ABSTRACT
Ecology is the scientific study of organisms, the communities they collectively comprise and their interactions with their abiotic environment: ecosystems. Political ecology has many definitions5 but the one with greatest utility for the purposes of this article is that furnished by Blaikie and Brookfield:
In other words, political ecology is the study of the community of organisms and their environments that critically includes humans or social collectives. 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).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. 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. 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.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. 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.12
