Related Papers
Oil: The Black Swan of Capitalism
Marco Accattatis
At a time when transnational capital is closer than ever to achieving full spectrum dominance in world economy, there are also signs indicating that its accompanying neoliberal ideology is resting atop a growing sea of glaring contradictions: supposedly rational consumers randomly choosing among an increasing glut of services and commodities; a geopolitical system increasingly engulfed in both low- and high-intensity conflicts over resources, markets, and global hegemony; a developing climate catastrophe which national and international political institutions, captured by financial and corporate interests, are seemingly unable to address. Still, amidst such and other ominous signs, it is also possible for the careful observer to identify the emergence of new social, political and cultural formations which are beginning to challenge the capitalist mode of production and its related hegemonic apparatuses. The primary aim of this paper is to assess the significance of fossil fuels and, particularly, of oil, not only within the logic of capitalism but, most importantly, as possibly one of the major contributors to its undoing. In this regard, it is the belief of this and other scholars that the unfolding climate crisis, coupled with the persisting Second Great Depression (GDII), has created the conditions for a radical rethinking of both the economic system and its cultural superstructure. Yet, as the institutional response to GDII already indicates, it is also apparent that the forces of capital are starting to view the climate crisis as another opportunity for systemic regeneration. Within the dialectic of such maneuverings, I will finally look at existing avenues of resistance and explore potential sites of disjuncture ripe for creative and meaningful forms of cultural penetration.
Business as usual? The post-politics of fracking
Gareth Fearn
In this dissertation I set out to understand the politics of fracking through the perspective of ‘post-politics’. Fracking is an issue where the U.K. government has had a significant involvement, supporting the nascent industry, despite the general acknowledgement of the need to act on climate change. After outlining a ‘post-politics’ theoretical framework, I analyse the discourse and institutional arrangements which are supportive of fracking, which is on the verge of recommencing in the U.K.. Within this case, I identify specific features that allow be to argue that this represents an expansion of post-political governance, characterised by the absence of antagonisms and reliance on techno-managerial solutions within the uncontested framework of neoliberalism. This from of governance aims to diffuse political challenges to the current order. There is a move from a ‘sustainable development’ to framing to an archi-political framing of ‘Energy Security’, which portrays fracking as an existential necessity and secondary to climate concerns. It implies a desperation to preserve the status quo give the lack of alternatives. I defend this approach against a purely Marxist one, which insufficiently theorises the political. The analysis of fracking provides good reasons to reflect on the limits of our political imaginary and what this means for our ability to change our society in the face of climate change.
Green Capitalism, Democracy and Social Justice.docx
Jerry R Harris
Major sections of the transnational capitalist class have begun to develop green capitalism, but their efforts and ideology make a sustainable conversion difficult, if not impossible.
Socialism and Democracy
The Coming Transition: Fossil Capital and Our Energy Future
2016 •
Jordan Kinder
Marx, Machinery and Motive Power: the Thermodynamics of Class Struggle
Tom Keefer
The environmental problems associated with the use of fossil fuels have been the subject of numerous studies, international conferences and well-meaning declarations, but there nonetheless seems to be little substantive analysis of what the root causes are of our ‘addiction to fossil fuels’ and why dominant interests are so unwilling to undertake the transition to a new energy regime. The failure to adequately grapple with this question stems from the fact that two of the most important schools of thought that hold important components of the analytical framework necessary for this undertaking -- ecological economics and Marxism -- miss crucial insights that the other brings to the debate. What is manifestly absent from most ecological economist thought is a critique of capitalism as a historically specific economic system which is not only based on ever-increasing expansion but is also compelled to substitute machinery and raw material for human labor in its quest for higher margins of profit, increased productivity and to undercut working-class self-organization and power. Moreover, in failing to recognize commodified, alienated and exploited labor as lying at the root of the capitalist system, the ecological movement has not, for the most part, been able to see the project of ecological diversity and sustainability as representing a class project based upon the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by an alternative economic and political order.
Materialism and the Critique of Energy
Energy Imaginaries: Feminist and Decolonial Futures
2018 •
Sheena Wilson
THE IRRECONCILABILITY OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM TO ECOLOGY
Gary F . Musa
The International Journal of Human Rights
Marx, Lemkin and the genocide–ecocide nexus
2014 •
Dr Martin Crook
A number of studies have shown that ecocide can be a method of genocide if, for example, environmental destruction results in conditions of life that fundamentally threaten a social group’s cultural and/or physical existence.1 With the ever-increasing rise of such cases of ecological destruction brought on by the extractive industries, or indirectly induced by anthropogenic climate change, we argue that the field of genocide studies should draw from the rich scholarly tradition of political ecology and environmental sociology. Indeed, it is the contention of the authors that, given the looming threat of runaway climate change in the twenty-first century, the advent of the geological phase classified by geologists and earth scientists as anthropocene and the attendant rapid extinction of species, destruction of habitats, ecological collapse and the self-evident dependency of the human race on our biosphere, ecocide (both ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’) will become a primary driver of genocide. It is therefore incumbent upon genocide scholars to attempt a paradigm shift in the greatest traditions of science3 and to cohere a synthesis of the sociology of genocide and environmental sociology into a theoretical apparatus that can illuminate the links between, and uncover the drivers of, ecocide and genocidal social death.4 Following a discussion of both the conceptual and legal nexus between ecocide and genocide, we further contend that capitalist ‘land grabs’ carried out by extractive industries, industrial farms and the like are, through the annexation of indigenous land and the associated ‘externalities’, the principal vectors of ecologically induced genocide when the genos in question is an indigenous people.
Moment of Transition
2010 •
Gregory Meyerson
Polygraph
Nine Principles for a Critical Theory of Energy
2020 •
Imre Szeman, Jeff Diamanti
