O'Connor 1998 Natural Causes (2024)

The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital

The Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital, 2017

Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital

This article draws out the contradictions in the relationship between capitalism as a mode of production and our contemporary efforts to deal with the breaching of planetary boundaries or the ecological crisis. First, it looks at the theoretical developments in understanding the source of our current ecological crisis. The historical establishment of a metabolic rift and the shifts engendered as solutions to this problem within capitalism are discussed. Then, it focuses on the problem of perception of the ecological crisis in the contemporary world. An unequal world cannot be a sustainable world as standpoint influences even the perception of an impending precipice, and consequently any form of collective action. Given this inability to understand the crisis, the solutions that emerge are reductive and tend to spatially, temporally or socially shift the problem rather than resolve it. Finally, it argues that environmentalism—or efforts to ‘save the planet’—needs to be understood based on the understanding of the problem rather than on social location of its members.

On the dialectics of capital and nature

Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1994

Journal of Political Ecology -- Special Issue on Alternative and Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies

The ecological limit of capitalism: Value-form and the accelerated destruction of nature in light of the theories of Karl Marx and Moishe Postone

in Pejnovic, Vesna Stankovic (Org.), Beyond Capitalism and Neoliberalism. Belgrado: Institute for Political Studies, pp. 111-122., 2021

Drawing on the theories of Karl Marx and Moishe Postone, I will seek to demonstrate that: i) A fetishistic inversion between concreteness and abstractness lies at the heart of the modern macro-social synthesis. Both human labor-power and the sensible, material and natural world are reduced to the status of inputs that must be productively consumed, digested and expelled to feed the ongoing process of valorization; ii) This subsumption of the concrete in the dynamic of capital accumulation (M – C – M’) has devastating implications for the environment. The compulsion associated to the normative standard of socially necessary labor time and to the extraction of relative surplus-value imposes, through competition, ever rising levels of productivity, output and, thus, of raw-materials consumption to all companies in order to achieve smaller and smaller increments in the aggregate mass of profit. Therefore, as capital accumulation becomes harder, economic crisis aggravates the ecological crisis. In sum, the capitalist mode of (re)production is based on an abstract social form of wealth – (surplus-)value –, which is inherently autotelic, boundless and, as such, entails a form of runaway economic growth deleterious to the biosphere.

Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis

Sociological Inquiry, 2011

The ecological crisis: A second contradiction of capitalism

Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1992

CAPITALIST INTERPLAY ON GEOGRAPHY and ANTHROPOGENIC ECOLOGICAL CRISIS Esin Guler

CAPITALIST INTERPLAY ON GEOGRAPHY and ANTHROPOGENIC ECOLOGICAL CRISIS Esin Guler, 2022

Humankind is an environment maker with the capability of abstract thinking. With the ability to think beyond their own scale, humans are powerful agents in terms of shaping and moving geographies with their mobility. From that point of view, our relationship with nature is like an ever-altering matrix; in which the capacity to create new possibilities and species, surrounds humankind in an environment formed as the web of life. Social connections are spread out through the Planet Earth on both temporal and spatial levels, therefore allowing humans to make an environment around their surroundings and act as a creative force: in an allegorical sense, just like elements of wind, fire, air, and water does. The biosphere of Planet Earth cohabitates a myriad of organic life forms from micro to macro scale. From minerals to prokaryotes, eukaryotes and protists, The Earth’s fauna and flora served as a vast resource in terms of carbon-based chemical ground to manifest compound life forms. However, through the course of human made history, natural entities are exploited by a linear economy paradigm; taking, making, and wasting in an irreversible fashion. Nature is appropriated as both a resource and a sink. Expansionist colonization movements start with clearing forests while shaping surrounding geography, biota and ecosystem diversities. Combining immense scale of plantations with forced / slave labor to produce value, not only through appropriating and commodifying common land but also accumulating profit over surplus labor. Therefore, a new form of the man-made global system came into play: Capitalism. In my thesis, as the most elaborate historical contradiction against the capitalist economy, the Marxist point of view and its terms will be deployed in reference to capitalist economy criticism. However, as an anthropocentric economy model, Marxist counterargument fails to be a responsive instrument for an urgent paradigm shift that we must employ to tackle the global ecological crisis we are in. In the first, second, and third chapters (1. Economy on Nature, 2. Ecology of Capitalism, 3. History - Feudal Crisis in Europe) Marxist terms will be used to explain the capitalist financial model and how it operates on the natural world support system to accumulate capital. Then subsequently, I will emphasize how the history of capitalism reveals gradual comodification of nature; from collecting surplus yield to exploitation of slave labor and modifying geographies along with enclosure movements, step by step, that capitalism were built on the surplus economy and took off its expansionary approach into next level combining imperialism with globalization. Finally, I will be closing with an ontological perspective to suggest why exponential growth is not compatible with natural support systems, since their true nature generates diversity rather than producing a single type of monoculture. Keywords: capitalism, Marxism, economy, colonization, feudalism, ecology, ecosystem, ecological crisis.

II. Capitalism and Ecology: The Nature of the Contradiction

Monthly Review, 2002

A critique of the "socio-ecological fix" and towards revolutionary rupture

Area , 2020

The "socio-ecological fix" has become increasingly popular to understand a possible and future energy transition off fossil fuels within the confines of capitalist social relations of production. The concept emerges and builds off David Har-vey's famous "spatial fix" concept to understand how capitalism can temporarily transcend the current climate crisis. The "socio-ecological fix" helps see how capitalist crises and fixes are economic and environmental at the same time, intertwined together. Through a review of the literature that develops the "socio-ecological fix" concept, I make two clear arguments. First, I argue that the concept is trapped in a specific historical understanding of 20th-century capitalism that goes through crisis and fixes. According to this framework, from which the "socio-ecological fix" functions within, the capitalist mode of production is here to stay indefinitely and can only be reformed through series of fixes. This understanding of capitalism not only downplays class struggle but also has too much of a narrow sense of politics in the context of the ongoing climate crisis. Second, I argue that this understanding of history largely ignores the potential for revolutionary ruptures that create social systems entirely at odds with capital. The severity of the climate crisis suggests that moving further into the 21st century will not allow such clean fixes. The climate crisis will make revolutionary ruptures not only possible, but inevitable. K E Y W O R D S climate change, energy transitions, Marxism, revolution, socio-ecological fix, spatial fix