February 20, 2024
‘Capitalism in the Anthropocene,’ a compendium of Marx’s ecological thought, is intended to blaze the trail to this impending civilization. For this monumental task, Marx could not have hoped for someone better suited than John Bellamy Foster.
February 20, 2024
Foster explains that “in general we can expect the Global South to be the site of the most rapid growth of an environmental proletariat, arising from the degradation of material conditions of the population in ways hat are equally ecological and economic”.
February 20, 2024
Geological epochs are divided into ages. So far the Anthropocene has been dominated by a globalised system of capitalist accumulation. Foster proposes the designation Capitalinian for this first geological age of the Anthropocene in the hope that it may be superseded by another; one “stabilizing the human relation to the earth” the Communian, rather than “an end-Anthropocene extinction event resulting in the destruction of civilization and quite possibly humanity itself.”
February 20, 2024
MR editor John Bellamy Foster’s The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020) was the recipient of the Paul Sweezy Outstanding Book Award of the Section on Marxist Sociology of the American Sociological Association for 2022…
February 20, 2024
…For many, willing to resign humanity to its “fate,” the idea of a way out of our current dilemma, fundamentally altering society in order to avoid the socioecological chasm before us, will undoubtedly sound utopian. But utopia, a pun coined in the sixteenth century by Thomas More meaning both “nowhere” and “good place,” and therefore often seen as representing a kind of dream state or wishful projection into the future, loses its idealistic connotation in the context of a planetary dystopia where catastrophe, measured against historical precedents, has now become normal and threatens to become irreversible on a planetary scale, due to the inherent apocalyptic tendencies of the current mode of production…
February 20, 2024
In this wide-ranging interview with Lukas Slothuus and Ashok Kumar of the Historical Materialism Podcast, John Bellamy Foster discusses, among other things, his lecture on “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature,” the influence of mechanistic worldviews on the field of ecology and 20th century Socialist thought, fundamental assumptions on the part of many Western Marxists regarding the nonexistence of a “dialectics of nature,” misunderstandings about Lukács’ supposed rejection of a dialectics of nature, Leibig’s work on the “soil crisis” and the ways that this steered Marx’s concept of the “metabolic rift,” etc. – and moves on from there.
February 20, 2024
The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way…
February 20, 2024
On Saturday, May 7th John Bellamy Foster will present on the ecology section of “The Marx Revival” (Cambridge University Press), alongside Marcelo Musto, who will present the Communism section of the book. The event is co-sponsored by the Marxist Education Project and Shelter and Solidarity.
February 20, 2024
It isn’t all black and white, of course. “Mastery over nature” doesn’t by definition preclude environmental conservation, nor does indigeneity bar overexploitation. But neither is the resulting system a mush of gray. For capitalists themselves cast the operative distinctions here as a matter of celebrated principle.
February 20, 2024
In the week before the COP26 international summit, John Bellamy Foster offered a lecture analyzing the climate emergency and how we can achieve climate justice: October 26th at 1 ET
