John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Monthly Review

  • Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism

    “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism” (coauthored with Intan Suwandi and R. Jamil Jonna, Foster listed last), Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-10-2019-03_1 [HTML]

    To comprehend twenty-first-century imperialism we must go beyond analysis of the nation-state to a systematic investigation of the increasing global reach of multinational corporations or the role of the global labor arbitrage. At issue is the way in which today’s global monopolies in the center of the world economy have captured value generated by labor in the periphery within a process of unequal exchange, thus getting “more labour in exchange for less.” The result has been to change the global structure of industrial production while maintaining and often intensifying the global structure of exploitation and value transfer.

    •   Chinese translation was published in Foreign Theoretical Trends, October 2019.

  • Capitalism Has Failed–What Next?

    “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?” Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 9 (February 2019), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-09-2019-02_1 [HTML]

    Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social system. The world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most extreme inequality in human history, accompanied by mass unemployment and underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at this point can only be called a planetary ecological “death spiral.” Many of the symptoms of the failure of capitalism are well-known. Nevertheless, they are often attributed not to capitalism as a system, but simply to neoliberalism, viewed as a particular paradigm of capitalist development that can be replaced by another, better one. A critical-historical analysis of neoliberalism is therefore crucial both to grounding our understanding of capitalism today and uncovering the reason why all alternatives to neoliberalism and its capitalist absolutism are closed within the system itself.

  • Marx and Alienated Speciesism

    “Marx and Alienated Speciesism” (coauthered with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 7 (December 2018), pp. 1-20. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-07-2018-11_1. [HTML]

    In many animal-rights circles, Karl Marx and a long tradition of Marxian theorists are to be faulted for their speciesist treatment of nonhuman animals and the human-nonhuman animal relationship. These criticisms typically neglect the larger historical conditions, intellectual influences, and debates out of which Marx’s treatment of the human-animal dialectic arose—even though this is crucial to any meaningful understanding of his thought in this area. In response, this article assesses the historical-intellectual background behind Marx’s arguments on humans and animals, placing it in the context of the influence exercised on his thought by Epicurus, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Ludwig Feuerbach, Charles Darwin, and others. In the process, they explain how Marx’s view of animals in the world came to be integrated with his theory of metabolic rift and his critique of capitalism.

  • Value Isn’t Everything

    “Value Isn’t Everything” (coauthored with Paul Burkett, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 6 (November 2018), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-06-2018-10_1 [HTML]

    The rapid advances in Marxian ecology in the last two decades have given rise to extensive debates within the left, reflecting competing conceptions of theory and practice in an age of planetary ecological and social crisis. One key area of dispute is the attempt by a growing number of radical environmental thinkers to deconstruct the labor theory of value in order to bring everything in existence within a single commodity logic. For many in Green circles, Karl Marx and a long tradition of Marxian theorists are to be faulted for not directly incorporating the expenditure of physical work/energy by extra-human nature into the theory of value. In response, this article argues that any form of analysis that seeks to eliminate the deep-seated dialectical contradictions between the natural form and the value form, as well as between the capitalist economy and the larger socioecological metabolism, fails to comprehend the complex, interdependent dialectics of nature and humanity.

    •  Earlier version was published in International Socialism 160 (Autumn 2018): 39-58.

     

     

  • Geoengineering

    “Geoengineering: Making War on the Planet,” copublished by Science for the People Magazine (Summer 2018) and Monthly Review, vol. 70, no. 4 (September 2018), pp. 1-10.DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-04-2018-08_1 [HTML]

    The dangers posed by climate change have inspired a desperate search for technological fixes in the form of geoengineering—massive human interventions to manipulate the entire climate or planet. But as long as the dominant strategy for addressing global warming remains subordinated to the ends of capital accumulation, any attempt to implement such schemes will prove fatal to humanity.

  • Marx, Value, and Nature

    “Marx, Value, and Nature,” Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 3 (July-August 2018), pp. 122-36. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_6 [HTML]

    In recent years ecological critiques of capitalism have deepened and multiplied, resulting in new debates over the conception, scope, and purpose of Marx’s value theory and its relation to the natural world.

  • The Robbery of Nature

    “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Metabolic Rift” (co-authored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 3 (July-August 2018), pp. 1-20. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_1 [HTML]

    Marx’s notion of “the robbery of the soil” is intrinsically connected to the rift in the metabolism between human beings and the earth. To get at the complexities of his metabolic rift theory, it is useful to look separately at the issues of the robbery and the rift, seen as separate moments in a single development.

  • Marx’s Open-Ended Critique

    “Marx’s Open-Ended Critique,” Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 1 (May 2018), pp. 1-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-01-2018-05_1 [HTML]

    Against attempts to characterize Marx as a dogmatic and deterministic thinker, it is precisely the open-endedness of his criticism that accounts for historical materialism’s staying power. This openness has allowed Marxism to continually reinvent itself, expanding its empirical and theoretical content and embracing ever larger aspects of historical reality.

     

  • The Expropriation of Nature

    “The Expropriation of Nature” (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 10 (March 2018), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-10-2018-03_1 [HTML]

    To understand the present ecological crisis, it is necessary to dig much deeper into capitalism’s logic of expropriation, as first delineated by Marx during the Industrial Revolution. At the root of the problem is a spoliation of the natural environment—the expropriation of the earth itself.

  • What Is Monopoly Capital?

    “What Is Monopoly Capital?” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 8 (January 2018), pp. 56-62. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-08-2018-01_5  [HTML]

    “Monopoly capital” is a term for the new form of capital, embodied in the modern giant corporation, that in the late nineteenth century began to displace the small family firm as the dominant economic unit, marking the end of the freely competitive stage of capitalism.

    • Published in Polish in Realny Kapitalizm. Wokót teorii kapitału monopolistycnego (Real Capitalism: Exploring Monopoly Capital Theory), edited by Grzegorz Knoat and Przemysław Eielgoz (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2017), 15-31.