Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet

Abstract

This article engages with and critiques dominant theories of political ecology. It takes the theory of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the framework of critique. It assesses the claims of “fossil capitalism,” eco-modernism, extractivism, and degrowth, as well as the theories of “post-development.” It finds that with the exception of degrowth, none of them take imperialism or the global history of accumulation sufficiently seriously, and either displace transformative obligations wholly onto the South or adopt a framework which centers merely the agency of the Northern working class or a class-blind movement of movements. Instead, it proposes modifications of EUE based on the polarized nature of accumulation and waste production and distribution, and neocolonialism. It uses that framework to identify the antisystemic role of nature-reliant peripheral semi-proletarian classes, and from there reopens the debate on appropriate-scale industrialization along with ecological transformations of agriculture as paths to development in the twenty-first century.

Thirty Years on: Planetary Climate Planning and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee

“…Agarwal and Narain (1991) offered a subsistence rights argument in their report, Global Warming in an Unequal World, that pointed to a distinction elided in the INC's alignment with the dominant truth regime: that of subsistence and luxury emissions (Raymond 2008). The fetishistic dominance and reductionism of carbon dioxide within the truth regime effectively enabled the consensus decision-making process to disavow the multiple and complex drivers of climate change rooted in a history of colonial domination, maldevelopment, and ecologically unequal exchange (Ajl 2023;Jasanoff 2004a). In the INC process, the globalized climate became a site where "rituals of dominance" became reinscribed via the deliberate abstraction of greenhouse gases.…”

“…Those countries most vulnerable to those changes will be the first victims of such political negligence and as a result we can do nothing other than to express our deep disappointment." 10 For these delegations, the deployment of global scale became a means for continued ecologically unequal exchange (Ajl 2023). As Shiva (1993, 233) explained on the sidelines of the negotiations:…”

“…It is now clear through close archival reading that uneven geographies of scientific authority (Mahony and Hulme 2018, 396) encoded normative developmental ideals-characteristics valued by elites that privileged certain delegations and forms of knowledge over others (Falzon 2021). These ideological postures further translated into material consequences: continued ecologically unequal exchange and dominance in a world economic system (Ajl 2021(Ajl , 2023. The INC became a setting in which power relations between national state delegations were configured in ways that undermined the knowledge claims of Third World Front actors (Hulme 2010, 561).…”

Imperialism, Ecological Imperialism, and Green Imperialism: An Overview

“…This value is obtained by the elites of the system due to the relations of figures, such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Raúl Zibechi, and María Galindo (see Goodman and González, 2019;Pedregal, 2020). A detailed critique of these weaknesses within different positions of contemporary political ecology can be found in Ajl (2023). 3 The historical contributions of Marxism to the debate on imperialism come mainly from figures such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bukharin, which have been enriched by the schools of world-systems analysis, monopoly capital, and dependency theory with the work of authors such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Arghiri Emmanuel, Samir Amin domination and dependence that they impose on the regimes of labor and access to materials and energy at the global level.…”

“…This leads their proposals to overemphasize technical aspects of capitalism like growth instead of scrutinizing systemic features related to the relationship between global hierarchies, the international division of labor, and international trade. As a result, degrowth politics can get blurred by calls for universal social justice missing the importance of concrete actions for sovereignty and emancipation in the Global South (Ajl, 2023; see also Frame, 2022b). As with other schools of political ecology and environmental justice that assumed ecological problems to be problems of social asymmetries, degrowth has sometimes overlooked the fact that those inequalities in the ecological burden are entirely linked to inequalities in the distribution of material and energy resources.…”