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Political Economy Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2015

Sociology

Critical theory

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Political Economy

Georg Lukács (1885-1971) And The Critique Of Reification: On The Dialectical Genesis Of The Great Acceleration, Alexander M. Stoner, Andony Melathopoulos Jan 2015

Georg Lukács (1885-1971) And The Critique Of Reification: On The Dialectical Genesis Of The Great Acceleration, Alexander M. Stoner, Andony Melathopoulos

Book Sections/Chapters

This chapter situates Lukács' critique of reification (1923) in relation to the emergence of the Great Acceleration. We develop Lukács' critique through the issue of the increasing rationalization of industrial and administrative work in the early twentieth century. In do so, we show how Lukács is able to relocate the continued relevance of Marx's insights with respect to the deeper structure of capitalist society in his consideration of the differential manner in which proletariat and bourgeois class consciousness approach the problem of social contradictions. We then discuss how, for Lukács, the overcoming of reification (or the failure to do so) …


Critique And Transformation: On The Hypothetical Nature Of Ecosystem Service Value And Its Neo-Marxist, Liberal And Pragmatist Criticisms, Andony P. Melathopoulos, Alex Stoner Jan 2015

Critique And Transformation: On The Hypothetical Nature Of Ecosystem Service Value And Its Neo-Marxist, Liberal And Pragmatist Criticisms, Andony P. Melathopoulos, Alex Stoner

Journal Articles

Ecosystem service valuation (ESV) attempts to transform the opposition of human economic necessity and ecological conservation by valuing the latter in terms of the services rendered by the former. However, despite a number of ESV-inspired sustainability initiatives since the 1990s, global ecological degradation continues to accelerate. This suggests that ESV has fallen far short of its goals of sustainable social transformation—a failure which has generated considerable criticism. This paper reviews three prominent lines of ESV criticism: 1) the neo-Marxist criticism, which emphasizes the “fictitious” character of ecosystem commodities; 2) the liberal criticism through Friedrich Hayek's concept “scientistic objectivism”; and 3) …