John Bellamy Foster | MR Online - Part 5

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 Optimism of the Heart: Harry Magdoff (1913-2006)*

John Bellamy Foster

Harry Magdoff — coeditor of Monthly Review since 1969, socialist, and one of the world’s leading economic analysts of capitalism and imperialism — died at his home in Burlington, Vermont on January 1, 2006. Harry Magdoff was born on August 21, 1913 in the Bronx, the son of working-class Russian Jewish immigrants. His father worked […]
Let’s Put the Nature of Work on Labor’s Agenda: Part Six

John Bellamy Foster

In the last four parts of this series, I gave many examples of the alienating and degrading nature of work in capitalist societies. Even “good” jobs, such as college teaching and nursing, have lost whatever luster they once had. Part-time teachers teach an increasing fraction of all course while struggling to make ends meet. […]
The Wall Street Journal Meets Karl Marx

John Bellamy Foster

Many reading the Wall Street Journal on May 13, 2005, must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief, looked back and then rubbed them again. A front page story headlined “As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls” informed the largely business readership of that paper that the old Benjamin Franklin-Horatio Alger myth of […]
Memorial Service for Paul Marlor Sweezy (1910-2004)

John Bellamy Foster

Referred to by The Wall Street Journal in 1972 as “the ‘dean’ of radical economists,” Paul M. Sweezy was, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, “the most noted American Marxist scholar” of the second half of the twentieth century.1 Sweezy’s intellectual influence, which was global in its reach, lay chiefly in two areas: as a leading radical economist (and sociologist), and as the principal originator of a distinct North American brand of socialist thought in his position as co-founder and co-editor of Monthly Review magazine. Like both Marx and Schumpeter, to whose thought his work was closely related, Sweezy provided a historical analysis and crtique of capitalist economic development, encompassing a theory of the origins, development and eventual decline of the system.