Articles by John Bell
We found 15 results.
Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” and ‘Monthly Review’: A Historical Introduction
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 May 2024
Albert Einstein, the world’s most famous physicist and celebrated scientist, had fled Nazi Germany for the US where he became a citizen in 1940. But for the FBI Einstein remained a dangerous and Un-American figure, threatening the security of the US by his very presence.
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Extractivism in the Anthropocene
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Apr 2024
April 2024 – The idea of extractivism is a key concept in understanding our current planetary crisis. The accelerated extraction of Earth’s resources since the mid-twentieth century threatens not only the natural world, but the means of life for the entire planet.
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Actual U.S. Military Spending Reached US$ 1.537 Trillion in 2022—More than Twice Acknowledged Level (US$ 765.8 billion)
Gisela Cernadas and John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Nov 2023
Nov 2023 – How much does it cost to maintain an empire? A stunning new analysis shows the true scale of U.S. military spending, which far outstrips conventional estimates, which use data gleaned from traditional sources.
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Socialism and Ecological Survival: An Introduction
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Aug 2022
1 Jul 2022 – Capitalism has brought the world to the edge of the abyss. We are approaching a climate Armageddon making the earth unlivable for the human and other species. Such a catastrophe is still avoidable with a revolutionary-scale reconstitution of the systems of production, consumption, and energy usage, though the time is rapidly running out.
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“Notes on Exterminism” for the Twenty-First-Century Ecology and Peace Movements
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 May 2022
May 2022 – The dual exterminist tendencies: the planetary ecological crisis and the growing threat of global nuclear annihilation.
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John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 May 2022
1 Apr 2022 – The rapid financialization of nature that is promoting a Great Expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on an unprecedented scale.
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Nature as a Mode of Accumulation: Capitalism and the Financialization of the Earth
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Mar 2022
1 Mar 2022 – From Sep-Nov 2021, overlapping with the UN Climate Change Conference, three major developments in global finance marked a turning point in the financial expropriation of the earth and a shift in the economic paradigm to unlimited accumulation of total capital, which is now seen as including “natural capital.”
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The New Cold War on China
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Jul 2021
1 Jul 2021 – On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming “There Will Not Be a New Cold War” appeared in Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strategy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former […]
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Capital and the Ecology of Disease
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Jun 2021
June 2021 – The dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis is simply an external, “black swan” event, a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence that has entered from outside the system. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under control. This received view, however, is incorrect on all counts.
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The Contagion of Capital
John Bellamy Foster, R. Jamil Jonna and Brett Clark | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Jan 2021
1 Jan 2021 – The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline.
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Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in the Anthropocene
John Bellamy Foster | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Nov 2020
John Bellamy Foster on how, two hundred years since his birth, Frederick Engels can be seen as one of the foundational ecological thinkers of modern times.
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COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism
John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Jun 2020
1 Jun 2020 – Commodity Chains and Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic Crises – COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism. We are seeing the emergence of catastrophe capitalism as the structural crisis of the system takes on planetary dimensions.
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The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark | Monthly Review – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Mar 2020
Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism.
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Capitalism and Robbery: The Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman | Monthly Review - TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Dec 2019
1 Dec 2019 – It is impossible to understand the totality of capitalist relations apart from the conditions of both exploitation and expropriation, which together generate the ensemble of oppressions that characterize the system. It is here too that we begin to understand the various interlocking aspects of capitalist domination, which require a corevolutionary praxis in response.
→ read full articleConfidence Men and Their Masquerade: The Spanish Inquisition Provides a Telling Parallel to ISIL’s Extremism
John Bell – Al Jazeera,
22 Sep 2014
One of the most surreal events of the Spanish Inquisition, was the “Auto da Fe”, a ritual procession that took the victim to his or her punishment. The “guilty” would be dressed in a special yellow garment and a long pointed cap, both strangely decorated with hellish images of effigies, flames, and demons.
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