John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Reprints

  • The Communist Manifesto and the Environment

    ”The Communist Manifesto and the Environment,” in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, ed., The Socialist Register, 1998 (London: Merlin Press), pp. 169-89.

    Most of the debate about Marx’s relation to environmental thought has focused on the early philosophical critique of capitalism in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and on his later economic critique embodied in Capital in the 1860s – since in both of these works he had a great deal to say about human interactions with nature. Nevertheless, the Communist Manifesto has often been invoked as presenting a view that was anti-ecological – some would say the very definition of anti-ecological modernism.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted in Dave Holmes, Terry Townsend, and John Bellamy Foster, Change the System, Not the Planet (pamphlet), Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 2007, 27-43.

  • The Crisis of the Earth: Marx’s Theory of Ecological Sustainability as a Nature-Imposed Necessity for Human Production

    “The Crisis of the Earth: Marx’s Theory of Ecological Sustainability as a Nature-Imposed Necessity for Human Production” [PDF], Organization and Environment, vol. 10, no. 3 (September 1997), pp. 280-97. DOI: 10.1177/0921810697103003

    Any systematic, forward-looking ecological vision must include three elements: (a) a theory of ecological crisis and its relation to human production; (b) a concept of sustainability as a nature-imposed necessity for production; (c) a vision of the transcendence of ecological crisis that establishes sustainability as a core part of any future society. All three elements are to be found in the work of Karl Marx. Marx `s analysis of the crisis of the earth (or soil) in the mid-nineteenth century led him to a concept of sustainability that was central to his vision of communist society. Because this concept of sustainability was rooted both in a critique of capitalism and a vision of a future society, it has a richness and complexity all its own. A close examination of Marx `s concept of sustainability therefore offers important insights into the possibilities for the creation of a more sustainable social order.

    Reprints:

  • 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).

     

  • The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Crisis of the Pacific Northwest

    “The Limits of Environmentalism Without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Crisis of the Pacific Northwest,” [PDF], Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 1993), pp. 11-41. DOI: 10.1080/10455759309358529.

    Many prominent environmentalists today have adopted a political stance that sets them and the movement that they profess to represent above and beyond the class struggle. For example, Jonathon Porritt, the British Green leader, has declared that the rise of the German Greens marks the demise of “the redundant polemic of class warfare and the mythical immutability of a left/right divide.” According to this outlook, both the working class and capitalist class are to blame for the global environmental crisis (insofar as it can be traced to capitalist rather than socialist modes of production), while the Greens represent a “new paradigm” derived from nature’s own values, one that transcends the historic class problem. By removing themselves in this way from the classic social debate, these Green thinkers implicitly em race the dominant “we have seen the enemy, and it is us” view that traces most environmental problems to the buying habits of consumers, the number of babies born, and the characteristics of industrialization, as if there were no class or other divisions in society.

    Reprints
    • Published in 1993 as a pamphlet issued jointly by Monthly Review Press and the Center for Ecological Socialism.
    • Expanded and updated version published in Daniel Faber, ed. The Movement for Environmental Justice in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 188-217.
    Translations
    • Italian translation of original, “I Limiti Dellámbientalismo Senza Classi. Un Esempio Che Viene Dalle Foreste,” Capitalismo, Natura, Socialismo, no. 9 (October 1993) pp. 32-53.

  • ‘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).

     

  • The Tendency of the Surplus to Rise, 1963–1988

    “The Tendency of the Surplus to Rise, 1963–1988” [PDF], (co-authored, second author with Michael Dawson), in John B. Davis, ed. The Economic Surplus in Advanced Economies (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing Company, 1992), pp. 42-70.

    In the increasingly universal monopoly-capitalist economy and culture of the late twentieth century, people no longer need what they want or want what they need. Wants are artificially manufactured while the most desperate needs of innumerable individuals remain unfulfilled. Although labor productivity has steadily risen, the overall efficiency and rationality of society has in many ways declined. Indeed, it is almost impossible to arrive at any other conclusion if one considers the lavish office structures in cities like New York, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, where employees use the most technologically advanced means to “develop” yet another laundry detergent, television commercial, or leveraged buyout, while on the ground below large numbers of people lack decent housing, food, clothing, medical care, and education; if one considers automated assembly plants existing in the same social space as millions of unemployed, partially employed, “discouraged,” and poorly paid workers; or if one contemplates what it means to launch still another aircraft carrier, the total costs of which are equal to half the annual federal budget for elementary and secondary education.

    Reprints

  • Marxian Economics and the State

    “Marxian Economics and the State,” Science & Society, vol. XLVI, no. 3 (Fall 1982), pp. 257-283.

    How can we account for the somewhat paradoxical fact that certain socialist models of the capitalist economy are often thought to be prone to political degeneration? In essence, there are four divisions among Marxist on the subject of crisis: (1) the falling rate of profit school, (2) disproportionality theory, (3) underconsumptionism, and (4) profit squeeze analysis. All but the first of these have been classified, at one time or another, as vulnerable to reformist contamination. This ceases to be puzzling once one discovers that each of the last three approaches has some resemblance to a distinct strand within establishment economics.

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