The greening of uneven and combined development: IR, capitalism and the global ecological crisis

Abstract

Contemporary extensions of Leon Trotsky’s argument have seen the introduction of uneven and combined development (UCD) into the field of International Relations (IR) as a theory that is uniquely able to unite sociological and international processes. Yet, despite UCD’s historical materialist foundation, its contemporary applications have been largely abstracted from ecological issues. This presents the theory with a problem that it needs to overcome if it wishes to retain explanatory relevance in a future of ecological uncertainty and crisis. This paper argues that UCD’s historical materialist basis includes a distinctly ecological dimension, which—if recovered—may enable the theory to make sense of contemporary environmental problems and also provide IR with an approach that unites international, sociological and ecological factors. The argument proceeds in three steps. It begins with an overview of UCD and its contemporary omission of ecological processes. To recover the theory’s deep ecology, it then foregrounds the ecological dimension of Karl Marx’s historical materialism, showing how an eco-socialist analysis reveals the capitalist nature of the ecological crisis. Finally, it demonstrates that an enhanced version of UCD—re-grounded in this “ecologized” historical materialism—is uniquely able to integrate the international into a Marxist socio-natural reading of the global ecological crisis.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the contributions to Eroukhmanoff and Harker (2017) for various forms of this argument.

2 Rosenberg (2006, 308) uses the term “international” independently from the historically specific concept of the modern nation-state to describe a transhistorical dimension of causality that arises from the presence of multiple, coexisting societies.

3 It is important to mention that Moore’s take on the society/nature relation differs from the eco-socialist approaches employed in this paper (see Saito 2017b for a discussion of this).

4 See Jones (2010), Matin (2013, ch 5) and Mitchell (2009) for critical discussions of the “rentier state” that touch on some of the aspects mentioned here.

5 See Marcel and Mitchell (2006) on the nationalization of oil across the Middle East.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johanna Siebert

Johanna Siebert completed her BA in International Relations and her MA in Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. Her research focusses on International Historical Sociology, critical Marxist theory and the global ecological crisis.