Tag: Italian

  • Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class

    Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class

    Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class: Beyond the Degradation of Labor,”[PDF],(coauthored with R. Jamil Jonna, Jonna listed first), Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journalvol. 26 (2014), pp. 219-36. DOI10.1007/s10672-014-9243-4.

    The fortieth anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital is the occasion here for a reassessment of his work as a whole. Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of work is shown to have been only a part of a much larger argument he was developing on the structure of the U.S. working class. Building on his pioneering empirical research into occupational composition, a new empirical assessment of the structural evolution of the U.S. working class over the last four decades is provided, throwing light on current problems of unemployment, underemployment, and socially wasted labor—and the rights of labor.

    Translations:
    • Italian translation (of “Beyond the Degradation of Labor“) in La Sinistra Rivista (January 2015).
    Reprinted/ Revised:

    as “Beyond the Degradation of Labor: Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class,” [PDFMonthly Review vol. 66, no. 5 (October 2014), pp. 1-24

  • The Global Stagnation and China

    The Global Stagnation and China

    The Global Stagnation and China”, (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 63, no 9 (February 2012), pp. 1-28. DOI: 10.14452/MR-063-09-2012-02_1

    Five years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09 began there is still no sign of a full recovery of the world economy. Consequently, concern has increasingly shifted from financial crisis and recession to slow growth or stagnation, causing some to dub the current era the Great Stagnation. Stagnation and financial crisis are now seen as feeding into one another.… To be sure, a few emerging economies have seemingly bucked the general trend, continuing to grow rapidly—most notably China, now the world’s second largest economy after the United States. Yet, as [IMF Managing Director Christine] Lagarde warned her Chinese listeners, “Asia is not immune” to the general economic slowdown, “emerging Asia is also vulnerable to developments in the financial sector.” So sharp were the IMF’s warnings, dovetailing with widespread fears of a sharp Chinese economic slowdown, that Lagarde in late November was forced to reassure world business, declaring that stagnation was probably not imminent in China (the Bloomberg.com headline ran: “IMF Sees Chinese Economy Avoiding Stagnation.”)

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Marxismo Critico, November 16, 2012.
    • Italian translation in Pantarossa, October 5, 2015.

     

  • Capitalism and Degrowth

    Capitalism and Degrowth

    Capitalism and Degrowth: An Impossibility Theorem“, Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 8 (January 2011), pp.26-33. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-08-2011-01_2

    Almost four decades after the Club of Rome raised the issue of “the limits to growth,” the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a formidable challenge. What is known as “degrowth economics,” associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic conference in Paris on “Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity,” and has since inspired a revival of radical Green thought, as epitomized by the 2010 “Degrowth Declaration” in Barcelona.… Ironically, the meteoric rise of degrowth (décroissance in French) as a concept has coincided over the last three years with the reappearance of economic crisis and stagnation on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The degrowth concept therefore forces us to confront the questions: Is degrowth feasible in a capitalist grow-or-die society—and if not, what does this say about the transition to a new society?

    Reprints:
    • An earlier, slightly different version of this article was published in the December/January 2011 issue of Red Pepper (UK).
    • The MR version was reprinted in Synthesis/Regeneration 55 (Spring 2010), pp. 35-39.
    Translations:
    • Italian translation by Andrea Grillo at Senza Soste.it, December 27, 2010.
    • German translation in Luxemburg 1 (2011), pp. 12-17.
    • Catalan translation, Kit de Supervivéncia Ambiental, March 16, 2011.
    • Greek translation in the Forum of ARENA, February 2, 2011.
    • Portuguese translation by Paula Sequeiros for Esquerda.net, December 4, 2010.

     

  • 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.

     

  • 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 ReviewPortuguese-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.

     

  • 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.

     

  • The Great Financial Crisis

    The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On,” (coauthored with Fred Magdoff), Monthly Review vol. 62, no. 5 (October 2010), pp. 52-55. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-05-2010-09_5

    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.

    Translations:
    • English language version of preface to the Bangla edition of The Great Financial Crisis.
    • Spanish translation by Alberto Nadal in Viento Sur, November 11, 2010.
    • Spanish language translation by Alberto Nadal in El Diario Internacional (December 2010).
    • Italian version published by Attac Italia, January 7, 2011, at http://www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip.php?article3525.
    • French translation printed by Le 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.
    • Catalan translation published by En Lluitahttp://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.

     

  • The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Crisis of the Pacific Northwest

    The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Crisis of the Pacific Northwest,” [PDF], Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 1993), pp. 11-41. DOI: 10.1080/10455759309358529.

    Many prominent environmentalists today have adopted a political stance that sets them and the movement that they profess to represent above and beyond the class struggle. For example, Jonathon Porritt, the British Green leader, has declared that the rise of the German Greens marks the demise of “the redundant polemic of class warfare and the mythical immutability of a left/right divide.” According to this outlook, both the working class and capitalist class are to blame for the global environmental crisis (insofar as it can be traced to capitalist rather than socialist modes of production), while the Greens represent a “new paradigm” derived from nature’s own values, one that transcends the historic class problem. By removing themselves in this way from the classic social debate, these Green thinkers implicitly em race the dominant “we have seen the enemy, and it is us” view that traces most environmental problems to the buying habits of consumers, the number of babies born, and the characteristics of industrialization, as if there were no class or other divisions in society.

    Reprints
    • Published in 1993 as a pamphlet issued jointly by Monthly Review Press and the Center for Ecological Socialism.
    • Expanded and updated version published in Daniel Faber, ed. The Movement for Environmental Justice in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 188-217.
    Translations
    • Italian translation of original, “I Limiti Dellámbientalismo Senza Classi. Un Esempio Che Viene Dalle Foreste,” Capitalismo, Natura, Socialismo, no. 9 (October 1993) pp. 32-53.
  • The Absolute General Law of Environmental Degradation Under Capitalism

    The Absolute General Law of Environmental Degradation Under Capitalism,” [PDFCapitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 3, no. 3 (September 1992), pp. 77-82. DOI:10.1080/10455759209358504

    James O’Connor has asked us to consider the relationship between what he has termed the “first and second contradictions” of capitalism. I would like to refer to the first contradiction, following Marx, as ‘the absolute cereal law of capitalist accumulation.” The second contradiction may then be designated as “the absolute general law of environmental degradation under capitalism.” It is characteristic of capitalism that the second of these “absolute general laws” derives its momentum from the first; hence it is impossible to overthrow the second without overthrowing the first. Nevertheless, it is the second contradiction rather than the first that increasingly constitutes the most obvious threat not only to capitalism existence but to the life of the planet as a whole.

    Translations:
    • Translated and published in Spanish as “La Ley General Absoluta de la Degradacion Ambiental en el Capitalismo,” Ecología Politica (September 1992), pp. 167-73.
    • Spanish translation later reprinted in Economía Politica, no. 11, Jan.-Feb. 1997.
    • Translated and published in Italian as “La Legge Assoluta, Generale del Degrado Ambientale nel Capitalismo,” Capitalismo, Natura, Socialismo, no. 6 (November 1992).