scholarly journals Marx's critical discourse for thinking about environmental devastation: a perspective beyond the hegemonic imaginaries of sustainability

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (29) ◽  
pp. e210826-e210826
Author(s):  
Josemanuel Luna-Nemecio
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Economics ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Ecological View ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Economics And Politics

The historical development of contemporary capitalism has produced an environmental crisis of global dimensions. The predominance of harmful capital technology determines the deployment of the capital productive forces that overexploit and pollute nature in ways never seen before. In this context, the present study aims to advance towards the reconstruction of the ecological streak of Marxism from Marx's critical discourse, distancing itself from both the hegemonic imaginaries of sustainability. An exploratory analysis of documents was followed to present the arguments that both Conventional Economics (CE) and environmental economics deploy to try to explain contemporary environmental devastation, and subsequently, from this impotent criticism and prey to the logic of the market and value as a social form, it goes on to structure the hegemonic imaginaries of sustainability. In this sense, this paper argues for the need for the critical and scientific discourse of Karl Marx to think about the environmental devastation and the objective conditions of possibility for ecological capitalism; thus, it was possible to address the ecological and political-libertarian dimension of Marx's thought and the task of developing it to break with the hegemonic views of sustainability; and overcome the series of misrepresentations and misstatements that have been made to an alleged anti-ecological view of Marx. The study concluded that, while the struggle for the environment has become somewhat urgent, this front does not replace that of the class struggle; that is, the contradiction between capital and nature does not subordinate to the contradiction between capital and labor but, on the contrary, updates it. Therefore, the validity of Marx's critical discourse is essential, in its genesis and development, to make an ecological criticism of the economics and politics of contemporary capitalism.

scholarly journals Architektura podziałów. Przestrzeń walki klas w filmach Bonga Joon-ho Snowpiercer: Arka przyszłości i Parasite

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-66
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kamrowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
Architectural Space ◽  
Theoretical Frame

Tekst jest próbą analizy filmów Snowpiercer: Arka przyszłości i Parasite koreańskiego reżysera Bonga Joon-ho w ujęciu socjologicznym. Teoretycznego zaplecza dostarczają pojęcia klasy społecznej i walki klas opisane przez Karola Marksa, następnie skorygowane przez Maxa Webera i dalej reinterpretowane przez Pierre’a Bourdieu. Posłużono się również koncepcją Aparatów Państwa autorstwa Louisa Althussera. Pojęcia te tworzą szkielet teoretyczny, w który wpisana została kwestia przestrzeni architektonicznej w analizowanych filmach. Bong Joon-ho umieszcza bohaterów w zamkniętych wnętrzach i stawia ich w sytuacji konfliktu klasowego, w którym muszą walczyć o przetrwanie lub awans społeczny. Stosując kategorie opisu przestrzeni, jak powierzchnia, zatłoczenie, uporządkowanie czy dostęp do światła słonecznego, twórca definiuje sytuację życiową bohaterów oraz ich motywację. Architecture of Divisions. The Space of Class Struggle in Films by Bong Joon-ho: Snowpiercer and Parasite Abstract The article presents a sociological analysis of two films by Korean director Bong Joon-ho: Snowpiercer(2013) and Parasite(2019). The theoretical background is founded on two terms: social class and class struggle by Karl Marx, redefined by Max Weber and reinterpreted by Pierre Bourdieu. Also the terms of Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser are applied. All those terms form a theoretical frame within which the architectural space of Bong’s films reside. The director situates the protagonists within closed spaces and class struggle, where they have to fight for survival or social advancement. By applying means of spacial description, such as density, area, orderliness, and daylight access, the director defines the protagonists’ social position and their motivation.

One hundred years of environmental crisis

2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
New South ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Physical Limit ◽  
The Social

Exactly a hundred years before this conference, in August 1900, a Royal Commission was appointed which 'deserves a prominent, if not defining, place in Australian environmental history' (Quinn 1995). This paper explores the social, political and environmental context of this very significant inquiry. Beginning with six edited extracts from the Commission's transcript of evidence, the paper reflects upon the enduring relevance of the inquiry today. It describes the nature of European occupation of the western lands of New South Wales in the 1860s and 70s — a period when there appeared no physical limit to pastoral expansion — and then summarises the environmental crisis of the final 20 years of the century. Nineteenth-century debates about land reform were dominated by the class struggle between squatters and selectors and by the imperative to occupy, for strategic and moral purposes, what were regarded as vacant lands. The 1901 Royal Commission gave early voice to environmental arguments for occupation, and not just cultural ones, and there was a recognition that European settlers had disrupted earlier, Aboriginal systems of habitation and management and tipped the land into an escalating instability. Legislators began to argue that the land needed people as much as people needed the land. The paper concludes with the reflection that it is not just the formality of a centenary that makes us want to listen carefully to the voices unearthed by the 1901 Royal Commission. Science is now more integrative of the social and humanist perspective than it was in the middle of the 20th century; it is more receptive to the testimony of people living on and working the land, and more eager to enter into a dialogue with them and their history.

scholarly journals Dialectical Materialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-109
Author(s):  
Hub Zwart
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Dialectical Materialism ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Friedrich Engels

AbstractAlthough Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels strictly speaking never used the term, “dialectical materialism” refers to the philosophy of science and nature developed in (and on the basis of) their writings, emphasising the pivotal role of real-world socio-economic conditions (e.g. labour, class struggle, technological developments). As indicated by their correspondence (Marx & Engels, 1983), their collaboration represented a unique intellectual partnership which began in Paris in 1844 and continued after Marx’s death, when Engels took care of Marx’s legacy, notably the sprawling mass of manuscripts which he managed to transform into Volume II and III of Capital. While their joint effort (resulting in no less than 44 volumes of collected writings known as the Marx Engels Werke, published by Dietz Verlag Berlin) began as co-authorship, they eventually decided on a division of labour (with Marx focussing on Capital), although reading, reviewing, commenting on and contributing to each other’s writings remained an important part of their research practice. As a result of this division of labour, while Marx focussed on political economy, Engels dedicated himself to elaborating a dialectical materialist philosophy of nature and the natural sciences, resulting in works such as the Anti-Dühring and his unfinished Dialectics of Nature (published posthumously), although Engels (a voracious intellectual) wrote and published on may other topics as well, so that his output can be regarded as a dialectical materialist encyclopaedia in fragments. Again, although I will start with an exposition of dialectical materialism, my aim is not to contribute to scholarly discussions on dialectical materialism. My focus is on the how and now, and my aim is to explore how to practice dialectical materialism of technoscience today (cf. Žižek, 2014/2015, p. 1; Hamza, 2016, p. 163).

scholarly journals Class struggle in the era of post-politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (s3) ◽  
pp. 20-34
Author(s):  
Ernesto Abalo ◽  
Diana Jacobsson
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Mainstream Media

Abstract This article addresses how class as a category of conflict and struggle is understood and shaped discursively in mainstream media today. We utilise a case study of how Swedish news media represents the long-lasting conflict in the Swedish labour market between the Swedish Dockworkers’ Union and the employer organisation, Sweden's Ports. Using critical discourse analysis, we show two ways in which class relations are recontextualised in three Swedish newspapers. One is through obscuring class and centring the conflict around business and nationalist discourses, which in the end legitimise a corporate perspective. The other, more marginalised, way is through the critique of class relations that appears in subjective discourse types. This handling of class, we argue, serves the reproduction of a post-political condition.

scholarly journals The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
The Core ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
Empirical Social Science ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Equal Space ◽  
Value Crisis

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx provides an entry point for those new to Marxism. At the same time, its chapters, written by leading Marxist scholars, advance Marxist theory and research. Its coverage is more comprehensive than previous volumes on Marx in terms of both foundational concepts and empirical research on contemporary social problems. It also provides equal space to sociologists, economists, and political scientists, with substantial contributions from philosophers, historians and geographers. The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx consists of seven sections. The first section, Foundations, includes chapters that demonstrate that the core elements of Marx’s political economy of capitalism continue to be defended, elaborated and applied to empirical social science including historical materialism, class, capital, labor, value, crisis, ideology, and alienation. Additional sections include Labor, Class, and Social Divisions; Capitalist States and Spaces; Accumulation, Crisis and Class struggle in the Core Countries; Accumulation, Crisis and Class Struggle in the Peripheral and Semi-Peripheral Countries; and Alternatives to Capitalism.

scholarly journals Kritik på delagtighedens betingelser. Om at være et problem

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (122) ◽  
pp. 263-292
Author(s):  
Devika Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Whiteness Studies ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Critical Whiteness Studies ◽  
Global System ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Critical Whiteness ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Critical Discourses ◽  
Academic Discourses

In this article, I discuss the issue of critique under conditions of complicity. Complicity and privilege might be said, in some sense, always to be conditions of possibility for critical discourse. But the complicity, I consider here, is not of this general or abstract, conceptual kind. Rather, I examine a critical genre – critique under conditions of complicity – in which the critical subject is both complicit in and privileged by the system, he or she is nevertheless attempting a critique of. I discuss three rather different examples of critique under conditions of complicity: A literary genre that I term ‘hypocrite fiction’, French anti-imperialism represented by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Critical Whiteness Studies. What these three critical positions share is, most importantly, their distaste of a global system of which they are themselves beneficiaries. Each of these three discourses thus respond in its own way to the systemic inequality and injustice caused by specific configurations of capitalism, imperialism, and racism, respectively. I argue that the experience of complicity, guilt, and hypocrisy recorded in these critical discourses are forms of moral-existential and critical thinking. I also suggest that the cultural, intellectual, public, and academic discourses that register complicity do not overall testify to the withering of critique.

Genealogy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson ◽  
Amy Nigh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technical Sense ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
As Effects ◽  
Empirical Material ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

In the everyday sense of the term, genealogy describes the study of ancestry and the tracing of a pedigree. As such, genealogy serves to follow the element in question to a singular origin which constitutes its source and guarantees its value. As a philosophical notion, however, genealogy is opposed to such tracing of a pedigree and instead describes the interrupted descent of a custom, practice, or idea, locates its multiple beginnings, and excavates the conditions under which it emerged. In this technical sense of the term, genealogy is a form of historico-philosophical analysis that mobilizes empirical material to uncover historically specific conditions under which the object under examination was able to emerge. Genealogy thus reverses customary explanations of objects of cultural history, according to which these objects are either necessary end points of historical development or results caused by some anthropological principle. Instead, genealogy reconstructs the history of their objectification—that is, of their contingent formation as an object of concern and intervention. Phenomena that are typically assumed to be the causes of certain practices, institutions, laws, norms, and so on are here revealed as effects of the very things they were thought to cause. The problems with which genealogy is concerned are historical formations that rely on and simultaneously make possible forms of knowledge, norms of behavior, and modes of being a subject. While the invention of genealogy in its technico-philosophical sense is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, a genealogy of genealogy itself reveals its numerous beginnings in a wide range of discourses and practices that constitute its conditions of possibility.

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