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  • Monthly Review Essays

About John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, is editor of Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published monthly in New York City. His research is devoted to critical inquiries into theory and history, focusing primarily on the economic, political and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also encompassing the wider realm of social theory as a whole. He has published numerous articles and books focusing on the political economy of capitalism and the economic crisis, ecology and the ecological crisis, and Marxist theory: (with Brett Clark) The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift; The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology; (with Paul Burkett) Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (2016); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014); (with Robert W. McChesney) The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (2012); (with Fred Magdoff) What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (2011); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (2009); (with Fred Magdoff) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (2009); The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009); (with Brett Clark and Richard York) Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (2008); Ecology Against Capitalism (2002); Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000); (with Frederick H. Buttel and Fred Magdoff) Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000); The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (1999); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert W. McChesney) Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (1998); (with Ellen Meiksins Wood) In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (1997); The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (1986); (with Henryk Szlajfer) The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism (1984). His work is published in at least twenty-five languages. Visit johnbellamyfoster.org for a collection of most of Foster's works currently available online.
  • Police officers help firefighters to extinguish a fire in Thrakomakedones, near Mount Parnitha, north of Athens

    Be moderate…we only want THE EARTH!

    John Bellamy Foster

    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.

  • Green Marx

    Turning the Earth into money w/ John Bellamy Foster

    Originally published: Tribune Magazine on May 11, 2022 (more by Tribune Magazine)  |

    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.

  • Olga Chernysheva (Russia), Kind People, 2004.

    The U.S. proxy war in Ukraine

    John Bellamy Foster

    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.

  • John Bellamy Foster Posted on September 7, 2021 Marxism, Ecology and the Climate Crisis

    Marxism, Ecology and the Climate Crisis—John Bellamy Foster

    John Bellamy Foster

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

  • Return of the Dialectics of Nature: Marxian Ecology and the Struggle for Freedom as Necessity

    Return of the Dialectics of Nature: Marxian Ecology and the Struggle for Freedom as Necessity —A Discussion of the Deutscher Prize 2020

    Originally published: Haymarket Books on November 12, 2021 (more by Haymarket Books)  |

    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

  • The Return of Nature

    ‘The Return of the Dialectics of Nature’: 2020 Deutscher Prize Lecture by John Bellamy Foster

    John Bellamy Foster

    John Bellamy Foster – Deutscher Memorial Lecture

  • A Discussion with John Bellamy Foster – Presenting the 2021 transform! yearbook

    A Discussion with John Bellamy Foster – Presenting the 2021 transform! yearbook

    Originally published: Transform Europe on October 19, 2021 (more by Transform Europe)  |

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

  • István Mészáros

    The Historical Challenges Facing the Socialist Movement

    István Mészáros and John Bellamy Foster

    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.

  • If humanity is to have any future at all

    If humanity is to have any future at all

    Originally published: BirGün (Istanbul) on September 5, 2020 by Ömur Şahin Keyif (more by BirGün (Istanbul))  |

    The history of capitalism as a world system is punctuated by struggles for world hegemony between declining hegemonic powers and rising states, usually leading to world wars. We are now in such a period, which had been building for some time under Obama and is now being pursued much more openly and belligerently under Trump.

  • A Fractured Empire, Within and Without: John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by BirGün Daily, July 25, 2020

    A fractured empire, within and without

    Originally published: Birgün on July 25, 2020 (more by Birgün)  |

    Two things seem certain at this point: (1) The Trump administration will continue to extend its heavy handed neofascist tactics in the next three months, seeking to expand its political base by these means, and (2) the White House and the Republican Party will try to engineer another set of stimulus payments/tax cuts in early September with Trump’s name all over it.

  • Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature

    Originally published: Cosmonaut on July 8, 2020 (more by Cosmonaut)

    The Cosmonaut team inaugurates the ecology series by discussing John Bellamy Foster’s seminal book Marx’s Ecology on its twentieth anniversary.

  • The “Town Destroyer,” George Washington, and the Seneca leader Guyasuta

    George Washington and genocide

    John Bellamy Foster and Eds.

    ‘The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of [Iroquois Confederacy] settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.… the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.’ —Commands from George Washington to General Sullivan on May 31, 1779

  • Protesting the murder of George Floyd in Washing, D.C. March 30, 2020

    The storm of protest in the United States

    Originally published: BirGün (Istanbul) on July 2, 2020 (more by BirGün (Istanbul))  |

    “Neofascism has its source in monopoly-finance capital, at the apex of the system, but depends for its existence on the ability to mobilize, with the help of a führer-like figure such as Trump, a very considerable part of the overall population.”

  • Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance by John Bellamy Foster

    Naked Imperialism by John Bellamy Foster – Review

    Originally published: Radical Reviewer Youtube Channel on May 22, 2018 (more by Radical Reviewer Youtube Channel)  |

    Radical Reviewer reviewing the book Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance by John Bellamy Foster.

  • Matador Network How to help those affected by the fires in Australia

    ‘Everything affects and is affected by every other thing’

    Originally published: ROAR magazine on June 23, 2020 (more by ROAR magazine)  |

    If “everything affects and is affected by every other thing,” we must respond to the dangers to human existence in the 21st century by changing the system, creating a different form of social metabolic reproduction. There is no other way.

  • John Bellamy Foster

    Catastrophe capitalism and the COVID-19 crisis

    John Bellamy Foster and BirGün Daily

    ÖŞK: In an interview with Michael D. Yates (“Trump, neo-fascism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic,”April 11, 2020, MR Online) you mentioned that “Capitalism is in its biggest crisis this century.” What makes this crisis the “biggest”? What will the outcome of this crisis look like? Will this crisis and failure lead to a major change in […]

  • Marxism and Ecology in a time of pandemic: John Bellamy Foster, Amy Leather & Martin Empson

    Marxism and Ecology in a time of pandemic: John Bellamy Foster, Amy Leather & Martin Empson

    Originally published: Socialist Workers Party Youtube Channel along with Amy Leather and Nadia Sayed on April 18, 2020 (more by Socialist Workers Party Youtube Channel along with Amy Leather and Nadia Sayed)  |

    Join John Bellamy Foster, Amy Leather & Martin Empson to discuss Marxism and ecology in a time of pandemic. The global environmental crisis has demonstrated how the system’s drive to accumulate means that capitalism puts profit before people and planet.

  • Pixabay Donald Trump Lying - Free image on Pixabay

    Trump, neo-fascism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

    Michael D. Yates and John Bellamy Foster

    The world is now in what scientists are calling a no-analogue situation. The dangers are increasing and so is the space for revolutionary human development, calling for a new Earth movement. If humanity is to survive a renewed struggle for freedom as necessity.

  • John Bellamy Foster

    Catastrophe capitalism: climate change, COVID-19, and economic crisis

    John Bellamy Foster and Farooque Chowdhury

    Obviously, the situation associated with the sudden appearance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 pandemic is grim all over the world. Both the causes and the consequences are closely related to capitalist social relations.

  • Capitalism and ecological theft.

    1131: Capitalism and ecological theft

    Originally published: This is Hell Podcast on February 19, 2020 (more by This is Hell Podcast)

    Sociologist John Bellamy Foster on the modern divide between humanity and nature and his book “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift” from Monthly Review.

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Also By John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review Magazine

  • Socialism and Ecological Survival: An Introduction July 01, 2022
  • Ecology and the Future of History July 01, 2022
  • Mészáros and Chávez: “The Point from Which to Move the World Today” June 01, 2022
  • “Notes on Exterminism” for the Twenty-First-Century Ecology and Peace Movements May 01, 2022
  • The Defense of Nature: Resisting the Financializaton of the Earth April 01, 2022
  • Nature as a Mode of Accumulation: Capitalism and the Financialization of the Earth March 01, 2022
  • Lukács and the Tragedy of Revolution: Reflections on “Tactics and Ethics” February 01, 2022
  • Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now? December 01, 2021
  • The Planetary Rift November 01, 2021

Books By John Bellamy Foster

  • Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution August 02, 2022

Monthly Review Essays

  • From Commodity Fetishism to Teleological Positing: Lukács’s Concept of Labor and Its Relevance
    Wang Pu Historia y conciencia de clase y el marxismo de Georg Lukács - Dialektika

    The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years.

Lost & Found

  • Russia and the Ukraine crisis: The Eurasian Project in conflict with the triad imperialist policies
    Samir Amin State flag of Ukraine behind a wall of anonymous protesters in Kyiv, Ukraine

    We wanted to draw readers attention to this piece by Samir Amin, which was written at the time of the Maidan Coup in 2014. —Eds. 1. The current global stage is dominated by the attempt of historical centers of imperialism (the U.S., Western and Central Europe, Japan—hereafter called “the Triad”) to maintain their exclusive control […]

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