The Ecological Crisis of Latin America

Abstract

The peoples and natural environments of Latin America and the Caribbean have suffered form centuries of exploitation at the hands of imperialist powers and their local client ruling classes. With the internationalization of the productive circuit of capital, however, ecological destruction and human poverty and misery have become more profound, and popular movements concerned with what Marx called the material of capitalist and for the reproduction of are growing stronger. Throughout Latin America, organizations and movements of environmentalists, urban and rural women, indigenous peoples, workers, health officials, peasants, and others are engaged in struggles with capital and the state over the ecological, human, and communal conditions of production (O'Connor, 1988; 1991).' Before production can take place, capital must gain favorable access to a sufficient quantity and quality of labor-power (its human conditions), land and natural resources (its ecological conditions), and infrastructure (its communal conditions). Because these conditions are not produced as commodities in accordance with the law of value, the state must attempt to make them available to capital via (1) family, education, health, housing, and other human welfare policies, (2) natural-resource and other environmental policies, and (3) communication, transportation, zoning, and other public service policies, respectively. In short, the state regulates the exploitation of the conditions of production by capital. Capital and the state rarely have a free hand, however, in their attempts to appropriate and restructure the production conditions according to the rules of the market, that is, exchange value. As previously stated, these conditions are also means for the reproduction of human beings and their communities (and life itself) according to cultural norms and social values, that is, use value. Hence, we find growing resistance