Capitalism and the Ecological Crisis
Asier Arias Domínguez
The term «capitalism» is far from univocal, referring instead to a constellation of historically specific forms of social organization. These are conventionally divided into mercantile and industrial capitalism, the latter encompassing its Fordist-Keynesian and neoliberal variants. Despite their differences, these forms share a set of structural features. First, they consist of institutional arrangements closely tied to the historical formation of the modern state, and are inconceivable in its absence, given its normative and coercive capacities as well as its extensive economic involvement. Second, they entail the expansion of market relations at the expense of communal forms of social reproduction. Third, they are structured around hierarchies of domination, both within and between states—including class exploitation and colonial regimes of appropriation.
Capitalism is, therefore, a historical formation. Fernand Braudel offered a seminal account of the gradual and stratified emergence of capitalist institutions (Braudel, 1979). Mercantile capitalism (XV–XVIII centuries) was structured around economic and financial centralization, the control of trade routes, and the colonial integration of heterogeneous economic spaces. Accumulation relied decisively on commercial rents secured under the aegis of consolidating state apparatuses. (The chronology proposed by Braudel has often been contested—most notably by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood—on the grounds that extending it too far back risks conflating heterogeneous phenomena. For the purposes of this text, early commercial capitalism is referred to as «capitalism» solely due to the widespread use of this convention).
Industrial capitalism, which crystallized in the nineteenth century, can in turn be defined as a structure of social relations: a legal and institutional order characterized by the dispossession of workers from the means of production, the generalization of wage labour, and commodity production for exchange. This form of production takes on a highly specific character: monetary investment in means of production and labour power with the aim of generating a sum of money greater than that originally advanced. Crucially, the inertia of this type of investment does not derive from character traits or other contingent factors, but operates as a systemic compulsion: those who fail to reinvest and expand value are displaced by competitors. Expanded reproduction thus emerges as a structural feature of the system as a whole, while growth appears as an imperative arising from the generalization of capitalist social relations.
The Fordist-Keynesian cycle (1945-1973) modulated this dynamic through policies of aggregate demand management, full employment, and welfare state expansion, without altering the wage-commodity core or the logic of expanded reproduction. Over three decades, this cycle saw a highly regulated capitalist regime—characterized by the Bretton Woods monetary order, capital controls, and restrictions on financial speculation—achieve exceptionally high and sustained rates of economic growth.
Significantly, this period was marked by a rapid expansion in oil use, with oil displacing coal as the primary energy source of industrial capitalism. The onset of this cycle also marks the beginning of what Earth system science has termed the Great Acceleration, referring to the sharp postwar rise in indicators of human activity at the planetary scale (Steffen et al., 2015). The end of this cycle coincided with the publication of one of the foundational texts for a systemic understanding of the ecological crisis: The Limits to Growth (1972), a report commissioned by the Club of Rome and carried out at MIT. Both in its original version and in later updates (1992, 2004), the report—based on the World3 system dynamics model, which describes the interactions among population, industrial and agricultural capital, non-renewable resources, and pollution—projects that, under current growth trends, the global socio-economic system will enter into decline by the mid-twenty-first century.
The exhaustion of the Fordist-Keynesian regime of accumulation in the 1970s set the stage for a restructuring of industrial capitalism aimed at restoring profitability (Harvey, 2005). As the postwar economic order was dismantled, neoliberalism emerged as a new framework of economic governance. It redefined the role of the state in the process of accumulation, not by scaling back its capacities—as conventional rhetoric suggests—but by redirecting it toward inflation control, fiscal discipline, the opening of capital flows and market liberalization, often through the privatization of public sectors and services. This latest phase of industrial capitalism reconfigured global value chains, displacing socio-environmental impacts across regions, while also shifting the expansion of capital from its spatial to its temporal dimension through an extensive process of financialization that has introduced new sources of instability into capitalism’s inherent tendency toward recurrent crises.
In the specialized literature, the relationship between capitalism and the ecological crisis is typically framed in structural terms, tracing it back to the constitutive dynamics of industrial capitalism—most notably, the compulsion for growth. By contrast, attributing the crisis to specific historical forms of industrial capitalism, particularly its neoliberal variant, is more common in media discourse than in scholarly analysis. However, as will be discussed, some currents within the academic literature locate the onset of the crisis in periods preceding the consolidation of industrial capitalism, emphasizing cultural and anthropological factors as well as premodern dynamics of environmental interaction and social reproduction.
Within the aforementioned structural framework—focused on the constitutive features of industrial capitalism—Karl Marx was the first to formulate, in a seminal though tentative manner, the incompatibility between the self-expanding dynamics of capital and the planet’s biophysical limits. Marx’s ecological insights arise from his analysis of social metabolism, in which labour serves as the historical mechanism through which societies exchange matter and energy with their environment. By reorganizing this metabolism to serve the expanded reproduction of capital, capitalism disrupts these material cycles, undermining the two original sources of wealth: human labour and the soil. John Bellamy Foster has influentially reconstructed this ecological dimension of Marxian thought, coining the term «metabolic rift» to systematize dispersed passages in Marx’s work that account for the ecological disruptions produced by capitalism’s expansive dynamics (Foster, 1999). The Marxist tradition, however, took time to return systematically to these ecological insights (see ecosocialism). Among those who revived this line of thought, Wolfgang Harich and Manuel Sacristán stand out as pioneering voices in arguing that the ecological crisis compels a critical reassessment of the inherited identification between emancipation and productive expansion (Harich, 1975; Sacristán Luzón, 2021).
In parallel, the thesis that indefinite economic growth is incompatible with biophysical limits was advanced by a number of heterodox economists. Within these lines of thought, Kenneth Boulding emphasized, using his metaphor of Spaceship Earth, that the human economy operates within a materially closed planetary system, constrained in its energy flows and subject to thermodynamic limits (Boulding, 1966). This insight was subsequently developed in greater depth by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who, in his critique of neoclassical economics, explicitly incorporated the second law of thermodynamics. He showed that every productive process involves the transformation of low-entropy resources into high-entropy waste, thereby precluding the indefinite material expansion on which the capitalist economy relies (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971).
Anchoring the aforementioned structural interpretation in its historical context, Andreas Malm has proposed the concept of «fossil capitalism» to highlight the historical entanglement between the consolidation of industrial capitalism and the widespread use of fossil fuels. He emphasizes that their adoption was driven not only by technical efficiency but also by social and spatial advantages they provided for capitalist accumulation. Unlike energy sources dependent on natural flows, coal allowed production to be concentrated, decoupled from environmental variability, and brought labour power under stronger control. The establishment of a carbon-intensive energy regime thus marks a constitutive moment in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation.
In recent years, much of the debate surrounding the ecological crisis has focused on the concept of the Anthropocene, proposed to denote a potential new geological epoch following the Holocene, characterized by the planetary imprint of human activity. However, it has been argued that the concept tends to obscure differentiated historical responsibilities. In this context, Jason W. Moore has introduced the term Capitalocene to emphasize that the planetary crisis cannot be attributed to humanity in general, but rather to a historical regime whose expansion has relied on the appropriation of «cheap nature»—including food, energy, labour, and raw materials. The increasing scarcity of these resources underlies contemporary ecosocial tensions (Moore, 2015).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, proponents of green liberalism and ecological modernization (see green capitalism) deny any causal link between industrial capitalism and the ecological crisis. From this perspective, the crisis is framed as an “inevitable consequence of human nature,” allegedly defined by a “universal drive” toward “aggressive adaptation” (Arias Maldonado, 2019). Rather than being its underlying cause, capitalism is construed as a condition for resolving the crisis, inasmuch as the self-expansive dynamics of capital are assumed to enable the development of the technologies these approaches rely on. Both denying such a link and appealing to technological fixes raise fundamental problems (Arias Domínguez, 2020). No technology can circumvent the laws of thermodynamics, and there is extensive historical evidence documenting the environmental consequences of technological interventions (see techno-optimism). More importantly, these approaches face a central difficulty: the absence of theoretical arguments or empirical evidence supporting the possibility of absolute global decoupling between economic growth and environmental impact.
Other lines of thought, while acknowledging capitalism as the main driver of ecological degradation, point to deeper causal layers beyond economic organization. In this vein, deep ecology interprets the crisis as resulting from an anthropocentric worldview that assigns only instrumental value to nature (Næss, 1973) (see Intrinsic/Extrinsic Value). In a related strand, several authors emphasize that humanity’s capacity to damage ecosystems long predates modernity and industrialism, as shown by the megafaunal extinctions linked to the expansion of Homo sapiens during the Late Pleistocene (Tafalla, 2022). Accordingly, the ecological crisis concerns not only the material bases of our societies, but also their ethical and cultural dimensions, as well as deeper layers of human nature marked by tendencies toward excess and difficulties in recognizing limits (Riechmann, 2022).
A substantial body of literature attributes the ecological crisis to the structural dynamics of industrial capitalism. At the theoretical level, ecological economics has identified the mechanisms underlying the incompatibility between expansive accumulation and the biophysical limits of the Earth system. At the historical level, political ecology and environmental history have documented the constraints industrial capitalism imposes on sustainable social reproduction.
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