The Socio-ecological Question, the Global Environmental Justice Movement and Anti-systemic Environmentalism

Abstract

This article makes two central arguments: i) we can understand the current phase of anti-systemic movements predominantly through the globally expanding forms of resistance centered on environment, food, climate, soil, water, and so on as a collective socio-ecological critique and confrontation of the global capitalist relations of production; and ii) we can conceptually specify the global environmental justice movement through the notion of anti-systemic environmentalism expressing “the second contradiction of capitalism,” i.e., the socio-ecological crisis of the capitalist world system. In making these arguments, it introduces the concept of the socio-ecological question, theoretically grounded in the value theory of nature, in establishing the world-historical relationality among diverse place-based socio-environmental movements.