John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Science and Society

  • Nature, Technology and Society

    “Nature, Technology and Society,” [PDF], Science & Society, vol. 59, no. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 225-28. (Review of Victor Ferkiss, Nature, Technology and Society: Cultural Roots of the Current Environmental Crisis.)

    Nature, Technology and Society is a book that promises much. Purporting to be a study of the cultural roots of todays global environmental crisis, it consists of three parts. The first deals with the history of ideas on nature and technology, beginning with Mesopotamian civilization and ending with the conservation movement in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. The second part explores ideas on nature and technology that lie outside the mainstream Western tradition, with successive chapters on Marxism, Islam, Nazism, and “the Orient.” The third part deals with contemporary environmental perspectives in the West, including technology critics, ecofeminism, ecotheology, the Greens, and radical environmentalism.

  • Is There an Allocation Problem?: A Comment on Murray Smith’s Analysis of the Falling Profit Rate

    “Is There an Allocation Problem?: A Comment on Murray Smith’s Analysis of the Falling Profit Rate,” [PDF], (co-authored with Michael Dawson, Foster listed first), Science & Society, vol. 58, no. 3 (Fall 1994), pp. 315-24.

    In the Fall 1993 issue of Science & Society the editors observed that Murray Smith’s articles on the falling rate of profit, which formed the opening contribution to that issue, constituted an important new study that “should be compared with the work of [Thomas] Weisskopf, [Edward] Wolff and [Fred] Moseley’- all of whom have carried his empirical results not so much with the work of these radical economists (two of whom he never mentioned) as with the traditional thought that he classified as ‘underconsumptionist,” associated with the work of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Joseph Phillips, Harry Magdoff, and the present authors. Indeed, Smith contended that a recent statistical assessment of the economic surplus that we authored (Dawson and foster, 1991; Dawson and Foster 1992) contradicted the main theoretical thrust of the tradition we represent, demonstrating that “the (profitability) crises of the 1970’s and 1980’s cannot be adequately explained on the basis of an underconsumptionist mode of analysis” (Smith, 1993, 282).

  • Radical Ecology

    “Radical Ecology,” [PDF], Science & Society, vol. 58, no. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 120-23. (Review of Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology.)

    Carolyn Merchant is known principally as the author of two landmark studies in Ecological History and the Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980) and Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (1989). In The Death of Nature Merchant provided a devastating critique of the mechanistic world view that originated with 17-century science. The mechanistic scientific outlook of such thinkers as Bacon, Descartes and Locke, she demonstrated, was intrinsically connected to the rise of capitalism, the death of the earlier organic world view, and the growing domination over women. In Ecological Revolutions she developed a general model of the interactions of production, reproduction and consciousness in the context of specific ecological revolutions, exploring in particular the colonial and capitalist ecological revolutions that took place in New England in the 17th through the 19th centuries.

  • Crises Lasting for Decades

    “Crises Lasting for Decades,” [PDF] Science & Society, vol. 54, no. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 73-81

    Sometimes a theoretical debate will degenerate into a tower of babel because the participants, without being aware of the fact, are answering not the same question but different questions. It is therefor essential to be clear about what is being asked. In the case of my essay in The Imperiled Economy (Foster, 1987), which Hower Sherman criticizes in a recent article in Science & Society (Sherman, 1989), the question was given in the title: “what is Stagnation?” Moreover, stagnation is distinguished from the business cycle in a sentence that refers to the former as a “trend-line” of slow growth “around which the recurrent fluctuations of the business cycle occur” (Foster, 1987, 59). Similarly, in the other article that Sherman criticizes along with my own – “Power, Accumulation, and Crisis” by Gordon, Weisskopf and Bowles – the authors also make it clear that what they are trying to address at that point is ” the stagnation of the United States economy over the last two decades…” (GWB, 1987, 53).

  • Sources of Instability in the U.S. Political Economy and Empire

    “Sources of Instability in the U.S. Political Economy and Empire,” [PDF] Science & Society, vol. XLIX, no. 2 (Summer 1985), pp. 167-193.

    In Discussing the sources of instability in the U.S. social order, it is useful to focus successively on the economic, political-cultural and imperial aspects of the problem, corresponding to the three levels of economy, state and world economy. This does not mean that these factors can be sealed off from one another, or that there is some kind of strict causal relationship running from the economic to the political to the international aspects of the current impasse. The interconnection, as I hope to demonstrate, is a dialectical one; which in the present context means that is is difficult to assign historical priority to any single dimension of the basic dilemma, or to neatly separate one manifestation of the overall disorder from another. “The social process,” as Joseph Schumpeter wrote in the introduction to The Theory of Economic Development, “is really one indivisible whole.” If anything, this becomes even more apparent in times of deepening crisis.

     

     

  • 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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