Fordismus als Fetisch

Unter der Bezeichnung »Fordismus« wird in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Literatur die Verbindung von Massenproduktion mit durch hohe Löhne möglich gewordener Massenkonsumtion bezeichnet, als deren Vorreiter Henry Ford gilt. Der Artikel bemüht sich dieses Bild von Ford zu korrigieren: die in Fords PR-Abteilung produzierte Ideologie werde mit der Realität verwechselt. Darüber hinaus werden die Widersprüche aufgezeigt, die eine Analyse des Nachkriegskapitalismus mit dem Konzept »Fordismus« mit sich bringt

Civilización ecológica, revolución ecológica

What is needed to bring about an ecological revolution aimed at human survival is not simply environmental reform, but a much broader ecological and social revolution aimed at transcending the logic of capitalism itself.Lo que se necesita para llevar a cabo una revolución ecológica dirigida a la supervivencia humana no es simplemente una reforma medioambiental, sino una revolución ecológica y social mucho más amplia dirigida a trascender la lógica del propio capitalismo

Stoffwechsel, Energie und Entropie in Marx‘ Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie: Jenseits des Podolinsky-Mythos (Teil 2)

"Thermodynamische Überlegungen zu Fragen der Energieerhaltung, der entropischen Dissipation durch Reibung sowie zur Wechselwirkung physikalischer Kräfte spielen im ersten Band des Kapital eine zentrale Rolle. Sie finden sich vor allem im Kapitel über Maschinerie und große Industrie, das den zentralen Teil der Marxschen Untersuchung der industriellen Entwicklung im Kapitalismus darstellt...

Stoffwechsel, Energie und Entropie in Marx’ Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie:: Jenseits des Podolinsky-Mythos (Teil 1)

Until recently, most commentators, including ecological Marxists, have assumed that Marx’s historical materialism was only marginally ecologically sensitive at best, or even that it was explicitly anti-ecological. However, research over the last decade has demonstrated not only that Marx deemed ecological materialism essential to the critique of political economy and to investigations into socialism, but also that his treatment of the coevolution of nature and society was in many ways the most sophisticated to be put forth by any social theorist prior to the late twentieth century. Still, criticisms continue to be leveled at Marx and Engels for their understanding of thermodynamics and the extent to which their work is said to conflict with the core tenets of ecological economics. In this respect, the rejection by Marx and Engels of the pioneering contributions of the Ukrainian socialist Sergei Podolinsky, one of the founders of energetics, has been frequently offered as the chief ecological case against them. Building on an earlier analysis of Marx’s and Engels’s response to Podolinsky, this article shows that they relied on an open-system, metabolic-energetic model that adhered to all of the main strictures of ecological economics – but one that also (unlike ecological economics) rooted the violation of solar and other environmental-sustainability conditions in the class relations of capitalist society. The result is to generate a deeper understanding of classical historical materialism’s ecological approach to economy and society – providing an ecological- materialist critique that can help uncover the systemic roots of today’s “treadmill of production” and global environmental crisis

Manuel Sacristán at the Onset of Ecological Marxism after Stalinism

Thirty-one years ago, in 1985, Manuel Sacristán died in Barcelona at the age of 59. After the publication in 2014 of a volume with some of his writings translated into English (Llorente 2014), it is time to help non-Spanish-speaking readers to know more about him. Yet it is not easy to explain to generations born after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that Manuel Sacristán was a most important Marxist philosopher and at the same time one of the few pioneers introducing political ecology and antinuclear peace movement during the last quarter of the 20th century in Spain. Many people believe that Marxism, environmentalism and pacifism are views that exclude each other. Most of what has been said and done on behalf of Marxism since Stalin took over the leadership of the Communist Party of the USSR in the 1930s, up to its dissolution in 1991, contributes to sustaining this belief. The fast industrialization of the Old Russian Empire undertaken by the Soviet State was nowhere near taking into account ecological sustainability. Its socio-environmental impact turned out to be comparable or even worse than the ones caused by capitalist industrialization

Enlightened common sense II: clarifying and developing the concepts of intransitivity and domains of reality

In this article, the second of a series of four articles that engage critically with the arguments of two recent and significant additions to the literature on critical realism (Bhaskar’s Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism and Bhaskar et al.’s Interdisciplinarity and Wellbeing: A Critical Realist General Theory of Interdisciplinarity), I present the results of a critical engagement with other categories of original or basic critical realism. Using the method of immanent critique and focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the arguments of Enlightened Common Sense, I identify, and propose solutions to, a range of problems pertaining to the concepts of intransitivity, the domains of the real and the subjective, and the domain of the actual. In identifying and resolving these problems, my aim is to clarify and develop the categories of original critical realism and thereby ensure that critical realism as a whole is as effective an underlabourer for science as it can be

Capitalism, Democracy, and the Degrowth Horizon

This papers seeks to contribute to a dialogue between the degrowth perspective and Marxist approaches on the sources and possible solutions to the ongoing ecological crisis of capitalism. While I agree with the general critique that the degrowth movement has raised not only against the consequences of growth but also against the idea of growth itself, I argue that the root causes of the destructive character of capitalism are not to be found in growth, but in capitalist accumulation. I present my reading of three of Marx’s most important contributions to our understanding of capitalism and argue for an understanding that puts the emphasis on the separation of the labourers from the means of production, alienated labour, the imperative and the dynamic of competition, and the limited nature of liberal democracy. I argue that growth could be greened in a post-capitalist society if the institutions and dynamics that drive capitalist accumulation were abolished and full democracy was established. The paper ends with a description of how the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil managed to unevenly and contradictorily challenge and subvert some of the social institutions and dynamics that sustain capitalist accumulation