cash crop to the world economy. In the opening scene we are informed that the island got its name from the fact that the only way that the original Portuguese colonizers were able to vanquish the indigenous population was by setting fire to the entire island and killing everyone on it, after which slaves were imported from Africa to cut the newly planted sugar cane.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted and published in Norwegian in Torstein Dahle (and to artikler av John Bellamy Foster, Ødeleggelsens Økonomi (Tidsskrifter Rødt!, 2008), 100-16.
    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Dong Jinyu, Foreign Theoretical Trends (China), no. 6, 2008, and translated separately by Liang Yongqiant, Internet Fortune (China), no. 4, 2009.
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008.
    • French translation in La Brèche-Carré Rouge, December 2007-January February 2008, pp. 46-53.
    • German translation in Perspectiven: Magazin Für Linke Tehoerie Und Praxis, 2007, no. 2 (Vienna);
    • Portuguese translation in O Comuneiro, no. 4, 2007, www.ocomuneiro.com.
    • Norwegian translation in Rødt–special edition in Norwegian daily Klassekampen (Class Struggle), June 2007.
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, 2007.
    • Korean translation October 15, 2009, at http://programto.net/wordpress/.
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, no. 3 (June 2007). Translated by Tushar Chakrabarty.

     

  • A Warning to Africa

    A Warning to Africa

    A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy“, Monthly Review vol. 58, no. 2 (June 2006), pp.1-12. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-02-2006-06_1

    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 permanent bases on every continent, including Africa, where a new scramble for control is taking place focused on oil.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted in Itinerários (Portugal), 2010. Reprinted in Pambazuka News: World Forum for Social Justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org published by Fahamu in Oxford, U.K.
    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Qi Jianjun, Social Sciences Abroad (China), no. 3, 2009.
    • French translation in Mondialisation.ca, March 13, 2007.
    • Arabic translation in Donia-Alwatan (Gaza-Palestine), www.alwatanvoice.com, January 15, 2007.
    • Korean translation in Monthly Review Korean Edition, no. 1 published by Philmac Publishing, Seoul Korea, May 2007, 40-57.
    • Italian version appears at Arianna Editrice.it, March 13, 2007.