Review of the Month
November 1, 2023
In this personal interview with Batuhan Sarican, John Bellamy Foster discusses the idea ecosocialism, relating it to his personal relationship to the environment and our collective relationship to the metabolism of nature.
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
Michael Lebowitz expounds on the simple truths found in Marx's theory of value—truths that, nonetheless, have been obscured by decades of incomplete theorizing that has failed to make key distinctions in the relationship between labor, value, and money.
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.
March 1, 2023
The Fishing Revolution is a rarely explored, yet critical, event in the evolution of capitalism. Ian Angus elaborates on this revolution in the global marketplace and its role as a cornerstone of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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.
