How can we transcend the alienation of humanity and nature, and create a world of substantive equality and ecological sustainability?

Book Launch: “The Dialectics of Ecology”

John Bellamy Foster speaks with Daniel Tutt about the work of István Mészáros and Paul Baran, contemporary irrationalist tendencies in left ecological thought, intensifying global class struggles, and the continued relevance of Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1952), recently reissued with an introduction by Enzo Traverso by Verso in 2021.

John Bellamy Foster points to “Beyond Leviathan” by István Mészáros for insights into the ancient origins of the state and nature of its evolution over thousands of years, the necessity to move beyond the state and how to meet that challenge.

A brilliant theoretical physicist best known for his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein was also a socialist. John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?”

Foster explains Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism and how the concept of “metabolic rift” highlights the alienation between humans and nature caused by capitalism’s focus on profit over sustainability.

A Polen Ekoloji seminar featuring John Bellamy Foster on the theoretical and historical background of Marx, the Anthropocene, and the metabolic rift.

Daniel Tutt of Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics interviews John Bellamy Foster on his new article, “The New Irrationalism,” from the February 2023 (Volume 74, Number 9) issue of Monthly Review.

John Bellamy Foster, Editor of Monthly Review (New York, USA) gives our annual Engels Memorial Lecture, joint with the Working Class Movement Library.

Late Imperialism and the Expropriation of the Earth.

Foster begins by referencing the fact that the 19th century, Newtonian view of nature, and the mechanistic, positivist approach to science originally penetrated socialist thought.

When the concept of ecological civilization came to prominence in China, beginning around 2002 it was depicted as a defining element of socialism with Chinese characteristics, requiring a transition away from the expropriation of nature endemic to capitalist modernity and pointing to the need for worldwide social transformations. It was thus closely related from the start to the Marxist critique of capitalism.

We have to recognize that there is a pathway forward for humanity, but that the capitalist world system, and today’s governments that are largely subservient to corporations and the wealthy, are blocking that pathway, simply because it requires revolutionary-scale socioecological change.

This week, Grace talks to John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review. They discuss Marx’s theory of nature and the relationship between humanity and nature under capitalism.

There are two prongs to U.S. imperial grand strategy, one as geopolitical expansion and positioning, including the enlargement of NATO, the other as the U.S. drive for nuclear primacy.

In the week before the COP26 international summit, John Bellamy Foster analyzed the climate emergency and how we can achieve climate justice.

This session is a discussion of the Deutscher Prize Winning Book 2020 ‘The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: Marxian Ecology and the Struggle for Freedom as Necessity’ – John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster – Deutscher Memorial Lecture

A discussion with John Bellamy Foster, one of the world’s leading figures in Marxian ecological theory.

The ‘crisis of politics,’ which cannot be denied today even by the system’s worst apologists represents a profound crisis of legitimacy of the established social metabolic mode of reproduction and its overall framework of political control. This is what has brought about the historical actuality of the socialist offensive, although the pursuit of its own “line of least resistance” by labor continues to favor for the moment the maintenance of the existing order, despite the increasingly obvious inability of that order to “deliver the goods” as the once overwhelmingly accepted foundation of its legitimacy.