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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.
  • John Bellamy Foster

    Engels and the second foundation of Marxism

    Originally published: Marx Memorial Library on November 30, 2022 (more by Marx Memorial Library)  |

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

  • Dio Cramer

    Extractivism in the Anthropocene

    Originally published: Science for the People on Volume 25, no. 2, Bleeding Earth (more by Science for the People)  |

    Late Imperialism and the Expropriation of the Earth.

  • The Return of Nature

    Marxism and the climate crisis (John Bellamy Foster on the ‘Historical Materialism podcast’)

    Originally published: Historical Materialism on October 2022 (more by Historical Materialism)  |

    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.

  • High Speed Train

    Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?

    John Bellamy Foster and Jianren Guo and Zhang Haiyan and Fan Meijun

    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.

  • 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 […]

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Also By John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review Magazine

  • The New Irrationalism February 01, 2023
  • Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment Humanism: A Revolutionary Ecological Perspective January 01, 2023
  • The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity December 01, 2022
  • Ecological Civilization, Ecological Revolution October 01, 2022
  • Ten Questions About Marx—More Than Twenty Years After Marx’s Ecology September 01, 2022
  • 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

Books By John Bellamy Foster

  • Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective November 15, 2022
  • Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution August 24, 2022

Monthly Review Essays

  • Extractivism in the Anthropocene
    John Bellamy Foster Dio Cramer

    Late Imperialism and the Expropriation of the Earth.

Lost & Found

  • End of Cold War Illusions
    Harry Magdoff F-16N Fighting Falcon

    In this reprint of the February 1994 “Notes from the Editors,” former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy ask: “The United States could not have won a more decisive victory in the Cold War. Why, then, does it continue to act as though the Cold War is still on?”

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