Marxist Ecology and the Problem of Non-Western Development

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

ONLINE: Tuesday, March 26: 10:00AM–11:30AM EST

This panel seeks to explore the applicability of Marxist ecological thought to the histories and environmental crises of non-Western societies. The question of whether Marx’s thought had relevance for the development of non-Western European countries has long been a central research question for scholars across the globe, leading to fruitful extensions of Marx’s concepts that were able to account for the historical particularities of capital’s manifestation in temporally and spatially diverse local contexts. Due to the current climate crisis, Marx’s thought has once again been mobilized to elucidate the historical origins of the present moment. While intellectually generative, this literature too often centers Western histories of industrial capitalism or privileges the contemporary perspective of the Euro-American working class. Against this, this panel aims to utilize the non-Western Marxist traditions of Japan, Egypt, and India to formulate an ecological Marxism that explicitly highlights the particular nature of capital’s role in the historical development of environmental problems across the non-Western world and the attendant inequalities that were an outcome of this process. We also suggest that this approach to analysis points the way toward imagining ecologically and historically grounded conceptions of development that take seriously the conditions of the majority of the global population and allow us to overcome not only the capitalist-driven climate crisis but the crisis of capitalism itself.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Water, Coal, Wheat: Irrigation, Colonial “Development,” and the Space-Time of Fossil Capitalism - Swarnabh Ghosh, Harvard University

• Metabolizing Development: Ecologies of Labor and Agriculture in Pre-War Japan - Charlotte Ciavarella, Harvard University; Joshua Linkous, Harvard University

• Ecological Themes in the Developmental Thought of Ismail-Sabri Abdallah - Max Ajl, University of Ghent

Discussant

• Kohei Saito, University of Tokyo