John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Portuguese

  • Marxism and Ecology

    Marxism and Ecology: Common Fonts on a Great Transition,” Monthly Review, vol. 67, no. 7 (Deember 2015), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-07-2015-11_1
    This article was originally published (along with comments on it by nine other authors, including MR contributors David Barkin, Hannah Holleman, and Fred Magdoff) on the Great Transition Initiative website in October 2015: http://greattransition.org/publication/marxism-and-ecology.
    To link Marxism and ecological transition may seem at first like trying to bridge two entirely different movements and discourses, each with its own history and logic: one having mainly to do with class relations, the other with the relation between humans and the environment. However, historically socialism has influenced the development of ecological thought and practice, while ecology has informed socialist thought and practice. Since the nineteenth century, the relationship between the two has been complex, interdependent, and dialectical.
    Versions and Publishers:
    • Earlier version published online by the Great Transition Initiative, October 19, 2015, 5800 words, greattransition.org. Published along with comments of 750-1000 words by majors scholars, part of the Great Transition Network, and with a response to the comments by the author.
    Translations:
    • Portuguese-language translation forthcoming in O Comuneiro (2016). Portugues-language version also forthcoming in Lutas Sociais (Sao Paulo, 2016).
    • German translation forthcoming in Analyse & Kritik (2016).

     

  • The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy

    The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy

    “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy“, Monthly Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (September 2011), pp. 1-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-063-04-2011-08_1

    Discussant Project XXI Conference, Venezuelan Cultural Ministry, Caracas, March 28-31, 2011.

    It is no secret today that we are facing a planetary environmental emergency, endangering most species on the planet, including our own, and that this impending catastrophe has its roots in the capitalist economic system. Nevertheless, the extreme dangers that capitalism inherently poses to the environment are often inadequately understood, giving rise to the belief that it is possible to create a new “natural capitalism” or “climate capitalism” in which the system is turned from being the enemy of the environment into its savior. The chief problem with all such views is that they underestimate the cumulative threat to humanity and the earth arising from the existing relations of production. Indeed, the full enormity of the planetary ecological crisis, I shall contend, can only be understood from a standpoint informed by the Marxian critique of capitalism.

    Translations:
    • Portuguese language translation in Lutas Sociais, www.pucsp.b/neils, 2012;
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 29 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2012), pp. 49-87

     

  • Capitalism and Degrowth

    Capitalism and Degrowth

    “Capitalism and Degrowth: An Impossibility Theorem“, Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 8 (January 2011), pp.26-33. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-08-2011-01_2

    Almost four decades after the Club of Rome raised the issue of “the limits to growth,” the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a formidable challenge. What is known as “degrowth economics,” associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic conference in Paris on “Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity,” and has since inspired a revival of radical Green thought, as epitomized by the 2010 “Degrowth Declaration” in Barcelona.… Ironically, the meteoric rise of degrowth (décroissance in French) as a concept has coincided over the last three years with the reappearance of economic crisis and stagnation on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The degrowth concept therefore forces us to confront the questions: Is degrowth feasible in a capitalist grow-or-die society—and if not, what does this say about the transition to a new society?

    Reprints:
    • An earlier, slightly different version of this article was published in the December/January 2011 issue of Red Pepper (UK).
    • The MR version was reprinted in Synthesis/Regeneration 55 (Spring 2010), pp. 35-39.
    Translations:
    • Italian translation by Andrea Grillo at Senza Soste.it, December 27, 2010.
    • German translation in Luxemburg 1 (2011), pp. 12-17.
    • Catalan translation, Kit de Supervivéncia Ambiental, March 16, 2011.
    • Greek translation in the Forum of ARENA, February 2, 2011.
    • Portuguese translation by Paula Sequeiros for Esquerda.net, December 4, 2010.

     

  • The Ecological Rift

    The Ecological Rift

    The Ecological Rift“The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War with the Earth,” (co-authored with Brett Clark and Richard York, Foster listed first, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 544 pp.

    Editions:

    • German edition, (Hamburg: Laika-Verlag, 2011).

    Translations:

    • Portuguese translation from Expressao Popular 2015.
    • Swedish translation of introduction available at Lalit magazine.
    • French translation of the chapter, “The Ecology of Consumption,” in Ecologie et Politique 43 (2012), pp. 109-30.

    Winner of the 2010 Gerald L. Young Book Award, bestowed by the Society for Human Ecology

    Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision—if we don’t alter course.

    In The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, environmental sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York offer a radical assessment of both the problem and the solution. They argue that the source of our ecological crisis lies in the paradox of wealth in capitalist society, which expands individual riches at the expense of public wealth, including the wealth of nature. In the process, a huge ecological rift is driven between human beings and nature, undermining the conditions of sustainable existence: a rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature that is irreparable within capitalist society, since integral to its very laws of motion.

    Critically examining the sanguine arguments of mainstream economists and technologists, Foster, Clark, and York insist instead that fundamental changes in social relations must occur if the ecological (and social) problems presently facing us are to be transcended. Their analysis relies on the development of a deep dialectical naturalism concerned with issues of ecology and evolution and their interaction with the economy. Importantly, they offer reasons for revolutionary hope in moving beyond the regime of capital and toward a society of sustainable human development.

    Reviews:

    This book is desperately needed, because it ends any illusion that we can solve our pressing environmental crises within the same system that created them. With tweaking the system—using incremental market-based strategies—off the table, we can put our efforts into genuine, lasting solutions.

    —Annie Leonard, author and host, Story of Stuff

    Marx’s concept of ‘metabolic rift’ in the circulation of soil nutrients between countryside and town is generalized by Foster, Clark, and York to an insightful Marxist analysis of the current ecological rift between modern capitalism and the ecosystem. It is a scholarly, well-referenced, and important contribution.

    —Herman E. Daly, Professor Emeritus, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland and author, Beyond Growth

    This important book treats industrial capitalism as the globally destructive force that it is, and powerfully points the way toward, as the authors put it, ‘universal revolts against imperialism, the destruction of the planet, and the treadmill of accumulation.’ We need these revolts if we are to survive. This book is a crucial part of that struggle.

    —Derrick Jensen, author, Endgame and The Culture of Make Believe

    This timely new work promises to become a basic resource in understanding the incompatibility between capitalism and ecology, and also in arguing for the ecological dimensions of any future socialism.

    —Fredric Jameson, Professor, Duke University; author, Valences of the Dialectic

    The Ecological Rift deserves to—and needs to—become a classic in its field.

    —Simon Butler, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

  • The Dialectic of Social and Ecological Metabolism

    “The Dialectic of Social and Ecological Metabolism: Marx, Mészáros, and the Absolute Limits of Capital” (coauthored with Brett Clark, Clark listed first), Socialism and Democracy, (2010), 12 pp. DOI:10.1080/08854300.2010.481447

    One of the most remarkable aspects of Marxist scholarship in recent decades has been the recovery and development of Marx’s argument on social and ecological metabolism, which was crucial to his metabolic terms. As he wrote in Capital: “Labour is … a process between man and nature, a process by which man … mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” Such and conception was two-sided. It captured both the social character of labor, associated with such metabolic reproduction, and its ecological character, requiring a continuing, dialectical relation to nature.

    Translations:
    • Original Portuguese language version, based on conference paper, published in Margem Esquerda: Ensaios Marxistas, no. 14 (2010), pp. 21-29.
  • The Financial Power Elite

    The Financial Power Elite

    “The Financial Power Elite“, (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 62, no. 1 (May 2010), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-01-2010-05_1

    Has the power of financial interests in U.S. society increased? Has Wall Street’s growing clout affected the U.S. state itself? How is this connected to the present crisis? We will argue that the financialization of U.S. capitalism over the last four decades has been accompanied by a dramatic and probably long-lasting shift in the location of the capitalist class, a growing proportion of which now derives its wealth from finance as opposed to production. This growing dominance of finance can be seen today in the inner corridors of state power.

    Translations:

     

  • The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital

    The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital

    “The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital“, (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Inger L. Stole, and Hannah Holleman, Foster listed second), Monthly Review vol. 60, no. 11 (April 2009), pp. 1-23. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-11-2009-04_1

    On the eightieth anniversary of the 1929 Stock Market Crash that led to the Great Depression, the United States is once again caught in a Great Financial Crisis and deep downturn of an order of magnitude comparable to the 1930s. At the center of this crisis is plunging consumer spending, caused by the destruction of household finance as a result of decades of wage stagnation and the piling up of debt. Consumer spending in today’s economy, dominated by giant firms, is significantly dependent on the sales effort, i.e., marketing as a whole, with advertising as its most conspicuous form. But the sales effort is also ebbing in the crisis, contributing to the general decline. So integral is the sales effort to the regime of monopoly capital that one cannot be understood without the other.

    Translations:
    • Portuguese translation in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition, April 2009.
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 26 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, March 2011).

     

  • A Failed System

    A Failed System

    “A Failed System: The World Crisis of Capitalist Globalization and its Impact on China“, Monthly Review vol. 60, no. 10 (March 2009), pp. 1-23. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-10-2009-03_1

    In referring in my title here to “A Failed System” I do not of course mean that capitalism as a system is in any sense at an end. Rather I mean by “failed system” a global economic and social order that increasingly exhibits a fatal contradiction between reality and reason—to the point, in our time, where it threatens not only human welfare but also the continuation of most sentient forms of life on the planet. Three critical contradictions make up the contemporary world crisis emanating from capitalist development: (1) the current Great Financial Crisis and stagnation/depression; (2) the growing threat of planetary ecological collapse; and (3) the emergence of global imperial instability associated with shifting world hegemony and the struggle for resources. Such structural weaknesses of the system, as Joseph Schumpeter might have said, are the product of capitalism’s past successes, but they raise catastrophic problems and failures in the present nonetheless. How we choose to act today in response to this failed system is therefore the most critical question that humanity has ever faced.

    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Dong Hui, Philosophical Trends (China), no. 5, 2009; separate Chinese translation by Wu Wei and Liu Shuai, Marxism and Reality (China), no. 3, 2009.
    • Portuguese translation in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition (Brazil), no. 11, 2009;
    • Spanish translations in Monthly Review, Selecciones en Castellano, no. 10 (2009), and Blog De Um Sem-Mídia, Domingo, March 29, 2009.
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (September 2009). Translated by Nilanjan Dutt.

     

  • A New New Deal under Obama?

    A New New Deal under Obama?

    “A New New Deal under Obama?“, (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 60, no. 9 (February 2009), pp. 1-11. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-09-2009-02_1

    With U.S. capitalism mired in an economic crisis of a severity that increasingly brings to mind the Great Depression of the 1930s, it should come as no surprise that there are widespread calls for “a new New Deal.” Already the new Obama administration has been pointing to a vast economic stimulus program of up to $850 billion over two years aimed at lifting the nation out of the deep economic slump.

    Reprints:
    Translations:
    • French translation in Etudes Marxistes, no. 86, December 1, 2009.
    • Spanish translation in Monthly Review, Selecciones en Castellano, no. 10, 131-40.
    • Galician translation published by Avantar, February 25, 2009.
    • Portuguese translation by Zion Edições in Association Resistir.Info , February 1, 2009, http://reistir.info.
    • Korean translation by Social Policy Committee, People’s Solidarity for Social Progress, http://www.pssp.org/main/index.php
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, vol. 1, no. 3, June 2009. Translated by Pachu Ray.
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 21 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2009), pp. 63-74.

     

  • Financial Implosion and Stagnation

    Financial Implosion and Stagnation

    “Financial Implosion and Stagnation; Back to the Real Economy“, (coauthored with Fred Magdoff, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 60, no. 7 (December 2008), pp. 1-29. DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-07-2008-11_1

    “The first rule of central banking,” economist James K. Galbraith wrote recently, is that “when the ship starts to sink, central bankers must bail like hell.” In response to a financial crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve and other central banks, backed by their treasury departments, have been “bailing like hell” for more than a year. Beginning in July 2007 when the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds that had speculated heavily in mortgage-backed securities signaled the onset of a major credit crunch, the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Treasury Department have pulled out all the stops as finance has imploded. They have flooded the financial sector with hundreds of billions of dollars and have promised to pour in trillions more if necessary—operating on a scale and with an array of tools that is unprecedented.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted in Michael Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, ed., The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century (Montreal: Global Research, 2010), pp. 72-101.
    Translations:
    • German translation published as a Supplement der Zeitschrift Sozialismus, no. 2, 2009 (separate pamphlet).
    • Spanish translation in Monthly Review, Selecciones en Castellano, no. 10 (2009), 37-70.
    • Italian translation by Elisabett Horvat, in Quale Stato (Anthologia Della Crisi Globale), no. 1-2 (January-June 2009), http://www.fpcgil.it.
    • Portuguese translation in Monthly Review, Portuguese-Language Edition, no. 8, 2008.
    • Turkish translation appears in Kapitalizmin Finansal Krizi, edited by Prof. Dr. Abdullah Ersoy (Ankara, Turkey: Imaj Publishing, 2011), 330 pp.