John Bellamy Foster: We need a society that is geared, as István Mészáros always tells us, to substantive equality. And no compromise on the issue of equality. Bolívar said equality is the law of laws. So we need substantive equality and we need ecological sustainability. And they have to go together. How do we know […]
Subjects Archives: Capitalism
Capitalism, Democracy, and Elections
Capitalism and real democracy never had much to do with one another. In contrast, formal voting in elections has worked nicely for capitalism. After all, elections have rarely posed, let alone decided, the question of capitalism: whether voters prefer it or an alternative economic system. Capitalists have successfully kept elections focused elsewhere, on non-systemic questions […]
Facing Off: The Integration of Capital v. the Integration of Peoples in the Americas
João Pedro Stédile, second from left, speaks to the Peasant Movement of Papay in Haiti. Photo: Beverly Bell. João Pedro Stédile is an economist, co-founder and co-coordinator of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil, and leader among Latin American social movements. He gave the following talk to hundreds of Haitian farmers at the 40th […]
Crises of Capitalism and Social Democracy
John Bellamy Foster is best-known as author of Marx’s Ecology (2000; in which he corrects the popular misapprehension that Marx did not ‘get’ environmental limits), and as editor of Monthly Review (monthlyreview.org), the journal founded by Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in the late 1940s. In his latest book, The Endless Crisis (2012; written with […]
The Environmental Crisis and Capitalism
Fred Magdoff: What I would end with is just a couple of ideas — not to give you a blueprint of another type of system but a couple of ideas of what it might be like. I would say one in which basically the economy and politics are both under social control, under democratic social […]
Chávez’s Chief Legacy: Building, with People, an Alternative Society to Capitalism
When Hugo Chávez triumphed in the 1998 presidential elections, the neoliberal capitalist model was already foundering. The choice then was none other than whether to re-establish the neoliberal capitalist model — clearly with some changes including greater concern for social issues, but still motivated by the same logic of profit seeking — or to go […]
Debt Trial of the Century: NML Capital, LTD. v. Republic of Argentina
“The Third World Network and Jubilee are partnering today to stand up against vulture fund activity, stand up for Argentina, in this incredibly important court case that has massive repercussions for all countries around the world to be able to protect themselves from this kind of litigation in the courts by holdout vulture funds. […]
Capitalism Becomes Questionable
The depth and length of the global crisis are now clear to millions. In the sixth year since it started in late 2007, no end is in sight. Unemployment rates are now less than halfway back from their recession peak to where they were in 2007. Over 20 million are without work, millions more limited […]
Capitalism, Crises, and a Socialist Alternative: In Conversation With Michael A. Lebowitz
Rebekah Wetmore and Ryan Romard (RW/RR): The crisis of world capitalism starting in 2007 was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression and thus far the recovery, both globally and within Canada, has been weak at best. With this mind, to what extent is the current crisis cyclical and in what […]
Do We Oppose the Anomalies of Capitalism or Capitalism Itself?
Q. Can you comment on increased public outrage regarding acts of corruption and strivings towards achieving what is considered normal functioning of the capitalist system? A. The question is: Do we oppose the anomalies of capitalism or capitalism itself? Corruption is vastly overrated. Of course, it can reach proportions in which even the normal […]
The Idea of Apocalypse in the Age of ‘Capitalist Realism’
So the world didn’t end after all and the ‘Mayan apocalypse’ turned out to be another in a long line of doomsday-related tall tales and hoaxes. No doubt a hard-core of Armageddon enthusiasts who really did believe — or wanted to believe — that the ‘Mayan prophecy’ was anything other than a load of cobblers […]
As Long as Capitalism Continues, These Tragedies Will Happen
Sometimes history repeats itself — the first time as tragedy and the second time . . . as another tragedy. The horrendous fire that just killed 112 workers, mostly young women, at the Bangladesh garment factory echoes the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City in 1911 that killed 146 workers, again mostly women. Both […]
Capitalism and “Human Nature”: A Rebuttal
In the celebrated section of The Wealth of Nations in which he discusses the advantages of the division of labor, Adam Smith advances the thesis that “common to all men” is a “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Smith hedges on whether this “propensity” is a matter of original human nature […]
Can Caring Capitalists or Progressive Policies Save the American Economy?
The Occupy movement forced the issue of economic inequality into American political discourse. The most common diagnosis, which comes from mainstream economics, is that inequality has risen over the last 40 years because technical change, notably computers and the Internet, has favored highly-educated workers and left lower-skilled workers behind. The cure is to increase education […]
What Capitalism Delivers
Most Presidents preside over one or more capitalist downturns (recessions, depressions, crises, etc.). Every President since at least FDR generated a “program” to respond to the downturn — as demanded by citizens and businesses. FDR and every later President promised that his program would “not only extricate the US from the present economic troubles but […]
Capitalism
Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain. | Print
Class, Psychology, and Capitalism
A young veteran was just arrested for murdering homeless people in Los Angeles. Regardless whether he is actually guilty, a large number of terrible acts have been committed by returning veterans traumatized from the war. None of the studies of which I’m aware accounts for such costs (including the cost of imprisoning them) in the […]
Labor Has a Legitimate Lien on Capital
When Steve Miller, the vulture capitalist who drove Delphi into the ditch of America’s dreams, declared, “Bankruptcy is a growth industry,” he was smiling, but he wasn’t joking. Bankruptcy in the US isn’t a sign of economic distress or mismanagement. It’s a business plan — calculated, cunning, and void of redeeming social value. American Airlines […]
Who Controls Capital? What Does Capital Control?
Who controls capital, and what does capital control? The concept of “capital” in this context must be corporate enterprise. By this metric the commanding heights of capital in the United States would be the Fortune 500 or 1,000, perhaps a thousand or so more, with an array of satellite firms numbering in the tens of […]
Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff at Occupy Wall Street. Photo by Carrie Ann Naumoff This is a reconstruction from notes of a talk delivered at a teach-in on “The Capitalist Crisis and the Environment” organized by the Education and Empowerment Working Group, Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park (Liberty Plaza), New York, October 23, 2011. […]
