{"title":"Spanish High-Speed Rail: Infrastructural Development and Dominance Without Hegemony","authors":"Natalia Buier","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2164403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2164403","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article addresses the development of Europe’s foremost high-speed rail (HSR) network, the Spanish AVE (Alta Velocidad Española-Spanish High-Speed Rail). Against the prevalent description of AVE as a project rooted in the consent of the subject population, I argue that it is better understood as a case of dominance without hegemony. I substantiate this claim by turning to two different moments in the history of AVE: its adoption as part of a broader transformation of the transport market; and the struggle against HSR in the Basque Country.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48664104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“There’s an App for That!”: Ordering Claims on Natural Resources through Individual Carbon Accounts in China","authors":"Charlotte Bruckermann","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2089705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2089705","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In China, the exchange of carbon credits prevalent in global environmental governance has expanded beyond emissions exchanges focused on polluting industrial installations and peripheral green lungs. Instead, an innovative field of individual carbon accounting schemes rescaled the responsibility for carbon emissions, savings, and offsets to the consumer-citizen through digital apps. This repurposing of carbon cannot be traced to simple top-down command-and-control measures conventionally associated with authoritarian regimes, nor to pure market-driven interests ascribed to neoliberal governance. In individual carbon accounting the auditing, consultancy and accountability strategies preaching resilience in the face of the global risks and capitalist crises meet with the Marxist-Leninist commitments to the “mass line.” The Chinese Communist Party and related actors thereby foster GDP growth while performing environmental redress. Chinese social management measures, including individual carbon accounting, belong to a cybernetic, autonomous, and aspirational promise of a more harmonious melding of ecology and economy, often distilled in visions of Ecological Civilization, yet placing hope in the possibility of green capitalism.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46515816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Passing the Editorial Torch","authors":"Salvatore Engel‐Di Mauro","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2140966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2140966","url":null,"abstract":"A farmer was on his way down to Biella one day. The weather was so stormy that it was next to impossible to get over the roads. But the farmer had important business and pushed onward in the face of the driving rain. He met an old man, who said to him, “A good day to you! Where are you going, my good man, in such haste?” “To Biella,” answered the farmer, without slowing down. “You might at least say, ‘God willing.’” The farmer stopped, looked the old man in the eye, and snapped, “God willing, I’m on my way to Biella. But even if God isn’t willing, I still have to go there all the same.” Now the old man happened to be the Lord. “In that case you’ll go to Biella in seven years,” he said. “In the meantime, jump into this swamp and stay there for seven years.” Suddenly the farmer changed into a frog and jumped into the swamp. Seven years went by. The farmer came out of the swamp, turned back into a man, clapped his hat on his head, and continued on his way to market. After a short distance he met the old man again. “And where are you going, my good man?” “To Biella.” “You might say, ‘God willing’.” “If God wills it, fine. If not, I know the consequence and can now go into the swamp unassisted.” Nor for the life of him would he say one word more. – Calvino, Italo. 2015 [1956] Fiabe Italiane [Italian Folktales]. Milano: Mondadori, p. 153.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43767326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Producing Capitalist Landscapes: Ethnographies of the Green Transition and its Contradictions","authors":"Natalia Buier, Jaume Franquesa","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2138481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2138481","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue “Producing capitalist landscapes: Ethnographies of the green transition and its contradictions” lays out the foundations of our shared approach to the study of capitalist processes of socioenvironmental transformation and spells out some of the main findings and common themes that traverse the articles in the collection. Thus, in the first part we present the basic tenets of Marxist historical ethnography, and discuss how it can be applied to the study of capitalism as an environment-making historical system. A brief summary of the articles in the special issue shows that each one of them represents a particular take on the study of the production of capitalist landscapes within the context of the green or low-carbon transition. In the second part we engage with three common threads that emerge from the collection: the dialectic between capitalist value, social worth and processes of cultural and economic devaluation; the role of the state in coordinating the production of environments appropriated to the goals of capitalist accumulation; and the symbolic and environmental dimensions of technological fixes.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42260804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Desalination as a New Frontier of Environmental Justice Struggle: A Dialogue with Oscar Rodriguez and Andrea León-Grossmann","authors":"B. O’Neill","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2126130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2126130","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This interview begins a conversation about the social justice implications of an emerging socioecological concern—the desalination industry. Seawater desalination is the industrial process of creating drinking water from the ocean. This dialogue, with two activists at the forefront of contesting desalination in California, indicates how this practice, as a proposed climate adaptation strategy, is not just a matter of crafting governance reforms allowing non-state actors to price water for the purposes of efficient management, or “drought-proofing.” Instead, they highlight the ways in which the environmental justice movement now faces a world-system of shareholder, equity-partnered, and pension-funded capitalism that is fragmenting nature and crafting an ever more abstract social nature into various, segmented resource types. As the dialogue describes, desalination is not pursued for the purposes of developing affordable and sustainable water management solutions alone, but for investment in long-duration fixed capital “assets.” This piece further facilitates the programs of environmental sociology and political ecology by engaging various publics in developing a community of critical praxis. As such, the dialogue carves out new terrains of theory and action at the frontiers of nature, water, and society.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45183170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jhon Jairo Losada Cubillos, Hernán Felipe Trujillo Quintero, Leyson Jimmy Lugo Perea
{"title":"Extractive Logic of the Coloniality of Nature: Feeling-Thinking Through Agroecology as a Decolonial Project","authors":"Jhon Jairo Losada Cubillos, Hernán Felipe Trujillo Quintero, Leyson Jimmy Lugo Perea","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2127416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2127416","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The following paper intends to discuss the effects of colonial power on nature, especially on the understanding of agriculture from the dialogue between decolonial approach and agroecology. It addresses the potential of agroecology within decolonial activities mainly in three scenarios: (i) the epistemological, as an alternative to scientific rationality; (ii) the political, as an alternative to the hegemony imposed by racial and patriarchal criteria; and (iii) the ontological, as an alternative to the dualist, individualist and atomizing of modernity. The main thesis is that the notions about “nature” and “environment”, which are associated with agricultural practices and capitalist-type practices, are consequences of power relations that are inscribed in the modernity- coloniality relationship and can be understood as epistemological and ontological assumptions based on an extractive logic. Finally, the importance of political work (or defiance) is discussed from the perspective of relationality and the pluri-verse in which agroecology can be a transformative option of decoloniality.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48928036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ecosocialism for Realists: Transitions, Trade-Offs, and Authoritarian Dangers","authors":"Michael J. Albert","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2106578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2106578","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 Ecological Marxists have succeeded in developing compelling ecological critiques of capitalism and principles for alternative ecosocialist political-economies. However, they have devoted relatively little attention to strategic questions, such as: How might ecosocialist transitions take place? What are the challenges, trade-offs, and risks they would likely confront? And how may ecosocialists and allied movements best strategize to navigate them? In particular, these approaches are limited by two problematic tendencies, which I focus on in this essay: 1) an “abstract utopian” tendency that describes idealized ecosocialist futures without deeply considering how they might emerge; and 2) a tendency to ignore or downplay possible trade-offs, dilemmas, and dangers that ecosocialisms-in-transition would likely confront. In contrast, I propose what I call a “realist utopian” approach to ecosocialism, which will more deeply investigate the possible dynamics of ecosocialist transitions; the possible trade-offs, dilemmas, and dangers they would likely face; and how ecosocialists may best strategize to confront them.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47187356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Liberatory Practices and Potentials in Brooklyn School Gardens","authors":"M. Oyewole","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2103443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2103443","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT School gardens provide collaborative grounds for education and cultivation, operating within the U.S. education system and in connection to movements to rectify societal and environmental injustices. Based on perspectives of gardeners in public schools in Brooklyn, NY and the intersection of school gardens with other movement work, a four-part framework of liberatory practices and potentials via school gardening is outlined. This paper asks: What liberatory practices are happening in Brooklyn school gardens, and what is the potential for building upon them, particularly in relation to rectifying injustices faced within racially minoritized communities? In this study, gardens were found to support personal achievements, health benefits, adult mentorship, peer bonding, identity affirmation, community transformation, and positive relationships with the natural world. Some programming addressed social and environmental injustices explicitly, but students and staff identified potential to expand this; particularly needed are clear curricular prioritization and social and material support. Important to engendering any form of liberation through school gardening are: intentionality and transparency regarding program aims, just forums for student engagement and impact, and critical acknowledgement of the political and geographic realities in which these gardens operate.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46321214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Southern Chronicles: The Political Ecology of Class in the Italian Industrial Periphery","authors":"A. Pusceddu","doi":"10.1080/10455752.2022.2104335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2104335","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article focuses on class as a central concept for analyzing the common ground of labor and environmental struggles. Through the examination of the frictions between industrial workers and environmentalists in Brindisi, an industrial city in the Italian South, the article unravels the socio-ecological dilemmas underlying their valuation frameworks. It addresses the job blackmail as a central element of the framework through which workers and environmentalists understand the contradictory forces at work in the local socio-ecological crisis. The article looks at the critical junctions that underpin the making of the local working class. As concrete determinations of capitalist socio-ecological contradictions, these junctions constitute the focus for the political ecology of class pursued in this article. To illuminate the place-bound experience of these contradictions, the article looks at the tension between value and values in shaping the experience of the work–environment nexus. Assuming the centrality of class for labor and environmental struggles, the article argues for the re-articulation of the fields of workers and environmentalists as a crucial step towards the definition of a common emancipatory socio-ecological project.","PeriodicalId":39549,"journal":{"name":"Capitalism, Nature, Socialism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42092118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}