• Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon - Eugene
• Editor of the Marxist magazine Monthly  Review
• Advocates a “red-green” alliance to abolish capitalism
• Considers the collapse of the Soviet empire a setback for human progress

John Bellamy Foster has taught at the University of Oregon's Eugene campus since 1985. Among the courses he teaches are “Social Movements,” “Marxist Sociological Theory,” and “Classical Marxist Theory.” Foster is a member of the American Sociological Association as well as the Union for Radical Political Economics. He has been a speaker and panelist several times at the annual Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City, and was an invited speaker at the Marxism 2002 Conference in London.

Since 1996, Foster has been an editor of the international academic journal of ecosocial research Organization & Environment. He has also been an Editorial Board member of the British Routledge journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, which describes itself as “an international red-green journal of theory and politics.”

In 1992 Professor Foster became an editor of Monthly Review, which was co-founded by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. The magazine was close to the Communist Party but independent of it. Its political line shifted from fellow-traveling Stalinism to Maoism after 1957. Foster was co-editor of Monthly Review from 2001 until 2004 with Robert W. McChesney, a professor and co-founder of the “media reform” organization Free Press. Since McChesney’s departure as co-editor in 2004, Foster has been Monthly Review’s sole editor.

In an academic atmosphere of "publish-or-perish," many Foster books and articles have been published -- most of them by Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press, both of which are under his control. These include Foster’s books The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (1986) and Ecology Against Capitalism (2002). Foster is also the editor of Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000), and Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (2005). The latter is an anthology that includes essays by Noam Chomsky, former Weather Underground domestic terrorist group leader Bernardine Dohrn, and others.

In an interview with one of his Monthly Review writers, Professor Foster said, “The dominant thrust nowadays is toward what might be called the privatization of nature.” But Foster advocates what he calls "the socialization of nature," explaining that "the more that nature is placed under the protection of people in general through democratic processes that determine the rules of sustainability, the better things are going to be." Government, in other words, should “own” nature.

With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the world discovered that man-made environmental catastrophes far worse than anything seen in the capitalist West were commonplace in the “People’s Democratic States.” Nevertheless, Professor Foster wrote in the March 2005 Monthly Review: “The fall of the Soviet bloc made matters worse, in the sense that there were now seemingly no obstacles to the universalization of capitalism, and thus no reason for the system to present itself any longer in sheep’s clothing. Beginning in the 1990s the world witnessed an even more dramatic shift toward naked capitalism, heartless both in its treatment of workers and its domination of those countries at the bottom of the global hierarchy. Both class struggle from above and imperialism were intensified in the wake of capitalism’s triumph in the Cold War.”

In that same issue of Monthly Review, Professor Foster referred to the most extreme global warming scenario: “It is now rational, as Jared Diamond explains in his new book Collapse, to consider the possibility of the ecological collapse of global capitalist society, in ways analogous to earlier ecological collapses of civilizations.”

Global warming is happening, Foster suggests, because of the end of the Cold War and demise of Soviet socialism, a demise that allegedly unleashed rapacious capitalism. “The problem is capitalism,” Foster wrote in 2005; “the only solution, as difficult as this may be to contemplate at the present time, is socialism.”