Tag: Spanish

  • Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology

    Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology

    Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology,” (John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 68, no. 5 (October 2016), pp. 1-17.

    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 of German idealism, French utopian socialism, and British political economy. However, such perspectives on classical historical materialism, which prevailed during the previous century, are now giving way to a broader recognition that Marx’s materialist conception of history is inextricably connected to the materialist conception of nature, encompassing not only the critique of political economy, but also the critical appropriation of the natural-scientific revolutions occurring in his day.

    What Georg Lukács called Marx’s “ontology of social being” was rooted in a conception of labor as the metabolism of society and nature. In this view, human-material existence is simultaneously social-historical and natural-ecological. Moreover, any realistic historical understanding required a focus on the complex interconnections and interdependencies associated with human-natural conditions. It was this overall integrated approach that led Marx to define socialism in terms of a process of sustainable human development—understood as the necessity of maintaining the earth for future generations, coupled with the greatest development of human freedom and potential. Socialism thus required that the associated producers rationally regulate the metabolism of nature and society. It is in this context that Marx’s central concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” “social metabolism,” and the metabolic “rift” have come to define his critical-ecological worldview.

    Translation:

    Spanish translation in Derrota y Navegación, November 13, 2016

  • Crossing the River of Fire

    Crossing the River of Fire: The Liberal Attack on Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything” [PDF] (coauthored with Brett Clark, Foster listed first) Monthly Review, vol. 66, no. 9 (February 2015), pp. 1-17. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-09-2015-02_1

    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, destroying in the process the earth as a place of human habitation.… In the age of climate change, Klein argues, a system based on ever-expanding capital accumulation and exponential economic growth is no longer compatible with human well-being and progress—or even with human survival over the long run.… In this way Klein…signals that she has now, in William Morris’s famous metaphor, crossed “the river of fire” to become a critic of capital as a system.… [This] has led to a host of liberal attacks on This Changes Everything, often couched as criticisms emanating from the left. These establishment criticisms of her work, we will demonstrate, are disingenuous, having little to do with serious confrontation with her analysis. Rather, their primary purpose is to rein in her ideas, bringing them into conformity with received opinion. If that should prove impossible, the next step is to exclude her ideas from the conversation.

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Noticas de Abajo, June 14, 2015.

     

  • Surveillance Capitalism

    Surveillance Capitalism

    Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age” [PDF] (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 66, no. 11 (July-August 2014), pp. 1-32. DOI: 10.14452/MR-066-03-2014-07_1

    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 1944, and industrial production jumped by 90 percent.

    1, At the immediate end of the war, due to the destruction of the European and Japanese economies, the United States accounted for over 60 percent of world manufacturing output.
    2, The very palpable fear at the top of society as the war came to a close was that of a reversion to the pre-war situation in which domestic demand would be insufficient to absorb the enormous and growing potential economic surplus generated by the production system, thereby leading to a renewed condition of economic stagnation and depression.

    Translations
    • Chinese-language translation in Social Science Abroad, 2015.
    • Spanish language translation by Miguel de Punoenrosto in Sin Permiso (July 2014) http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/index.php?id=7154.
    • French Translation by Miguel de Puñoenrostro in Marx Nangara (February 2015).

     

  • Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature

    Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature

    Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature,” [PDF], Monthly Review, vol. 65, no. 7 (December 2013), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-065-07-2013-11_1

    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 between natural and social science, and allowing us to perceive the concrete ways in which the contradictions of capital accumulation are generating ecological crises and catastrophes.… Yet, this recovery of Marx’s ecological argument has given rise to further questions and criticisms.

    Translations:

     

  • The Epochal Crisis

    The Epochal Crisis

    The Epochal Crisis,” [PDF], Monthly Review, vol.65, no. 5 (October 2013), pp. 1-12. DOI: 10.14452/MR-065-05-2013-09_1

    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 urgent necessity for the world today is therefore to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat—itself a by-product of capitalist development.

    Translations:
    • German-language translation Das Argument 305 (2013): 871-80.
    • Spanish language translation by Carlos Valmaseda in Mientras Tanto (May 2014)

     

  • Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy

    Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy

    Marx, Kalecki, and Socialist Strategy”, Monthly Review vol. 64, no. 11 (April 2013), pp. 1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-064-11-2013-04_1

    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 had laid the basis for the crisis by strengthening labor in relation to capital. As a number of prominent left economists, whose outlook did not differ from the mainstream in this respect, put it, the problem was a capitalist class that was “too weak” and a working class that was “too strong.” Empirically, the slump was commonly attributed to a rise in the wage share of income, squeezing profits. This has come to be known as the “profit-squeeze” theory of crisis.

    Translations:
    • Turkish translation in Monthly Review, Turkish edition (January 2014), pp. 59-77.
    • Chinese translation forthcoming in Foreign Theoretical Trends, vol. 3 (2014)
    • Spanish translation in Revista Sin Permiso, April 12, 2013, www.sinpermiso.info.

     

  • The Global Stagnation and China

    The Global Stagnation and China

    The Global Stagnation and China”, (coauthored with Robert W. McChesney, Foster listed first), Monthly Review, vol. 63, no 9 (February 2012), pp. 1-28. DOI: 10.14452/MR-063-09-2012-02_1

    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 as feeding into one another.… To be sure, a few emerging economies have seemingly bucked the general trend, continuing to grow rapidly—most notably China, now the world’s second largest economy after the United States. Yet, as [IMF Managing Director Christine] Lagarde warned her Chinese listeners, “Asia is not immune” to the general economic slowdown, “emerging Asia is also vulnerable to developments in the financial sector.” So sharp were the IMF’s warnings, dovetailing with widespread fears of a sharp Chinese economic slowdown, that Lagarde in late November was forced to reassure world business, declaring that stagnation was probably not imminent in China (the Bloomberg.com headline ran: “IMF Sees Chinese Economy Avoiding Stagnation.”)

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Marxismo Critico, November 16, 2012.
    • Italian translation in Pantarossa, October 5, 2015.

     

  • Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency

    Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency

    Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency: The Return of the Jevons Paradox“, (coauthored with Brett Clark and Richard York, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 62, no. 6 (November 2010), pp. 1-12. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-06-2010-10_1

    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 at the center of today’s environmental dispute

    Translations:
    • Spanish translation in Arquitectura Sustentable (Buenos Aires, Associación Argentina de Energias Renovables y Ambiente), http://www.arqsustentable.net/educacion_paradoja.html.

     

  • The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On

    “The Great Financial Crisis—Three Years On” (coauthored with Fred Magdoff), Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 5 (October 2010): 52-55.

    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. Austerity is being forced on working people in many countries. Matters are especially difficult in Greece, a country that is being compelled by the demands of bankers, including the International Monetary Fund, to squeeze its workers in return for loans from abroad to help pay down government debts. Official unemployment in the United States is still around 10 percent, and real unemployment is much higher. An unprecedented 44 percent of the officially unemployed have been without work for over six months. A record number of people are receiving government food assistance as well as meals and groceries from charities. Many U.S. states and cities, facing large shortfalls in their budgets due to falling tax revenues, are cutting jobs and reducing funding for schools and social programs.Much of the attention devoted to determining the cause of the crisis has been directed at the role of “subprime” mortgages in the United States that were sold to low-income people who had little chance of being able to pay the mortgages on their homes. Many of these subprime loans were given out under predatory terms that were especially unfavorable to the unsuspecting borrowers. The bundling of these loans together to be sold to institutions around the world served to spread significant risk far and wide.Yet, despite the instability generated by such loans, and a whole host of exotic financial instruments associated with them, the very severity of the Great Financial Crisis suggests that it was not primarily a product of such speculative practices. Rather, it was the outcome in the main of long-term structural factors, reflected in the secular decline in economic growth rates and the long-run increase of financial fragility and instability.The economic growth rates of the rich countries at the center of the capitalist world system have been shifting into low gear for decades. In the United States, average GDP growth, corrected for inflation, dropped from 4.4 percent in the 1960s, to 3.3 in the 1970s, 3.1 in the 1980s and 1990s, and 1.9 in the 2000s (2000 to 2009). In response to these conditions of deepening economic stagnation within the “real economy,” excess money capital flowed into the financial sector seeking quick returns, leading to the creation of a massive financial superstructure on top of a weakening economic base. This resort to speculative finance as a wealth-generation strategy gave rise to huge artificial profits (and capital gains) seemingly out of thin air—with no real relation to the commodity economy.In this situation, larger and larger infusions of debt—household, corporate, and government—were needed to generate a given level of growth. At the same time, the whole debt balloon, which more and more took on the character of Ponzi finance, required constant infusions of cash merely to stave off the inevitable crash. The result was a literal explosion of debt, which reached an astronomical 350 percent of U.S. GDP by 2007.

    Financial bubbles are invariably symptoms of deeper underlying problems. To focus simply on subprime loans, or even the housing bubble itself, as the real cause of the crisis—as most orthodox economic commentators have done—is thus to mistake the symptom for the disease. If it hadn’t been for the housing bubble in the United States, there would have been another bubble that would have likely led to essentially the same results. Since the 1970s, the economy has seen more and more “credit crunches,” with central banks each time rushing in at the first sign of trouble to bail out failing financial institutions. This, however, has contributed to the growing financial fragility, while the underlying problem of stagnation has remained unaddressed.

    Three years since the onset of the Great Financial Crisis, matters have become so serious that Paul Krugman, winner of the Bank of Sweden’s Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences, has declared that we are now in (or entering) a Third Depression, i.e., a third period of economic stagnation. This Third Depression, he suggests, resembles both the stagnation that began in Europe and the United States in the 1870s, which he labels the Long Depression, and the stagnation of the 1930s, or the Great Depression. As Krugman writes: “We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost—to the world economy, and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs—will nonetheless be immense.” Krugman contends that “this third depression will be primarily the result of a failure of policy”—the continuation, even in a severe downturn of the neoliberal policy of austerity aimed at erasing government deficits, as opposed to adopting a strong Keynesian stimulus policy as a way out of the crisis.1

    It is true that misguided neoliberal deficit-fighting economic policies during a slump will cause further damage to economic prospects. But Keynesian stimulus offers no genuine solution. The real problem, we argue, is not economic policy but capitalist development itself. Our thesis, in the briefest possible terms, is that the advanced capitalist economies are caught in a tendency to stagnation resulting from the dual processes of industrial maturation and monopolistic accumulation. Financialization (the shift in the center of gravity of the capitalist economy from production to finance) is to be regarded as a compensatory mechanism that has helped to lift the economic system under these circumstances, but at the expense of increased fragility. Capitalism is thus caught in what we call a “stagnation-financialization trap.”

    All of this is connected to the class structure of monopoly-finance capital, which has produced levels of inequality without precedent in the advanced capitalist world. The so-called “Forbes 400,” the 400 richest Americans, now own about as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, some 150 million people. A number of Citigroup analysts have recently argued that the United States and other rich economies are now so top heavy from the standpoint of wealth and income distribution that they are best described as “plutonomies,” in which small class fractions control increasingly large portions of social wealth.2

    To be sure, emerging economies, notably China and India, have not yet acquired the diseases of maturity and monopolization in the sense of the advanced capitalist states and thus are relatively free from the chronic illness that has crippled the countries at the center of the system. But emerging countries are far from being immune to the problems generated. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that they too will be impacted in multiple ways in today’s globalized economy as a result of the weakening of the system at its core. It is worth noting that the Long Depression was followed by a great wave of imperialist expansion leading up to the First World War, while the Great Depression led to the inter-imperialist conflict of the Second World War. The current Third Depression is already pointing ominously to heightened imperial conflict, centered especially in the Persian Gulf, which could potentially lead to devastating consequences for humanity as a whole.

    If all this were not enough, the world is now facing an even more serious peril: a rapidly accelerating planetary ecological crisis that threatens, if radical changes are not made in the next decade or two, the eventual collapse of most of the world’s ecosystems, together with human civilization itself.

    There is only one possible solution to this all-encompassing planetary crisis, and that is the euthanasia of capitalism, replacing it with a new economy geared to sustainable human development, ecological plenitude, and the cultivation of genuine human community. The sooner we begin to construct this qualitatively new system through our mass struggles, the better the long-term prospects for humanity and the earth will be.

    Eugene, Oregon
    Burlington, Vermont
    June 30, 2010

    [English language version of preface to the Bangla edition of The Great Financial Crisis. Spanish language translation by Alberto Nadal in El Diario Internacional (December 2010). Italian version published by Attac Italia, January 7, 2011, at HYPERLINK” http://www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip.php?article3525″
    http://www.italia.attac.org/spip/spip.php?article3525. French translation printed by Le  HYPERLINK “http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?anno=2&hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http://www.cadtm.org/&usg=ALkJrhhASr3MtAqVLKrb5KmngEWMpdgxrA” Comité pour l’Annulation de la Dette du Tiers Monde, December 29, 2010. Galician translation published by Avantar, December 21, 2010, http://www.galizacig.com/avantar/autor/john-bellamy-foster-e-fred-magdoff. Spanish translation by Alberto Nadal in Viento Sur, November 11, 2010. Catalan translation published by En Lluita,  HYPERLINK “http://www.enlluita.org/site/?q=node/3150” http://www.enlluita.org/site/?q=node/3150. Turkish translation appears in Kapitalizmin Finansal Krizi, edited by Prof. Dr. Abdullah Ersoy (Ankara, Turkey: Imaj Publishing, 2011), 330pp.]

    Notes

    1.  Paul Krugman, “The Third Depression,” New York Times, June 28, 2010.
    2.  Matthew Miller and Duncan Greenberg, ed., “The Richest People in America” (2009), Forbes, http://forbes.com; Arthur B. Kennickell, “Ponds and Streams: Wealth and Income in the U.S., 1989 to 2007,” Federal Reserve Board Working Paper 2009-13, 2009, 55, 63; Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances,” Citigroup Research, October 16, 2005; and “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Get Richer,” Citigroup Research, March 5, 2006.

     

  • The Financial Power Elite

    The Financial Power Elite

    The Financial Power Elite“, (coauthored with Hannah Holleman, Foster listed first), Monthly Review vol. 62, no. 1 (May 2010), pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.14452/MR-062-01-2010-05_1

    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 of the capitalist class, a growing proportion of which now derives its wealth from finance as opposed to production. This growing dominance of finance can be seen today in the inner corridors of state power.

    Translations: