A Post-Capitalist Earth, and Beyond? (original) (raw)

Capitalism and Earth System Governance: An Ecological Marxist Approach

Global Environmental Politics, 2020

Growing recognition of the Anthropocene era has led to a chorus of calls for Earth System Governance (ESG). Advocates argue that humanity’s newfound sociotechnical powers require institutional transformations at all scales of governance to wield these powers with wisdom and foresight. Critics, on the other hand, fear that these initiatives embody a technocratic impulse that aims to subject the planet to expert management without addressing the political-economic roots of the earth system crisis. This article proposes a more affirmative engagement with existing approaches to ESG while also building on these critiques. While advocates of ESG typically ignore the capitalistic roots of the earth system crisis and propose tepid reforms that risk authoritarian expressions, their critics also have yet to systematically consider the potential for more democratic and postcapitalist forms of ESG. In response, I propose an ecological Marxist approach based on a structural analysis of capitalis...

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment Magdoff and Bellamy Foster New York: Monthly Review Press. ISBN: 978-1-58367-241-9

Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2012

a powerful statement in their latest collaboration, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism. The book was conceived after a huge response to their article of the same name, originally published in the Monthly Review March 2010 issue. The book opens with an unapologetic stance by its authors against capitalism. They unequivocally remark that any suggestion that 'capitalism offers the solution to the environmental problem. .. (is) rooted in an absolute denial of reality' (pp. 7-8). The tone for the book is quickly established through early calls for revolutionary action, as seen on page 8: 'Put simply, it is essential to break with a system based on a single motive-the perpetual accumulation of capital. .. Such a break is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the creation of a new ecological civilisation'; and again on page 9: '(I)f humanity is going to survive this crisis, it will do so because it has exercised its capacity for human freedom, through social struggle, in order to create a whole new world-in coevolution with the planet.' What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism is an important book on many levels. The authors' ability to condense a large number of very complex environmental issues in a short and concise manner is commendable. Large-scale environmental issues provide context to the magnitude of the problem, while localised examples of devastation provide strong arguments for its impact, cause for concern and urgent need to respond. The obvious need to do something about the horrendous environmental impact of our consumption also begs the question why the title restricts the readership to environmentalists when it is obvious that every citizen needs to understand the seriousness of the ecological issues facing our planet. Perhaps instead its subtitle, A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment, is more apt. Equally, the graphic but justified description of the tyranny of capitalism is a reality that all citizens, not just environmentalists, should be exposed to. As the book continues, the enormity of the catastrophic nature of the villainous character of 'capitalism' unfolds. The villain, large in size and power, seeks to conquer all in pursuit of profits. Capitalism is portrayed as forcing powerless workers to work for less on tasks their conscience doesn't agree with, while forcing out socially and environmentally spirited independent companies in the name of expansion and growth. Reports of capitalism's ever-expanding and insatiable appetite to grow by any means are

The Ecological Question: Can Capitalism Prevail?

2007

Apocalyptic visions of resource exhaustion forcing capitalism's final crisis rest upon overly narrow understandings of what, exactly, constitute natural resources. Natural resources are posited to be out there, natural things that can be picked up, cut down, mined or otherwise gathered, processed, and used. They are finite, and once used up will be gone. There is some hedging of this position, of course: forests can be re-planted, tin cans and bottles can be recycled. But this view takes resources to be strictly natural, rather than just as much social. That is, it overlooks how things found in the natural world only become useful to human societies in the context of particular socio-technical frameworks. It thus fails to adequately grasp technology and especially the dynamism of technological innovation and change under capitalism. Furthermore, these visions of final crisis tend to confuse particular manifestations of capitalism--that is, particular historical social formations...

Environmental Law and the Unsustainability of Sustainable Development: A Tale of Disenchantment and of Hope

Law and Critique

In this article we argue that sustainable development is not a socio-ecologically friendly principle. The principle, which is deeply embedded in environmental law, policymaking and governance, drives environmentally destructive neoliberal economic growth that exploits and degrades the vulnerable living order. Despite seemingly well-meaning intentions behind the emergence of sustainable development, it almost invariably facilitates exploitative economic development activities that exacerbate systemic inequalities and injustices without noticeably protecting all life forms in the Anthropocene. We conclude the article by examining an attempt to construct alternatives to sustainable development through the indigenous onto-epistemology of buen vivir. While no panacea, buen vivir is a worldview that offers the potential to critically rethink how environmental law could re-orientate away from its ‘centered’, gendered and anthropocentric, neoliberal sustainable development ontology, to a ra...

An exit strategy from capitalism's ecological crisis

International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education , 2017

An effective exit strategy from the ecological crisis does not lie within the broad dichotomy of alternative policy prescriptions: those advocating the reform of capitalism using the same mechanisms which have embedded the ecological crisis (e.g., ecological economics, steady-state economics); and, those proposing a new albeit highly unlikely socioeconomic system (e.g., ecological Marxism, socialist ecology). A significant shift in our thinking is required to design a strategy directed at the interdependencies between the spheres constituting capitalist social and economic organisation and delivered by a reconceptualised form of state capitalism. Biographical notes: Lynne Chester is recognised as a Leading Australian Scholar in the empirical application of régulation theory. Her research focuses on a range of energy issues (affordability, security, markets, price formation, and the environment) and the policy responses of capitalist economies through different institutional forms. She is an author of Neoliberal Structural Change and the Electricity Sector: a Régulationist Analysis

The End of Cheap Nature or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about 'the' Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism

2014

Does capitalism today face the "end of cheap nature"? If so, what could this mean, and what are the implications for the future? We are indeed witnessing the end of cheap nature in a historically specific sense. Rather than view the end of cheap nature as the reassertion of external "limits to growth, " I argue that capitalism has today exhausted the historical relation that produced cheap nature. The end of cheap nature is best comprehended as the exhaustion of the value-relations that have periodically restored the "Four Cheaps": labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials. Crucially, these value-relations are co-produced by and through humans with the rest of nature. The decisive issue therefore turns on the relations that enfold and unfold successive configurations of human and extra-human nature, symbolically enabled and materially enacted, over the longue durée of the modern world-system. Significantly, the appropriation of unpaid work-including "free gifts" of nature-and the exploitation wage-labor form a dialectical unity. The limits to growth faced by capital today are real enough, and are "limits" co-produced through capitalism as world-ecology, joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature as an organic whole. The worldecological limit of capital is capital itself.

Capitalism Versus Democracy? Rethinking Politics in the Age of Environmental Crisis

Capitalism Versus Democracy? Rethinking Politics in the Age of Environmental Crisis, 2020

For over 150 years, political strategies and policies have been formed according to whether parties and movements believed that capitalism is either compatible or incompatible with democracy. This book challenges both supporters and opponents of the ‘compatibility’ thesis and calls for a rethink of politics in the age of environmental crisis. It is divided into three parts. Part One critically questions the dominant narratives and assumptions held by many of the broad Left about the origins, causes and alternatives to our present condition. Part Two focuses on how prominent neo-Keynesians and Marxists have explained the crises of the past decade and why they are still operating with essentially pre-environmentalist conceptions of the conflict between ‘capitalism and democracy’. Part Three offers one of the first detailed discussions of what kind of organisational, political economic and cultural issues that advocates of alternative post-carbon or post-capitalist societies will need to confront. In a penetrating critique of how the tensions between ‘democracy and sustainability’ have impacted the old debates over capitalism versus democracy, the author examines proposals and images of the ‘good life’ put forward by social democrats, greens, radical technological utopians, green growth ecological modernisers and degrowthers. Are the broadly held goals of greater social justice, ending poverty and inequality within and between affluent countries and low and middle-income societies possible without transgressing the fragile and damaged biophysical life support boundaries of the earth? Why is it that many who dispute the compatibility or incompatibility of ‘capitalism and democracy’ are yet to fully consider what policies, organisational forms and social changes flow from populations that favour democracy but oppose policies committed to greater environmental sustainability? These and many other issues are discussed in this unsettling new book which aims to stimulate us to rethink how we see our existing societies and future social, economic and political change.