Emanuele Leonardi works at the Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna (Italy). He is the co-editor of the Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics (Elgar, 2022). Articles of his have been published by prominent journals such as Globalizations, Ecological Economics, Radical Philosophy and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Preface to the English Edition

Introduction

I. Political Ecology as Method
Analytical Premises and New Political Stakes of Social Transformation

1. The divorce between wealth and value
2. André Gorz’s political ecology
3. Further considerations: the concept of nature, the theoretical status of the theory of value, and class composition

II. Nature in Classical Political Economy and Its Critique
Primitive Accumulation, Valorisation and Abstract Social Nature

1. Marx: nature as capital
2. Nature and political economy
3. Moore: abstract social nature

III. An Entropic Device
The Rise of the Labour-Nature-Value Nexus from Fossil Capitalism to the Fordist Pact

1. Resisting value theory: struggles against and within valorisation
2. The ‘classic’ labour-nature-value nexus as entropic device

IV. The Twofold Crisis of the ‘Classic’ Labour-Nature-Value Nexus
Social Struggles and Physical Limits to Growth at the Root of the First Oil Shock (1968-1973)

1. Gorz’s theory of the twofold crisis (1968-73)
2. The environmental causes of the twofold crisis: the physical limits to growth
3. The social causes of the twofold crisis: feminist revolution and liberation of work / liberation from labour

V. Nature as a Direct Element of Valorisation
Cognitive Labour and Financialization in the Green Economy

1. Ecology and class composition
2. Cognitive capitalism and the becoming productive of social reproduction
3. Financialisation of the economy and ecological crisis
4. Green Economy: exploitation and manipulation of cognitive labour in biomimicry

VI. For a Critique of Carbon Markets
Historical and Economic Notes on the Peculiar Commodification of the Climate

1. Carbon Trading in actu: the Kyoto Protocol (1997)
2. Productive failure of carbon markets and climate rent
3. How to produce a Certified Emissions Reduction: in the lab of carbon commodities

VII. Between Marxism and Degrowth
Shrinking Social Metabolism and Liberating Negentropic Work

Conclusion