 Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the PlanetMax Ajl Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2023, vol. 12, issue 1, 12-50 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. Keywords: Agriculture; climate; degrowth; extractivism; imperialism; ecologically unequal exchange (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:agspub:v:12:y:2023:i:1:p:12-50 DOI: 10.1177/22779760221145232 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy from Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South |
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