John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Monthly Review

  • The Fossil Fuels War

    The Fossil Fuels War

    “The Fossil Fuels War”, Monthly Review vol. 65, no. 4 (September 2013), pp. 1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-065-04-2013-08_1

    Only a few years ago governments, corporations, and energy analysts were fixated on the problem of “the end of cheap oil” or “peak oil,” pointing to growing shortages of conventional crude oil due to the depletion of known reserves. The International Energy Agency’s 2010 report devoted a whole section to peak oil. Some climate scientists saw the peaking of conventional crude oil as a silver-lining opportunity to stabilize the climate—provided that countries did not turn to dirtier forms of energy such as coal and “unconventional fossil fuels.”… Today all of this has changed radically with the advent of what some are calling a new energy revolution based on the production of unconventional fossil fuels. The emergence in North America—but increasingly elsewhere as well—of what is now termed the “Unconventionals Era” has meant that suddenly the world is awash in new and prospective fossil-fuel supplies.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (January 2014), pp. 133-51.
    • Swedish language edition in Röda rummet (the Red room), 2013.

     

  • Introduction to the Second Edition of The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism

    “Introduction to the Second Edition of The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism” [PDF], Monthly Review vol. 65, no. 3 (July 2013), pp.107-134.

    The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy was initially written thirty years ago this coming year as my doctoral dissertation at York University in Toronto. It was expanded into a larger book form with three additional chapters (on the state, imperialism, and socialist construction) and published by Monthly Review Press two years later. The analysis of both the dissertation and the book focused primarily on the work of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, and particularly on the debate that had grown up around their book, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1966). In this respect The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism was specifically designed, as its subtitle indicated, as an “elaboration” of their underlying theoretical perspective and its wider implications.… Three decades later much has changed, in ways that make the reissuing of The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism in a new edition seem useful and timely. The scholarly research into Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital has expanded enormously in the intervening years, most notably with the publication of the two missing chapters of Monopoly Capital—one on the theoretical implications of their analysis for economics, the other on culture and communications—and through research into their joint correspondence. The Great Financial Crisis and the resurfacing of economic stagnation have engendered new interest in this tradition of thought. Under this historical impetus the theory itself has advanced to address new developments, particularly with respect to the understanding of stagnation, financialization, and the globalization of monopoly capital.

  • Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy

    Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy

    “Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy”, Monthly Review vol. 64, no. 11 (April 2013), pp. 1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-11-2013-04_1

    A historical perspective on the economic stagnation afflicting the United States and the other advanced capitalist economies requires that we go back to the severe downturn of 1974–1975, which marked the end of the post-Second World War prosperity. The dominant interpretation of the mid–1970s recession was that the full employment of the earlier Keynesian era had laid the basis for the crisis by strengthening labor in relation to capital. As a number of prominent left economists, whose outlook did not differ from the mainstream in this respect, put it, the problem was a capitalist class that was “too weak” and a working class that was “too strong.” Empirically, the slump was commonly attributed to a rise in the wage share of income, squeezing profits. This has come to be known as the “profit-squeeze” theory of crisis.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (January 2014), pp. 59-77.
    • Chinese translation forthcoming in Foreign Theoretical Trends, vol. 3 (2014)
    • Spanish translation in Revista Sin Permiso, April 12, 2013, www.sinpermiso.info.

     

  • Class War and Labor’s Declining Share

    Class War and Labor’s Declining Share

    “Class War and Labor’s Declining Share”, (coauthored with Fred Magdoff; Magdoff listed first), Monthly Review vol. 64, no. 10 (March 2013), pp. 1-11. DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-10-2013-03_1

    Given [the] background of high unemployment, lower-wage jobs, and smaller portions of the pie going to workers, it should come as no surprise that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 50 million people in the United States live in poverty (with income in 2011 below $23,021 for a family of four) while another 50 million live between the poverty level and twice the poverty level—one paycheck away from economic disaster. Thus, the poor (those in poverty or near poverty), most of whom belong to the working poor, account for approximately 100 million people, fully one-third of the entire U.S. population.… Wage repression and high unemployment are the dominant realities of our time. A vast redistribution of income—Robin Hood in reverse—is occurring that is boosting the share of income to capital, even in a stagnating economy. Is it any wonder, then, that for years on end polls have shown a majority of the population agreeing with the statement that the United States is on the wrong track and not headed in the right direction?

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (October 2013), pp. 29- 41.

     

  • Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism

    “Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism: A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars,” [PDF] (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 9 (February 2013), pp. 54-61.

    I would like to thank Zhihe Wang, Meijun Fan, Hui Dong, Dezhong Sun, and Lichun Li for doing so much to promote a global dialogue on ecological Marxism by summarizing some of the insights and concerns of Chinese scholars in this area, focusing in this case on my work in particular. The various questions, challenges, and critiques raised in relation to my work and that of related scholars are all, I believe, of great importance to the development of theory and practice in this area. I am therefore providing a brief set of responses to the problems raised, which I hope will be helpful in the further promotion of this global dialogue on ecology and Marxism.

  • James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy

    James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy

    “James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy,”, Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 9 (February 2013) pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-09-2013-02_1

    The world at present is fast approaching a climate cliff. Science tells us that an increase in global average temperature of 2°C (3.6° F) constitutes the planetary tipping point with respect to climate change, leading to irreversible changes beyond human control. A 2°C rise is sufficient to melt a significant portion of the world’s ice due to feedbacks that will hasten the melting. It will thus set the course to an ice-free world. Sea level will rise. Numerous islands will be threatened along with coastal regions throughout the globe. Extreme weather events (droughts, storms, floods) will be far more common. The paleoclimatic record shows that an increase in global average temperature of several degrees means that 50 percent or more of all species—plants and animals—will be driven to extinction. Global food crops will be negatively affected.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 33 Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2013).
    • Norwegian translation in Vardøger no. 35 (May 2015): 98-116;

     

  • Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism: A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars

    “Toward a Global Dialogue on Ecology and Marxism: A Brief Response to Chinese Scholars,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 9 (February 2013): 54-61.

    I would like to thank Zhihe Wang, Meijun Fan, Hui Dong, Dezhong Sun, and Lichun Li for doing so much to promote a global dialogue on ecological Marxism by summarizing some of the insights and concerns of Chinese scholars in this area, focusing in this case on my work in particular. The various questions, challenges, and critiques raised in relation to my work and that of related scholars are all, I believe, of great importance to the development of theory and practice in this area. I am therefore providing a brief set of responses to the problems raised, which I hope will be helpful in the further promotion of this global dialogue on ecology and Marxism.

    Marx and Ecological Marxism

    Many of the criticisms expressed relate to the question of the compatibility of Marx’s ideas with ecological Marxism. Xu Yanmei, Pu Xiangji, Li Benzhu, Gao Huizhu, Zhang Xiangli, and Leng Yunsheng have all raised what I consider to be important questions about how Marx’s materialism is depicted in my book Marx’s Ecology, and how this is related to classical Marxian conceptions of history, practice, and dialectics—as well as Marx’s own development. Xu Yanmei, we are told, contends that my work makes the mistake of placing Marx’s dissertation on a par with his mature work. In contrast to my interpretation, she argues that an ecological critique did not consciously enter into Marx’s critique of capitalism or his critique of religion. These are important criticisms. Here I will confine my response to the relation of Marx’s ecological critique to his critique of capitalism. However, the connections of his ecological thought to the critique of religion are also important. I have discussed these in the bookCritique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present, written with Brett Clark and Richard York.1

    The initial research that led me to write Marx’s Ecology began with an investigation into the ecological analysis that came to occupy such a central place in Marx’s critique in Capital. The most important discussions lie at the end of the core chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in Capital, vol. 1, and at the end of the long treatment of capitalist ground rent inCapital, vol. 3—but the same critical ecological viewpoint permeates all of Marx’s mature work. In particular, he relied heavily on Justus von Liebig’s critique of capitalist agriculture (contained espeically in the long introduction to the 1862 edition of Liebig’s great work on agricultural chemistry). But Marx went beyond Liebig in brilliantly incorporating the metabolism concept to explain the relation between humanity and nature, defining the labor process itself in these terms. Human production, like life itself, could thus be viewed in terms of “metabolism,” i.e., as an “organic exchange of matter”—as Engels put it in Anti-Dühring. Marx described capitalism’s necessarily antagonistic relation to nature as an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” He thus anticipated the entire direction that critical ecological science was to take in twentieth-century systems ecology, which made the concept of metabolism the key to ecosystem theory.2

    I wondered how was this possible? How did Marx arrive at such profound ecological conclusions, which could not be explained simply in terms of his encounter with Liebig? Could the answer lie in the nature of Marx’s materialism? What was the relation of Marx’s thought to natural science? The only way to find an answer, I decided, was to go back to the genesis of Marx’s thought—not just to his “early writings” but what I came to think of as his “very early writings,” i.e., his dissertation and other pre–1844 manuscripts.3 That led me to Marx’s early encounter with Epicurean materialism, which had played such a large role in the development of modernity and modern science. Marx approached Epicurus, like all other major thinkers, dialectically, which meant that he appropriated Epicurus’s thought in a critical-transformative fashion. There is no intention here of equating “Marx’s dialectical materialism with Epicurean natural materialism” as Zhang Xiangli and Leng Yunsheng have, it seems, pointedly accused me of doing, and as Pu Xiangji also strongly implied. Marx should be understood as a complex, dialectical, creative thinker. In transcending Epicurus’s views, he retained their rational core, just as in transcending other key thinkers, such as Hegel and Ricardo, he retained what was most rational and critical. Epicurus was significant for Marx both as “the true radical Enlightener of antiquity” and as the main root within antiquity of the viewpoint of scientific modernity. Moreover, Marx admired Epicurus’ concept of freedom (even if a contemplative one) and above all his notion of the “swerve.” (In Epicurean philosophy the infinitesimally small “swerve” of atoms in what was otherwise a smooth, linear movement, stood for contingency, and ultimately the possibility of human freedom.)4

    It is therefore highly significant that Marx chose to write his dissertation on the ancient Epicurean philosophy of nature. In this way the importance of science and naturalism in his thought is revealed very early. I came to the conclusion that Marx, who studied geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and other natural sciences throughout his life, saw the materialist conception of nature promoted by natural science as vital to his own development of thematerialist conception of history within social science (and social praxis). In directly advancing the latter in his work he also continued to explore the former, incorporating new scientific knowledge into his analysis where necessary—for the simple reason that in his view there was “only one science” and thus human history and human labor were inseparable from the human metabolism with nature.5

    In such a conception, then, our understanding of Marx’s dialectic is necessarily widened. Not only was Marx a historical and a dialectical thinker, but the nature of his understanding of the world made him an ecological one as well—and none of this contradicted in the least (indeed it intensified) the revolutionary character of his thought. Hence, I disagree respectfully with the view attributed to Li Benzhu that Marx in my interpretation (and that of others) is degraded from a revolutionary thinker to an ecologist. The two are not antagonistic to each other. In fact, an ecological revolution, which would necessarily also be a social revolution, is the particular historical burden of our time.

    This is not to say that Marx in himself provides us with views adequate to deal with all of the specific challenges of today. That would be an ahistorical viewpoint. But for a long time an influential stream of Western Marxism has followed Lukács in arguing that in Marxism “orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.”6 In this sense, Marx, with his wider dialectic, which was so revealing of the contradictions of capitalism and modernity, remains a guide.

    The additional criticisms of Pu, Zhang, and Leng that there is the danger, in addressing the complex relation between humanity and nature, of falling into dualism and of losing sight of Marx’s concept of “humanized nature” are, in my view, important. What we are learning today, though—and what in my argument Marx had already recognized—was that “humanized nature” in its capitalist form has generated a metabolic rift as a result of our failure to recognize that humanity is “a part of nature.” As Engels said, “we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but…we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and…all our mastery consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws an apply them correctly.” Developing a non-dualistic understanding of the dialectic of humanity and nature, in this sense, without simply subsuming one under the other, is the great theoretical challenge of our age.7

    It never occurred to me, as Gao Huizhu says, to substitute the concept of metabolism for “objective activity.” The notion of metabolism as employed in Marx’s thought had to do with what he called the “eternal natural conditions” within which life exists and human production occurs.8 Revolutionary praxis, in Marx’s conception, is obviously not independent of material conditions, which are partly given by nature and then transformed by human production. Studying natural conditions and limits is part of a materialist understanding of the world. For example, one of the big issues today with respect to global ecology is species extinction due in part to climate change as the temperature zones or isotherms shift faster than species are able to move toward the poles, resulting in increased loss of species.9 I think it is, therefore, of great significance that near the end of his life, in 1878, Marx was studying, and taking scientific notes, on isotherms and their relation to species extinction due to shifts in the former—even making drawings of the temperature zones in his notebook. He clearly regarded this as crucial to the understanding of the material conditions and limits of life.10 The idea that in extending his thinking in these directions he was simply acting as an ecologist and not also as a revolutionary thinker is I think far too narrow. Marx’s view, like Hegel’s, was that “the true is the whole.”11 Marx’s use of the notion of metabolism was thus dialectical in the widest, most critical sense—as Lukács was among the first to perceive, seeing it as the key to a meaningful dialectic of nature and society.12 None of this should be conceived as subtracting from the Marxian notion of praxis or “objective activity.” Today ours is the task of developing a more dialectical and revolutionary ecological praxis, which is vitally needed in our period of planetary crisis.

    It would be a serious mistake, I believe, to view ecological Marxism as a replacement for Marxism or as a superior Marxism. Rather the incorporation of ecological-materialist understandings as integral to historical materialism was conceived in broad outline by Marx, and is an essential element of the dialectical approach to theory and practice, science and history, that he promoted. This was understood by some of his earlier followers. However, the ecological element within Marxism was largely lost in the early twentieth century. In the Soviet Union the leading ecological Marxists were purged. While in critical Marxist philosophy in the West—in what came to be viewed by many as the defining trait of “Western Marxism”—an extreme revolt against physical science as an embodiment of positivism resulted in an unfortunate divorce between Marxism and the ecological ideas that were developing within science at that time.13 Both of these developments were “sins” against Marxism. Today we are in a position to repair these rifts between Marxism and ecology as part of a larger revolutionary movement aimed at repairing the rifts between society and nature.

    China and Ecological Marxism

    A further set of criticisms and challenges raised in the above article relate to the significance of my work and ecological Marxism in general for understanding the conditions governing the former Soviet Union and the situation of present-day China. From a viewpoint influenced by constructive postmodernism—that is, the humanist ecological vision inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy—Meng Genlong argues that my perspective fails to explain what happened in the former Soviet Union or the ecological problems facing socialist China today. He contends that constructive postmodernism offers a more powerful critique in this respect than ecological Marxism, which is unable to account for socialism’s own failures.

    This raises extremely complex historical and theoretical questions. In my own view, modernity, insofar as it is separate from the distinctive development of bourgeois civilization, is too abstract a concept to carry the full burden of ecological critique. Minus historical specificity it becomes prone to Whitehead’s famous “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”14

    In addressing the question of socialism and the environment it is important to understand the accumulation imperative of a capitalist system that drives it inexorably toward ecological disaster, while socialism lacks such an absolute economic growth imperative as an invariant standard and driving force. Nevertheless, this makes it all the more important to explain why socialist revolutions led to ecological results analogous to those of capitalism. The reality is that the Soviet socialist experiment emerged in what was largely an underdeveloped and peripheral (or semi-peripheral) area of the capitalist world economy and was immediately subject to the full force of imperialism—geopolitical, military, and economic, of which the Cold War was itself emblematic. The pressure to prepare for defense and put all other interests aside was intense. In its early phase, until the 1930s, the USSR boasted an unequalled ecological science. But with external pressures, the internal deformations and brutalities of the 1930s, and then fighting for survival against the Nazis, it evolved into a system geared to “production for production’s sake.” When emergency conditions began to ease, deep and lasting damage had been done. The USSR did not even remain socialist in the sense of continually promoting egalitarianism; in fact, a proletarianized working class remained. New ruling elements emerged. The USSR consciously copied methods and systems from advanced capitalist countries—including factory size and organization, scientific management, and agricultural practices. The kind of forced drafting of resources that is characteristic of war economies became institutionalized in the system.

    In terms of Marxist theory, then, the USSR lost most of the essential characteristics of societies in transition from capitalism to socialism.15 Accompanying this was a blatant disregard of ecological conditions—and the purging of the scientists who in the 1920s and early ‘30s had made Soviet ecological science foremost in the world. I have written briefly on the ecological contradictions of the Soviet Union and the role they placed in its demise in a section of my book The Vulnerable Planet, entitled “The Environment of the Cold War: Ecocide in the Soviet Union.” In Marx’s Ecology the destruction of Soviet ecological science is discussed.16

    In China the capitalist road to socialism, articulated by the Chinese Communist Party in the most recent period (since 1979), put development first, and also involved the forced drafting of natural resources and, to a significant extent, reliance on the profit motive to propel investment. In contrast to this, we are now seeing new ecological initiatives taking place in China, such as the New Rural Reconstruction program promoted by Wen Tiejun, basing itself on some of the strengths of the Chinese revolution.17

    An article that I wrote with Brett Clark on “The Planetary Emergency” for the December 2012 issue of Monthly Review points to the ecological significance of the New Rural Reconstruction movement in China.18 In my book, The Endless Crisis, written with Robert W. McChesney, there is a discussion of China’s current socioeconomic problems in which the growing ecological crisis of China—accelerating perhaps even more rapidly than the planetary crisis—is addressed. Our concluding chapter on China does not stop short of the critique of Foxconn and of the abysmal forms of labor exploitation in China, where, as Wang and his colleagues indicate, workers recently have been openly referred to by entrepreneurs as “animals” and compared to occupants of zoos—in obscene violation of everything that socialism has stood for historically.19 My article “James Hansen and the Climate-Change Exit Strategy” in this issue of Monthly Review discusses China’s response to climate change and some of the challenges it faces.20 All of this makes the new “ecological civilization” discussion emerging in China all the more important. Fred Magdoff, with whom I recently wrote the book, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, published an article in the January 2011 issue of Monthly Review entitled “Ecological Civilization,” which was a talk delivered in 2010 at the Ecological Civilization Conference at Fudan University in Shanghai.21

    I would like to conclude by indicating my complete agreement with Zhihe Wang and his colleagues that ecological Marxism and constructive postmodernism represent overlapping and, to a considerable extent, complementary theoretical interventions, which, from all indications, are generating in China an intellectually powerful and praxis-oriented ecological critique. What Wang has elsewhere called “the indigenization of ecological Marxism in China” represents an extremely hopeful development not only for China but the world.22 China today must confront not simply capitalism as such, but the peculiar ecological and social rifts of a modern Chinese system, which, whatever its defining socioeconomic characteristics, is clearly threatened, both from within and without, by the cancerous spread of capitalist methods and mores.

    Notes

    1. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
    2. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 949, and Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 283; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 75; John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–405.
    3. ↩ See John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective,” International Socialism 96 (Autumn 2002): 71–86.
    4. ↩ Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 141; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 21–65; Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
    5. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, excerpt from The German Ideology, in Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 408. This is a crossed-out passage in the manuscript, not included in the Collected Works edition.
    6. ↩ Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 1.
    7. ↩ Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975), 328; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25, 461.
    8. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 637.
    9. ↩ James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 146–47.
    10. ↩ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MEGA IV: 26 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 214–19. See also Joseph Beete Jukes, The Student’s Manual of Geology, , third edition (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1872), 479–93.
    11. ↩ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 11.
    12. ↩ Georg Lukács, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness (New York: Verso, 2000), 129–31; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 215–47.
    13. ↩ Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976).
    14. ↩ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 51.
    15. ↩ The general problem of such post-revoutionary social formations is discussed in Paul M. Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980). See also István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 622–54.
    16. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 96–101.
    17. ↩ See Wen Tiejun, Lau Kinchi, Cheng Cunwang, He Huili, and Qiu Jiansheng, “Ecological Civilization, Indigenous Culture, and Rural Reconstruction in China,” Monthly Review 63, no. 9 (February 2012): 29–35.
    18. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review 64, no. 7 (December 2012): 20.
    19. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 155–83.
    20. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “James Hansen and the Climate Change Exit Strategy,” Monthly Review64, no. 9 (February 2013): 1–22.
    21. ↩ Fred Magdoff, “Ecological Civilization,” Monthly Review 62, no. 8 (January 2011): 1–25; Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
    22. ↩ Zhihe Wang, “Ecological Marxism in China,” Monthly Review 63, no. 9 (February 2012): 44.
  • The Planetary Emergency

    The Planetary Emergency

    “The Planetary Emergency” [PDF], (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 64, no. 7 (December 2012), pp. 1-25. DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-07-2012-11_1

    Capitalism today is caught in a seemingly endless crisis, with economic stagnation and upheaval circling the globe. But while the world has been fixated on the economic problem, global environmental conditions have been rapidly worsening, confronting humanity with its ultimate crisis: one of long-term survival. The common source of both of these crises resides in the process of capital accumulation. Likewise the common solution is to be sought in a “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,” going beyond the regime of capital.… It is still possible for humanity to avert what economist Robert Heilbroner once called “ecological Armageddon.” The means for the creation of a just and sustainable world currently exist, and are to be found lying hidden in the growing gap between what could be achieved with the resources already available to us, and what the prevailing social order allows us to accomplish. It is this latent potential for a quite different human metabolism with nature that offers the master-key to a workable ecological exit strategy.

     

  • A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital

    A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital

    “A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital: An Introduction to Baran and Sweezy’s ‘Some Theoretical Implications‘,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 3 (July-August 2012), pp. 3-23.
    DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-03-2012-07_2

    Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, published in 1966, is one of the foundational works in the development of Marxian political economy in the United States and indeed the world, and is today recognized as a classic, having generated more than four-and-a-half decades of research and debate. The completion of the book, however, was deeply affected by Baran’s death, on March 26, 1964, two years before the final manuscript was prepared. Although all of the chapters were drafted in at least rough form and had been discussed a number of times the authors had not mutually worked out to their complete satisfaction certain crucial problems. Consequently, two chapters were left out of the final work.… What happened to these two missing chapters—“Some Implications for Economic Theory” and presumably “On the Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society—II”—remained for many years a mystery.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 32 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2013, pp. 123-46.

     

  • Joan Acker’s Feminist Historical-Materialist Theory of Class

    “Joan Acker’s Feminist Historical-Materialist Theory of Class,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (June 2012), pp. 48-52.
    [Bangla language edition printed in Bangla Monthly Review, June 2013.]

    Marxism and feminism are usually seen as divorced from each other today, following the breakup of what Heidi Hartmann famously called their “unhappy marriage.”1 Yet, some theorists still show the influence of both. In my view, Joan Acker is both one of the leading analysts of gender and class associated with the second wave of feminism, and one of the great contributors to what has been called “feminist historical materialism.” In the latter respect, I would place her next to such important proponents of feminist standpoint theory as Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, and Sandra Harding. These thinkers, as Fredric Jameson has rightly said, represent the “most authentic” heirs of Lukács’s critical Marxist view articulating the proletarian standpoint—giving this dialectical insight added meaning by applying it to gender relations.2

    It is noteworthy that Acker’s important theoretical work Class Questions: Feminist Answersappeared in 2006, one year before the onset of the Great Financial Crisis.3 This of course was no mere accident. Acker was deeply concerned about the waning of class analysis, particularly amongst feminist theorists. At the same time she recognized that class was becoming more important than ever, not only because of growing inequality but also growing instability in the capitalist economy. Thus in the beginning of her book she referred to the “bursting of the economic bubble of the late 1990s,” i.e., the 2000 stock market crash that brought an end to the New Economy bubble, as presaging a new era of class intensification and class struggle (1). Today in the wake of the bursting of the even bigger housing bubble, and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement with its slogan of the 99%, Acker’s analysis can be viewed as prescient.

    Class Questions: Feminist Answers provides a rich and insightful history of class analysis in the Marxian, Weberian, and feminist theory traditions, emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of each. Acker’s treatment of the long debate over capitalism and patriarchy is particularly useful. In her view the only meaningful approach to class is one that is understood to be gendered and racialized. In this sense, she prefers “verbal forms, such as gendering, or adjectival forms, such as racialized, that better capture the sense of process and diversity” as opposed to the omnipresent noun, which all too often “reifies processes and practices” (5). And while class must (as Marxists have always insisted) be seen as related to relations of production and paid labor, it must also, she argues, be seen as encompassing relations of distribution and unpaid labor too.

    This is less of a departure from classical Marxian theory than one might suppose. Marx employed the concept of class more flexibly than we commonly do today—referring to women as a class, i.e., as “slaves,” within the bourgeois family. “In private property of every type,” he wrote in Capital, “the slavery of the members of the family at least is always implicit since they are made use of and exploited by the head of the family.”4 Classical Marxist theory, as a great deal of scholarship in recent decades has shown, defined class primarily in terms ofexploitation, i.e., how surplus product/surplus labor was appropriated from the direct producers. And just as classical Marxism applied this concept of class to pre-capitalist and pre-market relations, and hence to non-paid relationships, so the concept was always applicable to unpaid labor, which in Marxian terms is a relation of production. Slaves, as Marx (as opposed to Weber) insisted, constituted a class despite the fact that they were not wage workers and were regarded as property themselves.5

    The uniqueness of Acker’s work comes out in her critique of “unreconstructed ‘class’” notions, particularly those that make race and gender invisible within the class conception (4–5). In exploring how class, race, and gender are “mutually constituted” she not only criticizes Marxian and Weberian conceptions, but also questions popular feminist and sociological treatments of class, race, and gender in terms of intersectionalities. It is not so much that these conceptions are wrong as they are too crude, trying to reduce class (and along with race and gender) to particular spatial or structural locations/intersections, rather than emphasizing class as a fluid social relation, involving diverse practices and processes, including its gendering and racialization. In this respect, her work draws inspiration from the introductory discussion on class in E.P. Thompson’s classic, The Making of the English Working Class—a work that had a profound effect on Acker and other feminist historical materialists, as did Thompson’s critique of structuralist Marxism.6 What Acker, then, is offering is a methodology that will allow us to look at class, gender, and race together in terms of their inter-relational historical formations (“makings”), with all of the dialectical complexities that this implies. Referring to Rose Brewer, she insists that, “race, class, and gender processes should be seen as simultaneous forces, and that theorizing must be historicized and contextualized” (36).

    In a key statement of her general point of view, Acker writes:

    Because [class] practices are gendered and racialized, there are probably considerable differences in any one grouping…. This is a fluid notion of fragmented aggregates, with shifting boundaries and shifting practices, particularly during times of economic and employment restructuring, such as the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although I am committed to this notion of class as relations always in process, there are times when a shorthand way of indicating location can be very useful. Therefore, I will sometimes use the designations manual working class, service and clerical working class, middle class—a large and heterogeneous grouping—and capitalist class to designate very large aggregates with similar situations of access to and control over the means of provisioning. (68)

    In all of her important theorizing of the gendering and racializing of class, Acker never loses sight of the questions raised by class itself, or the specific historical significance of class issues. Thus a central theme throughout her analysis is that while gender and race discrimination no longer have any direct, legitimate basis in developed capitalist societies, this is not true in the case of class; class exploitation and class discrimination are accepted as fully legitimate in a system that relies on these bases for its core process of capital accumulation. As she puts it: “Class-based inequalities in monetary reward and in control over resources, power, and authority, and the actions and routine practices that continually recreate them, are accepted as natural and necessary for the ongoing functioning of the socioeconomic system” (52–53).

    In the end, Acker holds out the hope of a Polanyian “double movement” in response to neoliberalism, i.e., the promise of a counter revolt from below, emanating from peoples who are subject to multiple, overlapping forms of exploitation. “Global corporate capital,” she writes, “seems to be in control at the moment, but changes toward radically restructuring gendered and racialized class practices, and reversing the race to the bottom in living and working conditions, could come as more and more people confront the realities that global market capitalism has brought affluence to perhaps the top 20 percent of the world’s population, anxiety and insecurity to others who are still consuming and surviving, but deep poverty and desperation to the rest” (183–85).

    If this seems slightly dated today, only six years later, it is only because the general situation is so much more desperate in the period of stagnation and rising unemployment and poverty that has followed the bursting of the housing bubble. Now we readily talk of the conflict between the 99% and the 1%.

    If I have one criticism—or questioning—of Acker’s analysis, it is that in one particular way she deemphasizes the role of class. This is because class too needs its adjectival form. We need to recognize that gender is increasingly “classed,” as reflected in the feminization of poverty even while the conditions of many women improve; and likewise race is “classed.” Class should be seen as a process that also modifies race and gender relations.

    Still, Acker’s criticism of the way in which many Marxian thinkers have employed the concept of class is a welcome one today. Although Acker does not generally describe herself today as a Marxist, and indeed sees herself a critic of that perspective (or at least its more structuralist versions), her work might well be accepted by today’s Marxists as an important advance not so much on but of Marxian theory, representing a further synthesis, and helping to further its critical-revolutionary potential. There is no contradiction between Acker’s deep feminist critique, and the fact that she can be regarded as part of the broad historical-materialist tradition. Indeed, she demonstrates that each is a requirement of the other.

    In all of Acker’s work one sees an attempt to envision new strategies of radical change. Hence, she has been a leader in the struggle for comparable worth, a devastating critic of the role that the welfare system has played in disciplining women as well as the poor, and a penetrating analyst of the gendering of organizations. For her the problem with the New Left was not that it was too revolutionary but that it was not revolutionary enough. As she wrote in Monthly Review in December 2001: “The daunting reality facing radical and socialist feminist visions was, and is, not only that we have no gender and race egalitarian alternative to capitalism, but that the interweaving of gender and race with the economic, political, and social relations of capitalism is much more complicated and pervasive than we had imagined. To fundamentally change the situation of women, almost everything else must change.”7

    Selected Further Reading

    • Acker, Joan. “Class, Gender, and the Relations of Distribution,” Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 473–97.
    • _____.Class Questions: Feminist Answers (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2006).
    • _____.“My Life as a Feminist Sociologist; or Getting the Man Out of My Head,” in Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne, eds., Feminist Sociology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 28–47.
    • _____.“Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 4 (January 1973): 174–83.
    • Harding, Sandra G., ed, The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).
    • _____. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
    • Hartsock, Nancy C.M., Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983).
    • _____. Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
    • Hennessy, Rosemary and Chrys Ingraham, eds., Materialist Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997).
    • Scott, Joan W., “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75.
    • Smith, Dorothy E., The Everyday World as Problematic (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1987).
    • Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

    Notes

    1. ↩ Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,” in Lydia Sargent, ed.,Women and Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 1–41.
    2. ↩ Fredric Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness as an ‘Unfinished Project,’” Rethinking Marxism 1, no. 1 (1988): 64.
    3. ↩ Joan Acker, Class Questions: Feminist Answers (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006).
    4. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 1083. In his work on suicide we find Marx commenting on the “unbearable slavery” to which women are confined by law and “social conditions” in bourgeois society. See Karl Marx, Marx on Suicide (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 57–58.
    5. ↩ On the classical Marxian conception of class in relation to exploitation (and the contrast to Weber) see especially G.M.E. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World(London: Duckworth, 1981), 42–55, 88–91. Ralph Miliband pointed out that the emphasis onexploitation in Marx’s theory of class was entirely consistent with a wider understanding of a class system of domination, since it could be argued that “exploitation…has always been the main purpose of domination.” Nevertheless, it is important not to reduce domination in general to exploitation or class. “Patriarchy, for instance, as one form of domination, provides other advantages to its beneficiaries than the exploitation of surplus labour.” Miliband, “Class Analysis,” in Anthony Giddens and Jonathon Turner, eds., Social Theory Today (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 327–28.
    6. ↩ Joan Acker, “Class, Gender, and the Relations of Distribution,” Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 478; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 9.
    7. ↩ Joan Acker, “Different Strategies are Necessary Now,” Monthly Review 53, no. 5 (December 2001): 46–49.