What's Capitalism Got to Do with Environmental Justice from a Global Perspective?
The short answer is that capitalism - or at least a form of market organization, characterized by certain kinds of property ownership, goods treated as commodities, and background political institutions - contributes to the destruction of regional ecologies, species extinction, natural resource depletion, and the destabilization of vital planetary systems that support life on Earth.
Rather than look at environmental justice primarily through the lens of the consumption behavior of individuals and its aggregate impact on the planet we should examine the consequences of the mode of production that differentially shapes the organization of land, labor, and way of life for people around the world. So we have to ask: What social conditions - good and bad - are causally attributable to capitalism, alone or in combination with other social forces?
Capitalism has been credited with: securing a relatively long term peace and widespread prosperity; the emancipation of the laboring classes from feudal subordination; the creation of new economic opportunities that mitigate and erode legacy effects of racial and gender inequality; helping to bring the colonial era to an end; ushering in material conditions hospitable to the growth of democracy; and raising the global standard of living through unprecedented technological innovations.
And capitalism is often blamed for: fueling socially destructive, privately profitable regional military conflict; setting in motion a economic dynamic that simultaneously produces concentrations of wealth and human misery; expanding the domain of goods subject to commodification, thereby exacerbating and entrenching racial and gender hierarchies; unleashing patterns of resource extraction from fragile lands and labor exploitation of vulnerable peoples, during both the classical era of colonial rule and the neocolonial era; contributing to the demise of democratic institutions and undermining processes of collective control over key aspects of social life; and fostering endless economic growth and overconsumption that has resulted in massive environmental degradation and rapid resource depletion.
Among the topics to be included are:
Definitions of capitalism that are intended to reveal what makes it a distinctive mode of production and a template for social organization.
Periodization - ways demarcating epochs of capitalist organization, corresponding to features of markets and background political institutions presumed to be distinctive in both organization and consequences.
Characteristics of 21st century capitalism - what is global capitalism like now, and what are its current and likely consequences for land, labor, and way of life?
Neoliberalism - what is it, where and how did it originate, and what does it have to do with the way nation-states and supranational institutions regulate the global economy?
Imperialism and capitalism connections - a topic of ongoing debate, given that some have argued that imperialism represents the highest stage of capitalism, while others have traced the origins and rationale for empire to pre-capitalist social arrangements?
China’s role and significance in the global economy, with it peculiar brand of expansionist, state capitalism, and the probable environment footprint of its belt and road initiative, massive urban relocation efforts, and large-scale water projects.
The main ways in which global markets are structured, for example: global supply chains that rely more on contract than ownership and more on informal, precarious labor instead of formal employment arrangements; the ways in which natural resource contracts and concessions are structured, market risks are allocated, burdens of legal compliance are shifted, and environmental negative externalities are generated; the relation between global financial institutions and nation-states, in particular, the issues of tax avoidance and the hyper-mobility of capital, their role in imposing austerity programs on debtor nations, and the role of the financial sector in the growth of public and private debt and the consequent shrinkage of "policy space" for dealing with infrastructure replacement and the fallout of global market bubbles.
The future of Universal Basic Income (UBI) policies as a policy response to the predicted effects of artificial intelligence (AI) in eliminating jobs.
The relation between socioeconomic class and social position based on attributions of race and gender. Are these issues of intersectional justice, as some claim, each marking a socially defined axis of disadvantage, stigma, and disrespect, or are issues of race and gender in some way salient matters of justice due to the background facts about the workings of capitalism?
The short answer is that capitalism - or at least a form of market organization, characterized by certain kinds of property ownership, goods treated as commodities, and background political institutions - contributes to the destruction of regional ecologies, species extinction, natural resource depletion, and the destabilization of vital planetary systems that support life on Earth.
Rather than look at environmental justice primarily through the lens of the consumption behavior of individuals and its aggregate impact on the planet we should examine the consequences of the mode of production that differentially shapes the organization of land, labor, and way of life for people around the world. So we have to ask: What social conditions - good and bad - are causally attributable to capitalism, alone or in combination with other social forces?
Capitalism has been credited with: securing a relatively long term peace and widespread prosperity; the emancipation of the laboring classes from feudal subordination; the creation of new economic opportunities that mitigate and erode legacy effects of racial and gender inequality; helping to bring the colonial era to an end; ushering in material conditions hospitable to the growth of democracy; and raising the global standard of living through unprecedented technological innovations.
And capitalism is often blamed for: fueling socially destructive, privately profitable regional military conflict; setting in motion a economic dynamic that simultaneously produces concentrations of wealth and human misery; expanding the domain of goods subject to commodification, thereby exacerbating and entrenching racial and gender hierarchies; unleashing patterns of resource extraction from fragile lands and labor exploitation of vulnerable peoples, during both the classical era of colonial rule and the neocolonial era; contributing to the demise of democratic institutions and undermining processes of collective control over key aspects of social life; and fostering endless economic growth and overconsumption that has resulted in massive environmental degradation and rapid resource depletion.
Among the topics to be included are:
Definitions of capitalism that are intended to reveal what makes it a distinctive mode of production and a template for social organization.
Periodization - ways demarcating epochs of capitalist organization, corresponding to features of markets and background political institutions presumed to be distinctive in both organization and consequences.
Characteristics of 21st century capitalism - what is global capitalism like now, and what are its current and likely consequences for land, labor, and way of life?
Neoliberalism - what is it, where and how did it originate, and what does it have to do with the way nation-states and supranational institutions regulate the global economy?
Imperialism and capitalism connections - a topic of ongoing debate, given that some have argued that imperialism represents the highest stage of capitalism, while others have traced the origins and rationale for empire to pre-capitalist social arrangements?
China’s role and significance in the global economy, with it peculiar brand of expansionist, state capitalism, and the probable environment footprint of its belt and road initiative, massive urban relocation efforts, and large-scale water projects.
The main ways in which global markets are structured, for example: global supply chains that rely more on contract than ownership and more on informal, precarious labor instead of formal employment arrangements; the ways in which natural resource contracts and concessions are structured, market risks are allocated, burdens of legal compliance are shifted, and environmental negative externalities are generated; the relation between global financial institutions and nation-states, in particular, the issues of tax avoidance and the hyper-mobility of capital, their role in imposing austerity programs on debtor nations, and the role of the financial sector in the growth of public and private debt and the consequent shrinkage of "policy space" for dealing with infrastructure replacement and the fallout of global market bubbles.
The future of Universal Basic Income (UBI) policies as a policy response to the predicted effects of artificial intelligence (AI) in eliminating jobs.
The relation between socioeconomic class and social position based on attributions of race and gender. Are these issues of intersectional justice, as some claim, each marking a socially defined axis of disadvantage, stigma, and disrespect, or are issues of race and gender in some way salient matters of justice due to the background facts about the workings of capitalism?