Marxism and Ecology

A análise de obras de Marx, desde os Manuscritos econômico-filosóficos de 1844 até cartas escritas no início dos anos de 1880, demonstra mudanças e continuidades na formação teórica e política desse pensador. Essa dinâmica, por sua vez, também se revela na apresentação que Marx fez em relação ao comunismo. Este artigo apresenta elementos chaves da visão de Marx sobre o comunismo, examina as suas nuances e a sua coerência teórica interna e se refere a aspectos da relevância atual dessa concepção marxiana de organização social. (The analysis of Marx's works, from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to letters written in the early 1880s, shows changes and continuities in the theoretical and political formation of this thinker. This dynamic, in its turn, appears also in the presentation that Marx about the communism. This article presents some key elements of Marx's communism view, examines its nuances and its internal theoretical coherence and refers to aspects of the current relevance of this Marxian conception of social organization).

O debate ambiental a partir da Ciência Econômica é dominado por formulações que se desenvolvem em torno das relações  entre tecnologia, produção e consumo. Há, porém, um campo  de reflexões relativamente autônomo cuja plataforma principal é o binômio direitos de propriedade / mecanismos autorreguladores do mercado. Neste registro, os diagnósticos de problemas ambientais apontam a ausência de direitos de propriedade bem definidos – e, portanto, a operação não-ideal da lógica mercantil –, enquanto as propostas de solução envolvem a defesa de uma delimitação clara destes direitos e de arranjos institucionais que permitam a livre e fluida vigência da lógica mercantil. Com isso, seria possível realizar dois objetivos básicos: impedir o esgotamento de recursos naturais e reduzir a emissão de resíduos poluentes a níveis ecologicamente adequados. Este artigo propõe uma crítica a esta segunda possibilidade, tomando especialmente o caso dos mercados de carbono e das mudanças climáticas.

Mills writes: G. A. Cohen's influential ‘technological determinist’ reading of Marx's theory of history rests in part on an interpretation of Marx's use of ‘material’ whose idiosyncrasy has been insufficiently noticed. Cohen takes historical materialism to be asserting the determination of the social by the material/asocial, viz. ‘socio‐neutral’ facts about human nature and human rationality which manifest themselves in a historical tendency for the forces of production to develop. This paper reviews Marx's writings to demonstrate the extensive textual evidence in favour of the traditional interpretation ‐ that for Marx, the ‘material’ includes the economic, and is thus ineluctably social in character. Thus those critics of Cohen who have urged the inclusion of the relations of production in historical materialism's explanans do seem to have Marx's terminological and conceptual backing.

This is a final draft of the article published in Environmental Ethics 11 (Fall 1989): 243-258. This assessment of  the Promethean dimension of Marx's thought is accurate, but though it mentions Marx's more dialectical side and its potential implications, this aspect is seriously neglected in the article . A more balanced assessment is presented in "Marx's Natures," a draft version of which can be found on this site. This article should be read in connection with the latter one.

¿Afronta actualmente el capitalismo el “fin de la naturaleza barata”? Si así es, ¿qué podría significar esto y cuáles con las implicaciones para el futuro? Estamos, de hecho, siendo testigos del fin de la naturaleza barata en un sentido específico histórico. En vez de contemplar el fin de la naturaleza barata como la reafirmación de “límites de crecimiento” externos, sostengo que, a día de hoy, el capitalismo ha agotado la relación histórica que la produce. El fin de la naturaleza barata se comprende mejor como el agotamiento de las relaciones de valor que han restaurado periódicamente los “Four Cheaps”: trabajo, alimentos, energía y materias primas. Fundamentalmente, estas relaciones de valor son coproducidas por, y a través de, humanos con el resto de la naturaleza. La cuestión decisiva, por lo tanto, enciende las relaciones que envuelven y despliegan las sucesivas configuraciones de la naturaleza humana y extra-humana, simbólicamente capacitadas y materialmente realizadas, a través de la larga duración del sistema-mundo moderno. Significativamente, la apropiación de trabajo no remunerado —incluyendo los “regalos gratuitos” de la naturaleza— y la explotación del trabajo asalariado, forman una unidad dialéctica. Los límites del crecimiento enfrentados actualmente por el capital son suficientemente reales, y son “límites” coproducidos a través del capitalismo como ecología-mundo, uniendo la acumulación de capital, la búsqueda de poder y la coproducción de naturaleza como un todo orgánico. El límite de la ecología-mundo del capital es el capital en sí mismo.

Le dérèglement climatique nous aurait fait entrer dans « l’Anthropocène », définie comme cette ère géologique où, depuis l’industrialisation, l’espèce humaine serait devenue la force écologique majeure, notamment avec ses émissions de gaz à effet de serre. Mais est-ce vraiment « l’espèce humaine » de manière indifférenciée qui est responsable du dérèglement climatique ? Des historiens ont mis en doute cette vision simpliste, en faisant de l’industrialisation fossile – et donc du dérèglement climatique – un processus résultant avant tout des dynamiques du capitalisme, proposant à cette occasion un nouveau concept en substitut de celui d’Anthropocène : le Capitalocène.

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

Beyond European Civilization is the sequel to Nihilism Incorporated, a work in which I described how European civilization came to embody a nihilistic world-orientation and to conquer the world, and how, through the expansion of capitalism, it continues to impose its environmentally destructive culture on the rest of humanity. Through a critical analysis of the failure of Marxism to overcome the defects of European culture, Beyond European Civilization elaborates the foundations for a culture to transcend European civilization.
This book, along with Nihilism Incorporated, grew out of courses of lectures on environmental philosophy given at the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia in 1981 and 1983. Further research on Russian culture and Soviet Marxism has enabled me to situate the central ideas of Beyond European Civilization within a tradition originating in the work of Aleksandr Bogdanov who not only conceived humans as part of and within nature and recognized the environmental limits to economic activity, but also argued for a central role for culture in the dynamics of history and in the creation of a new social order. The Proletkul't movement inspired and led by him represented and still symbolizes the alternative to both capitalism and the centralized system of State control forged by Lenin and Stalin. The tradition of thought originating in this movement encompasses the pioneering efforts of Joseph Needham to combine Marxism and process philosophy and to transcend European culture in his monumental study of science and civilization in China, and makes it possible to link the more radical aspects of Marxist thought with the achievements of philosophers, scientists and environmentalists inspired by process philosophy such as Ivor Leclerc, C.H. Waddington, Ilya Prigogine, David Bohm, Charles Birch and John Cobb Jr.

The Popular Anthropocene limits our thinking about possible answers —
and the stories they’re embedded in — before we can really get started. By asking us to return to view of environmental problems premised on “humans” against “nature,” this Anthropocene returns us to the thinking that created these crises in the first place. Far from an innocent binary, the binary of “man” and “nature” has been fundamental to colonial rule, environmental change, and genocide ever since Columbus landed on Hispaniola. The idea of Humanity as the agent of environmental crisis —
today crystallized in the language of anthropogenic change — has been an indispensable weapon in capitalism’s arsenal.

O pdf completo foi liberado recentemente para download gratuito e está em outro arquivo, nesse mesmo perfil.

Este excerto traz apenas Capa, Sumário, Apresentação e Prefácio.

A versão física pode ser comprada diretamente com a Consequência Editora (http://www.consequenciaeditora.net.br/c-898110-Catalogo) ou na Amazon (amazon.com.br/gp/product/8569437463?pf_rd_p=96b1767d-f792-4902-8834-039a970f4513&pf_rd_r=DJJWGGMY7ETFVBTJWXP7)

Em parceria com a Consequência Editora, liberamos agora o pdf completo para download gratuito.

A venda do livro físico ainda continua no site da editora e em: https://www.amazon.com.br/Capital-Na-Estufa-Economia-Clim%C3%A1ticas/dp/8569437463

The global ecological crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever had to confront, and humanity is failing. The triumph of the neo-liberal agenda, together with a debauched ‘scientism’, has reduced nature and people to nothing but raw materials, instruments and consumers to be efficiently managed in a global market dominated by corporate managers, media moguls and technocrats. The arts and the humanities have been devalued, genuine science has been crippled, and the quest for autonomy and democracy undermined. The resultant trajectory towards global ecological destruction appears inexorable, and neither governments nor environmental movements have significantly altered this, or indeed, seem able to. The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization is a wide-ranging and scholarly analysis of this failure.
This book reframes the dynamics of the debate beyond the discourses of economics, politics and techno-science. Reviving natural philosophy to align science with the humanities, it offers the categories required to reform our modes of existence and our institutions so that we augment, rather than undermine, the life of the ecosystems of which we are part. From this philosophical foundation, the author puts forth a manifesto for transforming our culture into one which could provide an effective global environmental movement and provide the foundations for a global ecological civilization.

What is the relationship between Foucault’s concept of biopower and Deleuze’s concept of control? Despite the similarities between these two concepts, there is not a single scholarly article that solely thematizes this question, nor a comparative survey of the answers given so far. This essay aims to fill this lacuna. Drawing on Deleuze's unpublished and untranslated lectures on Foucault, the original thesis of this essay is thus that biopower and control are the same concept of power in both content and form.

Simandan D (2009) Industrialization, In R Kitchin & N Thrift, (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography , Oxford: Elsevier, volume 5, pp. 419-425.
ABSTRACT: This article (1) defines industrialisation and indicates ways in which it can be measured, (2) highlights the importance of the timing of industrialisation and the inherent limits to the proper scientific explanation of this phenomenon, (3) disentangles the often confused conceptual relation between industrialisation and capitalism, (4) explicates the causal links between industrialisation and modernisation, (5) undertakes a brief assessment of the relative costs and benefits of industrialisation, and (6) discloses the defining contours of scholarship on industrialisation in Anglo-American human geography and illustrates it with a recent attempt to integrate the field with the help of a master metaphor called ‘recursive cartographies’. Its portrayal of economic reality as interplay of legacies, rhythms, and events conveys the usefulness of spatial thinking in industrialisation research.

The purpose of this article is to deepen analyses of life production relations that are of central concern to the feminist global political economy frameworks around which this special issue is organized. While the original approach recognized ecological relations in its methodological synthesis of power, production, and social reproduction, most subsequent research engaging the approach focuses on areas such as household labor, health care, education, migration, and macroeconomic governance. Much less work, however, analyzes relations between capital accumulation and ecological life-producing relations that ultimately sustain human and non-human life. The article draws on elements of a ‘world-ecology’, commodity frontier perspective, to argue for the integration of primary – ecological – production of the substance of life into the power, production, and social reproduction global political economy framework. The article draws on this synthesis to conduct a long-term analysis of one of the earliest commodity frontiers in capitalist history, Newfoundland fisheries in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. Through an analysis of changing patterns of ecological production, household and community reproduction, state enclosure of ocean life production, and world market shifts, the article suggests that we need to move beyond narrow consequentialist analyses of the role of capital accumulation in ecological exhaustion toward broader, integrated analyses of change that reveal dynamic and perhaps more hopeful struggles and potential for sustainable and progressive conditions of intergenerational social-ecological reproduction.

There is a common belief that genuine awareness and acceptance of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (as opposed to either ignorance or denial) automatically leads one to develop political and moral positions which advocate for collective human action towards minimizing suffering for all and adapting human societies towards a fossil free future. This is a mistake. Against the idea that scientific awareness of the facts of climate change is enough to motivate a common ethical project of humanity towards a unifying good, I argue that climate change awareness can just as well equally motivate heightened divisions of humanity into anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, class-differentiated zones of competitive survival. I call this climate barbarism, and seek to explain its conceptual grounds.

In his 200th year of birth, Marx's critique of capitalism has been associated with various current problems. It is therefore interesting to compare Marx's radical critique of capitalism in the 19th-century with contemporary theories that radically question the economic system of the 21st-century. What do they have in common? What contradictions can be found? Is a convergence possible – or is the divisive dominant? The critique of the economic system and society by advocates of degrowth is particularly suitable for such a comparison, not only because of the radical nature of their economic and social concepts, but also because, like Marx in his day, they take the view that the current accumulation of crisis phenomena could soon create the conditions for a complete transformation of society. The present text compares the two lines of criticism with a special attention to the interpretation of Marx in ecomarxism.

Metabolic rift theory has been accused of assuming an untenable ontological dualism between nature and society. In response, two of its leading advocates, John Bellamy Foster and Andreas Malm, have tried to argue that the approach is not dualist but rather rigorously realist, nonreductively naturalist, and dialectically materialist. According to Foster and Malm, metabolic rift theory is essential because it enables eco-Marxism to make an analytic distinction between nature and society while nevertheless grasping their complex interrelation. From a Lacanian and Hegelian perspective, Foster and Malm are right to preserve the dialectical distinction between nature and society but their respective accounts of this dialectic are insufficiently materialist. Foster falls into a pre-Marxian contemplative materialism. Malm hesitates between his intended realism and Kantian idealism. For metabolic rift theory to be put on a firmer materialist footing, nature must be thought along Lacanian and Hegelian lines as incomplete, thwarted, or shot through with antagonisms out of which emerge the subject and society. To put this in dialectical terms: ontologically there is only nature, out of which society and the subject emerge as an effect of nature's failure to be fully natural.

O artigo é um comentário crítico ao texto de John Bellamy Foster publicado no número mais recente da Revista da SEP. Procuro apontar as virtudes, as insuficiências e as mistificações do texto. As reflexões trazidas por Foster permitem abordar questões sensíveis que vão além do pensamento do autor e interessam ao pensamento ecológico marxista de maneira geral.

The rise of the Anthropocene has created confusion in environmental politics, a field traditionally hopeful that a return to some socionatural stability was both possible and desirable. Paradoxically, while life in a warmer planet promises to be as dynamic as it is unstable, ecopolitical discussions of our post-Holocene future has become stuck. This chapter will explore this paradox, arguing for a political imaginary that goes beyond the simple dichotomy between a technocratic " good Anthropocene " and an " apocalyptic Anthropocene ". Political space should be opened up to other kinds of imaginaries. To such end, this chapter will pose three main arguments. First, the need to provincialize and pluralize the field of possible post-Holocene scenarios in order to avoid both conformity and despair. I will argue ecological modernities are plural. Second, that spaces emerging between critical design and the critical social sciences are, despite their limitations, an interesting place to look at in search for new ideas and scenarios. Finally, it will be argued that modes of critical design futuring need to more carefully attend to the labor point of view, so that a just transition to a post-Holocene future expands its range and appeal. This conversation will also show the ineradicable hybridity of the worlds we are going to make and the complexity of the transition. After all, a just transition is not simply about energy transition: it has to address much broader political matters and will require the deployment of new sources of political energy.

Les 1er et 2 décembre 2012, le Parti de Gauche organisait à Paris des "Assises pour l'écosocialisme". En vue des Assises, un projet de Manifeste en 18 thèses a été rédigé. Faisant preuve d’ouverture, les organisateurs ont eu la bonne idée de soumettre ce texte à un large débat public. Ils ont appelé les organisations et les personnes intéressées, en France et ailleurs, à réagir par des amendements ou des contributions.
Le texte qui suit est une réponse à cette invitation. Afin d’être le plus précis et nuancé possible, on a choisi de procéder systématiquement. Le texte de chacune des thèses proposées par le Parti de Gauche est reproduit intégralement avant d’être commenté. Cette méthode a l’inconvénient d’une certaine lourdeur - car plusieurs thèses se recoupent, mais elle présente l’avantage d’indiquer clairement les points sensibles, de mettre en lumière certaines contradictions du texte. La version utilisée est celle qui a été adoptée par le congrès du PG en mars 2013.

O objetivo é propor uma construção teórica (fundada em Marx e em elevado nível
de abstração) suficientemente ampla e consistente para, com as devidas mediações,
ser utilizada nos mais variados temas relacionados ao consumo (porém, mais
especificamente os temas ambientais).
Palavras-chave: Marx; meio ambiente; consumo.

Wall Street produit et organise la nature. Si la théorie sociale cherche aujourd’hui à s’amender en tenant compte des enjeux environnementaux, elle dépasse rarement le dualisme typiquement moderne de la Nature et de la Société. Dialoguant avec les théoriciens de l’écosocialisme d’une part et des penseurs critiques tels que Harvey et Arrighi d’autre part, Jason W. Moore formule ici l’hypothèse que le capitalisme n’est pas seulement une économie-monde mais également une écologie-monde.

The theory of metabolic rift is among the most dynamic perspectives in critical environmental studies today. This essay argues that the problem with the metabolic rift perspective is not that it goes too far, but that it does not go far enough. I take a ‘use and transcend’ approach that takes metabolic rift theory as
an indispensable point of departure in building a unified theory of capitalist development – one that views the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the production of nature as differentiated moments within the singularity of historical capitalism. My response unfolds through two related arguments. First, the theory of metabolic rift, as elaborated by Foster, Clark, and York, is grounded in a Cartesian binary that locates biophysical crises in one box, and accumulation crises in another. This views biophysical problems as consequences of capitalist development, but not constitutive of capitalism as a historical
system. The second part of this essay moves from critique to synthesis. Drawing out the value-theoretical implications of the metabolic rift – through which capitalism’s greatest contradiction becomes the irremediable tension between the ‘economic equivalence’ and the ‘natural distinctiveness’ of the commodity
(Marx) – I illuminate the possibilities for a unified theory of capitalist development and crisis over the longue duree. This is the theory of capitalism as world-ecology, a perspective that joins the accumulation of capital and the production of nature in dialectical unity. This perspective begins from the premise that capitalism does not act upon nature so much as develop through
nature–society relations. Capitalism does not have an ecological regime; it is an ecological regime.

Ce texte est basé sur une série d’exposés présentés soit au séminaire (UCL- SPED 3220) “Analyse intégrée et comparative des processus et problèmes de développement en rapport avec la population et l’environnement”, animé par les professeurs M. Goffin, J.-P. Van Ypersele & J.-P. Peemans, soit lors du séminaire “Capitalisme et mondes à venir” organisé  à l’ULB, dans le cadre des États généraux de l’écologie politique avec la participation des professeurs I. Stengers (ULB) et A. Berten (UCL). Avril 1998. Vos remarques et critiques sont les bienvenues : mailto:maissingab@arcadis.be

In this episode of Sikh Archives, we are joined by Pritam Singh who is a scholar and professor of Economics at Oxford Brookes University where his main areas of teaching interest and expertise are development economics, environmental economics, comparative economic systems and competing economic paradigms.

Today we discuss the origins of Marxism in Punjab, its relationship with Sikhi and the evolution of Marxism throughout the 20th century with particular reference to the interwar period, communalism, the independence movement, post-partition, Nehruvian politics and secularism, the Suba Lehar, the Khalistan movement and beyond.