John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Monthly Review

  • 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.

  • COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism

    COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism: Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises (coauthored with Intan Suwandi), Monthly Review vol. 72, no. 2 (June 2020), pp. 1-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-072-02-2020-06_1  [HTML]

    Since the late twentieth century, capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted the form of interlinked commodity chains controlled by multinational corporations, connecting various production zones, primarily in the Global South, with the apex of world consumption, finance, and accumulation primarily in the Global North. COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism.

  • The Rift of Éire

    The Rift of Éire (coauthored with Brett Clark), Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 11 (April 2020), pp. 1-11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_1 [HTML]

    Karl Marx’s (and Frederick Engels’s) analysis of nineteenth-century Irish history revealed what is referred to as “the rift of Éire” in the colonial period. Indeed, it is in relation to the analysis of the systematic disruption of the Irish environment that Marx’s ecological inquiries can be seen as taking on a concrete and developed form, encompassing the ecological as well as economic robbery that characterized the Irish colonial regime.

  • 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.

  • On Fire This Time

    “On Fire This Time,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 6 (November 2019), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_1 [HTML]

    We are seeing today what appear to be the beginnings of an ecological revolution, a new historical moment unlike any humanity has experienced. Not only is the planet burning, but a revolutionary climate movement is rising up and is now on fire in response.

  • The Rise of the Right

    “The Rise of the Right: John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Farooque Chowdhury,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 5 (October 2019), pp. 1-11. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-05-2019-09_1 [HTML]

    In an interview with Farooque Chowdhury, Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster speaks about the historical conditions associated with the rise of new far-right movements of a broadly neofascist character. What we are witnessing, especially in the advanced capitalist world, is the development of a neoliberal-neofascist alliance, reflecting the decline of the liberal-democratic state. Neofascism is the most dangerous and volatile phenomenon in this emerging right-wing historical bloc. All of this has to be seen in relation to the structural crisis of capitalism and growing ruling-class attempts to restructure the state-capital relationship so as to create regimes more exclusively for capital.

  • 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.

  • Late Imperialism

    “Late Imperialism,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 3 (July-August 2019), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-03-2019-07_1 [HTML]

    The globalization of production (and finance)—which emerged along with neoliberalism out of the economic stagnation of the mid–1970s and then accelerated with the demise of Soviet-type societies and China’s reintegration into the capitalist world system—has generated a more generalized monopoly capitalism, ushering in what can be called late imperialism. Late imperialism refers to the present period of monopoly-finance capital and stagnation, declining U.S. hegemony and rising world conflict, accompanied by growing threats to the ecological bases of civilization and life itself. It stands at its core for the extreme, hierarchical relations governing the capitalist world economy in the twenty-first century, which is increasingly dominated by mega-multinational corporations and a handful of states at the center of the world system. Just as it is now common to refer to late capitalism in recognition of the end times brought on by simultaneous economic and ecological dislocations, so it is necessary today to speak of late imperialism, reflecting the global dimensions and contradictions of that system, cutting across all other divisions, and posing a “global rift” in human historical development: an epochal crisis posing the question of “ruin or revolution.”

  • Absolute Capitalism

    “Absolute Capitalism,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 1 (May 2019), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-01-2019-05_1 [HTML]

    Although neoliberalism is widely recognized as the central political-ideological project of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is a term that is seldom uttered by those in power. Behind this particular ruse lies a deeply disturbing, even hellish, reality. Neoliberalism can be defined as an integrated ruling-class political-ideological project, associated with the rise of monopoly-finance capital, the principal strategic aim of which is to embed the state in capitalist market relations. Hence, the state’s traditional role in safeguarding social reproduction—if largely on capitalist-class terms—is now reduced solely to one of promoting capitalist reproduction. The goal is nothing less than the creation of an absolute capitalism. All of this serves to heighten the extreme human and ecological destructiveness that characterizes our time.