John Bellamy Foster > Quotes

“The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment--the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess.”
― John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment

“Sweezy argued on the basis of Marx and Keynes that “accumulation is the primary factor” in capitalist development, yet noted that its influence was waning. “There is no mechanism in the system,” he explained, “for adjusting investment opportunities to the way capitalists want to accumulate and no reason to suppose that if investment opportunities are inadequate capitalists will turn to consumption—quite the contrary.”
― John Bellamy Foster, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China

“Bouchaud penetratingly observes, “The supposed omniscience and perfect efficacy of a free market stems from economic work done in the 1950s and ’60s, which with hindsight looks more like propaganda against communism than plausible science.” The capitalist ideology that undergirds economics in the United States has led the profession to be detached from reality, rendering it incapable of understanding many of the crises the world faces. Mainstream economics’ obsession with the endless growth of GDP—a measure of “value added,” not of human well-being”
― John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth