Date of Award

5-16-2024

Publication Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

Political Science

Supervisor

Jamey Essex

Abstract

This analysis examines the socio-environmental contradictions of industrial-capitalist agriculture through a critical historical materialist lens and extrapolates this perspective to consider the capacity to which current “green” and “sustainable” technological climate change mitigation proposals hegemonically enforced by the vast majority of global governments, international organizations, and corporations can diverge from, or reaffirm, accelerations in environmental destabilization. In CHAPTER 1, I argue that the narrow, and specifically capitalistic, technological concern for valorization and the quantitative accumulation of surplus proposed to stabilize global food systems during an unprecedented period of environmental instability further intensifies a spiralling interaction of ecological-crises dependency composed of three distinct tendencies: the loss of conception and execution within the working class, the incomprehensibility of conception and execution within the technical, specialist, and intellectual class, and the acceleration of the socio-environmental metabolic rift. In CHAPTER 2, I examine the subsumption of socio-environmental contradictions of capitalistic techniques of agricultural production under Cuban state-socialist governance and the extent to which capitalistic agricultural techniques are capable of mitigating crises in the context of accelerating climate change and increased environmental destabilization. It works to clarify and concretize critical ecologicalMarxist theory on the inherent socio-environmental contradictions of naturalized capitalistic scientific epistemologies and their physical manifestation in the form of technology through a historical materialist case study of Cuba’s agricultural history.

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