Nature, capital, and the state are intertwined in developing environmental policy that addresses climate change and other ecological crises. Abstract methods including those addressing conjunctural approaches can be employed to examine how the state in its historical complexity can be undertheorized. In the current climate crisis, the conjunctural social territory necessary to address claims of reduced emissions requires addressing a wider range of social costs and environmental effects.
Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty. That which concerns more especially the analysis of the substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it was possible, popularised. [1] The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.
SOURCE: Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I, Preface to the First German Edition (London, July 25, 1867), translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels (1887).
In State, Capital, Nature: State Theory for the Capitalocene, a chapter in the new collection of essays titled, Marxism and the Capitalist State Towards a New Debate, Alyssa Battistoni brings together underdeveloped connections among the state, capital and nature. “The first, among eco-Marxists, concerns the relationship between capitalist and ecological crises; the second, among state theorists, concerns the state’s role in capitalism.”
She outlines “four ideal-types reflecting different combinations along two axes—one mapping whether capitalism’s destruction of nature is also self-destructive; and one mapping the degree of state autonomy from capital.” She examines “which kinds of state action we might expect in each case and draw out the implications for political strategy.”
The below story could be an intersection of the capital-nature relationship with the structural state-capital relationship where capital is seen as self-destructive where the conditions of production are preserved over protecting “means of life” (lower right quadrant in diagram). The valorizing process of processing waste products demonstrates how state action can preserve the conditions of production that could continue ecological harm while continuing to extract materials. Environmental impacts that require state action and remediation remain unresolved. Net Zero claims are nowhere to be seen.
The company has started extracting scrap that had been dumped at a tailings dam at Carajas in northern Brazil since 1985 as part of a project at its largest iron ore operation. The material, which is rich in iron ore particles, will be processed into feed for a plant that makes pellets to be used in blast furnaces for steelmaking. The $485-million Gelado project will have an initial production capacity of five-million tons a year.
The investment fits in Vale’s strategy of shifting toward higher-quality ore that requires less energy to process as the steel industry looks for alternatives to cut emissions. The world’s No. 2 iron-ore producer said it wants to lead the supply of cleaner materials to its customers to capture higher premiums and achieve the target of cutting emissions from its suppliers and clients 15% by 2035.
Vale is using all-electric dredges to extract the 140-million tons of tailings, along with pumps powered by hydroelectricity instead of fossil fuels. After that, the ore undergoes a process that uses magnets to separate ferrous particles from contaminants and improve its quality.
www.miningweekly.com/...
Brazil and Vale S.A. are no strangers to environmental effects in Brazil, and the recent change in government returns a leftist state that may better regulate mineral extraction and public health.
Water bodies are increasingly contaminated by industrial and anthropogenic activities, climate change, and major environmental accidents. Global awareness has led the United Nations to develop an action plan to increase individuals’ access to clean water. Mine-tailing spills have been reported worldwide, with serious implications for major watercourses, especially the release of high metal concentrations. More recently, two events with alarming proportions and effects occurred in Brazil (Mariana accident in 2015 and Brumadinho accident in 2019), which resulted in approximately 300 human deaths. Mine residues rich in metals (mainly iron, aluminum, and manganese) reached important freshwater sources and have traveled hundreds of kilometers to reach the Atlantic Ocean, causing environmental harm and human health issues. For example, in the Mariana disaster, studies using the zebrafish model reported toxicity in water samples collected 464 km from the dam rupture site. This study presents data on the magnitude of these events, focusing on concerns associated with high dissolved metal concentrations in watercourses, exposing the direct impacts reported to the local aquatic environment as well as other effects that could persist in the long term.
link.springer.com/…
In Brazil there are 769 mining dams, and the two that had the most serious disasters in the country and among the largest in the world were classified as low risk. The participation of Occupational Health in municipalities and states for inspection and audits in this universe must be integrated with licensing and inspection bodies (environment, water resources and mining).
In the disasters produced by Samarco and Vale, it was found that emergency plans existed only on paper and that warning and alarm systems were non-existent and ineffective. In addition to the sectors involved in licensing and inspection, the proactive participation of the health, labor, protection and civil defense sectors, as well as workers, communities and NGOs, would certainly prevent the Vale cafeteria in Brumadinho, with capacity for around 200 people, was located (about 1km and 1 minute from the arrival of the mud) in an area that would not be able to save lives. Furthermore, plans specify risk scenarios, making it absolutely necessary for the health sector, in the municipalities where the 769 mining dams are located, to be aware of whether health establishments are in the path of the mud, simultaneously posing a threat to health workers, as well as the commitment of the capacity of the health sector to the needs of the population in the post-disaster period.
It is necessary that plans, alerts and alarms are not treated only as bureaucratic licensing instruments, but that they involve an effective and transparent intersectoral planning process, with the participation of society, strengthening the preparation and response capabilities of municipalities through transparency and regular exercise. This change would avoid recent post-disaster situations in Vale, such as those experienced in the Minas Gerais municipalities of Ouro Preto, Nova Lima and Barão de Cocais, among others, where suddenly sirens rang and families were removed from their homes, with their territories are no longer considered safe, without considering that the uncertainties and insecurities triggered from there have repercussions on the health situations of these communities.
www.scielo.br/...
A recent review of Armand Boito, Reform and Political Crisis in Brazil: Class Conflicts in Workers’ Party Governments and the Rise of Bolsonaro Neofascism (Haymarket Books 2022) identifies the Brazilian class situation that is constitutive of the state’s connection.
The big internal bourgeoisie aggregates the following sectors: agribusiness, processing industry, transportation, and heavy construction. It also includes state-owned companies such as Petrobras. The associated bourgeoisie is represented by companies linked to foreign investment in Brazilian capitalism. These two fractions are what Poulantzas would refer to as the bloc in power.
[...]
Nevertheless, for Boito, the contradiction between the two fractions lies in their association with imperialism. ‘The big associated bourgeoisie aims at an almost limitless expansion of imperialism, while the big internal bourgeoisie, though linked to imperialism and relying on its actions to boost Brazilian capitalism, seeks to impose limits on that expansion’ (p.32).
It is the contradiction between those two fractions that leads Boito to see the crisis in Brazil as a result not of class struggle but of class conflict. In his view class struggle occurs only when there is a direct conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie choosing between socialism and capitalism. What occurred in Brazil was class conflict ‘between different segments of the capitalist class and of the dominated classes that disputed the appropriation of wealth and income’ (p.164).
www.counterfire.org/...
‘Conjunctural analysis’ is sometimes said to be the core activity and objective of ‘cultural studies’.1 But what do these terms mean? While all of them require further elaboration, ‘conjunctural analysis’ can be broadly defined as the analysis of convergent and divergent tendencies shaping the totality of power relations within a given social field during a particular period of time.
From this perspective, ‘cultural studies’ might be best understood as a species of political sociology, with an analytical emphasis on the study of semiotic practices and a heavy bias towards qualitative modes of analysis. Its primary objective is to map power relations of all kinds in in a given social field, with particular attention to the ways in which those relations are changing at a given moment.
[...]
The aim of conjunctural analysis is always to map a social territory, in order to identify possible sites of political intervention. Such interventions need not actually be made, or be made on behalf of any particular political project or tendency, for the analysis to have validity; but its potential utility to anyone wanting to intervene in a given situation is the key criteria according to which conjunctural analyses can be judged.
d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/...
A...discussion with the editors and several contributors to the just-released Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate. The collected essays combine general theoretical reappraisals with investigations of contemporary challenges, including new technologies, the climate crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, and changes in social reproduction. This project began from a shared commitment to understanding the specifically capitalist character of the modern state in relation to the causes of our current age of global catastrophe and the overcoming of capitalist social relations.
Our panel will feature the book’s three editors: Rob Hunter holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, USA. He is a member of the Legal Form editorial collective. Rafael Khachaturian is a Lecturer in Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Eva Nanopoulos is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. Nanopoulos co-edits the blog Legal Form and she co-directs the Queen Mary Centre of Law and Society in a Global Context and co-founded its “Law and Marxism” series. And joining them we will have four contributors: Alyssa Battistoni, “State, Capital, Nature: State Theory for the Capitalocene” Nate Holdren, “Social Murder: Capitalism’s Systematic and State-Organized Killing” Chris O’Kane, “The Marx Revival and State Theory: Towards a Negative-Dialectical Critical Social Theory of the State” Steve Maher, “From Economic to Political Crisis: Trump and the Neoliberal State”
Lauren Michele Jackson in the NewYorker captures what some of us think about on Sunday evenings in anticipation of a new year.
If a movie professor remains confined to campus grounds, he (it’s almost always a “he,” isn’t it?) must have a reason for doing so, something freakish: genius, say, or madness, or some combination of the two (see: “A Beautiful Mind”). Even then, campus is often a mere waystation. I might be the only one who preferred the first forty-five minutes of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” over the latter two and a quarter hours, before the titular physicist is whisked away from academia to turn his ideas into a weapon of mass destruction. Nolan stokes the fantasy of a self-consciously academic environment with all the necessary tableaux—oaken surfaces, chalk dust, the Socratic method—illustrating J. Robert Oppenheimer’s faith in campus life as the center of the universe. (In my experience, virtually every professor on Earth labors under a similar illusion.) During his graduate studies in Europe, young Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is absorbed in the breaking thought of his time, not only in physics but also in literature and the arts. In a montage, we see Oppie in the classroom; Oppie at a museum, in a face-off with Picasso’s “Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms”; Oppie at a chalkboard, at his desk, or turned away from it, smashing wine glasses against parquet floors and observing the scattered aftermath. This is academia as romance, independent study as origin story, and I, for one, was entertained. “Algebra’s like sheet music,” the elder physicist Niels Bohr tells him gravely, adding, “Can you hear the music, Robert?” Cue the strings. Later, as a professor at Berkeley, Oppenheimer works down the hall from Dr. Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), who, in high-waisted trousers and a variety of vests, gives Indiana Jones a run for his money. Oppenheimer’s classroom is initially near barren, which is to be expected when you’re “teaching something no one here has ever dreamt of.” Then, in a series of shots, we see a crowd gradually form—a star professor is born. (Ominously, the professor is preoccupied with what might happen when stars die.) As “Oppenheimer” tips into the forty-sixth minute, though, our hero takes his leave from the realm of theory and devotes himself to the admittedly far more spectacular imperatives of war.
www.newyorker.com/...