Moscow, March 2014 1. The current global stage is dominated by the attempt of historical centers of imperialism (the US, Western and Central Europe, Japan — hereafter called “the Triad”) to maintain their exclusive control over the planet through a combination of: so-called neo-liberal economic globalization policies allowing financial transnational capital of the Triad to […]
Subjects Archives: Political Economy
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Its Uses and Limits
Thomas Piketty. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. $39.95. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty has caused a stir, which it deserves. Capital 21, as we will abbreviate the title, grapples with a prominent current issue: outrageously unequal incomes and wealth. It is a data-rich, […]
“Deglobalization” Versus “Inclusive Growth”
The race of globalization is leaving the majority of the world’s population far behind. According to UNICEF, the richest 20% of the population gets 83% of global income, while the poorest quintile has just 1%.1 This trend is getting worse. A new UNDP report called “Humanity Divided” estimates that 75% of the world’s population lives […]
Explaining Stagnation: Why It Matters
Larry Summers and Paul Krugman have recently identified the phenomenon of stagnation. Given that they are giants in today’s economic policy conversation, their views have naturally received enormous attention. That attention is very welcome because the issue is so important. However, there is also a danger that their dominance risks crowding out other explanations of […]
As a Class for Itself
Numsa General Secretary’s Presentation to the Cape Town Press Club, February 11, 2014 I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year — the parliament we called the Numsa Special National Congress. In that parliament […]
“The Death of Social Democracy in the Age of Global Monopoly-Finance Capital”: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster
Tassos Tsakiroglou: How urgent do you consider the necessity to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat? John Bellamy Foster: The urgency of understanding the interconnections between the economic impassse and the ecological emergency derives from the combined threats they pose to […]
Two Transitions in Brazil: Dilemmas of a Neoliberal Democracy
This article reviews the background and the implications of two transitions in Brazil: the political transition from a military regime (1964-85) to democracy (1985-present), and the economic transition from import-substituting industrialization (ISI, 1930-80) to neoliberalism (1990-present). It subsequently examines how neoliberal economic policies were implemented in a democracy, under the centre-right administrations led by Fernando […]
The Epochal Crisis, Unequal Ecological Exchange, and Exit Strategies
John Bellamy Foster: My talk is called “The Epochal Crisis.” The term “epochal crisis” was introduced by Jason Moore to deal with periods in which economic and ecological crises intersect or merge. We are certainly in the greatest epochal crisis in the history of the world. . . . Now, we can also talk about […]
Jobs Versus the Environment
Is there a fundamental conflict between a healthy environment and a healthy economy? There has been a lot of concern lately about damage that we humans are inflicting on our small, beautiful Planet Earth. Waste CO2 from our way of life has been dissolving in the oceans, increasing the acidity of the water and making […]
Agrarian Crisis as the Crisis of Small Property Ownership in Globalizing Capitalism
The topic of agrarian crisis is everywhere. What does it mean, though? We know what ‘agrarian’ means. It refers to agriculture and its social relations. What does ‘crisis’ mean? It means a problem (or a set of problems). It is not an ordinary problem, however. It is a big problem. It is a problem that […]
Hindutva Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. The text below is based on the editorial in its September 2013 issue. — Ed. The parliamentary elections of 2014 are now casting their shadow ahead. The nationwide elections on a five-year schedule have become a festival, with […]
The Great Rift: Capitalism and the Metabolism of Nature and Production
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 […]
Municipal Bankruptcies, Pensions, and New Dimensions of Class Struggle in the United States
The news that Detroit has declared bankruptcy, the largest North American city to do so thus far, foreshadows an extension of the social crisis currently afflicting the centers of capitalism. As some observers have noted, Detroit is just the tip of the iceberg in what is sure to be a procession of indebted municipalities […]
An Interview with John Bellamy Foster (for the Sunday Eleftherotypia)
CJP: What began as a financial crisis in 2007 has become one of the biggest unemployment crises in the advanced capitalist world. Could this perhaps mean that the crisis of 2007-08 was not actually caused by finance itself but had its underlying causes in the real economy? JBF: No one doubts that it was […]
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 […]
ILWU’s Northwest Grain Conflict: Business Unionism or Fighting Class-Struggle Unionism
When Wisconsin state workers were courageously occupying the state capitol to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on their unions’ right to bargain, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka trumpeted a call for solidarity actions throughout the labor movement on April 4, 2011, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, killed during the Memphis sanitation […]
“The Economy Is Doing Fine, But the People Aren’t”: Some Facts on the Economic Background of the Protests in Turkey
Speaking about the then dictator of Nicaragua, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Whether or not Roosevelt actually said it in so many words is disputable, but there is no doubt that it — i.e., dictatorship is licensed in […]
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 […]
For the Finance Minister of Germany, Crisis Is a “Necessity”
Angela Merkel’s face usually displays a rather plain, friendly, almost benign expression, matching her simple, benign words. But in rare unguarded moments, some claim, they glimpse a very hard visage, which is matched, equally rarely, by hardly benign words, like her annoyed statement that Cyprus was “exhausting the patience of its euro partners.” Yes, Angela […]
