John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Monthly Review

  • The Household Debt Bubble

    The Household Debt Bubble

    “The Household Debt Bubble“, Monthly Review 58, no. 1 (May 2006), pp.1-11. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-01-2006-05_1

    It is an inescapable truth of the capitalist economy that the uneven, class-based distribution of income is a determining factor of consumption and investment. How much is spent on consumption goods depends on the income of the working class. Workers necessarily spend all or almost all of their income on consumption. Thus for households in the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution in the United States, average personal consumption expenditures equaled or exceeded average pre-tax income in 2003; while the fifth of the population just above them used up five-sixths of their pre-tax income (most of the rest no doubt taken up by taxes) on consumption.1 In contrast, those high up on the income pyramid-the capitalist class and their relatively well-to-do hangers-on-spend a much smaller percentage of their income on personal consumption. The overwhelming proportion of the income of capitalists (which at this level has to be extended to include unrealized capital gains) is devoted to investment.

    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Wang Shui in The Journal of Society and Science (China), 2006.

     

  • 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:

     

  • Organizing Ecological Revolution

    “Organizing Ecological Revolution,” Monthly Review, vol. 57, no. 5 (October 2005), pp.1-10. DOI: 10.14452/MR-057-05-2005-09_1

    My subject—organizing ecological revolution—has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted in John Jermier, ed., Corporate Environmentalism and the Greening of Organizations (Sage Publications, March 2013). Reprinted in Jane Kelley and Sheila Malone, ed., Ecosocialism or Barbarism (London: Socialist Resistance, 2006, pp. 56-67).
    Translations:
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008).
    • Greek translation published in Monthly Review (Greek edition, Athens), no. 2 (2005), pp. 11-23.
    • Spanish translation in Globalización, September 2005.
    • Portuguese translation at
      http://cai.xtreemhost.com/cdc-galiza/foster.htm.
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2008), pp. 183-93.

     

  • 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 Lluita, 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.

     

  • Naked Imperialism

    “Naked Imperialism,” Monthly Review, vol. 57, no. 4 (September 2005), pp. 1-11. DOI: 10.14452/MR-057-04-2005-08_1

    The global actions of the United States since September 11, 2001, are often seen as constituting a “new militarism” and a “new imperialism.” Yet, neither militarism nor imperialism is new to the United States, which has been an expansionist power—continental, hemispheric, and global—since its inception. What has changed is the nakedness with which this is being promoted, and the unlimited, planetary extent of U.S. ambitions.

    Translations:
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (Istanbul: Kalkedon, March 2006).

     

  • The Renewing of Socialism

    “The Renewing of Socialism: An Introduction” [PDF], Monthly Review, vol. 57, no. 3 (July-August 2005), pp. 1-18.

    Translation

    • Chinese translation by Zhuang Junju, Contemporary World and Socialism (China), no. 1 (2006).
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 1 (2006), pp. 11-30
    • Greek translation published in Monthly Review (Greek edition, Athens, 2006), pp. 7-26.

    Articles in Monthly Review often end by invoking the socialist alternative to capitalism. Readers in recent years have frequently asked us what this means. Didn’t socialism die in the twentieth century? Wasn’t it defeated by capitalism? More practically: if socialism is still being advocated what kind of socialism is it? Are we being utopian in the sense of advancing a pleasant but impossible dream?

  • The End of Rational Capitalism

    The End of Rational Capitalism

    “The End of Rational Capitalism,” Monthly Review, vol. 56, no. 10 (March 2005), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-056-10-2005-03_1

    The twentieth century’s dominant myth was that of a “rational capitalism.” The two economists who did the most to promote this idea were John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Both were responding to the great historical crisis of capitalism manifested in the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. In the wake of the greatest set of horrors the world had ever seen, accompanied also by the rise of an alternative, contending system in the Soviet Union, it was necessary for capitalism following the Second World War to reestablish itself ideologically as well as materially. In terms of the ideological requirement, the two economists who accomplished this most effectively were Keynes and Schumpeter—not simply because they epitomized the best in bourgeois economic ideology, but also because they were the leading representatives of bourgeois economic science. What they set out in their analyses were the requirements of a rational capitalism and at least the hope that these requirements would be achieved.

    Translations:

     

  • Empire of Barbarism

    Empire of Barbarism

    “Empire of Barbarism,” coauthored with Brett Clark (Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 56, no. 7 (December 2004), pp. 1-15. DOI: 10.14452/MR-056-07-2004-11_1

    “A new age of barbarism is upon us.” These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, and Nepalese workers in Iraq, and the killing of hundreds on a Spanish commuter train and hundreds more in Bali, Business Week declared: “America, Europe, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and governments everywhere are under attack by Islamic extremists. These terrorists have but one demand—the destruction of modern secular society.” Western civilization was portrayed as standing in opposition to the barbarians, who desire to destroy what is assumed to be the pinnacle of social evolution.

    Translations:
    • Original published version appeared in Portuguese translation in Commnicações, vol. 1, Civilização ou Barbárie (Serpa, Portugal: Encontro Internacional, September 2004), pp. 46-53.
    • German translation in Utopiekreativ: Diskussion Sozialistischer Alternativen, June 2005, vol. 176, 491-503;
    • Spanish translation in Marx Ahora (Cuba), no. 19 (2005), 7-19.
    • Polish translation in Rewolucja, no. 4, 2006.
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 9 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2006).
    • Japanese translation, February 1, 2005, at http://www.ne.jp/asahi/institute/association/old/newsletter/20050201/article_2.htm.

     

  • Ecology, Capitalism, and the Socialization of Nature

    “Ecology, Capitalism, and the Socialization of Nature: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster” [PDF], Monthly Review vol. 56, no. 6 (November 2004), pp. 1-12.

    Originally published on-line in Aurora (Athabasca University), Interview Collection at http://aurora.icaap.org/.

    Translations

    • Chinese translation by Liu Rensheng, Contemporary World and Socialism (China), no. 6, 2005.
    • Indonesian translation in Ecology, Capitalism and the Socialization of Nature (Jakarta: Indonesian Forum for Environment (WALHI): Institute for Media Liberation and Social Sciences, 2004).

    DENNIS SORON: Many environmentalists came away from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 with a great deal of optimism, believing that the cause of global environmental reform had finally been seriously placed on the political agenda. Today, with environmental conditions continuing to worsen and governments refusing to take effective action, it seems that little of this optimism remains. Why did the hopes spawned at Rio turn out to be so misplaced?

  • The Commitment of an Intellectual

    The Commitment of an Intellectual

    “The Commitment of an Intellectual: Paul M. Sweezy (1910-2004),” Monthly Review, vol. 56, no. 5 (October 2004), pp. 5-39. DOI: 10.14452/MR-056-05-2004-09_2

    Original draft placed on the Monthly Review web page in March of 2004, shortly after Sweezy’s death.

    The following brief intellectual biography of Paul Sweezy was drafted in September 2003 shortly before I saw Paul for the last time. It conveys many of the basic facts of his life. But as with all biographies of leading intellectuals it fails to capture the brilliance of his work, which must be experienced directly through his own writings. Nor is the warmth of Paul’s character adequately conveyed here. A short personal note is therefore needed. What was so surprising about Paul was his seemingly endless generosity and humanity. Paul gave freely of himself to all of those seeking his political and intellectual guidance. But a few, such as myself, were particularly blessed in that they experienced this on a deeper, more intense level. For decades Paul was concerned that Monthly Review not perish as had so many socialist institutions and publications in the past. He recognized early on that the continuance of the magazine and the tradition that it represented required the deliberate cultivation of new generations of socialist intellectuals. I was fortunate to be singled out while still quite young as one of those. For decades Paul wrote me letter after letter—no letter that I wrote to him ever went unanswered—sharing his knowledge, intellectual brilliance, and personal warmth. It was an immense, indescribable gift.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation of early version in iktisat dergisi (August 2004), pp. 22-40.
    • Persian translation of early version in Ketaab-e-Bar-rassi-haa-ye Ejtema’i (Journal of Social Reviews), November 2004 (publisher: Baztabnegar).
    • Bengali translation included in In the Rank of the Wretched: A collection of Short Biographies of Albert Einstein, Paul M. Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff. (Dhaka, Bangladesh: Shrabon Prokashoni, 2006).
    • Chinese translation by Xi Cai in Foreign Theory Dynamics, 6 (2003).