October 1, 2023
Following the work of scientist and Sinologist Joseph Needham, this talk by John Bellamy Foster illuminates the conceptual linkages between the ancient Greek and Chinese thought and modern dialectical materialism and ecological civilization. This interweaving of intellectual traditions, he writes, has created a "powerful organic ecological-materialist philosophy."
September 1, 2023
In this interview from April 2023, Jia Keqing and John Bellamy Foster discuss the state of ecological Marxism worldwide, the question of anthropocentrism, the theory of metabolic rift, and the environmental proletariat.
July 1, 2023
In the introduction to this summer's special issue on "Planned Degrowth," John Bellamy Foster outlines the major themes of degrowth thought, including, above all, a recognition of the need to challenge current notions of "growth" and "prosperity" and move toward a more sustainable model of human development, one that meets the needs of individuals and communities. This, Foster writes, requires a massive revolutionary shift in the social relations governing the means production and the prioritization of planning our economy around the survival of the species, rather than the endless drive to accumulation that has devastated the planet.
June 1, 2023
Historical materialism, in the dominant twentieth-century narrative in the West, is understood as confined to social sciences and humanities. However, John Bellamy Foster writes, Marx and Engels did not have such a limited conception, instead engaging with the natural sciences, providing insight into the dialectics of nature.
May 1, 2023
The working class is being robbed, both through outright expropriation and the more hidden exploitation of countless workers who are struggling to make ends meet while capitalists pocket the surplus value they produce. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster dissect the neoliberal assault on the working class that is spurring a new generation of labor organizing.
April 1, 2023
In this interview, originally published in the Czech journal Contradictions, John Bellamy Foster discusses the history of environmental thought among socialists from Marx to the present day, with a view to the need to mobilize in order to protect humanity's only home.
April 1, 2023
Monthly Review editors remember the life of MR editorial board member John J. Simon (1934–2022), a dedicated socialist, towering figure in radical publishing and broadcasting.
February 1, 2023
February’s Review of the Month confronts the new irrationalism and its reactionary tendencies, which find their roots in troubling philosophical and historical foundations. The answer, John Bellamy Foster writes, can be found in a return to historical materialism.
January 1, 2023
This issue's Review of the Month discusses Marx's role as the foremost revolutionary critic of bourgeois Enlightenment humanism. To this day, his conception of "the universal metabolism of nature" remains a powerful antidote to the phantasmagoric "dark ecology" posited by today's posthumanism.
December 1, 2022
John Bellamy Foster takes readers back to Marx's understanding of the dialectics of nature and society. As Marx and Engels noted, humanity must not only struggle for the advancement of human freedom, but also the capitalist destruction of the earth. Today, the struggle for freedom and the struggle for necessity coincide everywhere on the planet for the first time in human history, creating a prospect of ruin or revolution.
