John Bellamy Foster

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  • Capitalism’s Environmental Crisis

    Capitalism’s Environmental Crisis

    “Capitalism’s Environmental Crisis—Is Technology the Answer?,”(John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review vol. 52, no. 7 (December 2000), pp.  1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-052-07-2000-11_1

    The standard solution offered to the environmental problem in advanced capitalist economies is to shift technology in a more benign direction: more energy-efficient production, cars that get better mileage, replacement of fossil fuels with solar power, and recycling of resources. Other environmental reforms, such as reductions in population growth and even cuts in consumption, are often advocated as well. The magic bullet of technology, however, is by far the favorite, seeming to hold out the possibility of environmental improvement with the least effect on the smooth working of the capitalist machine. The 1997 International Kyoto Protocol on global warming, designed to limit the greenhouse-gas emissions of nations, has only reinforced this attitude, encouraging many environmental advocates in the United States (including Al Gore in his presidential campaign) to advocate technological improvement in energy efficiency as the main escape from the environmental mess.

    Reprints:
    • Published in a different version in Tokyo in Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 33, no. 1 (July 2001), pp. 143-50.
    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Emperyalizmin Yeniden Keşfi (Istanbul, Turkey: Kalkedon Publications (January 2006).

     

  • Henry Salt, Socialist Animal Rights Advocate: An Introduction to Salt’s ‘A Lover of Animals

    “Henry Salt, Socialist Animal Rights Advocate: An Introduction to Salt’s ‘A Lover of Animals,” [PDF], (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Organization and Environment, vol. 13, no. 4 (December 2000), pp. 487-92.

    Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) remains largely unknown today, despite his central role in social and humanitarian movements throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Salt is briefly mentioned in passing when discussing the history of animal rights activism, but serious consideration of his philosophical position has not been conducted. General interpretations of Salt often recognize that he was a socialist, and animal rights are seen as an additional interest of his. Likewise, animal rights advocates view him as an animal rights activist who happened to be a socialist. But for Salt, these positions were not separable. A philosophical understanding of materialism provided the foundation for Salt’s commitment to a wide range of humanitarian causes.

  • Marx’s Ecological Value Analysis

    Marx’s Ecological Value Analysis

    “Marx’s Ecological Value A,” [PDF], (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review vol. 52, no. 4 (September 2000), pp. 39-47. DOI: 10.14452/MR-052-04-2000-08_4

    Review of: Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 312 pp., $45, hardcover.

    If there is a single charge that has served to unify all criticism of Marx in recent decades, it is the charge of “Prometheanism.” Although Marx’s admiration for Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and his attraction to Prometheus as a revolutionary figure of Greek mythology has long been known, the accusation that Marx’s work contained at its heart a “Promethean motif,” and that this constituted the principal weakness of his entire analysis, seems to have derived its contemporary influence mainly from Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. The first volume of this work was drafted in Polish in 1968 and appeared in English in 1978.

     

  • Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millenium

    Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millenium

    “Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millennium,” Monthly Review, vol. 51, no. 11 (April 2000), pp. 1-18. 10.14452/MR-051-11-2000-04_1

    This article is dedicated to Paul Sweezy on his 90th birthday. It is also meant as a personal expression of my conviction that Monopoly Capital (1966) by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, which provided a rich analysis of capital accumulation and crisis rooted in insights from Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, and Schumpeter, is still the most useful starting point from which to view the historical evolution of the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. My intention in this article is to use that general analysis to comment on some of the central empirical developments within the economy in our time—in a new millennium and under conditions of the globalization of monopoly capital.

    Translations:
    • Translated into Norwegian and published in Røde Fane, no. 4 (2000), pp. 32-38.
    • Hungarian translation in Ezmélet (Consciousness) vol. 12 no. 47 (Autumn 2000), pp. 96-112.
    • Greek translation in Socialist Ecology (November 2011).

     

  • The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line

    “The Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line: The Environmental and Social Consequences of Economic Reductionism,” Richard Hofrichter, ed, Reclaiming the Environmental Debate; The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 135-53.

    In recent decades environmentalists have directed a persistent ecological critique at economics, contending that economics has failed to value the natural world. Lately economists have begun to respond to this critique, and a rapidly growing sub discipline of environmental economics has emerged that is dedicated to placing economic values on nature and integrating the environment more fully into the market system. However, the question arises: Is the cure more dangerous than the disease? Does the attempt to internalize the natural environment within the capitalist market system-without a radical transformation of the latter-lead to a new empire of the economy over ecology, a sort of neocolonialism where the old colonialism is no longer seen as sufficient? And what are the ultimate consequences of this?

  • Harry Magdoff 1913—

    “Harry Magdoff 1913—“ in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2000), pp. 385-94.

    Harry Magdoff was born on 21 August 1913 in the Bronx in New York. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; his father was a housepainter. As a youth he was swept up by the left political culture of his time. By the time he entered the City College of New York, where he commenced studies of physics and mathematics, he had already read a great deal of Marx.

  • The Canonization of Environmental Sociology

    “The Canonization of Environmental Sociology,” [PDF], Organization & Environment, vol. 12, no. 4 (December 1999), pp. 461-67. (Review essay on Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., The Sociology of the Environment, 3 volumes; and Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology).

    Environmental sociology first arose, as a distinct subfield of sociology, in the 1970s. The Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association was formally launched almost one quarter of a century ago, in 1976. The rise of the subfield was a direct response to the rapid growth of environmentalism in society at large in the 1970s. Sharing the fate of the environmental movement as a whole, environmental sociology seemed to peak in the mid-1970s and then to lose ground in the early 1980s, only to resurge once more with the renewed growth of concern about the global environment in the late 1980s.

  • Remarks on Paul Sweezy on the Occasion of his Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award

    Remarks on Paul Sweezy on the Occasion of his Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award

    “Remarks on Paul Sweezy on the Occasion of his Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award,” Monthly Review, vol. 51, no. 4, (September 1999) pp. 39-44 DOI: 10.14452/MR-051-04-1999-08_4

    I would like to quote at length from Paul Samuelson, who wrote a piece exactly thirty years ago for Newsweek magazine about a time thirty years before that “when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard”: When Diaghilev revived his ballet company he had the original Bakst sets redone in even more vivid colors, explaining, “so they would be as brilliant as people remember them.” Recent events on college campuses have recalled to my inward eye one of the great happenings of my own lifetime.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted from Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 33, no. 2 (June 1999), pp. 223-28.

     

  • Robbing the Earth of its Capital Stock

    “Robbing the Earth of its Capital Stock: An Introduction to George E. Waring’s ‘Agricultural Features of the Census of the United States for 1850,’” [PDF], Organization and Environment, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 1999), pp. 293-97. DOI: 10.1177/1086026699123004

    In his influential Letters to the President on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the United States, U.S. economist Henry Carey (1858) quoted at length from a talk by an “eminent agriculturist” who had provided rough calculations for the whole United States of the loss of soil nutrients resulting from the failure to recycle organic matter. In that statement, as quoted by Carey, the dire, long- term ecological consequences of the shipment of food and fiber in a one-way movement from country to town were raised:

    What with our earth-butchery and prodigality, we are each year losing the intrinsic essence of our vitality. . . . The question of the economy should be, not how much do we annually produce, but how much of our annual production is saved to the soil. Labor employed in robbing the earth of its capital stock of fertilizing matter, is worse than labor thrown away. In the latter case, it is a loss to the present generation—in the former it becomes an inheritance of poverty for our successors. Man is but a tenant of the soil and he is guilty of a crime when he reduces its value for other tenants who are to come after him. (quoted in Carey, 1858, pp. 54-55)

  • Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift

    “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology” [PDF], American Journal of Sociology, vol. 105, no. 2 (September 1999), pp. 366-405. DOI: 10.1086/210315

    This article addresses a paradox: on the one hand, environmental sociology, as currently developed, is closely associated with the thesis that the classical sociological tradition is devoid of systematic insights into environmental problems; on the other hand, evidence of crucial classical contributions in this area, particularly in Marx, but also in Weber, Durkheim, and others, is too abundant to be convincingly denied. The nature of this paradox, its origins, and the means of transcending it are illustrated primarily through an analysis of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, which, it is contended, offers important classical foundations for environmental sociology.

    Reprints
    • R. Scott Frey, The Environment and Society: A Reader (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000, 2003).
    • Reprinted in Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate, ed., New Developments in Environmental Sociology. (Aldershot, U.K., Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 2005), pp. 55-94.