Subjects Archives: Stagnation

​Global capitalism has huge problems coping with the second worst collapse in its history. Its extreme and deepening inequalities have provoked millions to question and challenge capitalism. Yet socialists of all sorts now find it more difficult than ever to make effective criticisms and offer alternatives that inspire. Part of the problem lies with classic […]

Thomas Piketty‘s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a six hundred and eighty-five page tome that definitively characterizes the empirical pattern of income and wealth inequality in capitalist economies over the past two hundred and fifty years, and especially over the last one hundred.  It also documents the grotesque rise of inequality over the past […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

“An economic recovery has begun.”      — President Obama, Second Inaugural Address President Obama’s optimism — baseless as it may be — was surely appreciated at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.  For in what was described as the “most optimistic” meeting since 2007, 2,600 members of the global elite convened over the weekend […]

In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman created Monthly Review.  In the same year, Paul Baran and I began to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area: Baran at Stanford, myself at UC Berkeley.  As the years unfolded, we worked together politically in the area with the same social aims and values.  Meanwhile, the two […]

I would like to focus this interview on three distinct but related questions: your vision of the world and the possibilities of changing it; your conceptual and political proposal on the implosion of capitalism and delinking from it; your analysis of the global context, seen especially from Africa and the Middle East.  What is your […]

Introduction The Greek crisis represents the deepening of a long systemic contradiction whose origins lie in the 1960s, in the stagnation of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of the South.  The industrial centers of the world economy were struck by a crisis of profitability, which was displaced outward in space and forward in time by […]

After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik. “There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response.  “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.” Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a […]

In circles close to the former Zapatero administration, attempts have been made to represent former Prime Minister Zapatero as the politician who “sacrificed himself to save Spain,” comparing him to former German Chancellor Schröder who, though aware that he would antagonize his electoral base with his clearly neoliberal policies, went ahead with them, for he […]

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 […]

Consumption grew at just a 0.1 percent annual rate in the second quarter, while government spending shrank at a 1.1 percent rate, holding GDP growth to 1.3 percent in the quarter.  This report also revised down first-quarter GDP growth to just 0.4 percent from a previously reported 1.9 percent.  Together, these numbers indicate that the […]

Testimony before the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight, and Government Spending, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the U.S. House of Representatives, at the Hearing on “How Federal Reserve Policies Add To Hard Times At The Pump,” 25 May 2011 Thank you, Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Kucinich, and other members of the Subcommittee, […]

The Case-Shiller 20-City index fell sharply again in December, dropping a full percentage point from its November level.  This is the third consecutive month that it has fallen by at least 1.0 percent.  It is now down by 4.3 percent from its peak in July.  Nineteen of the 20 cities had a drop in prices.  […]

Phases of Imperialism Lenin dated the imperialist phase of capitalism, which he associated with monopoly capitalism, from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the process of centralization of capital had led to the emergence of monopoly in industry and among banks.  The coming together (coalescence) of the capitals in these two spheres led to […]