Capitalism and Climate Crisis - Abstracts in English

Alf Hornborg, Andreas Malm: The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative

The Anthropocene narrative portrays humanity as a species ascending to power over the rest of the Earth System. In the crucial field of climate change, this entails the attribution of fossil fuel combustion to properties acquired during human evolution, notably the ability to manipulate fire. But the fossil economy was not created nor is it upheld by humankind in general. This intervention questions the use of the species category in the Anthropocene narrative and argues that it is analytically flawed, as well as inimical to action. Intra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the current ecological crisis and cannot be ignored in attempts to understand it.

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

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. e decisive is-sue 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 world-ecological limit of capital is capital itself.

Attila Szigeti: Capitalocene - Or What is the Cost of Cheap Nature?

In the last decades the Capitalocene discourse was emerging in the Marxist ecological thinking. This approach offers a sociohistorical explanation to the current ecological crisis by questioning the historical narrative of the Anthropocene discourse. Authors of Capitalocene are arguing that climate change and ecological crisis was not caused by the collective and homogenous humanity (predetermined by the human nature). According them capitalism's accumulative and expropriative socioeconomic relations are responsible for climate crisis.This paper analysis how Capitalocene-arguments are applying the Marxist critique of capitalism, especially the labour theory of value and its contemporary expansions and corrections in the understanding of the current ecological crisis. The first two subchapters are summarizing World-Ecology theory of Jason W. Moore, than I interpret the debate of Moore with the Metabolic Rift school (John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, Andreas Malm and others), and finally I analyse the possible normative ecopolitics from the theoretical perspective of Capitalocene.In the last decades the so-called Capitalocene discourse was emerging in the Marxist ecological thinking. This approach offers a sociohistorical explanation of the current ecological crisis by questioning the historical narrative of the Anthropocene discourse. Authors of Capitalocene are arguing that climate change and ecological crisis were not caused by the collective and homogenous humanity (predetermined by the human nature) in general. According them capitalism's accumulative and expropriative socioeconomic relations are responsible for climate crisis.This paper analysis how Capitalocene-arguments are applying the Marxist critique of capitalism, especially the labour theory of value and its contemporary expansions and corrections in the understanding of the current ecological crisis. The first two subsections are summarizing World-Ecology theory of Jason W. Moore, than the paper interprets the debate of Moore with the Metabolic Rift school (John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, Andreas Malm and others), and finally it analyses the possible normative ecopolitics from the theoretical perspective of Capitalocene.

Zsuzsa Gille: Is There a Socialocene?

The goal of this essay is to reevaluate state socialism's environmental record. Zsuzsa Gille argues that state socialist modernity had its own view of nature and materials, as well as a largely misunderstood ethical stance to consumption that is ignored in today's studies of capitalocene examining the interrelations of capitalism and climate crisis. This article provides a view not so much of the environmental advantages and disadvantages of central planning or "backwardness," but rather demonstrate a unique economic logic that arguably carried some potential for a greener postsocialism. Instead of returning to the rightfully criticized Anthropocene term, however, Zsuzsa Gille argues for a more central role for waste and materiality in our understanding of the current dilemmas around global environmental problems.

Steffen Dalsgaard: The Commensurability of Carbon: Making Value and Money of Climate Change

The introduction of the Kyoto Protocol is an attempt to save the climate through a number of schemes, or mechanisms, that commodify carbon. Among other things, these schemes create monetary incentives to reduce carbon emissions through the trade of permits and credits, and they make carbon an object of financial speculation. Most controversial is apparently the potential of carbon thus to be a universal yardstick for value by commensurating moral spheres of human action (the environment, the economy, development, etc.) that some people regard as distinct. This paper explores the consequences of the speculative aspects of carbon as a standard of value and as potential currency.on

Annamária Hódosy: Capitalocinema

The analysis of the interrelationship of ecological problems and the dominant economical system of the North is nothing new and is beginning to seep into films, even into Hollywood blockbusters. However, in movies that seem to be the most open and indignant about the destruction of nature, there is a certain conservative „latent content" underlying the „manifest content" of straightforward criticism. Two films of the three that are examined in this paper - Big Miracle (2012) and the Danish Skytten (2013) - seem to make an equation between ecological degradation and the capitalist exploitation of „free nature". Excessive radicalism is nevertheless avoided, when the antagonism between the environmental activists and the executives of profit-oriented corporations/governments in the films is reconciled through the representation of the personal motives and life-stories of the protagonists. The third film, Downsizing (2017) chooses a more complicated strategy to maintain the status quo. Although both the ecological problems and the social inequities entailed by the current phase of global capitalism are highlighted, the grotesque representation of the practical implementation of what may be thought of as the theory of no-growth or de-growth economy becomes an exculpation of the present economical system instead of making an attack on it.

Ariel Salleh: Ecofeminism

Ecological feminism is sometimes understood as a subset of social ecology. This is true in as much as ecofeminism addresses the interaction of social and natural processes. However, it would be false to suggest that ecofeminism derives from social ecology, or from deep ecology, or eco-Marxism [Chapter 6]. Ecological feminism is sui generis; its first premise being that society-nature relations in the dominant global economy are fundamentally sex-gendered in both material and ideological senses. In this respect, ecofeminism takes a methodological quantum leap beyond other political frameworks. Ecofeminism is also distinct from liberal and socialist feminisms, since these perspectives focus rather uncritically on the pursuit of equality. Ecofeminists are not looking for an equal slice of a toxic pie. Attention to the positive and negative implications of sex-gender difference is prioritised by ecofeminists, before attending to an equality that simply reinforces Eurocentric masculinist values as the universal norm. Likewise, respect for the principle of difference as cultural autonomy joins ecofeminism and postcolonial concerns. Further, the framing of liberal and socialist feminisms has been anthropocentric, whereas ecofeminism is oriented towards oikos and the interconnection of all life on Earth.

Philip McMichael: Peasants Make Their Own Histories, But Not Just as They Please...

his essay employs contemporary peasant mobilizing discourses and practices to evaluate the terms in which we understand agrarian movements today, through an exercise of historical specification. First, it considers why the terms of the original agrarian question no longer apply to agrarian change today. The shift in the terms corresponds to the movement from the late‐nineteenth century and twentieth century, when states were the organizing principle of political‐economy, to the twenty‐first century, when capital has become the organizing principle. Second, and related, agrarian mobilizations are viewed here as barometers of contemporary political‐economic relations. In politicizing the socio‐ecological crisis of neoliberalism, they problematize extant categories of political and sociological analysis, re‐centring agriculture and food as key to democratic and sustainable relations of social production.

Andreas Malm: Revolutionary Strategy in a Warming World

It doesn't take much imagination to associate climate change with revolution. If the planetary order upon which all societies are built starts breaking down, how can they possibly remain stable? Various more or less horrifying scenarios of upheaval have long been extrapolated from soaring temperatures. In his novel The Drowned World from 1962, today often considered the first prophetic work of climate fiction, J. G. Ballard conjured up melting icecaps, an English capital submerged under tropical marshes and populations fleeing the unbearable heat towards polar redoubts. The UN directorate seeking to manage the migration flows assumed that 'within the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life would continue much as before, with the same social and domestic relationships, by and large the same ambitions and satisfactions' - but that assumption 'was obviously fallacious'. A drowned world would be nothing like the one hitherto known. In more recent years, the American military establishment has dominated this subgenre of climate projection. Extreme weather events, the Senate learned from the 2013 edition of the 'worldwide threat assessment' compiled by the US intelligence community, will put food markets under serious strain, 'triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism'. So far, the sworn enemies of revolution have dominated this frenzy of speculation. Little input has come from the other side: from the partisans of the idea that the present order needs to be overthrown or else things will turn out very badly. But if the strategic environment of counterinsurgency is shifting, so is - by definition - that of revolutionaries, who then have just as compelling a reason to analyze what lies in store. The imbalance in the amount of preparation is glaring. Those who pledge allegiance to the revolutionary tradition - in whose collective mind the experience of 1917 will probably always loom large - should dare to use their imagination as productively as any writer of intelligence reports or works of fiction. One might begin by distinguishing between four possible configurations of revolution and heat.

Emma Piercy, Rachel Granger, Chris Goodier: Planning for peak oil: learning from Cuba's 'special period'

It is against recent experiences of proliferative consumption of the earth's resources that planners and politicians must confront the challenge of peak oil over the coming years. With so few examples of peak oil available worldwide, this paper explores the realities of this in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 - the so-called special period, which decimated the country's imports of energy, food and other vital supplies. Drawing on primary research collected in Cuba during 2008 and in an attempt to stimulate debate about how western countries and cities might respond to future losses of global resources, this paper examines the policy responses implemented in Cuba in the fields of transport, spatial planning, agriculture and energy. Despite the Cuban situation being politically different from other countries and the fact that the loss of resources during the special period were abrupt and unplanned, it is argued that there is still considerable scope for a wider application of the concepts to other towns and cities, if not countries and cultures.

Ágnes Gagyi: Mutual Assistance Instead of Fear: Lessons from sociology of disaster in the preparation to Climate Crisis (review of Rebecca Solnit: A Paradise Built in Hell)

Rebecca Solnit has published her book "A Paradise Built in Hell" ten years ago. Its main idea was originally formulated in 2005 in an essay published on the day when Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. Rebecca Solnit is writer, historian and activist living in San Francisco; she has been working in various environmental, anti-war, human and women's rights movements since the 1980s. She has published 17 books so far and is a regular author of Guardian and Harpers' Magazine. In her works she continues the tradition of American progressive public intelligentsia: although she relies on historical facts and social science research, she primarily outlines perspectives to expand sociological imagination (Mills 1959) on challenges that cannot be solved by the social knowledge produced within the current social order.

Mátyás Domschitz: Fuel and Social Change (Review of Andreas Malm: Fossil Capital; Timothy Mitchell: Carbon Democracy)

For thousands of years Sun was the source of energy that was necessary to the reproduction of human communities. Sunlight gave energy to plants that served as food for people and for their domesticated animals. In the 19th century this renewable source of energy was replaced by coal and later by oil. These two, more effective energy sources are the results of million years of rotting. As Sartre put it, they are "capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings". This review confronts the competing arguments of Andreas Malm and Timothy Mitchell on the rise of fossil energy sources and on its social implications.

Alexandra Czeglédi: Essays on Salvage Accumulation Woven with Hypha (review of Anna Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World)

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's book entitled The Mushroom at the End of the World could be read from the semi-periphery of the global capital. The supply chains of an Eastern Hungarian mushroom-business leads us to Tsing's book, to the author's concept of salvage accumulation. By introducing salvage accumulation, Tsing means the process of value creation when it occurs without established control system of capitalism, as it is managed in factories. Raw materials (coal and oil) are annexed by capital, within the outside sphere of capitalism, which independently occur in nature. This value-saving process, in this way, refers to the capital accumulation which does not depend on controlled conditions of capitalism. Commodification, thus, does not take place on factories' conveyor belt, rather outside of the social structure, deep in the middle of forests (2015: 62-63). Natural resources were already present before human existence, and reproduce even after the extinction of the human species. Although Tsing's book might be a valid critique of David Harvey's accumulation by dispossession, the concept of the reverse primitive accumulation coined by Kalyan Sanyal seems essential for mapping the complexity of capitalism. The reversal of capital accumulation is a political tool which legitimises exploitative processes of capitalism.

Róbert Balogh: Crisis of Historiography and Usefulness of History in the Light of Anthropocene Topics: Inequality, Power, World-System, Resistance and Deep History (Review of (Bonneuil és Fressoz: The Shock of the Anthropocene; Lewis és Maslin: The Human Planet)

The importance of the books reviewed here lies in their ability to go beyond the Anthropocene versus Capitalocene debate and in describing a framework of notions that lead to the conclusion that the adequate response to the risks that global biophysical changes bring about is a new mode of living replacing the current form of consumer capitalism. The authors of the two books are two ecologists and two historians. Their arguments converge on the point that if we live in the Anthropocene, then the academic response to this condition is a critical theory that includes a new narrative about human history and analysis of the processes that brought about the current condition and that need to be changed. The new ground that the volumes break makes it possible to hypothesize that historiography may overcome its decades-long crisis as a result of increasing sensitivity to socio-natural phenomena and interaction with biological sciences.