Bøger af John Bellamy Foster

Explores ecological socialism's potential against capitalist environmental degradation Today the fate of the earth as a home for humanity is in question--and yet, contends John Bellamy Foster, the reunification of humanity and the earth remains possible if we are prepared to make revolutionary changes. As with his prior books, The Dialectics of Ecology is grounded in the contention that we are now faced with a concrete choice between ecological socialism and capitalist exterminism, and rooted in insights drawn from the classical historical materialist tradition. In this latest work, Foster explores the complex theoretical debates that have arisen historically with respect to the dialectics of nature and society. He then goes on to examine the current contradictions associated with the confrontation between capitalist extractivism and the financialization of nature, on the one hand, and the radical challenges to these represented by emergent visions of ecological civilization and planned degrowth, on the other. The product of contemporary ecosocialist debates, The Dialectics of Ecology builds on earlier works by Foster, including Marx's Ecology and The Return of Nature, aimed at the development of a dialectical naturalism and the formation of a path to sustainable human development.

Since the atomic bomb made its first appearance on the world stage in 1945, it has been clear that we possess the power to destroy our own planet. What nuclear weapons made possible, global environmental crisis, marked especially by global warming, has now made inevitable--if business as usual continues.The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital's rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet. Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe, especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most ambitious experiments are taking place.This bold new work addresses the central issues of the present crisis: global warming, peak oil, species extinction, world water shortages, global hunger, alternative energy sources, sustainable development, and environmental justice. Foster draws on a unique range of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, William Morris, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Vandana Shiva, and István Mészáros. The result is a startlingly radical synthesis, which offers new hope for grappling with the greatest challenge of our age: what must be done to save the earth for humanity and all living species.

Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism's relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism's degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism's plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth. Instead we must maintain it for future generations and the innumerable, diverse inhabitants of the planet as part of a process of sustainable human development.

During the Cold War years, mainstream commentators were quick to dismiss the idea that the United States was an imperialist power. Even when U.S. interventions led to the overthrow of popular governments, as in Iran, Guatemala, or the Congo, or wholesale war, as in Vietnam, this fiction remained intact. During the 1990s and especially since September 11, 2001, however, it has crumbled. Today, the need for American empire is openly proclaimed and defended by mainstream analysts and commentators.John Bellamy Foster's Naked Imperialism examines this important transformation in U.S. global policy and ideology, showing the political and economic roots of the new militarism and its consequences both in the global and local context. Foster shows how U.S.-led global capitalism is preparing the way for a new age of barbarism and demonstrates the necessity for resistance and solidarity on a global scale.

In recent years John Bellamy Foster has emerged as a leading theorist of the Marxist perspective on ecology. His seminal book Marx's Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000) discusses the place of ecological issues within the intellectual history of Marxism and on the philosophical foundations of a Marxist ecology, and has become a major point of reference in ecological debates. This historical and philosophical focus is now supplemented by more directly political engagement in his new book, Ecology against Capitalism. In a broad-ranging treatment of contemporary ecological politics, Foster deals with such issues as pollution, sustainable development, technological responses to environmental crisis, population growth, soil fertility, the preservation of ancient forests, and the new economy of the Internet age. Foster's introduction sets out the unifying themes of these essays enabling the reader to draw from them a consolidated approach to a rapidly-expanding field of debate which is of critical importance in our times. Within these debates on the politics of ecology, Foster's work develops an important and distinctive perspective. Where many of these debates assume a basic divergence of red and green issues, and are concerned with the exact terms of a trade-off between them, Foster argues that Marxismproperly understoodalready provides the framework within which ecological questions are best approached. This perspective is advanced here in accessible and concrete form, taking account of the major positions in contemporary ecological debate.

Is the Teaching of Evolution to Be Banned in U.S. Public Schools? Is Science Once More to be Burned on the Cross? Will Creationism Win the 2,500 Year War with Materialism and Reason?A critique of religious dogma historically provides the basis for rational inquiry into the physical and social world. Critique of Intelligent Design is a key to understanding the forces of irrationalism challenging the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools and seeking to undermine the natural and social sciences. It illuminates the 2,500 year evolution of the materialist critique--the explanation of the world in terms of itself-- from antiquity to the present through engaging the work of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, David Hume, William Paley, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Jay Gould, and numerous others (including contemporary advocates of 'intelligent design').Proponents of intelligent design--creationism in a more subtle guise--have recently reignited the age-old war between materialism and creationism, in which they claim to elevate their doctrine to empirical truth and thus incorporate it into science curricula. They attack modern science, advancing a pseudo-scientific view and a reactionary political culture in line with their theology and what they perceive as a knowable moral order. They single out for criticism the greatest modern representatives of materialist-scientific thought: Darwin, Marx, and Freud.Critique of Intelligent Design is a direct reply to the criticisms of intelligent design proponents and a compelling account of the long debate between materialism and religion in the West. It provides an overview of the contemporary fight concerning nature, science, history, morality, and knowledge. Separate chapters are devoted to the design debate in antiquity, the Enlightenment and natural theology, Marx, Darwin, and Freud, and to current scientific debates over evolution and design. It offers empowering tools to understand and defend critical and scientific reasoning in both the natural and social sciences and society as a whole.

In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital, a monumental work of economic theory and social criticismthat sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of theirtime. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, HarryMagdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, infl uenced generationsof radical and heterodox economists. They recognizedthat Marx's work was unfi nished and itself historically conditioned, and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolvingphenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account.Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic)fi rms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at thecenter of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such fi rmsaccumulated--as a result of their pricing power, massive salesefforts, and other factors--could not be profi tably invested backinto the economy. Absent any "epoch making innovations" like theautomobile or vast new increases in military spending, the resultwas a general trend toward economic stagnation--a condition thatpersists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysiswas also extended to issues of imperialism, or "accumulation ona world scale," overlapping with the path-breaking work of SamirAmin in particular. John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspectivetoday, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy'sMonopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, TheTheory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explicationof this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporatingan analysis of recently discovered "lost" chapters from MonopolyCapital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It alsodiscusses Magdoff and Sweezy's analysis of the fi nancializationof the economy in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, leading up to theGreat Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Fosterpresents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capitaltheory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in away that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamantthat the deep-seated problems of today's monopoly-fi nancecapitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcomingthe system itself.

Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision--if we don't alter course.In The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth environmental sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York offer a radical assessment of both the problem and the solution. They argue that the source of our ecological crisis lies in the paradox of wealth in capitalist society, which expands individual riches at the expense of public wealth, including the wealth of nature. In the process, a huge ecological rift is driven between human beings and nature, undermining the conditions of sustainable existence: a rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature that is irreparable within capitalist society, since integral to its very laws of motion.Critically examining the sanguine arguments of mainstream economists and technologists, Foster, Clark, and York insist instead that fundamental changes in social relations must occur if the ecological (and social) problems presently facing us are to be transcended. Their analysis relies on the development of a deep dialectical naturalism concerned with issues of ecology and evolution and their interaction with the economy. Importantly, they offer reasons for revolutionary hope in moving beyond the regime of capital and toward a society of sustainable human development.

"In "The Robbery of Nature," John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within a system begun by Karl Marx and German chemist Justus von Liebig, examine capitalism's plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism"--

This volume gathers the work of leading left-wing analysts of imperialism to examine the burning question of our time--the nature and prospects of the U.S. imperial project currently being given shape by war and occupation in the Middle East. Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein, Peter Gowan, and others discuss the dynamics at work behind the "War on Terrorism." Their analyses locate recent developments within a longer historical arc, and set out the central questions for research and debate: Is U.S. unilateralism and militarism a sign of the increasing strength of the world's only remaining superpower? Or a desperate response to the erosion of the strategy it developed for ensuring its leadership over the advanced capitalist world during the Cold War? Essays by Barbara Epstein, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and others also examine the prospects for the resistance to imperialism in the United States and globally. Pox Americana brings together a range of insights and perspectives that were originally presented at a conference in Burlington, Vermont, to honor Harry Magdoff on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. It is a fitting tribute to Magdoff's pioneering analyses of U.S. imperialism and a testimony to the resilience and fruitfulness of the radical tradition.

"With a foreword by Robert W. McChesney"--Cover.

In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital,a monumental work of economic theory and social criticismthat sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of theirtime. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, HarryMagdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, infl uenced generationsof radical and heterodox economists. They recognizedthat Marx's work was unfi nished and itself historically conditioned,and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolvingphenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account.Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic)fi rms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at thecenter of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such fi rmsaccumulated—as a result of their pricing power, massive salesefforts, and other factors—could not be profi tably invested backinto the economy. Absent any "epoch making innovations” like theautomobile or vast new increases in military spending, the resultwas a general trend toward economic stagnation—a condition thatpersists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysiswas also extended to issues of imperialism, or "accumulation ona world scale,” overlapping with the path-breaking work of SamirAmin in particular.John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspectivetoday, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy'sMonopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, TheTheory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explicationof this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporatingan analysis of recently discovered "lost” chapters from MonopolyCapital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It alsodiscusses Magdoff and Sweezy's analysis of the fi nancializationof the economy in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, leading up to theGreat Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Fosterpresents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capitaltheory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in away that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamantthat the deep-seated problems of today's monopoly-fi nancecapitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcomingthe system itself.

Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision—if we don't alter course.In The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth environmental sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York offer a radical assessment of both the problem and the solution. They argue that the source of our ecological crisis lies in the paradox of wealth in capitalist society, which expands individual riches at the expense of public wealth, including the wealth of nature. In the process, a huge ecological rift is driven between human beings and nature, undermining the conditions of sustainable existence: a rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature that is irreparable within capitalist society, since integral to its very laws of motion.Critically examining the sanguine arguments of mainstream economists and technologists, Foster, Clark, and York insist instead that fundamental changes in social relations must occur if the ecological (and social) problems presently facing us are to be transcended. Their analysis relies on the development of a deep dialectical naturalism concerned with issues of ecology and evolution and their interaction with the economy. Importantly, they offer reasons for revolutionary hope in moving beyond the regime of capital and toward a society of sustainable human development.

Since the atomic bomb made its first appearance on the world stage in 1945, it has been clear that we possess the power to destroy our own planet. What nuclear weapons made possible, global environmental crisis, marked especially by global warming, has now made inevitable-if business as usual continues.The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital's rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet. Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe, especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most ambitious experiments are taking place.This bold new work addresses the central issues of the present crisis: global warming, peak oil, species extinction, world water shortages, global hunger, alternative energy sources, sustainable development, and environmental justice. Foster draws on a unique range of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus, William Morris, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Vandana Shiva, and István Mészáros. The result is a startlingly radical synthesis, which offers new hope for grappling with the greatest challenge of our age: what must be done to save the earth for humanity and all living species.

Explores the reasons why a global economic system, geared toward private profit, has spelled vulnerability for the earth's fragile natural environment. The book sets out to take the case for saving the planet beyond visions of doom, arguments about sustainability, and individual solutions.

This work challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis. Marx's writings on agriculture, soil ecology, philosophical naturalism and evolutionary theory are outlined.

Bogen bidrager til den manglende systemkritik, ud fra de helt fundamentalt materielle vilkår. Og er et redskab til oplysning og forandring. Foster og Magdorff pointe er, at der må gøre op med de fundamentale mekanismer, som karakteriserer kapitalismen, får den til at fungere, og som indbyrdes hænger sammen: Vareproduktion, bytteværdi, penge, marked, akkumulation mm. Hvis vi skal videre og ikke mindst overbevise et flertal, så må vi i gang med at udforme et alternativ uden disse træk, så konkret som det nu er muligt; ud fra grundlæggende økologiske og demokratiske principper.