![]() It is clear from this and other passages that Marx sought to develop a theory of society and history that was materialist on both a social and ecological level. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature (emphasis added). The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. The ceaseless drive to accumulate capital and the resultant environmental degradation (what Marx called the metabolic rift) are subjecting the biosphere itself to ecological stresses that could cause the ecological collapse of human civilisation and perhaps trigger an auto-species extinction event. 11 Furthermore, the drivers in the capitalist MOP that lead to ecological destruction are the very same drivers that have triggered climate change and the anthropocene. Together with Marx's critique of capital and in particular his analysis of the value form under generalised commodity production for the market, Marx's method serves as an invaluable tool kit to critique ecocide and its necessary corollary: genocide. ![]() Ecocide will be understood as a function of capital, with its remorseless drive to accumulate damaging and collapsing natural cycles and turning them into ‘broken linear processes’, 10 exceeding the constraints and boundaries of nature and causing what Marx described as a ‘metabolic rift’ between humankind and nature. 9 Indeed, it will be argued that only by employing Karl Marx's critique of the political economy of capitalism combined with the sadly overlooked theory of ecology found principally in Capital Vols 1 and 3, the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value can the drivers behind ecological destruction as a genocidal technique be explained. Consistent with an ontological approach that argues it is not necessarily the intention of any particular actor that is to blame for genocide but the effect of what Barta calls ‘remorseless pressures of destruction inherent in the very nature of the society’ 7 that is of importance, 8 the argument put forward in the following section of the article is that one can best explain the driving force behind ecologically induced genocide by examining the structural forces underpinning the aforementioned industrial mining and farming industries: namely the political economy of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production (MOP). 6 In other words, political ecology is the study of the community of organisms and their environments that critically includes humans or social collectives. Together this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself. The phrase ‘political ecology’ combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. 4 Following a discussion of both the conceptual and legal nexus between ecocide and genocide, we further contend that capitalist ‘land grabs’ carried out by extractive industries, industrial farms and the like are, through the annexation of indigenous land and the associated ‘externalities’, the principal vectors of ecologically induced genocide when the genos in question is an indigenous people. ![]() ![]() It is therefore incumbent upon genocide scholars to attempt a paradigm shift in the greatest traditions of science 3 and to cohere a synthesis of the sociology of genocide and environmental sociology into a theoretical apparatus that can illuminate the links between, and uncover the drivers of, ecocide and genocidal social death. Indeed, it is the contention of the authors that, given the looming threat of runaway climate change in the twenty-first century, the advent of the geological phase classified by geologists and earth scientists as anthropocene 2 and the attendant rapid extinction of species, destruction of habitats, ecological collapse and the self-evident dependency of the human race on our biosphere, ecocide (both ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’) will become a primary driver of genocide. 1 With the ever-increasing rise of such cases of ecological destruction brought on by the extractive industries, or indirectly induced by anthropogenic climate change, we argue that the field of genocide studies should draw from the rich scholarly tradition of political ecology and environmental sociology. A number of studies have shown that ecocide can be a method of genocide if, for example, environmental destruction results in conditions of life that fundamentally threaten a social group's cultural and/or physical existence. ![]()
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