In 1976, he moved to Canada and entered the political science graduate program at York University in Toronto. He submitted his 1979 paper, The United States and Monopoly Capital: The Issue of Excess Capacity, to Paul Sweezy of Monthly Review. He also was published in journals such as The Quarterly Journal of Economics and Science & Society, and, in 1986, published The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy, based on his Ph.D. dissertation.[6]
Foster was hired in 1985 as a Visiting Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College. One year later he took a position as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, and became a full professor of sociology in 2000. In 1989 he became a director of the Monthly Review Foundation Board and a member of the editorial committee of Monthly Review.[7]
Monthly Review
Foster published his first article for Monthly Review, "Is Monopoly Capital an Illusion?", while in graduate school in 1981. He became a director of the Monthly Review Foundation Board and a member of the Monthly Review editorial committee in 1989. Along with Robert McChesney, who had since their days at Evergreen College become a leading scholar of the political economy of the media, Foster joined Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff as a co-editor of Monthly Review in 2000. Two years later, he became president of the Monthly Review Foundation.
After Paul Sweezy's death in 2004, Robert McChesney's resignation as co-editor (while remaining on the board), and Harry Magdoff's death in 2006, Foster was left as sole editor of the magazine.
Work
Foster's initial research centered on Marxian political economies and theories of capitalist development, with a focus on Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran's theory of monopoly. This was reflected in Foster's early book The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism and the coedited volume (with Henryk Szlajfer), The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation under Monopoly Capitalism.[6][8]
In the late 1980s, Foster turned toward issues of ecology. He focused on the relationship between the global environmental crisis and the crisis in the capitalist economy, while stressing the imperative for a sustainable, socialist alternative. During this period he published The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment; his article "Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift" in the American Journal of Sociology; and Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature.[9][10] His reinterpretation of Marx on ecology introduced the concept of "metabolic rift" and was widely influential. This work led to his receiving the Distinguished Contribution Award of the American Sociological Association's Environment and Technology section. Marx's Ecology itself received the book award from the ASA's Section on Marxist Sociology.[11] This work was soon followed up by his book Ecology Against Capitalism, which focused on the critique of capitalist economics from the standpoint of the environment.[12]
Foster's book The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020) won the Deutscher Memorial Prize for that year. In the book, 'Foster explores how socialist analysts and materialist scientists of various stamps, first in Britain, then the United States, from William Morris and Friedrich Engels to Joseph Needham, Rachel Carson, and Stephen Jay Gould, sought to develop a dialectical naturalism, rooted in a critique of capitalism.'[17]
Bibliography
The Vulnerable Planet (1999)
Marx's Ecology (2000)
Ecology Against Capitalism (2002)
The Ecological Revolution (2009)
The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (2014)
Foster, J.B., B. Clark, and R. York (2010) The Ecological Rift
Foster, J.B. and R.W. McChesney (2012) The Endless Crisis
Foster, J.B. and P. Burkett (2016) Marx and the Earth[18]
Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce (2017)[19]
The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020)
Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (2022)
Articles, lectures, and interviews
1999. Marx's theory of metabolic rift: classical foundations for environmental sociology. American Journal of Sociology 105(2):366-405. DOI: 10.1086/210315
2016. Marxism in the Anthropocene: dialectical rifts on the Left. International Critical Thought 6(3):393-421. DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2016.1197787
^"John Bellamy Foster". Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale. February 17, 2012. Gale Document Number: GALE|H1000119139. Retrieved 2013-01-21 – via fee, Fairfax County Public Library. Gale Biography In Context. (subscription required)
