Socioecological marginality as a fix: leveraging inequality to valorise and legitimise capital in Southern Italy industrial-scale wind energy

Is socioecological marginality functional or dysfunctional to investment in wind energy? If marginality is functionally embedded in investment schemes, what is its role within the wider accumulation dynamic? I address these questions by applying the lens of historical materialist political economy to a case study of industrial-scale wind energy at the edge of European capitalism: the Apulo-Campano Apennine in Southern Italy.

I argue that marginality is functional to wind energy investment for two reasons. First, it reduces the cost of accessing the lands where winds enable turbines to spin. Second, it offers a rationale that justifies capital accumulation, framing it as the solution to both local underdevelopment and the global climate catastrophe.

At a higher level, socioecological marginality works as both a spatiotemporal and socioecological fix. On the one hand, it ensures that capital surpluses invested in wind energy are sufficiently valorised. On the other hand, it extends the hegemony of the underlying socioecological relations under the guise of ‘green’ and social credentials.

As a corollary, I show that both fixes are operationalised by territorially based alliances amongst classes, groups, and institutions that capture surplus value in and around wind energy. These systems of sociotechnical cooperation redistribute incomes and privilege in alignment with power relations as they occur at the territorial level.

In exploring how socioecological marginality and capital accumulation influence each other, the paper shows how the exploitation and crystallisation of historically determined inequalities function as a key element of wind energy generation under capitalism.