• Why We Occupy, What We Know

    Occupy Eugene rally, 15 October 2011 We are here as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which in a few short weeks has become a global movement in hundreds of cities around the world.  We are part of the 99 percent not only in this country but the world. I have been reading the […]

  • Understanding the Capitalist Economic Crisis

    John Bellamy Foster: Economic crises are functional to the system in that a crisis helps capital readjust its imbalances, disproportions, as Marxian theories often say, and it sets the basis for a renewed period of expansion.  So, regular business-cycle crises . . . help the system. . . .  But, in addition to cycles . […]

  • The Ecology of Socialism

      Solidair/Solidaire, the weekly journal of the Workers Party of Belgium (PVDA-PTB), interviewed John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, 26 April 2010 Solidair/Solidaire: Many green thinkers reject a Marxist analysis because they think that the Marxist approach to the economy is a very productivist one, focused on growth and seeing nature as “a free […]

  • Ecology Plant

    The crisis of capital: economy, ecology and empire

    How is it that we could be facing a crisis of empire, of imperialism, of war, of conflict internationally, we could be facing an environmental crisis on a scale that threatens the whole planet as we know it, and we could be facing at the same time being in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression? And how do we deal with all these problems simultaneously?

  • The Roots of the World Ecological Crisis

    “We have no other word but crisis to describe it, really.  It’s very different than the economic crisis that we are now in, in the sense that even a very, very severe economic crisis, such as the one that has been present since late 2007 . . . still is, in many ways, a cyclical […]

  • Adam’s Fallacy and the Great Recession

    It is now a commonplace that we are experiencing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  The downward trajectory on a global level is similar to the 1930s, though in the United States — the epicenter of the crisis — there are indications that the rate of decline may be slowing.1  […]

  • Ecology, Capitalism, and Socialism

    The keynote address at the “Climate Change, Social Change” conference (organized by Green Left Weekly), Sydney, Australia, 12 April 2008. This address became the basis for John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” (Monthly Review, November 2008), which in turn became the last chapter of The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with […]

  • One World Ecology

    John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, is the author of The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet, just published by Monthly Review Press.  He gave this talk in Eugene, Oregon, on 23 May 2006.

  • Capitalism in Crisis

    “Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

  • Tucson: The Desert “Civilized”

      “Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]

  • Bernanke and “The Great Moderation” Four Years Later

    “Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

  • Capitalism and Climate Change

    John Bellamy Foster: We need to go down to 350 parts per million [the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere], which means very big social transformations on a scale that would be considered revolutionary by anybody in society today — transformation of our whole society quite fundamentally.  We have to aim at […]

  • Postscript to “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis” (Monthly Review, April 2008)

    Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis — the roots of which were explained in this article.   Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world.  We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history […]

  • Monopoly-Finance Capital and the Crisis

      Klassekampen: Is the credit crisis a symptom of overaccumulation of capital?  It seems to me that investments worldwide, but especially in the United States, were funneled into the traditionally “safe” housing market following the bursting of the dotcom-bubble.  This overinvestment in turn generated a new bubble, thus causing today’s havoc.  Is this correct? JBF: […]

  • Capitalism and Climate Change

    John Bellamy Foster, Marxist ecologist and editor of Monthly Review, addressed the Climate Change I Social Change Conference on “Capitalism and Climate Change,” Sydney, April 11, 2008.  Foster’s talk was part of a panel discussing “Climate Change and Its Social Roots.”  The conference was organized by Green Left Weekly.  Below is Foster’s talk in five […]

  • Reply to Stephen Zunes on Imperialism and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

    Are there valid reasons to question the ICNC’s role in contemporary U.S. imperialism? We think so.

  • Marx and the Global Environmental Rift

    Ecology is often seen as a recent invention.  But the idea that capitalism degrades the environment in a way that disproportionately affects the poor and the colonized was already expressed in the nineteenth century in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.  Writing in Capital in 1867 on England’s ecological imperialism toward Ireland, Marx […]

  • A New War on the Planet?

    During the last year the global warming debate has reached a turning point.  Due to the media hype surrounding Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, followed by a new assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate skeptics have suffered a major defeat.  Suddenly the media and the public are awakening […]

  • The Iraq Study Group Report — Has the Empire Really Failed?

    Annual Fundraising Appeal Friends of MRZine and Monthly Review! The continuing existence of MRZine and Monthly Review depends on the support of our readers.  Unlike many other publications, we make all new Monthly Review articles, as well as MRZine articles, available online, free of charge.  We do so without drawing any advertising money at all […]

  • Third World Forum representatives

    The Bamako Appeal

    The Bamako Appeal aims at contributing to the emergence of a new popular and historical subject, and at consolidating the gains made at these meetings. It seeks to advance the principle of the right to an equitable existence for everyone; to affirm a collective life of peace, justice and diversity; and to promote the means to reach these goals at the local level and for all of humanity.