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4 - Collapse of the Biosphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2025

William I. Robinson
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Summary

Even if the structural, social, and political dimensions of global crisis could be resolved, the ecological crisis makes it questionable that capitalism can continue to reproduce itself as a global system. The infinite character of capitalist expansion runs up against the finite character of the biosphere. The Capitolocene, or world-ecology, approach seeks to displace the dualist assumptions associated with the Anthropocene approach that identifies humans rather than capital as the cause of ecological crisis. Climate change is a meta-disaster, and there is the onset of irreversible environmental degradation. The loss of biodiversity threatens to undermine the ecosystems needed for agriculture and animal husbandry on a scale needed to feed billions of people. Capital has responded to the ecological crisis with a "green" strategy that seeks to convert this crisis into new accumulation opportunities by expanding its appropriation and capitalization of nature and to shift the blame on to the poor through a neo-Malthusian discourse. Green capitalism is not more benign to the proletariat and surplus humanity just because it claims to be environmentally friendly, and it is no more capable of resolving the crisis of global capitalism, much less the ecological crisis, than is the rest of capitalism.

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Type
Chapter
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Epochal Crisis
The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism
, pp. 143 - 179
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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