John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the coauthor with Fred Magdoff of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, recently published by Monthly Review Press. This interview was conducted by Mike Whitney and first appeared at Dissident Voice. It has been posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with Whitney's permission.
Walk Against Warming, Sydney, 2006.
Photo by Alex Bainbridge/Green Left Weekly
By John Bellamy Foster
[This article, which first appeared in the November 2008 issue of Monthly Review, is a revised version of a keynote address delivered at the “Climate Change, Social Change” conference, Sydney, Australia, April 12, 2008, organised by Green Left Weekly. It is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission. Watch and listen to Bellamy Foster's presentation HERE. For more articles on Marxism and the ecology, click HERE.]
Postscript to "The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis"
John Bellamy Foster: We need to go down to 350 parts per million [of carbon dioxide], which means very big social transformations on a scale that would be considered revolutionary by anybody in society today -- transformation of our whole society quite fundamentally. We have to aim at that, and we have to demand that of our society.
Forget about capitalism, forget about whether the system can do it. Don't let that be your barometer. Say this is necessary for the planet, for human survival, for justice, for environmental justice, and we just have to do it.
We demand that be done, and we work out the operating system of the world economy, we work out our social relations of production, in accordance with necessity, in accordance with what is necessary for the planet, not in accordance with what is necessary for the accumulation of wealth and profits for a very few.
Interview with John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, for Página/12 (Argentina).
By Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen
By John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York
* * *
An exclusive interview with CPN (Maoist) leader Prachanda by MRZine (reposted by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission).
By Mary Des Chene and Stephen Mikesell
It is 14th Jeth, 2065, [Tuesday May 27, 2008] in Nepal, the day before the constituent assembly is to convene and declare Nepal a full republic. The king remains in his palace. The form of the new government, who will lead it, whether the old parliamentary parties will join in a Maoist-led government or, as they have indicated so far, will boycott and try to isolate it -- these and other basic questions remain to be resolved.
The following is an early morning interview with CPN (Maoist) leader Prachanda, before he embarked on a last intensive round of negotiations to try to bring the parliamentary parties into a coalition government under Maoist leadership.
