James Richard O’Connor’s Ecological Marxism

Be(e)coming pollinators: Beekeeping and perceptions of environmentalism in Massachusetts

“…When Capitalocene environmentalisms [ 52 ] are applied in conservation efforts, complex socioecological problems are thus addressed with the same rationality that created them in the first place [ 5 , 54 , 55 ]. O’Connor (1988) termed this process the “second contradiction” of capitalism, which he explains leads to an increased risk for unintended consequences and negative externalities, including social discord and environmental catastrophe [ 52 , 56 – 58 ]. The entanglement of hobbyist beekeeping and the current biodiversity crisis provides a case to examine how these theoretical arguments play out on the ground.…”

For granular geography

“…Yet the concrete heterogeneities of accumulation remained elusive, which subsequent Marxist and feminist theorists addressed through an expanded conception of primitive accumulation, the ‘original sin’ of capital, locating value’s expansion across non-capitalist frontiers of nature and social reproduction as intrinsic and necessary movements of capital’s self-valorization and evasion of crisis. Capital’s appropriation of nature has presented a continuing challenge toward deterministic theorizations of crisis; while non-human relations are simplified and degraded in the course of their commodification under capitalism, the complexity of their interrelations have often been elided in Marxist analyses, commonly presenting natural totality as a homeostatic unity disrupted by capital’s cannibalistic dynamism (Saed, 2019). The renewed attention to value in capitalist natures has been a critical step toward addressing the friction between nature and its erratic subsumption by value (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017), but the dynamic contingency of value’s haphazard interanimation and transformation by nature in its multiplicity requires careful and creative attention to manifest.…”