Pub Date : 2022-07-25DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2103442
Theodora Vetta
ABSTRACT The energy sector in Greece has been undergoing multiple processes of diversification, privatization and neoliberal restructuring, following EU imperatives for common energy market and metabolized by fast-track policies of the indebted state. Based on long ethnographic fieldwork in the main coal-mining region of Greece, this article discusses the energopolitics of austerity linking the state-backed logics of accumulation to the lived experience of energy producers and consumers. The expropriation of surrounding-the-mine villages, the growing transformation of public/communal/private land into photovoltaic parks and the very directions of imagining the future fuel multiscalar social and moral struggles. These reveal not only the horizontal integration of nature into capital valorization, though – albeit reduced – coal production and the spectacular investment to renewable energy ventures, but also the vertical processes of subsumption, enabled by financial engineering and rent-extraction. The model of energy transition rests on an uneven regime of ecological distribution that shapes but also exploits growing intra-class conflicts, propelled by the very contradictory nature of public power companies within each historical capitalist moment.
{"title":"Decarbonized Futures: Struggles Over Ecological Distribution in Greece","authors":"Theodora Vetta","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2103442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2103442","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The energy sector in Greece has been undergoing multiple processes of diversification, privatization and neoliberal restructuring, following EU imperatives for common energy market and metabolized by fast-track policies of the indebted state. Based on long ethnographic fieldwork in the main coal-mining region of Greece, this article discusses the energopolitics of austerity linking the state-backed logics of accumulation to the lived experience of energy producers and consumers. The expropriation of surrounding-the-mine villages, the growing transformation of public/communal/private land into photovoltaic parks and the very directions of imagining the future fuel multiscalar social and moral struggles. These reveal not only the horizontal integration of nature into capital valorization, though – albeit reduced – coal production and the spectacular investment to renewable energy ventures, but also the vertical processes of subsumption, enabled by financial engineering and rent-extraction. The model of energy transition rests on an uneven regime of ecological distribution that shapes but also exploits growing intra-class conflicts, propelled by the very contradictory nature of public power companies within each historical capitalist moment.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45733443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2126129
S. Fassbinder
The Future is Degrowth recommends practical proposals for degrowth while at the same time suggesting what Ernst Bloch, of all writers dead or living, called a “concrete utopia.” Bloch was a visionary whose masterwork The Principle of Hope defended the notion that “everyone lives in the future” ([1956] 1998, 4). One need not agree with everything Schmelzer et al. say to be impressed that they quote him. This is an expanded edition of a book written by three German authors in 2019, with the help of British doctoral candidate Aaron Vansintjan, and of European academic associations and reading groups. Its aim is “building a future for all beyond capitalism” (ix). Its starting point is that “it is feasible to live well without growth and to make society more just, democratic, and truly prosperous on the way” (4). This is not a Green New Deal proposal, though it does argue that “while Green New Deal proposals tend to emphasize this investment push and the growth of everything sustainable, degrowth also and at least as rigorously puts the focus on the many things that will have to go” (9). The term “degrowth” stands in opposition to the term “growth,”which is generally taken to mean economic growth, although in an early chapter the connotations of “growth,” understood broadly, are explored:
{"title":"A Glimpse of a World Beyond","authors":"S. Fassbinder","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2126129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2126129","url":null,"abstract":"The Future is Degrowth recommends practical proposals for degrowth while at the same time suggesting what Ernst Bloch, of all writers dead or living, called a “concrete utopia.” Bloch was a visionary whose masterwork The Principle of Hope defended the notion that “everyone lives in the future” ([1956] 1998, 4). One need not agree with everything Schmelzer et al. say to be impressed that they quote him. This is an expanded edition of a book written by three German authors in 2019, with the help of British doctoral candidate Aaron Vansintjan, and of European academic associations and reading groups. Its aim is “building a future for all beyond capitalism” (ix). Its starting point is that “it is feasible to live well without growth and to make society more just, democratic, and truly prosperous on the way” (4). This is not a Green New Deal proposal, though it does argue that “while Green New Deal proposals tend to emphasize this investment push and the growth of everything sustainable, degrowth also and at least as rigorously puts the focus on the many things that will have to go” (9). The term “degrowth” stands in opposition to the term “growth,”which is generally taken to mean economic growth, although in an early chapter the connotations of “growth,” understood broadly, are explored:","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47567210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2141430
David N. Pellow, Dena Montague
How do carceral systems intersect with and influence environmental justice and public health? And how might an abolitionist perspective address environmental justice and public health? Drawing on a broad range of literature and a case study from Southern California, we argue that mass incarceration is anathema to the pursuit of public health and environmental justice because carceral systems are inherently anti-ecological and produce illness and disease within and beyond the walls of confinement. Furthermore, we consider the myriad ways that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons and their allies are mobilizing to articulate these linkages in an effort to promote abolition, robust public health, and environmental and climate justice for all.
{"title":"Health and Environmental Justice Struggles in America’s Prisons During a Global Pandemic","authors":"David N. Pellow, Dena Montague","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2141430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2141430","url":null,"abstract":"How do carceral systems intersect with and influence environmental justice and public health? And how might an abolitionist perspective address environmental justice and public health? Drawing on a broad range of literature and a case study from Southern California, we argue that mass incarceration is anathema to the pursuit of public health and environmental justice because carceral systems are inherently anti-ecological and produce illness and disease within and beyond the walls of confinement. Furthermore, we consider the myriad ways that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons and their allies are mobilizing to articulate these linkages in an effort to promote abolition, robust public health, and environmental and climate justice for all.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45711835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2096765
P. Somerville
ABSTRACT Hornborg’s concepts of ecologically unequal exchange and social-material metabolism are incoherent and therefore of no scientific value. Capitalism creates real expanding value through labour exploitation, and this is the main source of economic and social inequality. Issues such as the distinctiveness of value under capitalism, the difference between labour and labour-power, and between exploitation and appropriation, are important for understanding capitalism and how to go beyond capitalism. They should not be obscured and subsumed under fanciful conceptual hybrids.
{"title":"Ecologically Unequal Exchange Theory: A Rejoinder to Hornborg","authors":"P. Somerville","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2096765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2096765","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Hornborg’s concepts of ecologically unequal exchange and social-material metabolism are incoherent and therefore of no scientific value. Capitalism creates real expanding value through labour exploitation, and this is the main source of economic and social inequality. Issues such as the distinctiveness of value under capitalism, the difference between labour and labour-power, and between exploitation and appropriation, are important for understanding capitalism and how to go beyond capitalism. They should not be obscured and subsumed under fanciful conceptual hybrids.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45886184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2021.1966485
Anna L. Peterson
ABSTRACT This essay explores the ways that Marxian categories of alienation, labor, and class can strengthen critiques of human exploitation of other animals. Marxist insights are valuable in particular because they point our attention to the structural dimensions of oppression, which are not always theorized explicitly in mainstream animal ethics. Thinking about animals as a class, with common interests and common suffering, enables us to see suffering and exploitation as results of a larger system, not particular acts of cruelty. This structural analysis can strengthen animal ethics, which often focuses on the qualities of individual animals that give them value and the human actions that cause animal suffering. Thus, even though Marx does not directly address animals at length, or even especially positively, a zoological reading of his work illuminates the ways and reasons animals experience alienation and the ways that humans might help to liberate them.
{"title":"The Zoological Marx","authors":"Anna L. Peterson","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2021.1966485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2021.1966485","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores the ways that Marxian categories of alienation, labor, and class can strengthen critiques of human exploitation of other animals. Marxist insights are valuable in particular because they point our attention to the structural dimensions of oppression, which are not always theorized explicitly in mainstream animal ethics. Thinking about animals as a class, with common interests and common suffering, enables us to see suffering and exploitation as results of a larger system, not particular acts of cruelty. This structural analysis can strengthen animal ethics, which often focuses on the qualities of individual animals that give them value and the human actions that cause animal suffering. Thus, even though Marx does not directly address animals at length, or even especially positively, a zoological reading of his work illuminates the ways and reasons animals experience alienation and the ways that humans might help to liberate them.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46791280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-30DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2081926
Japhy Wilson
ABSTRACT This paper tells the inside story of a spontaneous uprising in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2017, in which mestizo, Afro-descendant and Indigenous workers and communities confronted the combined forces of a multinational oil company and a militarized state. The paper documents a rapidly evolving battle that achieved a remarkable victory, and bears witness to the fleeting emergence of an insurgent form of political universality. It suggests that the decolonial dichotomy between top-down universalism and a bottom-up pluriverse should be replaced by an approach that is attentive to manifestations of universality performed by subaltern subjects in their confrontations with extractive capital.
{"title":"“We Are All Indigenous!” Insurgent Universality on the Extractive Frontier","authors":"Japhy Wilson","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2081926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2081926","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper tells the inside story of a spontaneous uprising in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2017, in which mestizo, Afro-descendant and Indigenous workers and communities confronted the combined forces of a multinational oil company and a militarized state. The paper documents a rapidly evolving battle that achieved a remarkable victory, and bears witness to the fleeting emergence of an insurgent form of political universality. It suggests that the decolonial dichotomy between top-down universalism and a bottom-up pluriverse should be replaced by an approach that is attentive to manifestations of universality performed by subaltern subjects in their confrontations with extractive capital.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43578320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-27DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2080907
M. Z. Muttaqin
{"title":"Humanity; About Forgetting","authors":"M. Z. Muttaqin","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2080907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2080907","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45196557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-13DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2062675
L. Levidow
ABSTRACT In the US and UK, Green New Deal (GND) agendas have gained significant support as means to reconcile environmental sustainability with a socially fairer economy. Their transformative vision has stimulated proposals such as more public goods, workers’ cooperatives, eco-localisation and caring activities. When seeking support from major political parties, however, GND agendas have undergone pressure to accept decarbonisation technofixes, as promoted by carbon-intensive industries in alliance with their trade unions. Such promises have provided an investment imperative for dubious low-carbon remedies, or an alibi to await their feasibility, or both at once. These agendas imagine the nation as a unitary economic space needing technoscientific advance for a global competitive advantage. Divergences within the labour movement express rival sociotechnical imaginaries of a low-carbon future. This conflictual process has shaped what counts as Green and Deal for a GND. Similar tensions will arise around any low-carbon transition, given the wider capitalist frameworks of Green Keynesianism and Green Growth. To go beyond them will depend on political struggles to disrupt the hegemonic cross-class alliance, to create different alliances and to gain state support for their agendas.
{"title":"Green New Deals: What Shapes Green and Deal?","authors":"L. Levidow","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2062675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2062675","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the US and UK, Green New Deal (GND) agendas have gained significant support as means to reconcile environmental sustainability with a socially fairer economy. Their transformative vision has stimulated proposals such as more public goods, workers’ cooperatives, eco-localisation and caring activities. When seeking support from major political parties, however, GND agendas have undergone pressure to accept decarbonisation technofixes, as promoted by carbon-intensive industries in alliance with their trade unions. Such promises have provided an investment imperative for dubious low-carbon remedies, or an alibi to await their feasibility, or both at once. These agendas imagine the nation as a unitary economic space needing technoscientific advance for a global competitive advantage. Divergences within the labour movement express rival sociotechnical imaginaries of a low-carbon future. This conflictual process has shaped what counts as Green and Deal for a GND. Similar tensions will arise around any low-carbon transition, given the wider capitalist frameworks of Green Keynesianism and Green Growth. To go beyond them will depend on political struggles to disrupt the hegemonic cross-class alliance, to create different alliances and to gain state support for their agendas.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48727056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-13DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2062611
Anton Vandevoorde
ABSTRACT Placing today’s anti-fracking protests amongst previous social struggles in Lancashire, this paper explores how radical environmental movements resist a capitalist drive for cheap Nature that endangers human and extra-human reproduction. Hydraulic fracturing encroaches on parts of nature that in the common sense of people have not yet completely lost their ontology of a commons. Clean water, air, silence and accessibility are not yet ontologically detached from the conditions for healthy lives and a vibrant community. Like the peasants who revolted in early-modern England because enclosures deprived them of access to firewood and land for grazing cattle, today local communities revolt to the new enclosures that deprive them and future generations from a clean environment, necessary for a healthy life. One of the more subtle and underexposed strategies of radical environmental movements is to emphasize and (re-)create an ontological unity between nature and humanity-in-nature as a reaction to the duality of modernity. This paper’s approach, which combines the political economic history of enclosures with anthropologically inspired research on changing conceptions of nature, shows how radical environmental movements object to material conditions that result from ontological dualisms. This helps to better understand the strategies and aspirations of radical “environmental” movements.
{"title":"Commons in the Common Sense: Resisting Enclosures with Anti-Fracking Activists in Lancashire, UK","authors":"Anton Vandevoorde","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2062611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2062611","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Placing today’s anti-fracking protests amongst previous social struggles in Lancashire, this paper explores how radical environmental movements resist a capitalist drive for cheap Nature that endangers human and extra-human reproduction. Hydraulic fracturing encroaches on parts of nature that in the common sense of people have not yet completely lost their ontology of a commons. Clean water, air, silence and accessibility are not yet ontologically detached from the conditions for healthy lives and a vibrant community. Like the peasants who revolted in early-modern England because enclosures deprived them of access to firewood and land for grazing cattle, today local communities revolt to the new enclosures that deprive them and future generations from a clean environment, necessary for a healthy life. One of the more subtle and underexposed strategies of radical environmental movements is to emphasize and (re-)create an ontological unity between nature and humanity-in-nature as a reaction to the duality of modernity. This paper’s approach, which combines the political economic history of enclosures with anthropologically inspired research on changing conceptions of nature, shows how radical environmental movements object to material conditions that result from ontological dualisms. This helps to better understand the strategies and aspirations of radical “environmental” movements.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44690207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2022.2061121
S. Fassbinder
This book, as the introduction states, was written by a once “aspiring interpreter” (xiii) from Ukraine who became politicized through an education in political economy at the University of Sussex. It might seem easily dated, as its copyright is four years old and as events in Ukraine move quickly today, yet it offers a necessary background to what is going on now. Generally, the 2018 book gives one the impression that one is reading an update of Chapter 26 of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital.
{"title":"Capital Accumulation as Theft in Ukraine","authors":"S. Fassbinder","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2061121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2061121","url":null,"abstract":"This book, as the introduction states, was written by a once “aspiring interpreter” (xiii) from Ukraine who became politicized through an education in political economy at the University of Sussex. It might seem easily dated, as its copyright is four years old and as events in Ukraine move quickly today, yet it offers a necessary background to what is going on now. Generally, the 2018 book gives one the impression that one is reading an update of Chapter 26 of Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43031578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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