Abstract
Over the last decade, capitalism has transmuted from its apparent embodiment of ‘Prometheus unbound’ to a veritable Pandora’s box of contradictions as it has encountered a series of mounting crises manifested variously as financial, austerity, unemployment, poverty, food, environment, energy, and climate. These manifold and increasingly all-pervasive crises potentially threaten, whether severally or collectively, the future of both humanity and non-human nature. As the twenty-first-century unfolds, we pass therefore into an increasingly uncertain future both economically and ecologically. Are these crises inter-linked, however, and, if so, how are we to understand the linkages? And do these crises presage the demise of capitalism, or can capitalism overcome them?
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Notes
- 1.
In particular, ‘Political’ Marxism, Neo-Gramscian Theory, Regulation Theory, and ‘Ecological’ Marxism.
- 2.
‘Primitive accumulation ’ is the process of divorcing subsistence producers, wholly or partially, from access to land and other resources in order to make them available as a labour force for agricultural or industrial capitalists.
- 3.
Post-developmentalism emphasizes the need to secure social well-being and poverty eradication not primarily through economic growth, but rather through eradication of exploitation, the redistribution of productive resources, most particularly land, amongst the people, and the reconfiguration of production according to ecological principles, such as those founded on agroecology.
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Tilzey, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64556-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64556-8_1
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