Theoretical Visionary: John Bellamy Foster and Capitalist Crisis in an Age of AI, Militarism, and Ecological Rift

John Bellamy Foster is best known for reconstructing Marx's ecology and developing the theory of metabolic rift. Yet his ecological writings form part of a wider theory of capitalist crisis rooted in the Monopoly Capital tradition. This article interprets Foster's contributions to crisis theory through four interlocking moments: monopoly and stagnation; financialization; imperialism and militarism; and ecological rift. Reflecting on Foster’s recent work on AI fetishism, the paper illustrates the applicability of these four moments in the contemporary AI boom, the political ascent of Big Tech oligarchs, and expanded U.S. militarism to illuminate the continuing power of this synthesis. These developments do not signal the transcendence of stagnation by a technologically revitalized capitalism. They represent concentrated and contradictory outlets for surplus, joining productive investment to speculative valuation, private rents, state power, and imperial strategy. The material expansion of digital infrastructure also intensifies conflicts over electricity, water, land, noise, public subsidies, and democratic authority. Foster's distinctive achievement is to show why economic, imperial, political, and ecological crises are best understood as differentiated expressions of a historically specific system of monopoly-finance capital.