Tag: Korean

  • Monopoly and Competition in the 21st Century

    Monopoly and Competition in the 21st Century

    Monopoly and Competition in the 21st Century“, (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Jonna, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 62, no. 11 (April 2011), pp. 1-39. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-11-2011-04_1

    A striking paradox animates political economy in our times. On the one hand, mainstream economics and much of left economics discuss our era as one of intense and increased competition among businesses, now on a global scale. It is a matter so self-evident as no longer to require empirical verification or scholarly examination. On the other hand, wherever one looks, it seems that nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Formerly competitive sectors like retail are now the province of enormous monopolistic chains, massive economic fortunes are being assembled into the hands of a few mega-billionaires sitting atop vast empires, and the new firms and industries spawned by the digital revolution have quickly gravitated to monopoly status. In short, monopoly power is ascendant as never before.

    Translations:
    • Chinese translation in Foreign Theoretical Trends (published in two parts), 2011).
    • Korean translation in The Breath of Life in the Landscape June 2014).]

     

  • The Ecological Revolution

    The Ecological Revolution

    The Ecological RevolutionThe Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet,” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 319 pp.

    Awards:

    • Winner of the Greald L. Young Book Award of the Society for Human Ecology, 2010.

    Editions:

    • Edited French-language editon, entitled Marx Écologiste. Amsterdam Press, 2011, includes chapters 8-11.

    Translations:

    • German translation Hamburg: Laika-Verlag, 2012.
    • Bangla translation being published in India by Cornerstone Books, Kharagpur.
    • Final chapter reprinted in Briarpatch magazine, July/August 2009.
    • Korean translation being translated by Dae-Han Song for the Korean Alliance of Progressive Movements.
    • Chinese translation forthcoming from Renmin Press.

    Since the atomic bomb made its first appearance on the world stage in 1945, it has been clear that we possess the power to destroy our own planet. What nuclear weapons made possible, global environmental crisis, marked especially by global warming, has now made inevitable—if business as usual continues.

    The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital’s rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet. Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe, especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most ambitious experiments are taking place.

    This bold new work addresses the central issues of the present crisis: global warming, peak oil, species extinction, world water shortages, global hunger, alternative energy sources, sustainable development, and environmental justice. Foster draws on a unique range of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, William Morris, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Vandana Shiva, and István Mészáros. The result is a startlingly radical synthesis, which offers new hope for grappling with the greatest challenge of our age: what must be done to save the earth for humanity and all living species.

    Reviews:

    In this time of growing ecological and economic crisis, John Bellamy Foster’s voice stands out like no other. In his new book, The Ecological Revolution, he demonstrates that questions of ecology cannot be separated from questions of economics, and that building a truly sustainable future means putting people and the planet before profit.

    —Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

    Foster is the most systematic thinker on red-green politics writing today—and he is quite clear about What is to be done! In these essays, he applies Marx’s theory of metabolic rift to elucidate a variety of contexts—the Pentagon’s pursuit of oil, neoliberalism and the Jo’burg Manifesto, the poverty of contemporary sociology, imperialism and ecological debt, critique of the New Sustainability Paradigm—all the while keeping his synthesis of historical scholarship, natural scientific detail, and Marxist theory readily accessible to a wide readership. Here is reason and discipline driven by passion and care.

    —Ariel Salleh, Research Associate in Political Economy, at the University of Sydney

    Author of Ecofeminism as Politics, Editor of Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice, and Co-editor of the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism

    In The Ecological Revolution, John Bellamy Foster rightly shows the inadequacy of the technological approaches to which the capitalist response to the ecological crisis is limited, raising the question of a wider revolution in ecology and community. In the process he puts to rest the widely held assumption that Marx and Marxists have little to contribute on the ecological crisis. His book demonstrates that Marx addressed the ecological issues with keen insight and that the historical materialist ecological tradition is alive and relevant today.

    —John B. Cobb, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology

    Co-author with Herman Daly of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, The Environment, and a Sustainable Future

    For fifteen years, in the books The Vulnerable Planet, Marx’s Ecology, and Ecology Against Capitalism, Foster has warned us of capitalist ecological catastrophe. With accessibility, grace, and a powerful intellectual punch, this new collection tackles the neoconservative petro-military complex of the Bush years sandwiched between Clinton-Gore-Obama’s pernicious eco-neoliberalism. Foster’s searing denunciations of environmental commodification give us confidence to fight bourgeois economic ideology—from the likes of Thomas Friedman, William Nordhaus, Larry Summers, and Nick Stern—and to demand an eco-socialist future.

    —Patrick Bond, senior professor of development studies

    University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban

    This book is a major achievement. It combines enormous breadth of scholarship with consummate theoretical integration to produce a powerful political argument. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about the future of humanity and the planet – that is, everyone!

    —Ted Benton, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

  • 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 Great Financial Crisis

    The Great Financial Crisis

    The Great Financial CrisisThe Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences,” (coauthored with Fred Magdoff, Foster listed first, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 160 pp.

    Editions:

    • Indian edition (English) published by Cornerstone Books, Kharagpur, 2009.

    Translations:

    • Korean translation from Eulyoo Publishers.
    • Czech language edition published by Grimmus, Czech Republic, 2009.
    • Spanish translation, Fondo De Cultura Económico (Spain), 2009.
    • Bangla translation by Farooque Chowdhury (Dhaka: Shahitya Prakash, 2011).
    • Arabic translation by Ateyyah Kareem Al Zafiri (Afaq Educational Services Company, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 2013).
    • Selected chapters appear in Kapitalizmin Finansal Krizi (Turkish), edited by Prof. Dr. Abdullah Ersoy (Ankara, Turkey: Imaj Publishing, 2011), 330pp.

    The bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial debacle have left most people, including many economists and financial experts asking: Why did this happen? If they had been reading Monthly Review, and were familiar with such articles as “The Household Debt Bubble,” “The Explosion of Debt and Speculation,” and “The Financialization of Capitalism,” they would not have needed to ask. In their new book, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster and long-time Monthly Review contributor, Fred Magdoff, update this analysis, exploring the whole course of what is now known as “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression”: from the debt explosion and housing bubble to the subprime debacle and federal bailout. They argue that this latest financial crash, although greater than any since 1929, is itself a symptom of deeper problems connected to the stagnation of the “real” or productive economy of mature capitalism. Financial bubbles have become the chief means of countering stagnation, but these inevitably burst, bringing the underlying economic problems back to the surface. The only recourse of the system: new and bigger bubbles, leading, as they too pop, to still greater financial crises and worsening conditions of production—in what has now become a vicious cycle.

    With this as their key, Foster and Magdoff are able to examine the complex interconnections associated with rising debt, weakening production and investment, stagnant wages, burgeoning unemployment, rapidly growing class inequality, spiraling global economic instability, and spreading militarism and imperialism. At the center of the story is the latest phase of capitalism, “monopoly-finance capital,” that has generated a giant casino economy and promotes enormously exorbitant, exploitative, and corrupt practices as well as violence abroad—all geared to finding and protecting profitable ways to invest the corporate capital surplus. Meanwhile, the real, pressing needs of most people in the society go unaddressed. The only genuine way out of trap, The Great Financial Crisis argues, is the promotion of those very measures—such as massively expanding socially useful public spending, improving the security of the working class, and democratizing ownership of productive property—that are invariably opposed by the current system of wealth and power. If the legendary Mother Jones was right, and we must educate ourselves for the coming struggle, then this book is today’s most essential reading.

    Reviews:

    …an insightful account of the roots of the crisis.

    —Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects

    With all the charges of ‘socialist’ hurled at Barack Obama from the howling back benches, I decided it was time to find out what some real socialists are saying about the crisis of monopoly capitalism. It’s a short book long on insight.

    —Bill Moyers, on selecting the book for his booklist

    In this timely and thorough analysis of the current financial crisis, Foster and Magdoff explore its roots and the radical changes that might be undertaken in response. . . . This book makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing examination of our current debt crisis, one that deserves our full attention.

    Publishers Weekly

    Those interested in the Marxist perspective should get hold of The Great Financial Crisis. . . . It is a fascinating read.

    —Larry Elliot, economics editor, The Guardian

    Follows Marxist writers Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy in arguing that ‘stagnation’ is the normal state of capitalism (or what the present authors term ‘monopoly-finance capital’). To preserve ‘growth,’ finance becomes increasingly decoupled from investment in real things, but in doing so it creates bubbles, and we all know what happens when they are pricked … Foster and Magdoff did call out an imminent collapse of the US “household debt bubble” as far back as spring 2006.

    The Guardian

    I like to hope that some members of the economics profession, some journalists who routinely interpret economics for the general public, and even (could we hope?) some public officials unafraid to think what had previously been the unthinkable (namely that radical leftists have something useful to say about the U.S. economy and economic policy) will take up this book and engage with it. . . . We ignore the arguments of this book and other dissenting economists at our peril.

    —Michael Meeropol, Challenge magazine

    The challenge for the left is to articulate both the temporary nature of capitalism’s fixes and of capitalism itself in accessible terms. This book is a useful weapon for all who strive to do so.

    Morning Star

    Everyone at last knows we are in a great financial crisis. Foster and Magdoff have seen it coming for some time now. If you want a clear and cogent explanation of the reality of our debt crisis and what might be done about it, this is your book.

    —Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University

    The Great Financial Crisis will be extremely useful for all who are trying to sort out the meaning of the most serious crisis U.S. and global capitalism has faced in eighty years. Few today are able both to make sense of the details of the modern ‘financial architecture’ that turned a predictable burst in the U.S. housing bubble into a full scale financial meltdown, and also to bring an historical perspective stemming from the work of Keynes, Hansen, Steindl, Kalecki, Minsky, Galbraith, and of course Marx, Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff. Because the authors could draw on their own excellent coverage of the lead up to the crisis in the pages of Monthly Review magazine, we have an invaluable book available to us much sooner than would otherwise be possible.

    —Robin Hahnel, Professor of Economics, American University

    Those of us who are dissatisfied with the analyses of the financial-economic meltdown of 2008 that attribute it to easily remediable ‘mistakes’ on the part of financial institutions, regulators, or policy-makers can learn a lot from John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences. Foster and Magdoff follow up the theses of Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, and Harry Magdoff that diagnose the structural problems of U.S. capitalism in its chronic tendency toward stagnation rooted in inadequate business investment and leading to slow growth, unemployment of labor, and low utilization of capital. This book makes the case that the excesses of financialization and the widening inequality of income distribution are themselves indirect effects of stagnation in the real economy, and explains with sobering clarity why the roots of this crisis may turn out to be deep and difficult to address with conventional policy measures.

    —Duncan K Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics

    New School for Social Research

    Much of the analysis of the latest economic meltdown has been confined to explanations about the housing bubble and bust. In The Great Financial Crisis, Foster and Magdoff take a broader approach, presenting a rigorous and sorely needed historical and forward-looking perspective of the capitalist system out of control. With intricate detail, Foster and Magdoff contextualize the housing debt and speculative bubble within its rightful place at the core of an accelerated period of the financialization of capital, eloquently arguing why a people-first, or socialistic, approach to this crisis is the most logical way to stabilize the general economy.

    —Nomi Prins, author of Other People’s Money and Jacked

    Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, to whom this book is dedicated, analyzed the financial crisis as inseparable from the tendency to stagnation of monopoly capital. The present book is written in the same spirit and brings their approach fully up to date under the circumstances of ‘monopoly-finance capital.’ It underlines that, whatever might be attempted today, the necessarily recurring crisis is bound to get worse without remedying the causes of stagnation. Thus Foster and Fred Magdoff rightly stress that ‘the answer lies in a truly revolutionary reconstruction of the entire society.’ Their book is a worthy memorial to Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy.

    —István Mészáros, author of The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time

    and Beyond Capital

    Foster and Magdoff’s very readable account of the crisis merits close and wide attention. Their analysis of consumer debt burdens is the perfect antidote for everyone who is tired of hearing how ‘we’ went on a consumption binge, and their historically sensitive discussions of the roots of the crisis are fresh and provocative.

    —Thomas Ferguson, University of Massachusetts, Boston

    Author of The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems

    John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s book on ‘The Great Financial Crisis’ is an excellent example for the usefulness of studying Marx’s works and that of other Marxist political economists, e.g. the writings of Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, in order to better grasp the dynamics and contradictions of the financial turmoil and its implications for social conflict. The disastrous contemporary financial crisis cannot be understood as the consequence of a ‘wrong regulation’ of the world of finance. It is an emanation of the ‘real’ accumulation process of financialized monopoly capital.

    —Elmar Altvater, Otto-Suhr-Institute of the Free University of Berlin

    Foster and Magdoff’s new book presents a sharp and stimulating analysis of the historical origins and structural roots of the current financial crisis. The authors argue that the implosion is a logical consequence of the contradictions of monopoly finance capital—contradictions that are reflected in the twin processes of financialization and stagnation that have dominated the development of the U.S. economy in the recent decades. It is an essential read if the mea culpas and post mortems of ‘the experts’ faced suddenly with ‘a fundamental flaw’ in the logic of unregulated markets have left you demanding a more penetrating account of this crisis.

    —Ramaa Vasudevan, Colorado State University

    A must read! Here is an excellent guide to understanding the role debt overload and the stagnation of real economy played in the recent crisis, in the tradition of Sweezy and Magdoff.

    —Michael Perelman, Professor of Economics, California State University at Chico

    Author of Railroading Economics, The Invention of Capitalism

    and The Confiscation of American Prosperity

    The financial crisis of 2007–08, and with more certainly in store for 2009 and beyond, is one of the great calamities of modern neoliberal capitalism. But it should come as no surprise for regular readers of John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s writings over the past few years in Monthly Review. In a series of highly accessible and cogent articles, they have consistently explained both the build up to the crisis and its consequences. The Great Financial Crisis brings their ideas together in one place. It is compelling reading for anyone seeking to both understand and change the world we live in today.

    —Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts-Amherst

  • 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.

     

  • Naked Imperialism

    Naked Imperialism

    Buy at Monthly Review Press

    Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance,” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 192 pp.

    (Consists of previously published articles/chapters from Monthly Review between 2000 and 2005 with a new preface by the author.)

    During the Cold War years, mainstream commentators were quick to dismiss the idea that the United States was an imperialist power. Even when U.S. interventions led to the overthrow of popular governments, as in Iran, Guatemala, or the Congo, or wholesale war, as in Vietnam, this fiction remained intact. During the 1990s and especially since September 11, 2001, however, it has crumbled. Today, the need for American empire is openly proclaimed and defended by mainstream analysts and commentators.

    Editions:

    • Indian edition (Delhi:Aakar Books, 2006).
    Translations:
    • Japanese translation by Watanabe Keiko, published by arrangement through Sakai Agency, 2009.
    • Korean translation, Renaissance Publishing Co. Korea, 2008.
    • Preface translated into Bangla in Bangla Monthly Review, no. 1 (December 2006). Translated by Indrani Nandi.
  • The New Geopolitics of Empire

    The New Geopolitics of Empire

    The New Geopolitics of Empire,” Monthly Review, vol. 57, no. 8 (January 2006), pp.1-18. DOI: 10.14452/MR-057-08-2006-01_1

    Today’s imperial ideology proclaims that the United States is the new city on the hill, the capital of an empire dominating the globe. Yet the U.S. global empire, we are nonetheless told, is not an empire of capital; it has nothing to do with economic imperialism as classically defined by Marxists and others. The question then arises: How is this new imperial age conceived by those promoting it?

    Translations:

     

  • Ecology Against Capitalism

    Ecology Against Capitalism

    Buy at Monthly Review Press

    Ecology Against Capitalism,” (New York: Monthly Review Press 2002), 176 pp.

    (Consists of previously published articles/chapters on ecology and capitalism written between 1992 and 2002.)

    Within these debates on the politics of ecology, Foster’s work develops an important and distinctive perspective. Where many of these debates assume a basic divergence of “red” and “green” issues, and are concerned with the exact terms of a trade-off between them, Foster argues that Marxism — properly understood — already provides the framework within which ecological questions are best approached. This perspective is advanced here in accessible and concrete form, taking account of the major positions in contemporary ecological debate.

    Foster’s introduction sets out the unifying themes of these essays to present a consolidated approach to a rapidly-expanding field of debate which is of critical importance in our time.

    Editions:

    • Indian edition (Kharagpur, India: Cornerstone Publications, 2003).
    • Korean edition by Chaekalpi Publishers, 2007 (contains new preface to Korean edition by author).
    • Bangla edition, (Dhaka, Bangladesh: Shrabon Prokoshani, 2008).
    Translations:
    • Portuguese translation forthcoming from Expressao Popular, 2015.
    • German translation, Hamburg: Laika-Verlag, 2013.
    • Chinese translation by Geng Jianxin and Song Xingwu, (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2006).
    • Greek translation, Metaixmio Editions.