• Monthly Review
  • Monthly Review Press
  • Climate & Capitalism
  • Money on the Left
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Mastadon
MR Online
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact/Submission
  • Browse
    • Recent Articles Archive
    • by Subject
      • Ecology
      • Education
      • Imperialism
      • Inequality
      • Labor
      • Literature
      • Marxism
      • Movements
      • Philosophy
      • Political Economy
    • by Region
      • Africa
      • Americas
      • Asia
      • Australasia
      • Europe
      • Global
      • Middle East
    • by Category
      • Art
      • Commentary
      • Interview
      • Letter
      • News
      • Newswire
  • 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.
  • The 2000s - National Geographic

    The crisis of capital

    Originally published: Alternative Radio on October 02, 2009 (more by Alternative Radio)  |

    It may be hard, but I want you to try to think back a decade, actually slightly less than a decade. In 2000, we were celebrating the millennium, and if you remember what was happening at that time, it was an enormous celebration of a new global capitalism, of globalization, of the end of conflict in the world, of a new world order.

  • Twenty-first century capitalism—the means exist to break the chains that hold us

    John Bellamy Foster and BirGün Daily

    “The overwhelming character of the ecological crisis will eventually…[force workers to recognize] that the main material conditions determining their lives are both economic and environmental—and indeed that the latter are more far-reaching.”

  • Climate Change

    There is still time for an ecological revolution to prevent hothouse earth

    Originally published: Co-published with Rebel: The New Socialist Website on August 24, 2018 by Fiona Ferguson (more by Co-published with Rebel: The New Socialist Website)  | (Posted Aug 27, 2018)

    The only thing that could alter this dire situation, all over the world, is the rise of another power in society. We need not millions but hundreds of millions of people, necessarily predominantly working class, in the street day in and day out.

  • Forest fire in Sweden

    The hope of ecosocialism

    John Bellamy Foster

    “The gross irrationality of our economic and social system is a measure of what we could do to improve the lives of people and the environment.”

  • Geoengineering detail

    Making War on the Planet: Geoengineering and Capitalism’s Creative Destruction of the Earth

    Originally published: Co-published with Science for the People on July 24, 2018 (more by Co-published with Science for the People)  |

    The enormous dangers that rapid climate change present to humanity as a whole, and the inability of the existing capitalist political-economic structure to address them, symbolized by the presence of Donald Trump in the White House, have engendered a desperate search for technofixes in the form of schemes for geoengineering, defined as massive, deliberate human interventions to manipulate the entire climate or the planet as a whole.

  • Marxian theory & eco-revolution talk

    Marxian theory & eco-revolution – Prof. John Bellamy Foster

    Originally published: MrMarxismo Youtube Channel on July 19, 2018 (more by MrMarxismo Youtube Channel)

    The Marxism 2018 festival, hosted by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), took place last week in a context of deepening political polarisation across the world.

  • John Bellamy Foster - April 26 @ SFU

    Capitalism and the Expropriation of Nature: The Strategic Discourse of Ecosocialism with John Bellamy Foster

    Originally published: Vancouver Ecosocialist on May 10, 2018 by Devin Gillan (more by Vancouver Ecosocialist)  |

    Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally.

  • Mural by Diego Rivera showing the history of Mexico, with detail showing Karl Marx, Mexico City, Palacio Nacional. Wolfgang Sauber / Wikimedia

    A new Marxian century

    Originally published: Jacobin on May 5, 2018 (more by Jacobin)  |

    It’s not just that Marx’s ideas remain relevant — we’re also in the midst of a great new age of Marxian thought.

  • Over a million Cubans march on May Day 2017

    May Day 2018: Exploitation, NO! Expropriation, NO! Unite for justice!

    John Bellamy Foster and Farooque Chowdhury and Fred Magdoff

    In view of the historic May Day, May 1st, analysts from Monthly Review, the famous independent socialist magazine, identify tasks the working classes should press with. The following interviews were conducted in early April with John Bellamy Foster, Professor and Editor of Monthly Review; Fred Magdoff, Professor Emeritus, and one of Monthly Review’s closest associates; […]

  • Trump graffiti

    The U.S. can’t revive the Monroe Doctrine or expel China from Latin America, but it can inflict pain on the region

    Originally published: Mint Press News on March 8, 2018 by Elliot Gabriel (more by Mint Press News)  |

    In this MPN exclusive, we speak to Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster and Latin America studies scholar Harry L. Simón Salazar about the U.S. fight to maintain hegemony in Latin America, the rise of the right wing, and the danger of “regime change” in Venezuela.

  • John Bellamy Foster speaking at an Occupy Demonstration in Eugene, OR

    ‘Socialism a necessity for human survival’

    Originally published: Frontline India by Jipson John & Jitheesh P.M. (more by Frontline India)  |

    According to John Bellamy Foster, the world environmental crisis is a systemic crisis, a product of capitalism, and requires systemic changes in the capitalist system. He says that environmental sustainability is incompatible with capitalism.

  • An employee holds copies of the book 'Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House'

    Trump, the Nationalist-Populist Movement, and Wolff’s Fire and Fury

    John Bellamy Foster

    The real story of Wolff’s Fire and Fury—ignored by an establishment media that has no interest in revealing anything about the class struggle—is the rise of the nationalist-populist movement, which has used Trump effectively to grow its base.

  • Planetary boundaries

    Capitalism, exterminism and the long ecological revolution

    Originally published: teleSUR; interview on December 22, 2017 by Elliott Gabriel (more by teleSUR; interview)

    teleSUR spoke to Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about climate change & the need to fight for an ecosocialist, revolutionary alternative to the profit-driven world capitalist system.

  • Ecology Plant

    Foreword to Creating an Ecological Society

    John Bellamy Foster

    As Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams point out in their new book, Creating an Ecological Society, the word “ecology” (originally œcology) was first coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s leading German follower, based on the Greek word oikos, or household. Ironically, the word “economy,” to which ecology is often nowadays counterposed, was derived much […]

  • Ce que tout écologiste doit savoir à propos du capitalisme (What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism)

    The earth shall rise on new foundations

    Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster

    The United States is sometimes viewed as the most extreme capitalist society on earth. The decision of the newly elected Trump administration to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement would seem to affirm such a judgment. It highlights the fact that while capitalism cannot solve the environmental problem, a more extreme capitalist society can, if it is not stopped, eliminate all possibility for a future sustainable society, by accelerating the runaway train to catastrophe represented by today’s business as usual.

  • Comic about Trump in the LA Times

    John Bellamy Foster interviewed on Law and Disorder radio

    Originally published: Law and Disorder, hosted on June 26, 2017 by Michael Steven Smith and Heidi Boghosian (more by Law and Disorder, hosted)

    Is Trump a neofascist? Thoughtful analysts on the left like Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism. They call him a right wing populist. What is neofascism? Right wing Populism? Does it really matter what Trump is called? The great German playwright and political thinker who lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign, Berthold Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it fourth?” We speak today with John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the venerable magazine “Monthly Review”. He wrote the lead article in the current June 2017 issue titled “This Is Not Populism.”

  • Capitalism or Socialism

    What is to constitute the new “yes” is the problem

    John Bellamy Foster

    For Klein, developing a meaningful anti-shock politics involves some combination of what Sanders represented and what Clinton symbolized: Sanders with respect to class and economics, Clinton as far as race and gender, and everything else. Imperialism and war scarcely enter the argument.

  • The Steps to Ecosocialism

    Ian Angus and John Bellamy Foster

    John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus reply to a recent article published by Daniel Tanuro on carbon pricing schemes. Tanuro, a vehement critic of such schemes, focuses his critique on the cautiously critical support given by Foster and Angus to proposals developed by climate scientist James Hansen.

  • Comic about Trump in the LA Times

    Trump’s March of Folly

    John Bellamy Foster

    The Trump White House is neofascist in terms of its political base, its ideology, and the policies it is advocating. The rest of the U.S. state, the Congress, the judiciary… are not at present neofascist. So we are in a period which is analogous to what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung (bringing into line), which means a fight within the state.

  • Help Save the Lukács Archive!

    John Bellamy Foster

    A Request to Friends of Monthly Review From the time the current rightist government in Hungary came into power, the archive of Georg Lukács — a preeminent Marxist of the 20th century — has been under a brutal attack.  It has been gradually deprived of its subvention from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of […]

← Previous
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Next →

Also By John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review Magazine

  • Marx and Communal Society July 01, 2025
  • The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism June 01, 2025
  • ‘Gleichschaltung’ in Nazi Germany June 01, 2025
  • The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime May 01, 2025
  • The U.S. Ruling Class and the Trump Regime April 01, 2025
  • Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue March 01, 2025
  • Imperialism and White Settler Colonialism in Marxist Theory February 01, 2025
  • The Dialectical Ecologist: Richard Levins and the Science and Praxis of the Human-Nature Metabolism January 01, 2025
  • Some Preliminary Theses on the Concept of Eco-Civilization January 01, 2025

Books By John Bellamy Foster

  • Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”: The Enduring Legacy of His Classic Essay June 24, 2025

Monthly Review Essays

  • The Migrant Genocide: Toward a Third World Analysis of European Class Struggle
    Iker Suarez A banner at a memorial rally for victims of the 2014 massacre of migrants at Tarajal, 2021.

    Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone.[1] On June 2022, the border fence of Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, was witness to a massacre that killed or disappeared over a hundred African migrants.[2]  A recent BBC investigation revealed that Greek border guards systematically repeal immigrants already on Greek […]

Lost & Found

  • Strike at the Helm: The First Ministerial Meeting of the New Cycle of the Bolivarian Revolution
    Hugo Chávez Mural of Chávez in Caracas. (Univision)

    On October 7th, 2012, after hearing of his victory as the nation‘s candidate with 56 percent of the vote, President Hugo Chávez Frias announced from a balcony in his hometown that a new cycle was beginning the very next day, October 8th.

Trending

  • News.az/European Student Think Tank
    Europe’s imperial power play
  • Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader (Photo: middleeastmonitor.com)
    New left party’s polling a wake-up call for Labour
  • Friedrich Engels
    Friedrich Engels facts for kids
  • Venezuelan migrant rescued from El Salvador's CECOT torture center kneeling on Venezuelan soil after deboarding the plane that brought him back home, July 18, 2025. Photo: Con el Mazo Dando.
    Venezuelans expose horrors experienced in El Salvador prison: ‘Beaten at breakfast, lunch and dinner’
  • Workers for a Free Palestine
    ‘The working class has no country’: What do Marxists mean by this?
  • A black and white image of a young man facing a herd of sheep in a valley.
    Palestine and the Commons: Or, Marx and the Musha’a
  • 1
    Michael Hudson: How the Global Majority can free itself from U.S. financial colonialism
  • A young demonstrator holds a banner objecting to the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump to the United Kingdom, in Belfast
    America’s 25 year tax cutting & fiscal train wreck
  • America - Religion (Photo: loongese.com)
    The Shadow Gospel & Why Religion Went Obsolete – Book Review(s)
  • The Politics of Donald Trump: Where Ignorance and Arrogance Collide
    Not knowing the ‘enemy’

Popular (last 30 days)

  • A person on a crane surveys the ruins of a bombed building, surrounded by smoke.
    The Empire’s Strategic Failure: How the US-Israeli Assault on Iran Accelerated Imperial Decline
  • John Bellamy Foster on U.S. Foreign Policy & the “New MAGA Imperialism”
    What is the Trump Doctrine? John Bellamy Foster on U.S. Foreign Policy & the “New MAGA Imperialism”
  • Black citizenship
    The necessity of birthright citizenship for Black People
  • World leaders attend the 2025 BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 7, 2025. Photo courtesy the Government of India/Wikimedia Commons.
    What is BRICS and where is it going?
  • Climeworks CO2 capture plant under construction in Iceland.
    Can carbon dioxide removal save the climate?
  • diabetes
    China strikes Diabetes
  • Chilean Communist Party leader Jeannette Jara in a photo composition with sketches of Santiago and the Chilean flag. Photo: Eduardo Ramón/El País.
    Chile: A major victory for the People and the Left, with strategic impact
  • Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff
    Paul Sweezy facts for kids
  • ICSS 20250629
    The Trump Doctrine and the New M.A.G.A. Imperialism — John Bellamy Foster — ICSS 20250629
  • The Tactical Failure of Israel/U.S. Attacks on Iran
    The tactical failure of Israel/U.S. attacks on Iran is leading both to a strategic disaster

RSS MR Press News

  • EXCERPT: Colonial dreams, racist nightmares, liberated futures (from the introduction to A Land With A People) July 11, 2025
  • LISTEN: Public banking must be definancialized…and democratized (Socialist Register/Thomas Marois on ‘Against the Grain’) July 11, 2025
  • LISTEN: Rafael Barrett’s keen observations, blistering critiques, and anarchist politics (William Costa on ‘Against the Grain’) July 9, 2025
  • The legacy of a Sardinian original (Roses for Gramsci reviewed in ‘Counterpunch’) June 13, 2025
  • LISTEN: Gramsci’s lasting contributions (Andy Merrifield on ‘Against the Grain’) June 6, 2025

RSS Climate & Capitalism

  • ‘Climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people’ July 9, 2025
  • Can carbon dioxide removal save the climate? June 29, 2025
  • Global heating isn’t just getting worse. It is getting worse faster. June 19, 2025
  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, June 2025 June 17, 2025
  • 1.5 is dead: How hot will the Earth get? June 5, 2025

 

RSS Monthly Review

  • July-August 2025 (Volume 77, Number 3) July 1, 2025 The Editors
  • A Special Issue on Communes in Socialist Construction July 1, 2025 Chris Gilbert
  • Venezuela’s Communal Project July 1, 2025 Ángel Prado
  • Socialist Communes and Anti-Imperialism: The Marxist Approach July 1, 2025 Chris Gilbert
  • The Worker-Peasant Alliance in the Transition to Socialism Today July 1, 2025 Prabhat Patnaik

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Monthly Review Foundation
134 W 29TH ST STE 706
New York NY 10001-5304

Tel: 212-691-2555