John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Sole Author

  • Introduction

    “Introduction“, Monthly Review vol. 44, no. 3 (July 1992), pp. 1-9.

    “The discovery of America and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,” Adam Smith wrote in 1776 in his Wealth of Nations, the book that more than any other was to mark the birth of liberal political economy, “are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”

  • Paul Alexander Baran 1910-1964

    “Paul Alexander Baran 1910-1964,” [PDF] in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992), pp. 22-29.

    Paul Baran, the internationally acclaimed Marxist economist, was born on 8 December 1910 into a Jewish family in Nikolaev, Russia, on the Black Sea. His father was a medical doctor with ties to the Menshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic party. The chaos rustling from the First World War and the Russian Revolution made it impossible to find a suitable school for Baran to attend and his education up to age 11 was entirely under his father’s tutelage. Dismayed by the continuing social disruption following the October Revolution, Baran’s family left the USSR in 1921, stopping briefly at his father’s ancestral home in Vilna, formerly part of Tsarist Russia and by that time part of Poland. Her his parents assumed Polish citizenship; as a minor entered on his mother’s passport, Baran received automatic Polish nationality which he was to retain until naturalized as an American citizen during the Second World War. The family then proceeded to Germany where Baran’s formal education began.

  • Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910–

    “Paul Marlor Sweezy 1910–” in Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, edited by Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992, pp. 562-70.

    Revised and expanded for 2000 edition.

  • 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).

     

  • The Vulnerable Planet

    The Vulnerable Planet

    Buy at Monthly Review Press

    “The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment,” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 160 pp.
    (A volume in the Cornerstone Books series; second edition, 1999.)

    In this clearly written and accessible book, John Bellamy Foster grounds his discussion of the global environmental crisis in the inherently destructive nature of our world economic system. Rejecting both individualistic solutions and policies that tinker at the margins, Foster calls for a fundamental reorganization of production on a social basis so as to make possible a sustainable and ecological economy.

    The Vulnerable Planet has won respect as the best single-volume introduction to the global environmental crisis. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

    Editions:

    • Bangla language edition (Dhaka: Shahitya Prakash, 2010), with a new preface by the author.
    • Turkish language edition, (Maltepe-Ankara: EPOS Yayinlari, 2002).
    • Japanese edition, (Tokyo: Kobushi Forum/Sakai Agency, 2001), translated by Keiko Watanabe.
    • Telugu language edition (Andhra Padesh, India: Prajasakti), 2001.
    • Korean language edition, (Seoul: Dongzoknara, 1996)–contains new “Preface to the Korean Edition” by author.
    • Low cost edition, (Kharaaqpur, India: Cornerstone Publications, 1995)–for Indian market.
    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Guo Jianren (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2013).
    • Chinese translation, Beijing University Press.
    • German translation (Hamburg: Laika-Verlag). Chapter 6, entitled “The Vulnerable Planet,” reprinted in Leslie King and Deborah McCarthy, Environmental Sociology: From Analysis to Action. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 3-15.

  • Two Ages of Waterfront Labor

    “Two Ages of Waterfront Labor,” [PDF] Labour/Le Travail, no. 26 (Fall 1990), pp. 1-9. (Review of Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront and William Finlay, Work on the Waterfront.)

    There are two crucial watersheds in the modem history of waterfront labour (1) the successful struggle, beginning with the Pacific Coast revolts of the 1930s, to set-up union-dominated hiring halls; and (2) the technological revolution in cargo handling and ship design associated with the introduction of containers in the 1960s and 70s. Bruce Nelson’s historical treatment of waterfront labour focuses on the first of these watersheds, with particular emphasis on the interactions between seamen and longshoremen during the “syndicalist renaissance” of the late 1930s. William Finlay’s sociological study is concerned with the effects of the second watershed — the technological revolution in cargo handling—on skill levels, job control and status hierarchies within the longshore labour express.

  • Liberal Practicality and the U.S. Left

    “Liberal Practicality and the U.S. Left,” in Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch and John Saville, ed., Socialist Register, 1990: The Retreat of the Intellectuals. (London: Merlin Press, 1990), pp. 265-89.

  • 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).

  • Marxism and the Uno School

    Marxism and the Uno School

    “Marxism and the Uno School,” (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review, vol. 41, no. 8 (January 1990), pp. 51-55. DOI: 10.14452/MR-041-08-1990-01_6

    Review of The Basic Theory of Capitalism: The Forms and Substance of the Capitalist Economy by Makoto Itoh.
    In an 1859 review of Marx’s Contribution to a Critique if Political Economy, Engels provided the following description of the economic method of historical materialism, frequently labeled the “logical- historical method”:

    [T]he critique of economics could .. , be exercised in two ways: historically or logically …. History moves often in leaps and bounds and in a zigzag line, and as this would have to be followed throughout, it would mean not only that a considerable amount of material of slight importance would have to be included, but also that the train of thought would frequently have to be interrupted; it would, moreover, be impossible to write the history of economy without that of bourgeois society, and the task would thus become immense, because of the absence of all preliminary studies. The logical method of approach was therefore the only suitable one. This, however, is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences …. [W]ith this method the logical exposi- tion need by no means be confined to the purely abstract sphere. On the contra?, it requires historical illustration and continuous contact with reality.

     

  • The Spirit of ’68

    “The Spirit of ’68” (John Bellamy Foster) Monthly Review, vol. 41, no. 7 (December 1989), pp.47-54. DOI: 10.14452/MR-041-07-1989-11_7

    Review of Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Memoir by Hans Koning.