John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Sole Author

  • Is Democratic Socialism the American Dream?

    “Is Democratic Socialism the American Dream?” (John Bellamy Foster), The Washington Post (2016)

    National income can be likened to a pie. If between one year and the next the pie gets bigger, everyone can have a bigger slice. But if, instead, the size of the pie stays the same, a bigger slice for some can only mean a smaller slice for others.

    This helps us understand the present dismal state of the U.S. economy and the impetus behind Bernie Sanders’s electoral campaign, which is aimed at the needs of workers and working families. For decades, U.S. economic growth has stagnated, with each succeeding decade experiencing a lower rate of growth. Under these circumstances, the rapidly increasing income of those at the top — or what Sanders likes to call the “billionaire class” — is at the expense of the income shares (slices of the pie) of those at the bottom.

  • The Opt Out Revolt

    The Opt Out Revolt

    In the United States today, the age of monopoly-finance capital and neoliberal politics, all aspects of social life are being financialized at breakneck speed, while the economy as a whole and employment remain lackluster. Financial flows of whatever kind are converted into “securitized” assets to be leveraged by Wall Street speculators. The data of private communications are mined. Health care is converted into a realm of super profits. Public water and electric facilities are sold to the highest bidder. The political system is turned into an open-air auction. Even pollution is treated as a market.… At the center of this juggernaut is elementary and secondary education, which receives over $550 billion in annual public spending, equal to the GDP of Belgium, ranked twenty-fifth worldwide in national income. The new copyrighted Common Core State Standards, and the accompanying standardized tests run by two multi-state consortia in conjunction with testing companies, are “high stakes” not merely for schools, teachers, and students, but also for the vested interests of capital.

  • The Great Capitalist Climacteric

    “The Great Capitalist Climacteric: Marxism and “System Change Not Climate Change,” Monthly Review, vol. 67, no. 6 (November 2015), pp. 1-18.
    DOI:10.14452

    This article is from a keynote address presented at Manifesta in Ostend, Belgium on September 19, 2015. This year’s Manifesta was organized around the theme of climate change in preparation for the COP21 climate negotiations (and protests) in Paris in December 2015.

    Humanity today is confronted with what might be called the Great Capitalist Climacteric. In the standard definition, a climacteric (from the Greek klimaktēr or rung on the ladder) is a period of critical transition or a turning point in the life of an individual or a whole society. From a social standpoint, it raises issues of historical transformation in the face of changing conditions.

  • The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital

    “The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finace Capital,” Monthly Review vol. 67, no. 3 (July-August 2015), pp. 1-22.
    DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-03-2015-07_1

    It is now a universal belief on the left that the world has entered a new imperialist phase.… The challenge for Marxian theories of the imperialist world system in our times is to capture the full depth and breadth of the classical accounts, while also addressing the historical specificity of the current global economy. It will be argued in this introduction (in line with the present issue as a whole) that what is widely referred to as neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century is in fact a historical product of the shift to global monopoly-finance capital or what Samir Amin calls the imperialism of “generalized-monopoly capitalism.”

  • Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis

    “Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis,” [PDF] Monthly Review vol.67, no. 2, pp. 1-20.
    DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-02-2015-06_1

    Soviet ecology presents us with an extraordinary set of historical ironies. On the one hand, the USSR in the 1930s and ’40s violently purged many of its leading ecological thinkers and seriously degraded its environment in the quest for rapid industrial expansion. The end result has often been described as a kind of “ecocide,” symbolized by the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the assault on Lake Baikal, and the drying up of the Aral Sea, as well as extremely high levels of air and water pollution. On the other hand, the Soviet Union developed some of the world’s most dialectical contributions to ecology, revolutionizing science in fields such as climatology, while also introducing pioneering forms of conservation. Aside from its famous zapovedniki, or nature reserves for scientific research, it sought to preserve and even to expand its forests.

     

  • The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left

    “The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left,” [PDF], vol. 44, no. 3 (May 2015), pp. 314-21. DOI: 10.1177/0094306115579190a

    On September 21, 2014, the largest climate march in U.S. history took place in New York City, as more than 300,000 protestors signaled to UN delegates arriving for climate talks that more desperate measures were needed to protect humanity and other species. The massive demonstration, though representing a wide array of social and political viewpoints, had its origins on the Left. The radical intellectual thrust of the movement was apparent the day prior to the march, when a vast ‘‘People’s Summit/ Teach-In’’ was led by two organizations- Global Climate Convergence and System Change Not Climate Change- that have arisen out of the left, particularly from the ecosocialist movement, and have been influenced to a considerable extent by U.S. environmental sociology.

     

  • Chávez and the Communal State

    Chávez and the Communal State

    “Chávez and the Communal State: On the Transition to Socialism in Venezuela,” Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 11 (April 2015), pp.1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-02-2015-06_1 [HTML]

    On October 20, 2012, less than two weeks after being reelected to his fourth term as Venezuelan president and only months before his death, Hugo Chávez delivered his crucial El Golpe de Timón (“Strike at the Helm”) speech to the first meeting of his ministers in the new revolutionary cycle. Chávez surprised even some of his strongest supporters by his insistence on the need for changes at the top in order to promote an immediate leap forward in the creation of what is referred to as “the communal state.” This was to accelerate the shift of power to the population that had begun with the formation of the communal councils (groupings of families involved in self-governance projects—in densely populated urban areas, 200–400 families; in rural areas, 50–100 families). The main aim in the new revolutionary cycle, he insisted, was to speed up the registration of communes, the key structure of the communal state.

     

  • “Foreword” to Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization

    “Foreword” to Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (forthcoming: Zed Press, second edition, 2014).

  • The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition)

    The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition)

    The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism“The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy,” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 320 pp.

    In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital, a monumental work of economic theory and social criticism that sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of their time. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, influenced generations of radical and heterodox economists. They recognized that Marx’s work was unfinished and itself historically conditioned, and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolving phenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account. Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic) firms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at the center of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such firms accumulated—as a result of their pricing power, massive sales efforts, and other factors—could not be profitably invested back into the economy. Absent any “epoch making innovations” like the automobile or vast new increases in military spending, the result was a general trend toward economic stagnation—a condition that persists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysis was also extended to issues of imperialism, or “accumulation on a world scale,” overlapping with the path-breaking work of Samir Amin in particular.

    John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspective today, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explication of this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporating an analysis of recently discovered “lost” chapters from Monopoly Capital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It also discusses Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis of the financialization of the economy in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, leading up to the Great Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Foster presents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capital theory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in a way that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamant that the deep-seated problems of today’s monopoly-finance capitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcoming the system itself.

    Foster’s book is brilliantly successful elaborating Marxian political economy and the tendency of monopoly-finance-imperialist capitalism toward stagnation. The book deserves a wide (re-)readership and a new generation of theorists to appreciate the explanatory power of Marxian political economy.

    —Hans G. Despain, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

    A clear and powerful explanation of the Marxian political economy, this book is a welcome addition for those who are interested in, or have serious concerns about, monopoly capital as well as economic stagnation, financial instability, and the futures of both capitalism and socialism.

    —CHOICE

    Essential reading for those attracted by the monopoly capital school.

    —The Economic Journal

    A clear and forceful elaboration of basic Marxist concepts such as economic surplus, capital accumulation, imperialism, and value.

    —Labour/Le Travail

    A literate defense of the … Marxian analytical framework of Baran, Sweezy, Kalecki, and Steindl …. Foster develops an improved version of Baran and Sweezy’s … model of of accumulation by adding theoretical refinements.

    —Cooperative Economic News Service

    Editions:

    • Second edition (2013), includes new introduction to second edition by author, pp. 22
    • “Introduction to Second Edition” published in Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July-August 2013), pp. 107-34.
    • Japanese language edition, (Tokyo: Uni Agency, 1988).
    Translations:
    • Chinese Translation of “Introduction to Second Edition” forthcoming in Foreign Theoretical Trends.

  • Polish Marxian Political Economy and U.S. Monopoly Capital Theory: The Influence of Luxemburg, Kalecki, and Lange on Baran and Sweezy and Monthly Review

    “Polish Marxian Political Economy and U.S. Monopoly Capital Theory: The Influence of Luxemburg, Kalecki, and Lange on Baran and Sweezy and Monthly Review,” in Ricardo Bellofiore, Ewa Karwoski, and Jan Toporowski, ed., The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange and Michael Kalecki, vol. 1 of Essays in Honour of Tadeusz Kowalik (London: Palgrave, 2014), 104-21.

    From the viewpoint of orthodox economists, macroeconomics has no significant historical antecedents prior to the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936. Theories of aggregate demand before Keynes, such as those associated with Lauderdale, Malthus, and Hobson, were generally weak theoretically. A number of important mainstream economic thinkers raised what would be considered macroeconomic questions in the context of business cycle analysis.1 But it required Keynes to construct a monetary theory of production that broke decisively with Say’s Law (the notion that supply creates its own demand) before economic orthodoxy was able to address macroeconomic questions in a significant way.