Radical Perspectives on Climate Change: From Critical Theory to Eco-Marxism and Beyond
Authors: Hornborg Alf 
Published: May 2024

Since the late 1980s, a number of radical theorists have increasingly addressed the relation between capitalism and environmental degradation, including climate change. Many environmentalists and ecosocialists have criticized classical Marxist theory for celebrating the intensification of technological productivity and ignoring environmental issues. Responding to such charges, some “ecological Marxists” have intended to show that the theoretical framework conceived by Marx and Engels is attuned to ecological concerns. In reviewing their classical texts, however, they have inadvertently exposed fundamental obstacles to articulating a consistent materialist account of political economy. A central obstacle is the incompatibility of a materialist theory of value with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Entropy Law. Whether focusing on inputs of labor power or energy, such a theory of value contradicts the entropic or dissipative character of any production process. Whereas so-called Western Marxism has refrained from considering biophysical nature, eco-Marxists such as Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster have attempted to reconcile Marxian value theory and thermodynamics. However, as the increase of economic exchange-value through production correlates positively with entropy, the Marxist labor theory of value is as unable as mainstream economics to align itself with the laws of thermodynamics. The interaction of cultural valuation and biophysical processes illustrates why social and natural aspects of economic processes must be analytically distinguished. “Social” aspects are those which are contingent on and generated by symbolic communication. The process of global warming, largely driven by the entropic emissions of fossil-fueled technology, has both natural and social aspects. Climate change has become an increasingly prominent concern in eco-Marxist literature. Its origins have been traced by Andreas Malm to the turn to fossil energy in early industrial Britain. To indicate how global warming is connected to the incentives of industrial capitalists, he coined the concept of the Capitalocene for our current era. The concept has also been used by Jason W. Moore, who emphasizes the ecological dimension of the capitalist world-system. While Moore’s global perspective is important, his adoption of a posthumanist approach has led him to unconditionally abandon all nature/society distinctions, which has met critique from Foster, Malm, and other eco-Marxists. A radically materialist understanding of global warming since the Industrial Revolution would recognize the accumulation of fossil-fueled technology in wealthier parts of the world-system as resulting from ecologically unequal exchange. Such asymmetric resource transfers, orchestrated but also obscured by market prices, simultaneously aggravate global inequalities and greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. A transdisciplinary analysis of the climate crisis would focus on how incentives prompted by the artifact of all-purpose money generate a global social metabolism conducive to rising emissions and the uneven accumulation of technological infrastructure.