Razmig Keucheyan

Excelente fuente de análisis de la coyuntura y de gran bibliografía política de izquierda.

Asociaciones de productores-consumidores como posible vector de cambio ante un mundo en época neoliberal y de catástrofe ambiental.

Esfera productiva y esfera consumista articuladas para controlar democráticamente lo que se produce sobre lo que se necesita.

akeaway: sujeto consumista producto de determinado sistema de producción.

Recomendaciones recolectadas:

Gramsci El cesarismo
Poulantzas Estado poder y socialismo
Shallins Edad de piedra
Keucheyan La naturaleza es un campo de batalla
Zawieja Diccionario de la fatiga
Graeber Trabajos de mierda
Trentman Empire of things… (meer)

Going into this book I assumed it was about the environment and climate change with ideas on how the author believes it should be dealt with. Now that I'm finished, I'm not quite sure what the point of the book really was.

In the introduction, he presents a situation where poor (ie. powerless) people had to resort to demonstrations and resistance to avoid having a toxic waste landfill in their neighborhood. He even hints that in the future, such radicalization will need to become the normal tactic (pg 4). This thought works well with his theme in chapter 1, which is about environmental racism. The poor (and by "the poor" he means non-white people) bear the worst of pollution and don't have access to national parks. He says "[British] organizations close to the environmental justice movement... provide [minorities] with an opportunity to familiarize themselves [with the countryside] to break through the upper classes' monopoly connection with nature." (pg 20)

Chapter 2 talks about the "financialization" of nature. This refers to the various financial products designed to mitigate the affects of weather on the capitalist system. Although such products have been around for a long time, they are seeing more diversification with climate change, such as cap-and-trade carbon credits. And chapter 3 is about war and it's affects on the environment... or something like that. Honestly, by this point I'd about reached my tolerance limit.

The book is highly academic, but also seems to be all over the place. He discusses his topics at great length but examples seem to be cherry-picked to prop up his argument and didn't always seem convincing. I'm not sure what the central idea of this book was supposed to be, but if there was one, I missed it. In the beginning I thought he was anti-capitalist (he certainly seems to have a fondness for Marxism), but he concluded by saying "capitalism is not only capable of adapting to the environmental crisis, but-on top of that-of profiting from it." (pg 151) I still believe he is racist towards whites, however.… (meer)