John Bellamy Foster – författare

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.

A field-defining masterwork, this posthumous publication maps the evolution of the idea of the state from ancient Greece to today István Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the thinkers discussed in depth. The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-edged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of "the withering away of the state." In his definitive, seminal work, Mészáros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy.

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.

Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality'as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington, most of the mainstream media are working overtime to convince us that we can still stand the heat. Leave it to John Bellamy Foster, one of the world's outstanding radical scholars, to expose Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist. Just at the boiling point, Foster offers us cool logic to comprehend the system that created Trump's moral and political emergency'and to resist it.In Trump in the White House, John Bellamy Foster does what no other Trump analyst has done before: he places the president and his administration in full historical context. Foster reveals that Trump is merely the endpoint of a stagnating economic system whose liberal democratic sheen has begun to wear thin. Beneath a veneer of democracy, we see the authoritarian rule that oversees decreasing wages, anti-science and climate-change denialism, a dying public education system, and expanding prisons and military'all powered by a phony populism seething with centuries of racism that never went away.But Foster refuses to end his book in despair. Inside his analysis is a clarion call to fight back. Protests, popular demands, coalitions: everyone is needed. Change can't happen without radical, anti-capitalist politics, and Foster demonstrates that'even now, with the waters ever warming'it may yet be possible to stop the desecration of the Earth; to end endless war; to create global solidarity with all oppressed people. Could a frog do that?