Title: Marxist political economy and global warming

Authors: Robert Albritton

Addresses: Department of Political Science, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto M3J 1P3, Canada

Abstract: This paper adds to the Marxist literature on the ecological crisis by drawing from the levels of analysis approach of Japanese political economists Kozo Uno and Thomas Sekine. While there are differences amongst scholars who have been influenced by this approach, I believe that Uno and Sekine's most important contributions are their rigorous theorisation of capital's inner logic achieved by building upon Marx's efforts in Capital, and their advances towards rethinking theory/history relations or structure/agency relations by utilising three levels of analysis to avoid both the rigidities of structuralist determinism on the one hand, and the overly loose indeterminism of empiricism on the other.

Keywords: global warming; Marx; Marxist economics; political economy; commodity-form; value; use-value; capitalism; human flourishing; commodification; profit maximisation; accumulation; crises; austerity; transitional phase; levels of analysis; corporate propaganda; agro-fuels; land grabs; biofuels; Kozo Uno; Thomas Sekine.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPEE.2013.058263

International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, 2013 Vol.4 No.3, pp.310 - 324

Published online: 30 Apr 2014 *

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