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Merging process ecology and historical materialism to study capitalism dynamics: lessons from Gran Chaco ...
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Abstract:
1. The current pattern of anthropization of the biosphere, which has led scientist to coin the term Anthropocene, cannot be properly understood without accounting for the specific dynamics of capitalism. 2. Here we combine theoretical ecology with a framework from the social sciences, historical materialism, to study these dynamics by looking at the case of capital-intense agriculture in the Gran Chaco. In so doing we espouse a process perspective, and we obtain some important general insights for the transition towards sustainability. 3. We appreciate the interplay between contingencies and autocatalytic configuration of processes in the emergence, persistence and eventually transformation of a socio-economic system. 4. We point to the analogy between the capitalist urge for economic expansion, driven by the competitive search for maximum profits, and the intrinsic growth-enhancing tendency of autocatalytic configurations. 5. More broadly, we expose the dialectical relationship between the set of ...
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Keyword:
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology; 500 Science
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URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.48350/157233
https://boris.unibe.ch/157233/
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