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 […]
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Nature, Technology and the Sacred
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 Imperialist World System
By John Bellamy Foster on May 1, 2007 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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 […]
The Financialization of Capitalism
By John Bellamy Foster on April 1, 2007 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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 Ecology of Destruction
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2007 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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 […]
‘No Radical Change in the Model’
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2007 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Short Articles
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 […]
The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology
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 […]
“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 […]
Monopoly-Finance Capital
By John Bellamy Foster on December 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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 […]
The Optimism of the Heart
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
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 […]
