John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Hannah Holleman

  • Marx and Slavery

    Marx and Slavery

    Marx and Slavery (coauthored), Monthly Review vol. 72, no. 3 (July 2020), DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-072-03-2020-07_9

    The rise to prominence of analyses of racial capitalism represents a breakthrough in Marxian theory. This has necessarily been accompanied by a critique of previous Marxian analyses, which all too often ignored or minimized the relation of slavery to capitalism. In recent years, however, these criticisms of orthodox Marxist treatments of slavery have been extended, much more problematically, to the work of Karl Marx himself. Although Marx never wrote a treatise on slavery, the issue of slave labor was woven into his analysis of social formations, both ancient and modern, and was inextricably intertwined with his treatment of wage labor.

  • Marx and the Indigenous

    Marx and the Indigenous (coauthored with Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 9 (February 2020), pp. 1-19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-071-09-2020-02_1 [HTML]

    The “turn toward the indigenous” in social theory in the last couple of decades, associated with the critique of white settler colonialism, has reintroduced themes long present in Marxian theory, but in ways that are often surprisingly divorced from Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

  • Capitalism and Robbery

    “Capitalism and Robbery: The Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life” (coauthored with Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 7 (December 2019), pp. 1-23. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-07-2019-11_1 [HTML]

    Historical capitalism cannot be understood aside from its existence as a colonial/imperialist world system in which the violent exercise of power is an ever-present reality. In order to uncover the material conditions governing concrete capitalism, including its interface with land, nonwage labor, and corporeal life, it is therefore necessary to go beyond the inner reality of exploitation, and address expropriation, or the process of appropriation without equivalent (or without reciprocity) through which capital has sought to determine its wider parameters.

  • Imperialism in the Anthropocene

    “Imperialism in the Anthropocene” (coauthored with Hannah Holleman and Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 3 (July-August 2019), pp. 70-88. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-03-2019-07_5 [HTML]

    Today there can be no doubt about the main force behind our ongoing planetary emergency: the exponential growth of the capitalist world economy, particularly in the decades since the mid–twentieth century. The mere critique of capitalism as an abstract economic system, however, is insufficient in addressing today’s environmental problems. Rather, it is necessary also to examine the structure of accumulation on a world scale, coupled with the division of the world into competing nation-states. Our planetary problems cannot realistically be addressed without tackling the imperialist world system, or globalized capitalism, organized on the basis of classes and nation-states, and divided into center and periphery. Today, this necessarily raises the question of imperialism in the Anthropocene.

  • The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange

    “The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange: A Marx-Odum Dialectic,” [PDF] (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, authors listed alphabetically) Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 41, no. 2 (2014), pp. 199-233. DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2014.889687.

    A world-system analysis of the ecological rift generated by capitalism requires as one of its elements a developed theory of the unequal ecological exchange between center and periphery. After reviewing the literature on unequal exchange (both economic and ecological) from Ricardo and Marx to the present, a new approach is provided, based on a critical appropriation of systems ecologist Howard Odum’s emergy (spelled with an m) analysis. Odum’s contribution offers key elements of a wider dialectical synthesis, made possible in part by his intensive studies of Marx’s political-economic critique of capitalism and by Marx’s own theory of metabolic rift.

  • Weber and the Environment

    “Weber and the Environment: Classical Foundations for a Post-Exemptionalist Sociology” (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), American Journal of Sociology, vol. 117, no. 6 (May 2012), pp. 1625-1673. DOI: 10.1086/664617.

    In the last two decades classical sociology, notably Marx, has been mined for environmental insights in the attempt to surmount the “human exemptionalism” of post–Second World War sociology. Weber, however, has remained an enigma in this respect. This article addresses Weber’s approach to the environment, including its significance for his interpretive-causal framework and his understanding of capitalism. For Weber, sociological meanings were often anchored in biophysical realities, including climate change, resource consumption, and energy scarcity, while environmental influences were refracted in complex ways within cultural reproduction. His work thus constitutes a crucial key to constructing a meaningful postexemptionalist sociology.

    Awards
    • Winner of the 2013 Outstanding Publication Award of the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.

  • Advertising and the Genius of Commercial Propaganda

    “Advertising and the Genius of Commercial Propaganda” (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Inger L. Stole, and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed third), in Gerald Sussman, ed., The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 27-44.

  • 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:

     

  • The Penal State in an Age of Crisis

    The Penal State in an Age of Crisis

    “The Penal State in an Age of Crisis“, (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, Foster listed third), Monthly Review vol. 61, no. 2 (June 2009), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-061-02-2009-06_1

    As a rule, crime and social protest rise in periods of economic crisis in capitalist society. During times of economic and social instability, the well-to-do become increasingly fearful of the general population, more disposed to adopt harsh measures to safeguard their positions at the apex of the social pyramid. The slowdown in the economic growth rate of U.S. capitalism beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s—converging with the emergence of radical social protest around the same period—was accompanied by a rapid rise in public safety spending as a share of civilian government expenditures. So significant was this shift that we can speak of a crowding out of welfare state spending (health, education, social services) by penal state spending (law enforcement, courts, and prisons) in the United States during the last third of a century.

    Reprints:
    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in El Aromo, no. 50/Razón y Revolucion (Argentina, 2009), http://www.razonyrevolucion.org.
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, vol. 2, no. 1 (December 2009). Translated by Farooque Chowdhury.
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition no. 22 (Istanbul: Kalkedon), pp. 29-48.