Relationship human society/nature, productivism
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