John Bellamy Foster

‘The Return of the Dialectics of Nature’: 2020 Deutscher Prize Lecture by John Bellamy Foster (plus discussion)
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November 14, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — This is a prerecording of the 2020 Deutscher Prize Lecture by John Bellamy Foster. The title of the lecture is: “The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: Marxian Ecology and the Struggle for Freedom as Necessity.” In addition to this lecture a remote panel discussion was held on November 12, 2021.

Women, nature, and capital in the Industrial Revolution
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By John Bellamy Foster and Brett ClarkJanuary 30, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Monthly Review — The remarkable rise in recent years of “social reproduction theory” within the Marxist and revolutionary feminist traditions, identified with the studies of such figures as Johanna Brenner, Heather Brown, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Silvia Federici, Susan Ferguson, Leopoldina Fortunati, Nancy Fraser, Frigga Haug, David McNally, Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh, Lise Vogel, and Judith Whitehead—to name just a few—has significantly altered how we look at Karl Marx’s (and Frederick Engels’s) treatment of women and work in nineteenth-century Britain.[1] Three conclusions with respect to Marx’s analysis are now so well established by contemporary scholarship that they can be regarded as definitive facts: (1) Marx made an extensive, detailed examination of the exploitation of women as wage slaves within capitalist industry, in ways that were crucial to his overall critique of capital; (2) his assessment of women’s working conditions was seriously deficient with regard to housework or reproductive labor;[2] and (3) central to Marx’s (and Engels’s) outlook in the mid-nineteenth century was the severe crisis and threatened “dissolution” of the working-class family—to which the capitalist state in the late nineteenth century was compelled to respond with an ideology of protection, forcing women in large part back into the home.[3]
The long ecological revolution
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By John Bellamy Foster December 2, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Monthly Review — Aside from the stipulation that nature follows certain laws, no idea was more central to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and to the subsequent development of what came to be known as modern science, than that of the conquest, mastery, and domination of nature. Up until the rise of the ecological movement in the late twentieth century, the conquest of nature was a universal trope, often equated with progress under capitalism (and sometimes socialism). To be sure, the notion, as utilized in science, was a complex one. As Francis Bacon, the idea’s leading early proponent, put it, “nature is only overcome by obeying her.” Only by following nature’s laws, therefore, was it possible to conquer her.
John Bellamy Foster answers five questions about Marxism and ecology
 
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Introduction by Ian Angus March 30, 2017 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Climate & Capitalism – The Indian website Ecologise recently published John Bellamy Foster’s Foreword to my book Facing the Anthropocene. Commenting on Foster’s article, journalist and activist Saral Sarkar, who describes his views as eco-socialist, raised questions that challenge the usefulness of Marxist analysis in understanding the global ecological crisis. Foster’s reply was posted by Ecologise on March 26.
Trump and climate catastrophe
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John Bellamy Foster: The anthropocene and Marxism today
July 24, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal v
John Bellamy Foster answers three questions on Marxism and ecology
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In the present planetary epoch, the concept of sustainable human development, as a way of conceiving of socialism, represents Marx’s most valuable legacy. No other ecological analysis has such breadth and power. April 18, 2016 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Climate & Capitalism -- John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review. His most recent book, written with Paul Burkett, is Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique (Brill, 2016). The French magazine La Revue du Projet asked him to reply to three questions on ecology and Marxism.
John Bellamy Foster: Is China building an 'ecological civilisation'?
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John Bellamy Foster: Marx and the rift in the universal metabolism of nature
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John Bellamy Foster: The epochal crisis -- the combined capitalist economic and planetary ecological crises
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The Great Rift: Capitalism and the metabolism of nature and production

August 7, 2013 --

Reducing production: How should socialists relate to struggles against capitalist growth
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By Don Fitz

March 19, 2013 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The question is not should we advocate reducing production within capitalist society but rather: How do we best relate to those struggles that are already occurring? Activists across the globe are challenging the uncontrollable dynamic of economic expansion which threatens the survival of humanity. It has never been more urgent to provide a vision of a new society that can pull these efforts together.