The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Capitalism is unsustainable; capitalists perception of nature makes it impossible for them to regenerate what they’ve used
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Capitalism is unsustainable; capitalists perception of nature makes it impossible for them to regenerate what they’ve usedLeff 21 Leff, Deconstructing Capital and Territorializing Life, Enrique, Professor of Political Ecology at UNAM, p The general conditions of production, understood as everything that exists in Nature and society that is not produced according to the process of value formation and the laws of the market but rather which establishes the certain necessary conditions for capitalist production, should also be redefned in the context of extended capital reproduction. In this sense, ecological conservation principles that provide essential environmental services for the reproduction of Nature and the survival of humanity were incorporated into economic policies. These socio-environmental conditions include all those activities considered to be of strategic interest for the State that is unproftable for capital, such as infrastructure and public services; conservation areas, and environmental norms for industry, subsidies for basic foodstuffs, and health services. However, these traditional public sector activities are being challenged by neoliberal economics through privatization policies that extend the laws of the market to all environmental common goods and services, conditioning and reducing the ecological and cultural conditions of production to the dominating ontological regime of the economic process—the imperative of the development of the productive forces driven by capital accumulation, the potency of technology and the power of the rational—throughout the planet, from North to South, and East to West. Tus, the strategies of capital and the geopolitics of sustainable development have been focused on the re-elaboration—reframing, rephrasing and welding anew—of those conditions for production that are most difcult for capital to generate and regenerate, those processes which are ontologically excluded from and actually exterior to economic rationality E. Leff 195 due to their nature that rejects being objectified and quantified. These include qualitative processes where capital accounting and discount rates can not value time cycles—the resiliency and productivity of ecosystems; conservation conditions and regeneration times of natural resources; environmental services and common goods of the biosphere; health conditions, environmental quality, the meaning of life; local and global impacts; trans-generational efects of ecological risks and long-term ecological processes; the bio-cultural patrimony of the people and their existential rights. These socio-environmental conditions of production cannot be absorbed under the theories of a green economy and reduced to the concept of natural capital without exerting violence on Nature. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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