Nov 16, 2013 - ... who sees the world's superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills.â Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet ...
16/11/2013
The Political Ecology of the State: Neoliberalism and Environmental Statehood in Latin America Antonio A. R. Ioris Human Geography seminar series, UoE, 14 Nov. 2013
“Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.” “A reformer is a man who sees the world's superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills.” Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
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16/11/2013
“Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few presupposes the indigence of the many. (…) It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property (…) can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appeased, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate (…). The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary.” Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
Bolivia The “state is rational in and for itself inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness that has been raised to its universality”. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (1821)
Peru
Brazil
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16/11/2013
““Only the critique of political emancipation itself would constitute a definitive critique. (…) Political emancipation is the last form of human emancipation within the prevailing scheme of things.”
“For the fate of Charles the First, hath only made kings more subtle – not more just.” Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Marx, On the Jewish Question (1843)
Summary Environmental debate & the failures of Western modernity State is the key socioecological player and the main producer of socioecological problems Environmental statehood - arrangements and practices for the control and regulation of ecosystems and territorialized resources Neoliberal environmental statehood betrays elements of Hegelianism (mystification, idealism, subtle elitism, etc.) Marx (1843) – the shortcomings of conservative democracy are in the state itself Latin America – creative socioecological interactions as alternative epistemologies
“We certainly do not want socialism in Latin America to be a copy or an imitation. It should be heroic creation. We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.” José Carlos Mariátegui (1928)
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