John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Persian

  • The Ecology of Destruction

    The Ecology of Destruction

    “The Ecology of Destruction“, Monthly Review vol. 58, no. 9 (February 2007), pp.1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-09-2007-02_1

    I would like to begin my analysis of what I am calling here “the ecology of destruction” by referring to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Burn!. Pontecorvo’s epic film can be seen as a political and ecological allegory intended for our time. It is set in the early nineteenth century on an imaginary Caribbean island called “Burn.” Burn is a Portuguese slave colony with a sugar production monoculture dependent on the export of sugar as a cash crop to the world economy. In the opening scene we are informed that the island got its name from the fact that the only way that the original Portuguese colonizers were able to vanquish the indigenous population was by setting fire to the entire island and killing everyone on it, after which slaves were imported from Africa to cut the newly planted sugar cane.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted and published in Norwegian in Torstein Dahle (and to artikler av John Bellamy Foster, Ødeleggelsens Økonomi (Tidsskrifter Rødt!, 2008), 100-16.
    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Dong Jinyu, Foreign Theoretical Trends (China), no. 6, 2008, and translated separately by Liang Yongqiant, Internet Fortune (China), no. 4, 2009.
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008.
    • French translation in La Brèche-Carré Rouge, December 2007-January February 2008, pp. 46-53.
    • German translation in Perspectiven: Magazin Für Linke Tehoerie Und Praxis, 2007, no. 2 (Vienna);
    • Portuguese translation in O Comuneiro, no. 4, 2007, www.ocomuneiro.com.
    • Norwegian translation in Rødt–special edition in Norwegian daily Klassekampen (Class Struggle), June 2007.
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, 2007.
    • Korean translation October 15, 2009, at http://programto.net/wordpress/.
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, no. 3 (June 2007). Translated by Tushar Chakrabarty.

     

  • 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 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).

     

  • A Planetary Defeat

    A Planetary Defeat

    “A Planetary Defeat: The Failure of Global Environmental Reform,” Monthly Review, vol. 54, no. 8 (January 2003), pp.1-9. DOI: 10.14452/MR-054-08-2003-01_1

    The first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 generated hopes that the world would at long last address its global ecological problems and introduce a process of sustainable development. Now, with a second summit being held ten years later in Johannesburg, that dream has to a large extent faded. Even the principal supporters of this process have made it clear that they do not expect much to be achieved as a result of the Johannesburg summit, which is likely to go down in history as an absolute failure. We need to ask ourselves why.

    Translations:
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008).

     

  • Global Ecology and the Common Good

    “Global Ecology and the Common Good”, Monthly Review vol. 46, no. 9 (February 1995), pp. 1-10. DOI: 10.14452/MR-046-09-1995-02_1

    Over the course of the twentieth century human population has increased more than threefold and gross world product perhaps twentyfold. Such expansion has placed increasing pressure on the ecology of the planet. Everywhere we look—in the atmosphere, oceans, watersheds, forests, soil, etc.—it is now clear that rapid ecological decline is setting in.

    Reprints:
    • Kevin Danaher, ed., Corporations are Gonna Eat Your Mama: Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1996), pp. 133-41.
    • William F. Grover and Joseph G. Peschek, ed., Voices of Dissent: Critical Readings in American Politics (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1999, 2003), pp. 33-37.
    Translations:
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008).

     

  • “Introduction to Special Issue Commemorating the Twentieth Anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital”

    “Introduction to Special Issue Commemorating the Twentieth Anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review, vol. 46, no. 6 (November 1994), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-046-06-1994-10_1

    It is a measure of the influence of Harry Braverman and radical labor process analysts generally that only two decades after the publication of Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) it is difficult to recall the absolute confidence with which the orthodox view of work relations was espoused in the early post-Second World War years. At that time the preeminent interpretation of work in modern society was the one presented by Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, and others in a book entitled Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960).

    Translations:
    • Portugese translation in Revista Principios 43 (1996).

     

  • ‘Let Them Eat Pollution’

    “‘Let Them Eat Pollution’: Capitalist Economics and the World Environment” [PDF] (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review vol. 44, no. 8 (January 1993), pp.10-20. DOI: 10.14452/MR-044-08-1993-01_2

    On December 12, 1991, Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, sent a memorandum to some of his colleagues presenting views on the environment that are doubtless widespread among orthodox economists, reflecting as they do the logic of capital accumulation, but which are seldom offered up for public scrutiny, and then almost never by an economist of Summers’ rank. This memo was later leaked to the British publication, The Economist, which published part of it on February 8, 1992, under the title “Let Them Eat Pollution.”

    Reprints:

    • Third World Resurgence, no. 34 (January 1993), pp. 7-10.
    • Johnathon Petrikin, ed., Environmental Justice (San Diego, California: Greenhaven, 1995), pp. 100-07.
    • George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana and Herbert Schiller, ed., Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Control of the Media Means for America and the World (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 221-28;
    • Amanda Konradi and Marta Schmidt, Reading Between the Lines: Toward an Understanding of Current Social Problems (Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1998), pp. 491-95.
    Translations:
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008).

     

  • Capitalism and the Ancient Forest

    “Capitalism and the Ancient Forest,” Monthly Review, vol. 43, no. 5 (October 1991), pp. 1-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-043-05-1991-09_1

    The battle for the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest, which gained widespread national attention with the designation of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species in June 1990, can be thought of as a complex set of social and ecological problems traceable to a single cause: the continuing failure on the part of timber capital and the federal government to see either the forest for the trees or the trees for billions of board feet of standing timber. By the late 1980s this environmental failure had reached such tragic proportions that the Pacific Northwest forest ecosystem, one of the most important natural environments on the face of the earth—encompassing many of the world’s oldest and largest trees, storing more carbon per unit area than any other terrestrial ecosystem, and supporting the largest or second largest accumulations of living matter per unit area to be found anywhere, including numerous rare and endangered species—was increasingly being threatened with annihilation.

    Translations:
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008).