John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Monthly Review

  • Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution

    “Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution” (coauthroed with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 8 (January 2018), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-08-2018-01 [HTML]

    Examining the historical specificity of women’s lives and labor in England during the Industrial Revolution allows us to better analyze the assumptions regarding gender, family, and work that informed the writings of Marx and Engels—and ultimately to understand how capital as a system threatens the social and ecological bases of human life.

  • The Long Ecological Revolution

    “The Long Ecological Revolution,” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 6 (November 2017), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-06-2017-10_1 [HTML]

    From an ecological perspective, the Anthropocene marks the need for a more creative, constructive, and coevolutionary relation to the earth. In ecosocialist theory, this demands the reconstitution of society at large—over decades and centuries. However, given the threat to the earth as a place of human habitation this transformation requires immediate reversals in the regime of accumulation.

    • Turkish translation, Dünyadan Ceviri, November 6, 2017, dunyadanceviri.wordpress.com

  • The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society

    “The Meaning of Work in a Sustainable Society,” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 4 (September 2017), pp. 1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-04-2017-08_1 [HTML]

    The idea of total liberation from work, in its one-sidedness and incompleteness, is ultimately incompatible with a genuinely sustainable society. The real promise of a system of labor beyond capitalism rests not so much on its expansion of leisure time, but rather on its capacity to generate a new world of creative and collective work, controlled by the associated producers.

    • Earlier version published by the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Society, University of Surrey, March 2017.
    • Spanish translation in Sinpermiso, April 1, 2018, sinpermiso.info,. Dutch and French translations, 2017 in Lavamedia.be.

  • Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917-2017

    “Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1917-2017,” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 3 (July-August 2017), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-03-2017-07_1 [HTML]

    If counterrevolution ultimately triumphed over the revolutionary waves of the twentieth century, how are we to understand this, and what does it mean for the future of world revolution? The answer requires a survey of the whole history of imperialist geopolitics over the last century.

    • Spanish translation in Alejandro Muyshondt Noticas, July 29, 2017.

  • This Is Not Populism

    “This Is Not Populism,” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 2 (June 2017), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-02-2017-06_1 [HTML]

    Since Trump’s election, mainstream commentary has generally avoided the question of fascism or neofascism, preferring instead to apply the vaguer, safer notion of “populism.” In today’s political context, however, it is crucial to understand not only how the failures of neoliberalism give rise to neofascist movements, but also to connect these to the structural crisis of concentrated, financialized, and globalized capitalism.

    •             Turkish traslation in Özgür Üniversite, July 6, 2017.

  • Neofascism in the White House

    “Neofascism in the White House,” Monthly Review vol. 68, no. 11 (April 2017), pp. 1-30. DOI: 10.14452/MR-068-11-2017-04_1 [HTML]

    Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken up residence at the White House: neofascism. It resembles in certain ways the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

  • Trump and Climate Catastrophe

    Trump and Climate Catastrophe

    “Trump and Climate Catastrophe,” Monthly Review, vol. 68, no. 9 (February 2017), pp. 1-17.

    The alarm bells are ringing. The climate-change denialism of the Trump administration, coupled with its goal of maximizing fossil-fuel extraction and consumption at all costs, constitutes, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “almost a death knell for the human species.” As noted climatologist Michael E. Mann has declared, “I fear that this may be game over for the climate.”

  • Marx as a Food Theorist

    Marx as a Food Theorist

    “Marx as a Food Theorist,” Monthly Review, vol. 68, no. no. 7 (December 2016), pp. 1-22.

    Food has become a core contradiction of contemporary capitalism. Discussions of the economics and sociology of food and food regimes seem to be everywhere today, with some of the most important contributions made by Marxian theorists. Amid plentiful food production, hunger remains a chronic problem, and food security is now a pressing concern for many of the world’s people.

    Yet despite the severity of these problems and their integral relation to the capitalist commodity system, it is generally believed that Karl Marx himself contributed little to our understanding of food, beyond a few general comments on subsistence and hunger. In their 1992 introduction to The Sociology of Food, Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. van Otterloo declared that “food as such is only of passing interest to Marx,” quipping that the only mention of “‘Diet’ in an index of Marx’s writings” referred “to a political assembly.”

  • Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology

    Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology

    “Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology,” (John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 68, no. 5 (October 2016), pp. 1-17.

    The recovery of the ecological-materialist foundations of Karl Marx’s thought, as embodied in his theory of metabolic rift, is redefining both Marxism and ecology in our time, reintegrating the critique of capital with critical natural science. This may seem astonishing to those who were reared on the view that Marx’s ideas were simply a synthesis of German idealism, French utopian socialism, and British political economy. However, such perspectives on classical historical materialism, which prevailed during the previous century, are now giving way to a broader recognition that Marx’s materialist conception of history is inextricably connected to the materialist conception of nature, encompassing not only the critique of political economy, but also the critical appropriation of the natural-scientific revolutions occurring in his day.

    What Georg Lukács called Marx’s “ontology of social being” was rooted in a conception of labor as the metabolism of society and nature. In this view, human-material existence is simultaneously social-historical and natural-ecological. Moreover, any realistic historical understanding required a focus on the complex interconnections and interdependencies associated with human-natural conditions. It was this overall integrated approach that led Marx to define socialism in terms of a process of sustainable human development—understood as the necessity of maintaining the earth for future generations, coupled with the greatest development of human freedom and potential. Socialism thus required that the associated producers rationally regulate the metabolism of nature and society. It is in this context that Marx’s central concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” “social metabolism,” and the metabolic “rift” have come to define his critical-ecological worldview.

    Translation:

    Spanish translation in Derrota y Navegación, November 13, 2016

  • “Foreword” to English translation of Marta Harnecker, “Latin America and Twenty-First Century Socialism”

    “Foreword” to English translation of Marta Harnecker, “Latin America and Twenty-First Century Socialism” (originally published as a book in Spanish), Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 3 (July-August 2010), iii-xvii. 

    Translation(s):

    Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, vol. 3, no. 1 (December 2010). Translated by Ashish Lahiri.]