John Bellamy Foster

“{{cite journal|last1=Krakow|first1=Morgan|title=Blacklisted: The Fight For Freedom of Expression on Campus|journal=Ethos Magazine|volume=9|issue=2|pages=:22-25|date=April 17, 2017|url=http://ethosmagonline.com/blacklisted/}}”

“John Bellamy Foster's personal website”

“An understanding of the failure of capitalism, beginning in the twentieth century, requires a historical examination of the rise of neoliberalism, and how this has only served to increase the destructiveness of the system. Only then can we address the future of humanity in the twenty-first century.”

“We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now far exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth.”

“Violence against women and the expropriation of their {{w|unpaid labor}}, as well as the higher level of exploitation of their paid labor, are integral to the way in which power is organized in capitalist society—and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of women worldwide have experienced physical/{{w|sexual violence}}. {{w|Women’s bodies}}, in particular, are objectified, reified, and commodified as part of the normal workings of monopoly-capitalist marketing.”

“To say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent. It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century.”

“What we need is courage and determination in facing up to seemingly insurmountable odds. What we have to do is not so difficult on the face of it, if we just look at the direct ecological measures that we need to take. What makes it seem like an insurmountable problem is the monstrosity of global capitalist society.”

“We are already facing growing catastrophes due to climate change. It is too late to avoid soaring temperatures, scarce water, and extreme weather. That ship has in many ways already sailed. The earth is going to be much less hospitable to human beings in the future.”

“Capitalism imposes its laws of motion on the environment, irrespective of the biogeochemical cycles of the planet and the earth’s metabolism, so that it creates rifts or ruptures in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system, disrupting ecosystem relations in ways that transcend the mere scale-effects of economic growth. It is this problem of the metabolic rift that is our deepest challenge. Sustainability is more and more compromised at ever higher levels—a continually accelerating threat to civilization and life itself.”

“Marx once said that workers (and this would perhaps go for consumers even more) are in their purely economic action in a capitalist society always the weaker side, and therefore they need to organize politically.”

“It has been long understood that “{{w|consumer sovereignty}}” is a myth. To make fundamental changes in the commodity economy it is necessary to have power over production.”

“Unless we change ourselves as individuals and our culture—the way we relate to the earth—we can’t expect to make the overall changes in society that our necessary.”

“We are on a runaway train headed over the climate cliff as we stoke the engine with more coal to increase its speed.”

“Right now alternative energy is still treated as a supplement rather than a substitute for fossil fuels within the {{w|energy industry}} as presently constituted. The rapid growth of alternative energy should not therefore be seen as a radical break with the domination of fossil fuels. That still needs to occur.”

“The truth is that, rather than directly challenging capitalism from the Marxist perspective in line with reason and the material interests of the working class, Western academics still professing to be on the Left abandoned Marxism altogether, seeking to criticise modernity and humanism by drawing on the irrationalist tradition emanating from the Right.”