John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Sole Author

  • On Fire This Time

    “On Fire This Time,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 6 (November 2019), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_1 [HTML]

    We are seeing today what appear to be the beginnings of an ecological revolution, a new historical moment unlike any humanity has experienced. Not only is the planet burning, but a revolutionary climate movement is rising up and is now on fire in response.

  • Late Imperialism

    “Late Imperialism,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 3 (July-August 2019), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-03-2019-07_1 [HTML]

    The globalization of production (and finance)—which emerged along with neoliberalism out of the economic stagnation of the mid–1970s and then accelerated with the demise of Soviet-type societies and China’s reintegration into the capitalist world system—has generated a more generalized monopoly capitalism, ushering in what can be called late imperialism. Late imperialism refers to the present period of monopoly-finance capital and stagnation, declining U.S. hegemony and rising world conflict, accompanied by growing threats to the ecological bases of civilization and life itself. It stands at its core for the extreme, hierarchical relations governing the capitalist world economy in the twenty-first century, which is increasingly dominated by mega-multinational corporations and a handful of states at the center of the world system. Just as it is now common to refer to late capitalism in recognition of the end times brought on by simultaneous economic and ecological dislocations, so it is necessary today to speak of late imperialism, reflecting the global dimensions and contradictions of that system, cutting across all other divisions, and posing a “global rift” in human historical development: an epochal crisis posing the question of “ruin or revolution.”

  • Absolute Capitalism

    “Absolute Capitalism,” Monthly Review vol. 71, no. 1 (May 2019), pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-01-2019-05_1 [HTML]

    Although neoliberalism is widely recognized as the central political-ideological project of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is a term that is seldom uttered by those in power. Behind this particular ruse lies a deeply disturbing, even hellish, reality. Neoliberalism can be defined as an integrated ruling-class political-ideological project, associated with the rise of monopoly-finance capital, the principal strategic aim of which is to embed the state in capitalist market relations. Hence, the state’s traditional role in safeguarding social reproduction—if largely on capitalist-class terms—is now reduced solely to one of promoting capitalist reproduction. The goal is nothing less than the creation of an absolute capitalism. All of this serves to heighten the extreme human and ecological destructiveness that characterizes our time.

  • Capitalism Has Failed–What Next?

    “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?” Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 9 (February 2019), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-09-2019-02_1 [HTML]

    Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social system. The world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most extreme inequality in human history, accompanied by mass unemployment and underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at this point can only be called a planetary ecological “death spiral.” Many of the symptoms of the failure of capitalism are well-known. Nevertheless, they are often attributed not to capitalism as a system, but simply to neoliberalism, viewed as a particular paradigm of capitalist development that can be replaced by another, better one. A critical-historical analysis of neoliberalism is therefore crucial both to grounding our understanding of capitalism today and uncovering the reason why all alternatives to neoliberalism and its capitalist absolutism are closed within the system itself.

  • Geoengineering

    “Geoengineering: Making War on the Planet,” copublished by Science for the People Magazine (Summer 2018) and Monthly Review, vol. 70, no. 4 (September 2018), pp. 1-10.DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-04-2018-08_1 [HTML]

    The dangers posed by climate change have inspired a desperate search for technological fixes in the form of geoengineering—massive human interventions to manipulate the entire climate or planet. But as long as the dominant strategy for addressing global warming remains subordinated to the ends of capital accumulation, any attempt to implement such schemes will prove fatal to humanity.

  • Marx, Value, and Nature

    “Marx, Value, and Nature,” Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 3 (July-August 2018), pp. 122-36. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-03-2018-07_6 [HTML]

    In recent years ecological critiques of capitalism have deepened and multiplied, resulting in new debates over the conception, scope, and purpose of Marx’s value theory and its relation to the natural world.

  • Marx’s Open-Ended Critique

    “Marx’s Open-Ended Critique,” Monthly Review vol. 70, no. 1 (May 2018), pp. 1-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-070-01-2018-05_1 [HTML]

    Against attempts to characterize Marx as a dogmatic and deterministic thinker, it is precisely the open-endedness of his criticism that accounts for historical materialism’s staying power. This openness has allowed Marxism to continually reinvent itself, expanding its empirical and theoretical content and embracing ever larger aspects of historical reality.

     

  • What Is Monopoly Capital?

    “What Is Monopoly Capital?” Monthly Review vol. 69, no. 8 (January 2018), pp. 56-62. DOI: 10.14452/MR-069-08-2018-01_5  [HTML]

    “Monopoly capital” is a term for the new form of capital, embodied in the modern giant corporation, that in the late nineteenth century began to displace the small family firm as the dominant economic unit, marking the end of the freely competitive stage of capitalism.

    • Published in Polish in Realny Kapitalizm. Wokót teorii kapitału monopolistycnego (Real Capitalism: Exploring Monopoly Capital Theory), edited by Grzegorz Knoat and Przemysław Eielgoz (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa, 2017), 15-31.

  • William Morris’s Romantic Revolutionary Ideal

    “William Morris’s Romantic Revolutionary Ideal: Nature, Labour and Gender in News from Nowhere,” Journal of William Morris Studies, Special Issue: Morris and Revolution, Vol. XXII No. 2 (2017). [PDF]

    William Morris’s celebrated utopian romance News from Nowhere or An Epoch of Rest (1890) constituted his most singular attempt to present a revolutionary ideal aimed at inspiring a “movement towards Socialism” in his day. Centering on the overcoming of human alienation in relation to the three primary forms of the division of labour—social production, town and country and gender relations—it provided a holistic, ecological outlook extending far beyond most nineteenth-century socialist views. Although News from Nowhere was subtitled Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, it followed a pattern that left it free from the criticisms that Marxian thinkers, including Morris himself, had levelled at utopian socialism, since its role was didactic rather than prophetic. The object was not to forecast the victory of socialism as a superior way of organising the mechanism of production, but rather one of radically refashioning the movement toward socialism in the present by widening the whole conception of the revolutionary project, building on the romantic tradition.

  • Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce

    Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce

    Trump in the White House

    Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, with a foreword by Robert W. McChesney (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 160 pp.

    Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality—as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington, most of the mainstream media are working overtime to convince us that we can still stand the heat. Leave it to John Bellamy Foster, one of the world’s outstanding radical scholars, to expose Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist. Just at the boiling point, Foster offers us cool logic to comprehend the system that created Trump’s moral and political emergency—and to resist it.

    In Trump in the White House, John Bellamy Foster does what no other Trump analyst has done before: he places the president and his administration in full historical context. Foster reveals that Trump is merely the endpoint of a stagnating economic system whose liberal democratic sheen has begun to wear thin. Beneath a veneer of democracy, we see the authoritarian rule that oversees decreasing wages, anti-science and climate-change denialism, a dying public education system, and expanding prisons and military—all powered by a phony populism seething with centuries of racism that never went away.

    But Foster refuses to end his book in despair. Inside his analysis is a clarion call to fight back. Protests, popular demands, coalitions: everyone is needed. Change can’t happen without radical, anti-capitalist politics, and Foster demonstrates that—even now, with the waters ever warming—it may yet be possible to stop the desecration of the Earth; to end endless war; to create global solidarity with all oppressed people. Could a frog do that?

    By rejecting the term “populism” that is widely used to describe the Trump phenomenon and other similar ones around the globe at present, and using the term “neo-fascism” instead, John Bellamy Foster has done a great theoretical service to the Left. This shift in conceptual perspective prompts him to compare current developments to those in the 1930s, to examine their political economy roots, and to highlight the “destruction of reason” that characterizes all fascism, then and now. This book is a pioneering contribution that is extremely important and valuable.

    —Prabhat Patnaik, professor emeritus, economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University; author (with Utsa Patnaik), A Theory of Imperialism

    Disdain for human rights, elections, democracy; hatred of intellectuals, artists and journalists; obsession with power and punishment, with being first and biggest and right; rampant corruption, corporate cronyism, runaway nationalism, racism, homophobia and sexism: the Trump White House is a neo-fascist project. Resistance is possible, but only if we name things for what they are and trace Trumpism to its neoliberal roots. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” said Orwell. Lucky for us, John Bellamy Foster is doing the work.

    —Laura Flanders, broadcast journalist; host, The Laura Flanders Show; author, Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America

    John Bellamy Foster’s Trump in the White House should be read by all those concerned not only about Trump but about the social conditions that produced this phenomenon. No doubt we have reached a stage where democracy has become antithetical to capitalism, where the bosses of the world would rather muffle democratic institutions than allow their property to be touched. JBF goes beneath the surface, demanding that we follow, asking for more radical change than merely the removal of Trump.

    —Vijay Prashad, author, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South

    Informed and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, exceptionally well written, organized and presented, Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce is unreservedly recommended reading for every citizen and should be a part of every community and academic library Contemporary Political Science collection in general, and Donald Trump supplemental studies reading list in particular.

    —Midwest Book Review

    Praise for The Endless Crisis:

    The authors carefully develop a powerful case that the normal state of ‘really existing capitalist economies,’ increasingly dominated by multinational megacorporations along with associated financialization, is not growth with occasional recession, but rather stagnation with occasional escapes that have diminishing prospects. Hence an ‘endless crisis.’… This valuable inquiry should be carefully studied and pondered, and should be taken as an incentive to action.

    —Noam Chomsky