The Limits to Capitalist Nature

Ulrich Brand is Professor of International Politics at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna.

The book provides for a historical-materialist understanding of the multiple crises of capitalism, focusing on the ecological crisis and its interaction with other crisis phenomena (financial crisis, crisis of democracy, economic crisis). Drawing on political ecology, Gramscian theory of hegemony, critical state theory and the regulation approach, it introduces the concept of an imperial mode of living in order to better understand the everyday practices and perceptions as well as the social relations of forces and institutional constellations that facilitate environmentally destructive patterns of production and consumption. Furthermore, it develops a historical-materialist critique of the green economy concept that has been propagated in recent years as a solution not only for the ecological but also for the economic crisis. Finally, the book proposes a democratisation of societal nature relations as a way out of the crisis that requires overcoming capitalist property relations and the exclusive forms of controlling nature guaranteed by them.

Chapter 1: Theorizing the Imperial Mode of Living: An IntroductionChapter 2: The Crisis of Global Environmental Politics and the Imperial Mode of LivingChapter 3: Crisis and Continuity of Capitalist Societal Nature RelationsChapter 4: Strategies of a Green Economy, Contours of a Green CapitalismChapter 5: The Valorization and Financialization of Nature as Crisis StrategyChapter 6: Social-Ecological Transformation as the Horizon of a Practical Critique of the Imperial Mode of LivingChapter 7: Towards the Democratization of Societal Nature RelationsChapter 8: Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living: Political and Strategic ImplicationsReferencesIndex