By JOSÉ MANUEL DE SACADURA ROCHA & ENEIDA GASPARINI CABRERA*
In the historical materiality of present subjectivity, under the logic of infinite accumulation of the capitalist production system, environmental collapse was revealed
“We do not want to save Capitalism, but to save ourselves from it”
(Zapatism).
1.
Since the 19th century, several researchers and climate scientists[I] already pointed out in their studies that the planet's temperature was regulated, among other factors, by the concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, water, among other elements).
This natural greenhouse effect is a process caused, especially, by the gases mentioned, which occurs naturally in the Earth's atmosphere, being fundamental to the balance of the Planet, since its key function is to maintain atmospheric, maritime and Earth's surface temperatures compatible with the life of humans and non-humans who inhabit the planet.
Therefore, the natural greenhouse effect maintains the planet's balance, preventing it from freezing. If it did not exist, the planet would have an average temperature of -18°C, meaning there would be no liquid water, no plant life through photosynthesis, and so on. Thanks to the natural greenhouse effect, the planet's average temperature has remained at 15°C, allowing all species to live.
But the natural has become detached from the vital, collapsing the planet due to anthropogenic global warming, that is, the imbalance (increase) in the greenhouse gas emission system, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, caused by the man of the present, a social subject who is also an economic, political, legal and cultural subject, a product of the specific social and historical constitution of multifaceted and contradictory practices and dynamics, subject to social forms that determine capitalism – commodity, value, money, abstract labor, legal subjectivity, State.[ii]
In the historical materiality of present subjectivity, under the logic of infinite accumulation of the capitalist production system, environmental collapse has been revealed by countless researchers, from different perspectives and ideologies, at least since 1972, when the first scientific projection of global warming until the end of the 1916th century was made, by John Stanley Sawyer (2000-XNUMX), published in the magazine Nature,[iii] which projected global warming of 0,6°C by the year 2000.
From then on, through the creation of the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)[iv] in 1988, which has produced numerous assessment reports on Climate Change to date, and data and reports from NCC-NOAA (the US government's Environmental Information Education Centers),[v] we have only confirmed the increase in greenhouse gas emissions and with them, global warming, as we can see in the article by Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, from 2017,[vi] whose predictions came true through the analysis of risk categories – the catastrophic scenario is already a reality.
Such predictions that our planet has already reached an average global temperature increase of over 1,5°C were confirmed in the latest 2025 report from the Copernicus Program,[vii] of the European Union (EU), which monitors our planet and its environment.
The study by Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan also confirms that, with the projected levels of continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, it is now inevitable that the planet will warm by more than 2°C by 2050, a risk that has been assessed as “disastrous for the planet”. In other words, if we do not emit a single gram of greenhouse gases from today onwards, we already have an inertia in the climate system that will inevitably lead to global warming above 2°C by 2050.
All warming trends are relative to pre-industrial temperatures and, according to the authors (XU & RAMANATHAN, 2017): “It took society almost 220 years (from 1750 to 1970) to emit the first trillion tons of CO2 and only another 40 years (1970–2010) to emit the next trillion tons. The third trillion tons, under current emission trends, would be emitted by 2030 and the fourth trillion tons before 2050.”
The impacts on human and non-human lives are immeasurable, just like the exploratory development of the capitalist private accumulation movement on the planet, which follows the guidelines of “sustainable development” or “sustainable capitalism”, expressions of playful appearance that occur behind the backs of social subjects.
The real risks of numerous climate events that (are already) affecting the planetary ecosystem, human health and the extinction of species, are accompanied by an increase in abrupt and irreversible changes.
In the Brazilian case, in this ongoing scenario of high greenhouse gas emissions, the country has a high probability (+ 70%) of experiencing a temperature increase greater than 4°C before the end of the century, according to the report. The Climate Change Performance Index 2015[viii]. In this case, the Brazilian biomes, especially the Amazon, are at risk not only due to global warming, but also and mainly due to the ecological risk of deforestation, degradation, droughts and fires, where agribusiness, mining, logging and the imminent exploration of oil, gas and energy are the main activities that have metamorphosed in historical time and assume the identity that allows the reproduction of capital.
2.
The capitalist call for an “energy transition” is, inexorably, a fallacy and a contradiction. Capitalism allows the political citizen subject to claim an ecological subjectivity, but at the same time operates political exclusion – a fallacy – and economic limitation – a contradiction. With regard to the fallacy of the ecological citizen subject, the capitalist State operates on the basis of deregulation, combined with infinite exploitation and inequality.
Historically, environmental policy has not become universal simply because the legal form declares ecological citizen-subjects equal before the law. With reference to the contradiction, capitalism is structured based on the ownership of the means of production by a few who operate within the non-owning mass, this mass destined to sell its labor force and land to capital.
Karl Marx (2015, p. 574)[ix] states: “Therefore, capitalist production only develops the technique and combination of the social production process to the extent that it undermines the sources of all wealth: the land and the worker”. Constituted in classes, in a structural way, there is no possible universality of ecological subjectivity.
Driven by his functions and his vocation, the ecological citizen-subject is voracious in energy consumption. An analysis of studies on global primary energy consumption between 1800 and 2022, in terawatt hours (TW/h), published in the report of the Our World in Data, of 2023, represented by the graph below (Figure 1), shows that what exists, in reality, is the “stacking” of energy sources and not a transition or replacement of one source by another:
Figure 1 – Global primary energy consumption by source
We can see that coal does not replace traditional biomass (which has not decreased, but has increased in specific periods, despite the increase in coal use); that oil has not replaced coal; that natural gas has not replaced oil. For more than 200 years, we have not replaced energy sources, we have accumulated them.
In the following figure (Figure 2), we also see a strong consumption of fossil fuels from the 1970s onwards, and without any substitution for one another, perhaps by so-called renewable energies, reaching 2023 with a global consumption of oil in the order of more than 53 thousand terawatts/hour, followed by coal with more than 44 thousand terawatts/hour and gas with more than 40 thousand terawatts/hour.
Figure 2 – Global primary energy consumption by source/terawatts – hour
The scenario described here is merely a summary of several studies, and an optimistic one at that. We would be horrified by our Brazilian situation if governments were to focus on monitoring and investigating the “ecological conditions” that arise from agro-industrial soil; if these inspections were granted the same powers to investigate the truth that they enjoy in the country; if, for this undertaking, it were possible to find men as suitable, impartial and inflexible as congressmen and judges, with their technical rapporteurs on “agricultural pesticides”, with their legal attorneys on the “trails” of criminal mining, deforestation and the conditions of indigenous and quilombola peoples. However, it is necessary to remember a passage from Marx (2015, p.79)[X]: “Perseus needed a helmet of mist to chase the monsters. We pull the helmet of mist over our eyes and ears so we can deny the existence of the monsters.”
3.
It is true that we have three global ecological movements, of greater relevance today, that seek alternatives to the current development model, questioning the capitalist logic of continuous growth and its socio-environmental impacts (ACOSTA & BRAND, 2018; LOWY, 2014).[xi]
The so-called “degrowth” movements emerged in the 70s and gained strength in Europe in the XNUMXst century, bringing together different thinkers who advocate an economy compatible with the planet’s ecological limits. They basically criticize the continued growth of capitalism and propose reducing the consumption of natural resources and energy, distributing wealth, investing in collective goods and public services, and reducing the working day.
The so-called “post-extractivist” movements, formed by intellectuals and social movements from Latin America, question the idea of development based on the reproduction of capital from rich countries. They advocate overcoming the extractive-export model of natural resources, proposing an eco-social transition that reconciles social and environmental justice. The main emphasis is on the importance of “caring” for the environment, the sick, the elderly and children, and they question the international hierarchy that places poor countries in the Global South in a subordinate position.
Finally, the so-called “ecosocialist” movements have a strand closer to Marxist critical theory, questioning the development models of capitalism and “real socialism”. They prioritize the need to stop the climate and ecological crisis, along with social justice. Many advocate planned degrowth and the global equalization of resource and energy consumption as a strategy to save the planet and build a socialist society.
In short, the three movements share a critique of the current development model and propose alternatives that consider the ecological limits of the planet, social justice and the need to overcome the capitalist logic of continuous growth.
So, as you can't get out of the “toxic swamp by pulling yourself out by your own hair”,[xii] We need all joint efforts to understand, mainly, the dynamics of this swampy soil in which we have been buried down to the last hair for more than 200 years, if we want to have life to allow such reflections.
We already know that the crisis of capitalism is not due to the actions of its adversaries, but rather to its own logic of valorization of value, which is based on the production of goods and the incessant search for profit. This logic leads to the exploitation of labor and land, the production of superfluous goods (also workers!) and the destruction of nature, in addition to generating social inequality and suffering for all.
Capitalism is a crisis, but its development contains contradictory and antagonistic specificities in a given historical period. Certainly, the crisis of capitalism is a crisis of capital accumulation that manifests itself in the fall of the mass of value and in the need to “simulate” accumulation through finance and credit. This simulation, however, has its limits, but it is unlimited in suffering and social inequality. It is worth noting that the crisis derives not only from the fact that only the labor force can attribute value to goods, but also in spite of the fact that technologies replace human labor.
In the historical process, capital has always moved towards its most complete form: financial capital. This process involves the search for independence from specific productive spaces in order to reproduce itself autonomously. However, financial capital, being allogamous, still today needs real production to reproduce itself, but aims to become completely self-sufficient, whose virtuality, therefore, tends to separate itself completely from real production.
Until then, capital assumed control over the other factors of production, such as land and labor, acquiring the ability to shape them according to its own interests. Now virtualized financial capital seeks to reproduce itself through hegemony over the other productive factors (land and labor), “acquiring the divine ability to create them in its image and likeness” (GONÇALVES, 2005, p. 28)[xiii].
4.
Specifically in Brazilian agribusiness, the evolution of agriculture (which is responsible for an average of 75% of deforestation in Brazilian biomes) driven by industrial technological innovations has significantly increased land productivity, with extraordinary obsolescence of labor. Agricultural production has become less dependent on the land itself, with the overcoming of limitations of soils previously considered unsuitable for cultivation, where “even deserts could be cultivated” (GONÇALVES, 2005, p. 28) with applied technosciences.
The “creation of land” through the use of genetic techniques and chemical inputs (pesticides and fertilizers) is a key factor in the advancement of Brazilian agriculture, which has “freed itself” from the exploitation of the “natural fertility of the soil”. Land is now seen more as a patrimonial asset, important for access to credit and tax incentives, than as a factor of production in itself.
Modern Brazilian agriculture has been characterized by its ability to transform intact and destroyed lands into arable areas through technology and investment, freeing itself from dependence on the natural fertility of the soil, increasingly assuming the condition of patrimonial collateral and giving land a prominent role as a financial asset. No less, machines and technologies have significantly reduced the amount of living labor incorporated into each new commodity by significantly increasing the operational yield of labor and, with it, its overall productivity.
In the present Brazilian case, despite technological development and science applied to the land, agricultural products are presented as commodities highly valued, which supports such activities as the real economy. This does not mean that Brazilian agribusiness does not also see financialization as a way to profit from fictitious assets – as is the case with credit anticipation and securitization based on agricultural production forecasts. This possibly happens in less developed countries with a large “vocation” for food production.
5.
If movements critical of the capitalist logic of continuous growth do not want the exploited and oppressed to live off the things found in the trash – a rhetoric to sugarcoat the pill of the “new poor” – they will have to prepare for the clashes and antagonisms inherent to productive hybridization and the new processes of reproduction of capital and its regulation – changes in the organic composition of capital, more or less fictitious capital, creative idleness, unemployment and poverty.
After all, as Marx wrote (2015, p. 704)[xiv]: “On the one hand, the additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts, in proportion to its volume, fewer and fewer workers. On the other hand, the old capital, periodically reproduced in a new composition, repels more and more workers than it previously employed.”
At the forefront of commodity totalitarianism, we cannot limit ourselves to criticizing only the ultraliberal form of capitalism, but rather direct our critique towards capitalism as a whole, towards a mercantile society founded on abstract labor, value, money and commodities.
The formulation of new forms of social organization for social beings in our thinking is also provided by technological and scientific advances, which also make possible, in our thinking and for our consciousness, proposals for degrowth and non-extractivism – it is not theory that is calling for other forms of development and life, but the new forms of development and life that lead us towards an ecologically “more” sustainable socialism. And even then, not through the formal state and legal forms that we are accustomed to; they do not work, they are capitalist!
It is interesting that ecosocialism, in general, does not correspond to explicit proposals for official and state non-violence, nor does it propose “zero investment” in state ideologies and apparatuses. And this is still the great problem of socialism, of the movement towards socialism, the beginning of the autonomous agency of power in self-sufficient and self-managed community initiatives that go beyond the technocratic capitalist forms of the state. Aren’t stagnating growth, or adhering to carbon offset formulas (negotiated!), practices of developmentalism, practices of capital regulation?
*José Manuel de Sacadura Rocha He has a PhD in Education, Art and Cultural History from Mackenzie University. Author, among other books, of Legal sociology: foundations and borders (GEN/Forensics) [https://amzn.to/491S8Fh]
*Eneida Gasparini Cabrera is a lawyer, specializing in economic criminal law.
Notes
[I] Scientists such as Jean-Baptiste Fourier (1824), Eunice Newton Foot (1856), John Tyndall (1861) and Svante Arrthenius (1896) (MARQUES, Luiz. Capitalism and environmental collapse. 3rd rev. ed. Campinas: Unicamp Publishing House, 2018).
[ii] ALTHUSSER, Louis. State ideological apparatuses. Rio de Janeiro, Graal, 1985. p. 93; ALTHUSSER, Louis. Freud and Lacan. Marx and Freud. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1985; PACHUKANIS, Evguiéni. General theory of law and Marxism. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2017.
[iii] SAWYER, JS Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the “Greenhouse” Effect. Nature, 239(5366), 1972, p. 23–26. Available at: https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/239023a0.
[iv] Created to be a scientific platform at ECO-92 for the Climate Agreement by the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) and UNEP (United Nations Environment Program).
[v] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/.
[vi] PNAS, on line. Well below 2°C: Mitigation strategies to avoid dangerous to catastrophic climate change. 2017. Available at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1618481114.
[vii] https://www.copernicus.eu/pt-pt/node/75354.
[viii] The Climate Change Performance Index – Results 2015.
[ix] MARX, Carl. The capital. Book 1, chap. 13. New York: Routledge, 2015.
[X] MARX, Carl. The capital. Book 1, Preface to the 1st edition. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2015.
[xi] ACOSTA, Alberto; BRAND, Ulrich. Post-extractivism and degrowth: exits from the capitalist labyrinth. São Paulo: Elefante, 2018; LÖWI, MICHAEL. What is ecosocialism? 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.
[xii] The Mad Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, is a work written by Rudolf Erich Raspe, and published in London in 1785. They are fantastic and quite exaggerated stories, propagated mainly in children's literature. “A character who balances between reality and fantasy in his own world, where he faces the most diverse dangers, perpetrates impossible escapes (the most famous of which is the escape from the swamp in which he sank together with his horse, having managed to escape by pulling on his own wig), witnesses extraordinary events and makes fantastic journeys — without ever losing his cool”. Available at: (Baron of Münchhausen – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
[xiii] GONCALVES, Jose Sidnei. Agriculture under the aegis of financial capital: a step towards deepening the development of agribusiness. Available at: https://iea.agricultura.sp.gov.br/ftpiea/ie/2005/tec1-0405.pdf.
[xiv] MARX, Carl. The capital. Book 1, chap. 23. New York: Routledge, 2015.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
