John Bellamy Foster

Independent activity Academic Marxism 1953.8.19.–

Editor of Monthly Review; American sociologist of the metabolic rift and monopoly-finance capital

Foster studied political science at York University in Toronto and took his PhD there in 1984; his dissertation became The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (1986), which extended Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's theory of monopoly capital and upheld their underconsumption theory of crisis. He joined the sociology department of the University of Oregon in 1986 and became full professor in 2000. From the late 1980s he turned to ecology; his article "Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift" (1999) and Marx's Ecology (2000) made the concept of metabolic rift widely influential. Co-editor of Monthly Review from 2000, he became its sole editor after the deaths of Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, and has analysed financialization and the 2008 crisis as a phase of "monopoly-finance capital".