The recovery of the ecological-materialist foundations of Karl Marx’s thought, as embodied in his theory of metabolic rift, is redefining both Marxism and ecology in our time, reintegrating the critique of capital with critical natural science. This may seem astonishing to those who were reared on the view that Marx’s ideas were simply a synthesis […]
Tag Archives | Spanish
Crossing the River of Fire
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2015 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything [argues that the source of the looming crisis from climate change] is not the planet, which operates according to natural laws, but rather the economic and social system in which we live, which treats natural limits as mere barriers to surmount. It is now doing so on a planetary scale, […]
Surveillance Capitalism
By John Bellamy Foster on August 1, 2014 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The United States came out of the Second World War as the hegemonic power in the world economy. The war had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression by providing the needed effective demand in the form of endless orders for armaments and troops. Real output rose by 65 percent between 1940 and […]
Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature
By John Bellamy Foster on December 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The rediscovery over the last decade and a half of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift has come to be seen by many on the left as offering a powerful critique of the relation between nature and contemporary capitalist society. The result has been the development of a more unified ecological world view transcending the divisions […]
The Epochal Crisis
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
It is an indication of the sheer enormity of the historical challenge confronting humanity in our time that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, sometimes now called the Second Great Depression, is overshadowed by the larger threat of planetary catastrophe, raising the question of the long-term survival of innumerable species—including our own. An […]
Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy
By John Bellamy Foster on April 1, 2013 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
A historical perspective on the economic stagnation afflicting the United States and the other advanced capitalist economies requires that we go back to the severe downturn of 1974–1975, which marked the end of the post-Second World War prosperity. The dominant interpretation of the mid–1970s recession was that the full employment of the earlier Keynesian era […]
The Global Stagnation and China
By John Bellamy Foster on February 1, 2012 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Five years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–09 began there is still no sign of a full recovery of the world economy. Consequently, concern has increasingly shifted from financial crisis and recession to slow growth or stagnation, causing some to dub the current era the Great Stagnation. Stagnation and financial crisis are now seen […]
Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency
By John Bellamy Foster on November 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
The curse of energy efficiency, better known as the Jevons Paradox—the idea that increased energy (and material-resource) efficiency leads not to conservation but increased use—was first raised by William Stanley Jevons in the nineteenth century. Although forgotten for most of the twentieth century, the Jevons Paradox has been rediscovered in recent decades and stands squarely […]
The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On
By John Bellamy Foster on October 1, 2010 in Comments-Short Articles-Introductions to Archival Reprints
The Great Financial Crisis began in the summer of 2007 and three years later, despite a putative “recovery,” it is still having profound effects in the United States, Europe, and in much of the world.
The Financial Power Elite
By John Bellamy Foster on May 1, 2010 in Articles, Other Major Scholarly Journal Articles, Translated
Has the power of financial interests in U.S. society increased? Has Wall Street’s growing clout affected the U.S. state itself? How is this connected to the present crisis? We will argue that the financialization of U.S. capitalism over the last four decades has been accompanied by a dramatic and probably long-lasting shift in the location […]
