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John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. John Molyneux edits the Irish Marxist Review, is a member of People Before Profit, is coordinator of the Global Ecosocialist Network, and has written widely on Marxism and ecosocialism. Owen McCormack is a longstanding socialist activist. He is a bus driver who has also worked as a parliamentary researcher for People Before Profit, with a special focus on ecology.

This interview took place in early October and first appeared in the November 2021 issue of the Irish Marxist Review under the title “The Planetary Emergency: What Is to Be Done Now?” It has been adapted for publication here.

John Molyneux and Owen McCormack: Given the extreme summer weather and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, just how bad are things now? What do you believe the time scale is for catastrophe and what do you think that catastrophe will look like? Are things worse than the IPCC report claims? Some, including Michael Mann, have warned against “doomsday scenarios” that might deter people from acting. In your view, are doomsday scenarios the truth that needs to be told?

John Bellamy Foster: We should of course avoid promoting “doomsday scenarios” in the sense of offering a fatalistic worldview. In fact, the environmental movement in general and ecosocialism in particular are all about combating the current trend toward ecological destruction. As UN general secretary António Guterres recently declared with respect to climate change, it is now “code red for humanity.” This is not a doomsday forecast but a call to action.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A tale of two civilisations

October 24, 2021

A tale of two civilisations

In recent years, America’s unsuccessful attempts at containing China as a rival hegemon has only served to promote Chinese antipathy against American capitalism. China is now retreating into the comfort of her long-established moral values, best described as a mixture of Confucianism and Marxism, while despising American individualism, its careless regard for family values, and encouragement of get-rich-quick financial speculation.

After America’s defeat in Afghanistan, the geopolitical issue is now Taiwan, where things are hotting up in the wake of the AUKUS agreement. Taiwan is important because it produces two-thirds of the world’s computer chips. Meanwhile, the large US banks are complacent concerning Taiwan, preferring to salivate at the money-making prospects of China’s $45 trillion financial services market.

The outcome of the Taiwan issue is likely to be decided by the evolution of economic factors. China is protecting herself against a global credit crisis by restraining its creation, while America is going full MMT. The outcome is likely to be a combined financial market and dollar crisis for America, taking down its Western epigones as well. China has protected herself by cornering the market for physical gold and secretly accumulating as much as 20,000-30,000 tonnes in national reserves.

If the dollar fails, which without a radical change in monetary policy it is set to do, with its gold-backing China expects to not only survive but be able to consolidate Taiwan into its territory with little or no opposition.

Introduction

On the one hand we have America and on the other we have China. As civilisations, America is discarding its moral values and social structures while China is determined to stick with its Confucian and Marxist roots. America is inclined to recognise no other civilisations as being civilised, while China’s leadership has seen America’s version and is rejecting it…
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The Great Reset – The Final Battle Against Marxists

June 18, 2020

The Great Reset – The Final Battle Against Marxists

The rising civil unrest is starting to take notice of Bill Gates and his consortium hell-bent on changing the world economy. They have used the coronavirus as a ploy to shut down the world economy all for their Climate Change Agenda. There is a mountain of circumstantial evidence that points to Fauci funding the creation of this virus and transferring it to the Wuhan lab where neither China nor the United States leaked it, but this consortium which has planned this Event 201 on how to destroy the world economy and rebuild it from scratch. They are already introducing Guaranteed Basic Income, assuming they can wipe out over 300 million jobs and then pay people to sit home and watch TV, where they recreate the world in their own image which they are promoting as the Great Reset.

This has all been planned and it is being promoted by the infamous Davor — World Economic Forum. These people are all elitists who would never walk among us who they consider the great unwashed. They have unleashed domestic violence on the world and encouraged all the suicides by imprisoning people, and stripping them of all human rights. Their view is that the world is overpopulated, so thinning the herd to save the planet is justified and not genocide. Countries like Thailand saw their tourist trade collapse and countless food lines, all for a fake virus. These people have used the press to terrorize the people to achieve their goal to recreate the world economy as “greener, smarter, and fairer.” The World Economic Forum is promoting a Marxist agenda with a 50-page manifesto organized by the communist Thomas Piketty. The Forum promotes a new Marxist world, calling upon Piketty’s “urgent new message on how to fight inequality” where they want to attack anyone with wealth. Their proposal for Europe is to increase taxation by 400%!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fine-Tuning the Surveillance State

May 31, 2018

Fine-Tuning the Surveillance State

We have been watching the shift of society and all of its components to collectivist thought and action in preparation for the step into a full-blown totalitarian state. Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and practically abrogated. The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, within the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.

Currently there are 22 states that have made a crime of what is referred to as “disturbing the school,” and this has led to thousands of arrests of students for such things as interrupting a teacher, or even belching in class. Schools have an increased police presence; however, as we have seen with the school shootings this year, they certainly aren’t there to protect the students.

Police are in schools to enforce conformity and submissive behavior: they’re managing the “troupe” of juveniles, driving the herd.

Collective, community thought is the mantra. Advertisements on the radio for high-school sports list all of the acceptable skills that sports convey: leadership, teamwork, cooperation, etc. Gone is personal development, let alone “fun,” the latter being archaic and non-utilitarian. In the past 3 to 4 decades, this collective “consciousness” has become the norm. Creative thought is discouraged unless it is directed…directed by authorities or “approved” controllers/managers. Such thought is supplemented by the actions of those authorities, mislabeled as “government” when the appropriate term is rule.

An article ran out of News 4, posted on NBC Washington on 5/17/18 entitled Potential Spy Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over D.C., Md., Va. It is worth reading, as it details the Stingray technology (carried in a briefcase) that capture cellular telephones by tricking them into believing the devices are cell phone towers. This means the phones are tracked, and the government is taking information on them surreptitiously.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

For Saving the Earth We Need to Tell the Whole Truth — an eco-socialist’s response to Richard Smith

December 5, 2017

For Saving the Earth We Need to Tell the Whole Truth — an eco-socialist’s response to Richard Smith

In his article,¹ Richard calls upon his readers to “change the conversation”. He asks, “What are your thoughts?” He says, if we don’t “come up with a viable alternative, our goose is cooked.” I fully agree. So I join the conversation, in order to improve it.
Let me first say I appreciate Richard’s article very much. It is very useful, indeed necessary, to also present one’s cause in a short article – for those who are interested but, for whatever reason, cannot read a whole book. Richard has ably presented the eco-socialist case against both capitalism and “green” capitalism.
But the alternative Richard has come up with is deficient in one very important respect, namely in respect of viability. Allow me to present here my comradely criticisms. It will be short.

Is only Capitalism the Problem?

(1) Richard writes, “Capitalism, not population is the main driver of planetary ecological collapse … .”. It sounds like an echo of statements from old-Marxist-socialism. It is not serious. Is Richard telling us that, while we are fighting a long-drawn-out battle against capitalism in order to overcome it, we can allow population to continuously grow without risking any further destruction of the environment? Should we then think that a world population of ten billion by 2050 would not be any problem?
I would agree if Richard would say that capitalism is, because of its growth compulsion, one of the main drivers of ecological collapse. But anybody who has learnt even a little about ecology knows that in any particular eco-region, exponential growth of any one species leads to collapse of its ecological balance.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cradles of Capitalism: The City-States of Greece and Italy

December 4, 2017

CRADLES OF CAPITALISM: THE CITY-STATES OF GREECE AND ITALY

There long has been a persistent academic debate as to whether an “ancient economy,” referring mainly to Greece, even existed at all. In a field dominated by Marx, Marxists, the 19th century sociologist Max Weber, and such scholars of renown as Sir Moses Finley, the lingering image of the economic world of the Greek polis is that of something very static. We imagine a leisure class lounging at the sandaled foot of an orator while slaves tended to the fields, flogging cows harnessed to ploughs stuck in the mud. It is the notion of a “primitive” economy: money made for status, not investment; credit extended for the purchase of slaves, war waged for the capture of booty, elites in control of craft guilds and tyrant-kings keeping the peace by randomly doling out the goods.

Then there is ancient epic itself, with the noble Odysseus disdaining seafaring for profit (though he did take all the pay-offs he could collect) and the great Achilles pondering a discovery of precious treasure only so far as it might estimate his aristocratic worth. From this rudimentary foundation, an entire field of Socialist-Keynesian views on the Greek economy has prevailed, with occasional libertarian scholars such as Murray Rothbard and Jesús Huerta de Soto getting a word in edgewise. In recent time, however, academia has found much more evidence of technological advances and market-driven considerations on the part of the classical polis than previously thought.

Keeping in mind that in both ancient Greece (and Renaissance Italy) that democracy was not incompatible with aristocracy, and that oligarchies and tyrants were not necessarily illiberal, several points may be made in defense of the economic model of the city-state: 1) that the stronger the city-state, the greater the industrial and economic expansion; 2) that private property was considered a fundamental economic principle; 3) that banking standards were relatively conservative;

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Climate Crisis, ‘Smart’ Growth and the Logic of Calamity

December 1, 2017

Climate Crisis, ‘Smart’ Growth and the Logic of Calamity

A few years back at a Leftish gathering a group of self-described Marxist economists channeled liberal Democrat Paul Krugman’s explanation of the Great Recession without apparently knowing of Mr. Krugman’s thesis. Basically, a self-perpetuating recession had a grip on the economy, Wall Street was a catalyst of the crisis but ultimately only a bit player, money is economically ‘neutral,’ and government spending could raise demand and end the recession.

This is all standard fare in liberal economics. Within the circular logic of the genre, it circles just fine. What was odd was hearing it from self-described Marxists. Since Wall Street created the money that fueled the housing bubble and bust through predatory lending, how was its role not (1) pivotal and (2) political? If money is ‘neutral,’ why have financial asset prices responded so favorably (for their owners) to asset purchases by global central banks? And finally, where is the class analysis?

In similar fashion, UMASS Amherst economist Robert Pollin arguedrecently that capitalist economic production is necessary to maintain social wellbeing. The object of his disparagement is the suggestion that a planned reduction in economic growth (‘degrowth’) is the most probable way of resolving climate crisis. For the uninitiated, the contention that challenges to capitalist production will hurt ‘the little people’ has been a rhetorical tactic of capitalist economists for at least a century now.

Graph: Real (inflation-adjusted) Per Capita GDP is more than double today what it was in 1970. In the U.S. in 1970 mass starvation was notably absent. So people could conceivably not only get by if U.S. GDP were halved, but could thrive. The problems with doing so are (1) social complexity has been built into the political economy and (2) unwinding this complexity requires planning and the political will to do so. However, climate crisis poses the threat of unplanned degrowth of similar or greater magnitude. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve

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The End of the Age of Benevolence

November 25, 2017

The End of the Age of Benevolence

The history of democracy, Marxism and feminism is the history of the snake, which, being hungry for more, stalks its own tail and consumes itself.

Some evenings I sit on the sofa in the family room with my teenage daughter and watch a TV program with her. I leave the choice of the show to her, it matters little to me, and when she finds something she likes she sits next to me, puts her head on my shoulder, and snuggles up for the hour it takes to watch whatever it is she’s chosen.

It’s our time.

Occasionally we’ll sneak in another twenty or thirty minutes to the objection of her mother but I like my time with her so I put up with the raised eyebrows and the, “She’s got school tomorrow,” scoldings. It’s important to me that she knows I love her, that I want to spend time with her and that she feels safe when she is with me. Someday, when she is a grown woman I want her to find a man that will take care of her and protect her like I do. I expect no less from a suitor and neither should she.

There will be women who read this who will object to my stance. They will say, “She doesn’t need a man to feel safe or validated or content,” but I would disagree. When she gets older she’ll need a good man, not just any man, and that’s as true today as much as it was ten years, twenty years, fifty years, one hundred years and even one thousand years ago. And it will become even more so as time goes on.

Indeed, we have reached peak denial in our civilization and whether we like it or not reality is about to make a come back.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Coming Class Wars

February 11, 2017

The Coming Class Wars

The forces dividing us are overwhelming those that unite us

In the modern era, the phrase Class War is rooted in the socialist/Marxist concept that the conflict between labor (the working class) and capital (owners of capital) is not just inevitable—it’s the fulcrum of history. In this view, this Class War is the inevitable result of the asymmetry between the elite who own/control the capital and the much larger class of people whose livelihood is earned solely by their labor.

In Marx’s analysis, the inner dynamics of capitalism inevitably lead to the concentration of capital in monopolies/cartels whose great wealth enables them to influence the government to serve the interests of capital. Subservient to capital, the laboring class must overthrow this unholy partnership of capital and the state to become politically free via ownership of the means of production, i.e. productive assets.

This Class War did not unfold as Marx anticipated. The laboring class gained sufficient political power in the early 20^th century to win the fundamentals of economic security: universal public education, labor laws that prohibited outright exploitation, the right to unionize, and publicly funded pensions.

(The alternative explanation for this wave of progressive policies is that prescient leaders of the capital/state class ushered in these reforms as the only alternative to the dissolution of the status quo. Labor reforms began in Germany and Great Britain in the late 19^th century Gilded Age, and another wave of reforms were enacted in the decade-long crisis of capitalism in the Great Depression.)

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The Collapse of the Left

January 23, 2017

The Collapse of the Left

The Left is not just in disarray–it is in complete collapse because the working class has awakened to the Left’s betrayal and abandonment of the working class in favor of building personal wealth and power.

The source of the angry angst rippling through the Democratic Party’s progressive camp is not President Trump–it’s the complete collapse of the Left globally. To understand this collapse, we turn (once again) to Marx’s profound understanding of the state and capitalism.

We turn not to the cultural Marxism that is passingly familiar to Americans, but to Marx’s core economic analysis, which as Sartre noted, is only taught to discredit it.

Cultural Marxism draws as much from Engels as Marx. In today’s use, cultural Marxism describes the overt erosion of traditional values–the family, community, religious faith, property rights and limited central government–in favor of rootless Cosmopolitanism and an expansive, all-powerful central state that replaces community, faith and property rights with statist control mechanisms that enforce dependence on the state and a mindset that the individual is guilty of anti-state thinking until proven innocent by the state’s own rules.

Marx’s critique of capitalism is economic: capital and labor are in eternal conflict. In Marx’s analysis, capital has the upper hand until the internal contradictions of capitalism consume capital’s control from the inside.

Capital not only dominates labor, it also dominates the state. Thus the state-cartel version of capitalism that is dominant globally is not a coincidence or an outlier–it is the the only possible outcome of a system in which capital is the dominant force.

To counter this dominance of capital, social democratic political movements arose to wrest some measure of control out of the hands of capital in favor of labor.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

From Growth Economics to Home Economics: Towards a Peasant Socialism

December 21, 2015

From Growth Economics to Home Economics: Towards a Peasant Socialism

As a student in the 1980s, I was educated by probably the last generation of academics who found it possible to identify wholeheartedly with Marxism. They were good people and clever thinkers, and I suppose I became a Marxist myself for a time under their influence. I never made a good revolutionary, but I believed in science, progress, rationality and, above all, equality. I was acutely conscious of how lucky I was to be a privileged citizen of a privileged country – privileges that in many ways were built on the backs of less fortunate people. So, if I thought much at all about the kind of society I wanted to see, I suppose it would have been one in which everyone could live a life like mine – an urban wage labourer working in the knowledge economy, shopping in the supermarket, and getting away for the odd weekend to the mountains to reconnect with the wilder side of life.

Decades later, I’m a mostly self-employed farmer working a small piece of land, growing a fair slice of my own food, with few opportunities to ‘get away’, but absorbed in the daily wildness of creating sustenance from the earth. I still believe in equality, and I still believe in science, progress and rationality, although in a more conflicted way than before. And when I now think about the kind of society I’d like to see – which I do more often than I used to – I imagine one in which a lot of people live a similar kind of life to my present one. I have, in short, become an advocate for peasantisation, localisation, agrarian populism, anti-globalisation and degrowth – a cluster of ideas that I think of as an economics of the home¹.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Central Banks Have Pushed the Middle Class Down into Neofeudal Serfdom

December 21, 2015

Central Banks Have Pushed the Middle Class Down into Neofeudal Serfdom

The injustice of central-bank enforced neofeudalism cannot be suppressed like interest rates.

In traditional feudal systems, serfs were the landless peasantry who worked the land of their feudal lords in exchange for protection. In our present-day neofeudal system, serfdom has a different definition: present-day serfs own little or no productive capital and have few opportunities to ever acquire any.

The Marxist term wage-slaves describes those who, lacking capital, have only their labor to sell. This describes the vast majority of people in both capitalist and socialist systems, but what makes the present system neofeudal is the central banks: by extending essentially unlimited credit at near-zero interest rates to financiers and corporations, the central banks have given the top .01% the ability to outbid mere savers for income-producing assets (i.e. productive assets).

Just as the feudal-era serf had no choice but to enslave himself and his family to the manor-house lord, the modern-day serf must indenture himself to banks to “own” a car or home or “buy” a college education.

The X22 Report and I discuss this and related topics in the podcast Central Bankers Are Creating A World Where We Are All Serfs (38:10).

As I outlined in The Flaws in Basic Income for Everyone, all the guaranteed basic income schemes being proposed as solutions to automation are merely institutionalized serfdom as they sentence the unemployed to the marginalized political status (equivalent to powerless serfs) of state dependents while stripping them of purposeful work and the opportunity to acquire the means of production and productive capital.

Guaranteed basic income is thus the perfection of neofeudal serfdom.

The central banks are the critical enforcers of this neofeudal system. Without access to unlimited credit at near-zero rates, financiers and corporations would not be able to outbid savers for productive assets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Austerity Good or Bad?

October 12, 2015

Austerity Good or Bad?

QUESTION: Martin,

The ‘Austerity’ argument seems a bit confusing.

Surely, “Austerity” means reducing the size of Government and is an understanding that we can’t keep funding zillions of civil/public servants and on the other is a reduction of the Social Security Bill – healthcare, social benefits, the cost of the un and underemployed etc – both of which seem to be excellent objectives unless you are in one of the groups affected. Isn’t it impossible to return to or have a vibrant economy unless and until these objectives are achieved?

ANSWER: The problem with austerity carried out in the fashion is they are turning off the spigot, which is ending Marxist/Socialism, but they are continuing to service the debt and to accomplish that they hunt the rich and raise taxes, then agree to exchange all info and in the process you cause capital to hoard and not invest. So you are not really ending socialism, you are moving more toward totalitarianism.

So we will get these riots for they are not just people who receive, these are the people who cannot find a job because nobody is creating them with deflation. We have to look at both sides and this is why our proposal is to eliminate taxation at the federal level to unwind this mess from both directions.

So there is more to this than just reducing social programs. Doing that raising taxes to still service debts you end you with taxation without representation for the current workforce must then pay for spending that they never received anything in return.

The Human Cost of Socialism in Power

September 12, 2015

The Human Cost of Socialism in Power

The attempt to establish a comprehensive socialist system in many parts of the world over the last one hundred years has been one of the cruelest and most brutal episodes in human history.

Some historians have estimated that as many as 200 million people may have died as part of the dream of creating a collectivist “Paradise on Earth.” Making a better “new world” was taken to mean the extermination, the liquidation, the mass murder of all those that the socialist revolutionary leaders declared to be “class enemies,” including the families, the children of “enemies of the people.”

The Bloody Road to Making a New Socialist Man

We will soon be marking the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (November 1917) under the Marxist revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin. In Soviet Russia, alone, it has been calculated by Russian and Western historians who had limited access to the secret archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB (the Soviet secret police) in the 1990s, that around 68 million innocent, unarmed men, women and children were killed over the nearly 75 years of communist rule in the Soviet Union.

The communist revolutionaries in Russia proudly declared their goal to be destruction and death to everything that existed before the revolution, so as to have a clean slate upon which to mold the new socialist man.

The evil of the Soviet system is that it was not cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Rather it was cruelty for a purpose – to make a new Soviet man and a new Soviet society. This required the destruction of everything that had gone before; and it also entailed the forced creation of a new civilization, as conjured up in the minds of those who had appointed themselves the creators of this brave new world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Greece and the Marxism of Syriza

June 30, 2015

Greece and the Marxism of Syriza

Has the Leopard Really Changed its Spots?

Back in February, a brief article at the BBC remarked on the seeming transformation of Syriza from a bunch of Marxist dreamers into (shudder..) quasi-“Blairites”. To be sure, we also approved of the signs of pragmatism that emerged at the time. The party had seemingly ditched its previously implacable opposition to privatizations and didn’t even try to tax the country’s shipping magnates. The tax exemptions enjoyed by the latter strike many as unjust, but the fact is that they provide around 7% of Greek employment and their assets are out at sea. It is up to them under which flag said assets are sailing and it would be self-destructive to chase them away.

hammer_and_sickle_in_star_2_fav_wall_paper_background-1979px

Given the stunt Mr. Tsipras just pulled (note that the Greek negotiators learned of his referendum announcement via Twitter – they were not privy to what was about to happen), we are not so sure that the leopard has really changed its spots. We are not critical of a referendum as such, on the contrary. However, the timing and the way Tsipras has gone about it, suggest that he is really trying to arrange for a “Grexit” and one cannot help getting the impression that this may have been the intention all along. As noted previously, a referendum could have been held months ago already – why wait until it is almost too late for all practical purposes?

A reminder was provided by a mail correspondent of ours in Spain, who pointed out that the parties voting in favor of Tsipras’ plan were Syriza, ANEL and Golden Dawn. As to the Stalinist KKE, he noted “[the] KKE is against everything (as usual), but I still have hope in their “No” vote, closing the circle: from the Nazis to the Communists, all united against a free Europe, in a “Molotov-Ribbentrop v2.0″.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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