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Editorial Nro. 46

Estenssoro, F. (2019): La Geopolítica Ambiental Global del Siglo XXI. Los desafíos para América Latina. RIL editores, 232 pp.

Reseña de: San Román Gómez, A. (2021). Pensar el Tecnoceno, vivir el Cosmoceno. Distopía y esperanza en la era de la emergencia climática. Apeirón, 148 pp.

El capitalismo como ecología-mundo. Contribuciones y aplicaciones para los estudios y luchas contemporáneas. ENTREVISTA A RAJ PATEL

Debatir el Antropoceno desde el estructuralismo y el materialismo ecofeminista   Barca, S. (2020). Forces of Reproduction. Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene. Elements in Environmental Humanities. Cambridge University Press. Moore, J. W. (Ed.). (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Kairos PM.

From prehistoric times human activity has transformed ecosystems. But it has been since the rise of industrial capitalism that a certain historical threshold has been reached. At the end of the Twentieth Century the creation of a world productive space implies the ecological unification of the world. The accelerated destruction of living species, pollution of the oceans, and the hole in the ozone layer threaten the planet Earth. These developments parallel previously existing environmental tensions such as deforestation and desertification. In creating a world economy, capitalism in its classical forms as well as in its « socialist » incarnations has projected societies into a new relation with nature, that of a world ecology. Desde tiempos prehistóricos, las actividades humanas han transformado los ecosistemas. Pero es con la llegada del capitalismo industrial se ha traspasado un umbral histórico. A finales del siglo XX, la constitución de un espacio mundo productivo es el estandarte de la unificación ecológica del mundo: de la destrucción acelerada de especies, de la contaminación de los océanos, del agujero en la capa de ozono atmosférica amenazan hoy al planeta. En el Tercer Mundo, las tensiones ambientales son viejas conocidas, como la deforestación y la desertificación. Llevándolos al umbral de una economía-mundo, el capitalismo, tanto en sus versiones clásicas como en sus avatares \"socialistas\" ha empujado a las sociedades a una nueva relación con la naturaleza: la de un mundo ecológico.

The paper aims to articulate an \"encounter\" between Autonomist Marxism (AM) and World-Ecology (WE), that is, between two theoretical paradigms increasingly discussed at the global level, but so far never analyzed in close connection to one another. AM is a current of unorthodox Marxism that is characterized, methodologically, by the partiality of the point of view, the constitutive unity of thought and conflict, the ambivalence of the working-class condition (labor force / abstract labor within capital, working class / living labor against capital), and the centrality of class composition. Politically, AM proposes two main innovations: the practice of refusal of work, and the so-called Copernican revolution, according to which class struggle comes first and capitalist organization follows suit (instituting, therefore, a causal and incremental link between workers' unrest and capitalist development).WE can be defined as a global conversation that develops the analysis of the world-system along distinctively environmental lines: capitalism, therefore, does not have an ecological regime, but rather is an ecological regime, i.e. a specific way of organizing nature. Beyond any residue of Cartesian dualism, the concept of world-ecology refers to an original mixture of social dynamics and natural elements that make up the capitalist mode of production in its historical development, and in its tendency to become a world-market. In this framework, the capitalist theory of value imposes space as flat and geometric, time as homogeneous and linear, and nature as external, infinite, and free.The aim of this paper is to show that, although the two perspectives relate to the question of the (ecological) crisis in a very different way, they can be effectively integrated if juxtaposed on a different level - that of the historico-political analysis of the question concerning the environment. Both approaches originally rework Marx’s crisis theory, but they do not completely avoid the polarization that marked its evolution: development vs. catastrophe.AM tends to renew the tradition that sees the crisis as a moment of development and historicizes it through original interpretations of the cycle of struggles 1968-1973, claiming its defeat was “peculiar” as it imposed a change in the structure of capitalist valorization in the direction of an expansion of its accumulation base. The causes of this transition are to be found in the intersection between the financialization of the economy, the cognitization of labor and, above all, the becoming-productive of the sphere of social reproduction. On the other hand, WE elaborates the so-called “breakdown” theory in unprecedented fashion. The starting point is a convincing reconstruction of the historical succession of long waves of economic cycles through an articulation of underproduction (of ecological surplus) and overproduction (of commodities). Thus, WE provides an instrumental ecological counterpoint to the socio-centric reading of AM through the fundamental notion of negative value — the most innovative analytical element with regard to the neoliberal form of crisis theory. However, the general discursive strategy follows that of every breakdown theory ever since the “classical” debate within the Second International. Therefore, it is aimed at showing that, although the crises of the twentieth century were developmental (that is, they fostered the capitalist restructuring at a higher level), the crisis we live through nowadays presents itself as epochal in that its result is deemed to be an inevitable collapse.The convergence between the two paradigms —which is actually a rather demanding theoretical exchange, and as such require some deep rethinking for both positions— can take place through a re-reading of the historical process of politicization of ecology. Although it is customary to date it between the mid-seventies and the following decade —i.e. after the great cycle of Fordist conflicts— in recent years a different hypothesis is being tested: that such politicization occurred not only a decade earlier, but also, and above all, because of rather than despite the struggles of the workers' movement (in close connection with the rise cycle of revolutionary feminism). With particular regard to the Italian context, the struggles against noxiousness, which multiplied between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, and often in opposition to the confederal unions, were the first to fiercely criticize the so-called monetization of risk; that is,the idea that wage increases and/or organizational benefits could “compensate” for exposure to pollutants, even hazardous ones. Although this criticism would never become common sense of trade union action, such occurrence does not deny that it was first of all the strength of organized workers that blew up the compensatory mechanism and (im)posed the ecological question as politically unavoidable. Only at a later stage will the environmental movement emerge along with a new post-materialist sensitivity among the urbanized intermediate strata.Against this background, the paper proposes an analysis of neoliberal green economy —i.e. the capitalist attempt to internalize the ecological limit, turning it from obstacle to valorization, through an innovative strategy of accumulation— as simultaneously assuming the form of development (in accordance with AM hypothesis) and of anti-development (in accordance with WE hypothesis). From this plausible \"convergence\" could then emerge a political interpretation of the contemporary ecological crisis, capable of questioning the relationship between capitalism and nature by avoiding both catastrophism and the elective affinity between the logic of profit and the logic of environmental protection.In this unprecedented context, WE can grasp the second aspect through the concept of negative value, which correctly conveys the message that climate change, health-related emergencies, and the narrowing of waste borders make the ecological crisis an unprecedented everyday reality in the history of capitalism. In fact, negative value implies an internal contradiction of the dynamics of capital and, above all, an ontological challenge to the valorization project, therefore to capitalist civilization tout court.On the other hand, AM is in a privileged position to make sense of the shift from the rhetoric of limits to growth, which somehow alluded to environmental noxiousness as a crisis of capitalism, to a rhetoric of growth of limits, which identifies these latter as drivers of accumulation, as “filters” that turn the ecological constraint into a crisis for capitalism. Furthermore, AM can now show that commodities traded on environmental markets contain value as they are produced by hybrid units of labor (reproductive / informational) and nature (financialized). However, the developmental potential of such green economy must also be relativized. In fact, the process of enhancing the “free” activity of nature seems, at least until now, to be unable both to “repair” the environmental damage already done and to provide widespread social protections potentially able to compensate for the class polarization that invariably accompanies the multiplication of financial dividends. What neoliberal capitalism lacks is an inclusive mechanism capable of (partially) socializing financial profits either through a decarbonization of the economy, or through the formation of a new middle class (or both). Este artículo pretende articular un encuentro entre el operaísmo y la ecología-mundo, es decir, un encuentro entre dos paradigmas teóricos cada vez más objeto de debate a nivel global, pero que, hasta el momento, no han sido analizados en estrecha relación. El operaísmo es una corriente del marxismo heterodoxo caracterizada por centrarse en la ambivalencia de la condición de la clase obrera (fuerza de trabajo/trabajo abstracto dentro del capital, clase obrera/trabajo vivo contra el capital) y la noción de la composición de clases sociales. La ecología-mundo puede definirse como un diálogo internacional que desarrolla el análisis del sistema-mundo desde una perspectiva ambiental: el capitalismo, por lo tanto, no tiene un régimen ecológico, sino que es un régimen ecológico, es decir, constituye un modo especifico de organizar la naturaleza. El objetivo de este artículo es demostrar que, a pesar de que las dos perspectivas se relacionan con la cuestión de la crisis (ecológica) de forma muy distinta, ellas pueden integrarse eficazmente si son yuxtapuestas a otro nivel: el del análisis histórico-político de la cuestión medioambiental. En su origen, ambos planteamientos revisan la teoría de la crisis de Marx, pero no eluden la polarización que caracteriza su evolución: mientras que el operaísmo tiende a reafirmar la tradición que considera la crisis como un momento de desarrollo, la ecología-mundo desarrolla la teoría de la brecha metabólica de un modo bastante inaudito. La convergencia entre estos dos paradigmas —lo que, en realidad, constituye un exigente intercambio teórico y que, por lo tanto, requiere una intensa reflexión por parte de ambas posiciones— puede producirse a través de una relectura del proceso histórico de la politización de la ecología. Aunque se suele situarlo entre mediados de los años setenta y la siguiente década —tras el gran ciclo de conflictos fordistas—, en los últimos años se está comprobando una hipótesis distinta: esta politización no sólo ocurrió una década antes, pero también, y, sobre todo, sucedió debido a, y no a pesar de, las luchas del movimiento obrero (en estrecha relación con el surgimiento del feminismo revolucionario). En ese contexto, la economía verde neoliberal —es decir, el intento capitalista de internalizar el límite ecológico, transformándolo de un obstáculo a la valorización a una estrategia innovadora de acumulación— asume simultáneamente la forma de desarrollo (en línea con la

Colonial empires played a significant role in the history of the capitalocene through their appropriation and exploitation of nature, cheap labor and cheap energies in the extra-European world. In this way, colonial empires contributed to the creation of a world-ecology characterized by unequal economic and ecological exchanges at the global scale. This article, drawing on Jason Moore’s conceptual framework, archival sources and the historical literature, takes as case studies the contribution to modern world-ecology of the two main colonies of the French colonial empire, Algeria and Vietnam, with their respective fossil, forest and agricultural resources. In the first part, the comparative analysis of fossil fuel productions in colonial Algeria and Vietnam aims to test the world-ecology hypothesis of a colonial production of energy characterized as systematically cheap and exported to western capitalist centers. In the second part, the joint history of Vietnam’s rubber plantations and of Algeria’s settler agriculture seeks to determine to what extent colonizers succeeded in producing cheap tropical goods for western countries. Finally, in the third part, the combined study of the colonial exploitation of Vietnam and Algeria’s forest resources intends to assess to what extent French colonial environmentalism interfered with the production of cheap wood exported to the world-ecology. The first section of the article establishes that in the case of Algeria, the colonial production of fossil energy was not always cheap. In the case of coal, exploited in Kenadsa between 1917 and 1962, it was neither cheap nor exported to western capitalist centers due to its remote location, its high extraction and transportation costs, and its rebellious and scarce workforce, making it uncompetitive with cheaper British coals. In the case of oil and gas resources, although their exploitation from 1956 was profitable for private companies, and exported mainly to France until the 1970’s, their price was higher than the Middle East’s hydrocarbons. Moreover, their State-assisted development was undertaken due to strategic considerations (‘energy security’ and the possibility of paying oil in francs rather than in dollars) and despite the costs it implied – and not because it was cheap. This demonstrates that although peripheries of the capitalist world-ecology tend to produce cheap energy for the western centers, this is not always the case and can even by the opposite. The second section of the article shows that although Vietnamese coal was cheap and profitable to exploit for some – but not all – colonial companies, it was mainly exported to Asian countries. This indicates that cheap energy produced in colonies and based on unequal ecological exchange did not always benefit exclusively western capitalist centers. The third section of the article shows that French colonizers failed to create capitalist natures producing cheap tropical goods for western countries, only succeeding to cultivate similar agricultural goods (like wine) to those produced by western centers. This manifests that colonial agricultural productions can sometimes, despite the cheapness of the colonial workforce in both cases, be neither cheap nor environmentally complementary to those of western centers. However, colonial agriculture in Algeria did manage to bolster French settler colonialism economically, although it was costly for the metropolis through underproduction crises. The fourth section, by contrast, exhibits the successes of colonial scientists to acclimate hevea brasilianis to Vietnam and that of companies, with the assistance of the colonial administration, to produce cheap tropical raw materials for western industries. However, rubber plantations in Vietnam favored the spread of malaria amongst workers, a socio-ecological contradiction that was not too costly for plantations at first but that eventually led Vietnamese workers, frustrated by the absence of substantial reforms to better their life conditions, to revolt against plantations during the Indochina War (1946-1954). Hence, the success of French colonizers in Vietnam to create capitalist natures producing cheap tropical goods was far from absolute, with falling profits during the Indochina War due to the destruction of one tenth of rubber plantations. The fifth section of the article reveals that despite the environmentalist rhetoric that France had conquered Algeria to restore the alleged granary of Rome, the cheap appropriation and exploitation of Algerian forests by private colonial companies at the expense of local populations -especially that of cork trees- was not impeded by colonial environmentalism, but rather justified by it. This proves that, even in such a case, colonizers were more concerned with economic considerations than with ideological ones. Similarly, the environmentalist stance of the colonial forestry administration in Vietnam never obstructed the cheap exploitation of local forest resources by private colonial companies, but only justified the colonial appropriation of Vietnam’s forests at the expense of local populations. The comparative analysis of fossil fuel productions in colonial Algeria and Vietnam allows us to relativize and question the idea that colonial energy productions were systematically cheap and exported to western capitalist centers. Indeed, the importance of geo-strategic considerations can and did push colonial powers, in this case France, to fund at great cost unprofitable and/or uncompetitive energy productions in their colonies. The joint study of colonial Algeria’s settler agriculture and Vietnam’s rubber plantations provides evidence for the unequal capacity of colonizers to create capitalist natures producing cheap tropical goods. This indicates that colonizers were always to a certain extent dependent on local environmental conditions to create capitalist natures, although they did manage to significantly transform these conditions in both cases. This also shows that the development of colonial agricultural productions did not always have the same priorities as settler colonies; the colonial administration mainly aimed at the economic prosperity of settlers, even when their production competed with those of metropolitan farmers, while in non-settler colonies it rather encouraged the production of cheap tropical goods that were not producible in the colonial metropolis. Finally, the comparative history of the exploitation of forest resources in colonial Vietnam and Algeria by private companies shows that colonial environmentalism was not an obstacle to colonial deforestation, but rather justified the dispossession and blaming of local colonized populations. Hence, although the environmental preoccupations of some colonizers, linked with racial anxieties in Algeria and scientific forestry management principles in Vietnam, were sincere and sometimes clashed with the economic interests of private companies, they almost never prevailed over the latter. The world-ecology conceptual framework thus proves to be analytically useful for the study of French colonies and their productions, although it must be given greater nuance and complexity through the multiplication of case studies. Los imperios coloniales jugaron un papel importante en la historia del Capitaloceno a través de la apropiación y explotación de los recursos naturales baratos, de la mano de obra y las energías baratas del mundo extraeuropeo, pero también por su producción de las naturalezas capitalizadas dentro de él, y, más ampliamente su coproducción de un mundo ecológico caracterizado por intercambios económicos y ecológicos desiguales a escala global. Basado en una problemática resultante del trabajo de Jason Moore, una reinterpretación de la historiografía existente y un trabajo de archivo, este artículo muestra que, si bien es esclarecedor comprender la historia de los combustibles fósiles, los bosques y las plantaciones de Argelia (1830-1962) y de Vietnam (1858-1954) en términos de ecología-mundo, su contribución al desarrollo de la ecología-mundo debe examinarse a la luz de las especificidades de cada colonia y de cada sector. En primer lugar, hay que matizar la hipótesis de una producción colonial de combustibles fósiles que sería sistemáticamente barata y destinada a los centros capitalistas occidentales de la ecología-mundo, no correspondiendo esta hipótesis ni al carbón argelino (caro y usado localmente) ni a los hidrocarburos argelinos (caros y exportados principalmente a Francia) ni al carbón vietnamita (barato pero exportado al sudeste asiático). Entonces, la historia conjunta de las plantaciones de caucho vietnamitas y la agricultura colonial argelina revela una capacidad desigual y nunca absoluta de los colonizadores franceses, siempre dependientes de las condiciones ecológicas locales, para crear naturalezas capitalizadas que generen productos tropicales baratos. Finalmente, el estudio combinado de la explotación colonial de los recursos forestales en Argelia y Vietnam permite mostrar hasta qué punto el ecologismo manifestado por los colonizadores franceses, en particular el de las administraciones forestales coloniales, no obstaculizó la producción. Para la ecología-mundo, este análisis, evidentemente, merecería ser profundizado por nuevos estudios de caso, pero constituye, sin embargo, un primer vistazo a la compleja inserción histórica de las colonias francesas en el mundo ecológico.

A lo largo del siglo XX y comienzos del XXI la comunidad académica ha desarrollado numerosas teorías para explicar el fenómeno de las migraciones internacionales, tal como Massey et al. (1998) recogieron en su famoso libro “Worlds in motion”. Sin embargo, una mayoría de estudios producidos en este campo se han referido principalmente a casos empíricos recurriendo al uso de los principales paradigmas cuyas explicaciones de la realidad han tendido a reiterarse. Rompiendo con esta tendencia, en los últimos años han ido desarrollándose nuevos enfoques, cuyo carácter interdisciplinar ha permitido llevar a cabo estudios novedosos que han aportado respuestas diferentes a los interrogantes más clásicos acerca de las migraciones internacionales. Esta investigación pretende contribuir a dicha tendencia presentando un nuevo paradigma proveniente de las Relaciones Internacionales: la ecología-mundo. Situando las relaciones socio-ecológicas como epicentro del desarrollo del capitalismo global, el paradigma creado por Jason W. Moore permitirá no solo llevar cabo novedosas investigaciones de los fenómenos sociales y políticos, sino que abrirá una nueva ventana teórica para conectar sus postulados con una infinidad de áreas de estudio. En base a su perspectiva holística, histórica y transnacional, la ecología-mundo se ofrece como un nuevo paradigma idóneo para explicar fenómenos globales tan diversos como el cambio climático, la crisis económica o la movilidad humana. Gracias a sus múltiples herramientas teóricas, el paradigma aquí presentado ofrece una infinidad de posibilidades para el desarrollo de estudios críticos que expliquen las migraciones humanas desde prismas hasta ahora inexplorados. El objetivo de este artículo por lo tanto será doble. En primer lugar, se perseguirá caracterizar la ecología-mundo definiendo sus raíces teóricas y sus principales planteamientos analíticos con el objetivo de dar a conocer una propuesta hasta ahora largamente desconocida en el mundo hispanoparlante. En segundo lugar, se buscará resaltar las principales contribuciones que los constructos teóricos del paradigma ofrecen para el estudio de las migraciones. Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the academic community has developed numerous theories to explain the phenomenon of international migration, as Massey et al. (1998) collected in his famous book \"Worlds in motion\". However, a majority of studies produced in this field have referred mainly to empirical cases resorting to the use of the main paradigms whose explanations of reality have tended to be reiterated. Breaking with this trend, in recent years, new approaches have been developed, whose interdisciplinary character has allowed to carry out innovative studies that have provided different answers to the most classic questions about international migrations. This research aims to contribute to this trend by presenting a new paradigm from International Relations: the world-ecology. Placing socio-ecological relations as the epicenter of the development of global capitalism, the paradigm created by Jason W. Moore will allow not only to carry out novel investigations of social and political phenomena, but will also open a new theoretical window to connect his postulates with an infinity of study areas. Based on its holistic, historical and transnational perspective, world-ecology offers a new paradigm suitable to explain diverse global phenomena such as climate change, economic crisis or human mobility. Thanks to its multiple theoretical tools, the paradigm presented here offers an infinity of possibilities for the development of critical studies that explain human migrations from prisms until now unexplored. The objective of this article will therefore be twofold. Firstly, it will define the world-ecology paradigm by identifying its theoretical roots and its main analytical approaches. Secondly, it will seek to highlight the main contributions that the theoretical constructs of the paradigm offer for the study of migrations.