Relationship human society/nature, productivism

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Outline

The development of the capitalist ecological crisis

Humans produce their existence through social contacts

Labour, as a conscious activity, transforms natural resources into use values

   1. Causes of the ecological crisis
   • Technological system is destructive?
   • Population growth destroys nature?
   • Reconsider the relationship with of society with nature in a concrete historical and social context
   2. Marxist concepts explain the productivist nature of capitalism 
   • Use value and exchange value 
   • Production of exchange value becomes independent of human needs
   • General aim is accumulation of capital
   • Competition between capitals is necessary
   • Result is permanent increase of production and constant growing environmental degradation
   3. Short history of the development of capitalism
   • Enclosures movement in England
   • Farmers expulsed form their land: landless poor will become later the proletariat in factories
   • Separation of country side and towns
   • Capitalist dynamics of accumulation spread over the world
   • Industrialisation in 19th century is the cause of an erupting ecological crisis
   • Mercantilism: plundering of natural resources and genocides in colonies
   • First monocultures of export crops
   • New slave based economy put in place
   • Industrial revolution based on factories in cities and on burning of coal for steam engines
   • Growing differentiation in agriculture
   • Intensified destruction of tropical forests
   • The fertility crisis and its solution chemical fertilisers
   • Second industrial revolution : discovery of oil and mechanisation based on electricity
   • New sectors in 20th century: car industry, petrochemicals, aeronautics, farming and building engines
   • Agribusiness: pesticides and chemical fertilisers; GMO’s
   • New materials such as  plastics, pesticides growing poisoning of all ecosystems
   4. New global problems emerge in the 1970’s
   • Hole in ozone layer: problem solved by regulations not by market forces
   • Global warming caused by greenhouse gasses: most dramatic and urgent problem 
   • Neoliberalism worsens the ecological crisis
   • Capitalist pseudo-solutions
   5. Necessity of an ecosocialist alternative