ABSTRACT
The capitalist economy contradicts the functioning of the relationships between life forms and the environment and erases the particularities of ecological processes by attempting to compress space by accelerating production and consumption time. Through capitalist relations, time and space are made devoid of context and history in the quest to make everything interchangeable for the sake of market sale and capital accumulation. What takes space and time as social and environmental reality is supposed to take less and less space and less and less time. This is a contradiction between capitalist economy and ecology. It is shown that capitalist economics, fixated on treating everything as exchangeable and thereby reversible, cannot grasp the irreversibility and thermodynamics that underlie the subject of its own study, which is resource scarcity. Thermodynamics-based critique of mainstream economics, on the other hand, is unable to specify the social bases of the value of what is extracted from nature, which in capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers. Ultimately, the pressure for endless accumulation leads to the transgression of ecological borders and threatens the very survival of the human race.
