John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Sole Author

  • The Latin American Revolt

    The Latin American Revolt

    “The Latin American Revolt: An Introduction“, Monthly Review vol. 59, no. 3 (July 2007), pp. 1-8. DOI: 10.14452/MR-059-03-2007-07_1

    The revolt against U.S. hegemony in Latin America in the opening years of the twenty-first century constitutes nothing less than a new historical moment. Latin America, to quote Noam Chomsky, is “reasserting its independence” in an attempt to free itself from centuries of imperialist domination. The gravity of this threat to U.S. power is increasingly drawing the attention of Washington. Julia Sweig, Latin American program director at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that the twenty-first century is likely to be known as the “Anti-American Century,” marking a growing intolerance of the “waning” U.S. empire. Outweighing even the resistance to the U.S. war machine in Iraq in this respect, Sweig suggests, is the political realignment to the left in Latin America, which, in destabilizing U.S. rule in the Americas, offers a “prophetic microcosm” of what can be expected worldwide.

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in America Latina en Movimiento, Barcelona.
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 16 (Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2007).
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, no. 4 (September-November 2007. Translated by Protiva Mondol.

     

  • Nature, Technology and the Sacred

    “Nature, Technology and the Sacred,” [PDF], American Journal of Sociology, vol. 112, no. 6 (May 2007). (Review of Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred), pp. 1937–1939. DOI: 10.1086/519706.

    The classical sociologists, including Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, all argued that society was experiencing a rapid secularization, arising from the Enlightenment, industrialization, and capitalism. While Marx famously argued that under capitalism “all that is holy is profaned,” Weber just as famously referred to the “disenchantment of nature” associated with formal rationalization. Although by no means the first work to question this secularization thesis, Nature, Technology and the Sacred does so to a degree perhaps unequaled by any other analysis.

  • The Imperialist World System

    The Imperialist World System

    “The Imperialist World System: Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth After Fifty Years“, Monthly Review vol. 59, no. 1 (May 2007), pp. 1-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-059-01-2007-05_1

    The concept of the imperialist world system in today predominant sense of the extreme economic exploitation of periphery by center, creating a widening gap between rich and poor countries, was largely absent from the classical Marxist critique of capitalism. Rather this view had its genesis in the 1950s, especially with the publication fifty years ago of Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth. Baran’s work helped inspire Marxist dependency and world system theories. But it was the new way of looking at imperialism that was the core of Baran’s contribution. A half-century later it is important to ask: What was this new approach and how did it differ from then prevailing notions? What further changes in our understanding of imperialism are now necessary in response to changed historical conditions since the mid-twentieth century?

    Translations:
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (Istanbul: Kalkedon, August 2007.

     

  • The Financialization of Capitalism

    The Financialization of Capitalism

    “The Financialization of Capitalism“, Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 11 (April 2007), pp. 1-12. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-11-2007-04_1

    Changes in capitalism over the last three decades have been commonly characterized using a trio of terms: neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. Although a lot has been written on the first two of these, much less attention has been given to the third. Yet, financialization is now increasingly seen as the dominant force in this triad. The financialization of capitalism-the shift in gravity of economic activity from production (and even from much of the growing service sector) to finance—is thus one of the key issues of our time. More than any other phenomenon it raises the question: has capitalism entered a new stage?

    Translations:
    • Chinese Translations by Wang Nianyong and Chen Jiali Foreign Theoretical Trends (China), no. 7 (2007) and Wu Wei, Marxism and Reality (2008).
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, August 2007.
    • Spanish translation in Monthly Review, Selecciones en Castellano, no. 8 (March 2008).
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, no. 4 (September-November, 2007). Translated by Arindam Bandopaddhay.

     

  • The Ecology of Destruction

    The Ecology of Destruction

    “The Ecology of Destruction“, Monthly Review vol. 58, no. 9 (February 2007), pp.1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-09-2007-02_1

    I would like to begin my analysis of what I am calling here “the ecology of destruction” by referring to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Burn!. Pontecorvo’s epic film can be seen as a political and ecological allegory intended for our time. It is set in the early nineteenth century on an imaginary Caribbean island called “Burn.” Burn is a Portuguese slave colony with a sugar production monoculture dependent on the export of sugar as a cash crop to the world economy. In the opening scene we are informed that the island got its name from the fact that the only way that the original Portuguese colonizers were able to vanquish the indigenous population was by setting fire to the entire island and killing everyone on it, after which slaves were imported from Africa to cut the newly planted sugar cane.

    Reprints:
    • Reprinted and published in Norwegian in Torstein Dahle (and to artikler av John Bellamy Foster, Ødeleggelsens Økonomi (Tidsskrifter Rødt!, 2008), 100-16.
    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Dong Jinyu, Foreign Theoretical Trends (China), no. 6, 2008, and translated separately by Liang Yongqiant, Internet Fortune (China), no. 4, 2009.
    • Persian translation in Paul M. Sweezy, et. al., Capitalism and the Environment (Tehran: Digar Publishing House, 2008.
    • French translation in La Brèche-Carré Rouge, December 2007-January February 2008, pp. 46-53.
    • German translation in Perspectiven: Magazin Für Linke Tehoerie Und Praxis, 2007, no. 2 (Vienna);
    • Portuguese translation in O Comuneiro, no. 4, 2007, www.ocomuneiro.com.
    • Norwegian translation in Rødt–special edition in Norwegian daily Klassekampen (Class Struggle), June 2007.
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, 2007.
    • Korean translation October 15, 2009, at http://programto.net/wordpress/.
    • Bangla translation in Bangla Monthly Review, no. 3 (June 2007). Translated by Tushar Chakrabarty.

     

  • ‘No Radical Change in the Model’

    ‘No Radical Change in the Model’

    “No Radical Change in the Model“, foreword to “Brazil Under Lula: An MR Survey,” Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 9 (February 2007), pp. 15-16. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-09-2007-02_2

    In the 2006 presidential election campaign in Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula), leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT or Workers’ Party), was interviewed at length on July 11, 2006, by the Financial Times (which also interviewed Lula’s main rightist challenger Geraldo Alckmin). The interview touched on many topics but mainly concentrated on Lula’s adherence in his first term of office to the global neoliberal policies of monopoly-finance capital, particularly repayment of debt and “fiscal responsibility.” At two points in the interview the Financial Times bluntly asked whether Lula was looking toward a “radical change in the model,” i.e., whether he and his Workers’ Party intended to break with financial capital and neoliberalism in his second term of office. Lula gave them the answer they wanted: “There is no radical change in the model….What we need now, in economics and in politics, is to strengthen Brazil’s internal and external security.”

     

  • The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology

    “The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology,” in Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith ed., Dialectics for a New Century (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 50-82.

    For ‘Western Marxism’ — a term introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in 1955 in his Adventures of the Dialectic (1973) to describe the philosophical tendency stemming from Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (1971; originally published in 1923) — no concept internal to Marxism has been more antithetical to the genuine development of historical materialism than the ‘dialectics of nature’. Commonly attributed to Engels rather than Marx, this concept is often seen as thedifferentia specifica that beginning in the 1920s separated the official Marxism of the Soviet Union from Western Marxism. Yet, as Lukács, who played the leading role in questioning the concept of the dialectic of nature, was later to admit, Western Marxism’s rejection of it struck at the very heart of the classical Marxist ontology — that of Marx no less than Engels.

  • “Foreword” to István Mészáros

    “Foreword” to István Mészáros, O Desafio E O Fardo Do Temp Histórico: O Socialismo No Século XX! [The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time] (Portuguese edition, Boitempo Editorial, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2007), pp. 13-18.

    Translation(s):
    • English version of foreword in English edition of book, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008).
    • Portuguese language version also printed in Le Monde Diplomatique—Brazilian edition, November 2007.
    • Included in Spanish edition: El Desafio y la Carga del Tiempo Histórico.
  • Monopoly-Finance Capital

    Monopoly-Finance Capital

    “Monopoly-Finance Capital“, Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 7 (December 2006), pp. 1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-07-2006-11_1

    The year now ending marks the fortieth anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s classic work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966). Compared to mainstream economic works of the early to mid-1960s (the most popular and influential of which were John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Industrial State and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom), Monopoly Capital stood out not simply in its radicalism but also in its historical specificity. What Baran and Sweezy sought to explain was not capitalism as such, the fundamental account of which was to be found in Marx’s Capital, but rather a particular stage of capitalist development. Their stated goal was nothing less than to provide a brief “essay-sketch” of the monopoly stage of capitalism by examining the interaction of its basic economic tendencies, narrowly conceived, with the historical, political, and social forces that helped to shape and support them.

    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Research Center on Marxism, Yunnan Normal University, Foreign Theoretical Trends (China), no. 3, 2007.
    • Turkish translation in http://www.sendika.org, October 16, 2008.
    • Arabic translation by Thamer Al-Saffar in Civilized Dialogue 1925, May 24, 2007, http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=97582

     

  • The Optimism of the Heart

    The Optimism of the Heart

    “The Optimism of the Heart“, (memorial to Harry Magdoff), Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 5 (October 2006), pp. 10-26. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-05-2006-09_2

    The following intellectual biography of Harry Magdoff is a slightly revised and expanded version of a piece that was posted on MRzine a few days after Harry’s death on January 1, 2006. It evolved out of an earlier biography I wrote for the Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists in 2000. Since the aim of this biography was to present the basic facts of Harry’s intellectual career, personal feelings and observations were largely excluded. A brief word on Harry’s character and the warm emotions he engendered within those who knew him therefore seems essential here.

    Online draft, placed on www.monthlyreview.org

    Translations:
    • Translated in Monthly Review, Turkish edition, no. 2 (2006), pp. 9-22.
    • Bangla translation included in in the Rank of the Wretched: A collection of Short Biographies of Albert Einstein, Paul M. Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Shrabon Prokashoni, 2006.
    • Chinese translation by Shoutao Sun in Foreign Theory Dynamics, 3 (2006).