Ceddia, M. Graziano; Montani, Rodrigo; Mioni, Walter; Bardsley, Nicholas; Christopoulos, Dimitris; Inguaggiato, Carla; Tschopp, Maurice; Zepharovich, Elena (30 June 2021). Merging process ecology and historical materialism to study capitalism dynamics: lessons from Gran Chaco (Unpublished)
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1. The current pattern of anthropization of the biosphere, which has led scientist to coin the term Anthropocene, cannot be properly understood without accounting for the specific dynamics of capitalism.
2. Here we combine theoretical ecology with a framework from the social sciences, historical materialism, to study these dynamics by looking at the case of capital-intense agriculture in the Gran Chaco. In so doing we espouse a process perspective, and we obtain some important general insights for the transition towards sustainability.
3. We appreciate the interplay between contingencies and autocatalytic configuration of processes in the emergence, persistence and eventually transformation of a socio-economic system.
4. We point to the analogy between the capitalist urge for economic expansion, driven by the competitive search for maximum profits, and the intrinsic growth-enhancing tendency of autocatalytic configurations.
5. More broadly, we expose the dialectical relationship between the set of material/economic processes and cultural/institutional ones, which originates the historical development of capitalist dynamics and the associated pattern of dangerous anthropization.
6. Transition towards sustainability will require acting simultaneously on both spheres, while taking advantage of a suitable window of opportunity.
Item Type: |
Working Paper |
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Division/Institute: |
10 Strategic Research Centers > Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) |
UniBE Contributor: |
Ceddia, Michele Graziano, Montani, Rodrigo Matias, Inguaggiato, Carla, Tschopp, Maurice Nicolas, Zepharovich, Elena |
Subjects: |
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 500 Science |
Funders: |
[18] European Research Council |
Projects: |
[UNSPECIFIED] INCLUDE |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Michele Graziano Ceddia |
Date Deposited: |
30 Jun 2021 13:45 |
Last Modified: |
05 Dec 2022 15:51 |
BORIS DOI: |
10.48350/157233 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/157233 |
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