Erik Swyngedouw

IntroductionL’écologie politique radicale comm(o)uniste et l’« écologie politique » du capitalismeAu cours des dernières décennies, l’écologie politique a mûri, offrant un éventail de perspectives sophistiquées qui ont fleuri au sein des disciplines académiques, des réseaux politiques et des organisations militantes sur tous les continents. Un ensemble complémentaire d

Urban political ecology (UPE) has over the past few decades matured into a thriving and sophisticated critical perspective in speaking to power and allying with a wide range of eco-social resistance movement, there is a shared assumption that substantive critical analysis in its revelatory mode articulates with or nurtures the making of progressive, radical, and effective political movements that aim at making a socially more equitable, politically more inclusive, and ecologically sensible urbanity. Nonetheless, this hypothesis requires careful critical scrutiny as exposing the mechanisms of power does not seem to translate in effective political action in the absence of a clear political desire to transform the present. In this commentary, we explore the new contours of capitalism and the pivotal importance to engage with communist urban political ecologies in order to cut through the deadlock of the present.

The eco-emancipatory project is hegemonically predicated upon the signifier of socioecological “adaptation.” Given the importance of adaptation, maladaptation usually occupies a secondary and invariably negative role. If considered at all, maladaptations are understood as temporal (or occasionally structural) dysfunctions that interfere with the homeostatic striving of the adaptive process, thereby reducing a system's ability to effectively respond to stress. This article, in contrast, departs from the ontological centrality of maladaptation. Using insights from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, evolutionary biology, and political ecology, we insist that a fully adapted Nature (and Society) does not exist other than in its own inconsistency, contradictions, and out-of-jointness. Based on an approach that takes maladaptation for granted, we highlight the emancipatory potential of embracing maladaptation by traversing the infernal fantasy of adaptation. Such emancipation loses any hold in Nature and instead recognizes the “abyss of freedom” as the zero point for a radical and emancipatory political ecology.

By Marco Armiero, Erik Swyngedouw, Massimo De Angelis, et al., Published on 01/24/23

One of Anne Haila's major contributions to rent theory was her close scrutiny of Harvey's proposition that there is an inherent tendency within capitalism to treat land as a financial asset (2006). This is the claim that land is increasingly mobilized for its exchange value as opposed to its use value. This, in turn, permits land to become fungible and function as a form of fictitious or interest-bearing capital. Her rigor and clarity of thought in insisting on the importance of considering land as a financial asset in rent theory and her problematization of the concept as an empirical proposition to be tested (as opposed to Harvey's theoretical deductions) challenged existing Marxist approaches to land rent (Haila, 1988).

This chapter presents a broad backdrop for understanding socially innovative initiatives and movements (their ambitions and interactions with the political world). A brief history of the relationship between the development of community and polity from early society until now sets the scene, with a particular focus on the rise and change in the societal role of civil society. Contemporary debates on the relationships between social innovation, social change, political life and socio-political transformation today are discussed; followed by a presentation of key-concepts used in the chapters that follow, as well as a summary of approaches and tensions between the three thinkers on the relationships between social innovation and socio-political transformation.

This paper focuses on what I refer to as Climate Populism and how this structures not only many radical climate movements but also the liberal climate consensus. I argue that the architecture of most mainstream as well as more radical climate discourses, practices, and policies is strictly parallel to that of populist discourses and should be understood as an integral part of a pervasive and deepening process of post-politicization. Mobilising a process that psychoanalysts call ‘fetishistic disavowal’, the climate discourse produces a particular form of populism that obscures the power relations responsible for the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. I shall mobilise a broadly Lacanian-Marxist theoretical perspective that permits accounting for this apparently paradoxical condition of both acknowledging and denying the truth of the climate situation, and the discourses/practices that sustain this.

The main trust of this article unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the article focuses on the lure of autocratic populism. The second part considers how transforming neoliberal governance arrangements pioneered post-truth autocratic politics/policies in articulation with the imposition of market rule and, in doing so, cleared the way for contemporary illiberal populisms. The third part considers the institutional configuration through which the democratic has been fundamentally transformed over the past few decades in the direction of a post-democratic constellation. The article concludes by arguing for the need to re-script emancipation as a process of political subjectivation unfolding trough a political act.