If class war is continual in capitalist society, there is no doubt that in recent decades in the United States it has taken a much more virulent form. In a speech delivered at New York University in 2004 Bill Moyers pointed out that the effects of this relentless offensive by the vested interests against the […]
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Naked Imperialism
During the Cold War years, mainstream commentators were quick to dismiss the idea that the United States was an imperialist power. Even when U.S. interventions led to the overthrow of popular governments, as in Iran, Guatemala, or the Congo, or wholesale war, as in Vietnam, this fiction remained intact. During the 1990s and especially since […]
The Household Debt Bubble
By John Bellamy Foster on May 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
It is an inescapable truth of the capitalist economy that the uneven, class-based distribution of income is a determining factor of consumption and investment. How much is spent on consumption goods depends on the income of the working class. Workers necessarily spend all or almost all of their income on consumption. Thus for households in […]
The New Geopolitics of Empire
By John Bellamy Foster on January 1, 2006 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Today’s imperial ideology proclaims that the United States is the new city on the hill, the capital of an empire dominating the globe. Yet the U.S. global empire, we are nonetheless told, is not an empire of capital; it has nothing to do with economic imperialism as classically defined by Marxists and others. The question […]
Organizing Ecological Revolution
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2005 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
My subject—organizing ecological revolution—has as its initial premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the web of life of the entire planet is threatened and with it the future of civilization.
Naked Imperialism
By John Bellamy Foster on September 5, 2005 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The global actions of the United States since September 11, 2001, are often seen as constituting a “new militarism” and a “new imperialism.” Yet, neither militarism nor imperialism is new to the United States, which has been an expansionist power—continental, hemispheric, and global—since its inception. What has changed is the nakedness with which this is […]
The End of Rational Capitalism
By John Bellamy Foster on March 1, 2005 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The twentieth century’s dominant myth was that of a “rational capitalism.” The two economists who did the most to promote this idea were John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Both were responding to the great historical crisis of capitalism manifested in the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. In the […]
The Treadmill of Accumulation
Allan Schnaiberg’s “treadmill of production” model has formed the single most influential framework of analysis within environmental sociology in the United States. Schnaiberg’s work is often characterized as “neo-Marxist,” but its actual relation to Marxian political economy has been left obscure. The following article examines Marx’s treatment of the treadmill as the crudest historical expression […]
The Commitment of an Intellectual
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2004 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The following brief intellectual biography of Paul Sweezy was drafted in September 2003 shortly before I saw Paul for the last time. It conveys many of the basic facts of his life. But as with all biographies of leading intellectuals it fails to capture the brilliance of his work, which must be experienced directly through […]
The New Age of Imperialism
By John Bellamy Foster on July 1, 2003 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Imperialism is meant to serve the needs of a ruling class much more than a nation. It has nothing to do with democracy. Perhaps for that reason it has often been characterized as a parasitic phenomenon-even by critics as astute as John Hobson in his 1902 classic, Imperialism: A Study. And (rom there it is […]
