Casa Abierta 2024. Ecología del paisaje y conflictos sobre los territori...

En este video de Casa Abierta 2024, se presenta el Dr. Brian Napoletano, investigador del CIGA, con el tema: "Ecología del paisaje y conflictos sobre los territorios y proyectos de desarrollo", explorando a su vez los perfiles que eventualmente podría asesorar en el marco del Posgrado en Geografía, sede CIGA, niveles maestría y doctorado.

Marxist sociology blog post on the communitarian revolutionary subject

The American Sociological Association published a short article by David Barkin and me that synthesizes our recent article in Monthly Review on David's concept of the communitarian revolutionary subject. In our age of profound social-ecological crises, the communitarian revolutionary subject is already proceeding to develop radically new social-ecological metabolic configurations. From my perspective, the key challenge here remains moving from individual projects to the sort of mass movement needed to bring about systemic transformation. Otherwise, I fear the radical alternatives being pursued by the revolutionary communitarian subject may be isolated or crushed by the combined forces of capital and the state. The post can be found on the Marxist sociology blog. The original article that David and I wrote for Monthly Review is also publicly avccessible on the MR website.

Henri Lefebvre's conception of nature-society in the revolutionary project of autogestion

When related to his conception of nature and society, Henri Lefebvre's concept of autogestion indicates the possibilities for a radical response to the social-ecological crises of capital in the twenty first century. Reuniting his radical critique of the capitalist production of space with his theorization of autogestion as a radical praxis aimed at total transformation offers a corrective to common, speculative appropriations of the former, while offering valuable insight into Lefebvre's observations regarding the centrality of the reappropriation of space to any genuinely radical project. Moreover, relating these concepts to his conception of nature-society and his engagement with what is now known as Marx's theory of metabolic rift indicates how a radical reappropriation of space, time, and the body also entails a transformation of humanity's relationship and metabolic interchange with the rest of nature.

Territorialising Space in Latin America

A book on territory and territoriality in Latin America, based on a pair of sessions at the 2018 Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers that I organized together with Mike McCall, has just been published by Springer. Here are the highlights:

• Investigates, from a grounded and contemporary perspective, how the notion of territory is being used in Latin America
• Covers significant theoretical and methodological approaches regarding territory and territoriality
• Highlights current trends of geographical research on Latin America from a wide diversity of researchers

Antinomies of space and nature or an open totality? Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on nature and society

Prior to recent, systematic engagement with the whole of his corpus, geographical appropriation of the thought of Henri Lefebvre has tended to be been fragmentary and eclectic. This is aptly illustrated in Neil Smith's paradoxical claim that his production of nature thesis was inspired by Lefebvre's work on the production of space even as Smith rejected or misunderstood most of what Lefebvre actually said while reworking the production of space into an epiphenomenon of the production of nature. This paper is one of several that ramified out of our call to re-evaluate Lefebvre's conception of the nature-society dialectic in geography, and compare it and contrast it to other understandings and theorizations of the problematic. In this paper, we focus primarily on interrogating Smith's influential portrayal of Lefebvre's thought on the dialectics of nature and society, reconsider Lefebvre's discussion of the domination of nature---a category on which much of Smith's thesis pivots---, and how Lefebvre's grasp of what is now referred to as Marx's theory of metabolic rift offers an alternative route to a spatial-ecological critique of capital than various attempts to "ecologize" David Harvey's theory of spatial fix.

Sustainability and Metabolic Revolution in the Works of Henri Lefebvre

A paper that we wrote, based on a study of the translated portion of Henri Lefebvre's corpus, on the potential insights that his conception of the oppositional unity of nature-society offers into questions of sustainability, was just published in World. The paper looks primarily at Lefebvre's relation to contemporary issues of sustainability in terms of three central themes: the urban revolution, autogestion, and the critique of everyday life and the notion of total revolution. The hope is to stimulate further thought and discussion, as well as consideration of how other aspects of Lefebvre's work could be brought to bear on a radical project of sustainability in the context of a comprehensive social transformation.

Five Centuries of Pillage and Resistance: Latin America and Africa

In advance of the 50th anniversary of the publication of two defining books of the 20th century,  Review of African Political Economy is publishing an account of both Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America and Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Today, the first of these two, which I wrote together with Héctor Ignacio Martínez Alvarez and Pedro S. Urquijo, was published on the ROAPE blog.

Spatial analysis and GIS in the study of COVID-19. A review

Iván Franch-Pardo spearheaded a comprehensive review of articles dealing with the spatial analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic published between January and May of 2020, and the results of the literature review, which I co-authored, have been published in Science of the Total Environment. The paper groups the 63 articles reviewed into categories of spatiotemporal analysis, health and social geography, environmental variables, data mining, and web-based mapping, and discusses the contributions of each. The article is published as Open-Access, and is freely available at the following link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140033.

The cultural production of Mexico

I recently reviewed Jennifer Jolly's (2018) Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas for Monthly Review. Overall, I found the book very interesting, and learned much about the study and interpretation of art, as well as how Pátzcuaro was turned into a historical monument to a particular notion of Mexican culture, and the important role of internal tourism in reproducing this national identity. Some of the minor details were a inconsistent with my own study of Mexican history, and the neglect of politico-economic factors sometimes resulted in incomplete explanations, but overall it is a compelling and worthwhile book.

The full review is available at Monthly Review: https://monthlyreview.org/2020/01/01/interrogating-the-cultural-production-of-mexico/

An ecological-Marxist response to the Half-Earth Project

A paper I wrote together with Brett Clark critiquing a widely circulated "ecocentric" argument claiming that concerns for the fate of nature should override any concerns with social justice in conservation was just published Ahead-of-print in Conservation and Society. Building on the theory of metabolic rift, the paper offers an explicitly Marxist perspective on the proposal to set aside at least half the Earth's surface for biodiversity conservation. Here are the details:
DOI: 10.4103/cs.cs_19_99

Henri Lefebvre’s Marxian ecological critique: recovering a foundational contribution to environmental sociology

The online version of the first in a series of articles we are writing describing Henri Lefebvre's use of Marx's theory of metabolic rift and its potential in developing a geographical perspective on the same was just published in Environmental Sociology. As the title suggests, the focus of this article is on Lefebvre's potential contribution to environmental sociology. Here are the details:
DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2019.1670892

Making Space in Critical Environmental Geography for the Metabolic Rift

The Version of Record of our article in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers making the case for stronger engagement with Marx's theory of metabolic rift in geography was published online today. In the article, we critically assess two other Marxist framings in geography from  which criticisms of the theory of metabolic rift have been made, then clarify several important conceptual aspects of the theory that have been misunderstood as a result of these criticisms. We then finish with a discussion of how the theory of metabolic rift relates to key themes in critical environmental geography, and how stronger engagement here could benefit the field. The article is available at Taylor & Francis Online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24694452.2019.1598841

Geographic rift in the urban periphery

The preprint of our article in the Journal of Latin American Geography describing work on the use of the concept of geographic rift---i.e., a metabolic rift referring to the spatio-geographical antagonisms associated with the disjuncture between material and value flows through the landscape---to examine the drivers and processes of land change in Morelia's urban periphery was just released. It can be accessed through Project Muse: https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.0.0106

Solidarity rises up to greet the caravan in Mexico

Afsaneh Moradian, Bea Abbott, Héctor A. Rivera and Brian Napoletano report from Mexico and the U.S. on the progress of the migrant caravan through Mexico — and on the inspiring displays of solidarity at every stop that set an example for activists in the U.S. — for Socialist Worker.

Members of the caravan in Mapastepec, Chiapas on October 25. Photo by José Manuel Mojica Vélez.

The founding of Science for the People-Mexico

I recently had the honor of helping to translate the declaration announcing the founding of Science for the People-Mexico, which was just published today in Socialist Worker. Two key issues that the Mexico branch of SftP formed around are concerns regarding the way science has been bent to the service of ongoing capital accumulation and the attacks and inaction on climate science.

Half-Earth: A biodiversity ‘solution’ that solves nothing

Variants of the half-Earth biodiversity conservation initiative, recently popularized by E.O. Wilson, have increasingly been gaining acceptance among conservationists. While the boldness of their proposal is commendable, placing half the Earth in protected areas only addresses the immediate causes of the biodiversity crisis, and even this conflicts with the land-use mandates of capital. As I argue in a recent article in Climate & Capitalism, ecological Marxism does not reject protected areas, but more fundamentally points out the need for a co-revolutionary struggle against alienation.

Mexico’s students today and the spirit of ’68

Together with Héctor Agredano Rivera, I translated an analysis by Edgard Sánchez Ramírez of the Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores on the student mobilizations that emerged in response to a recent incident on the UNAM campus in Mexico City that was just published by Socialist Worker.

The crisis of the Mexican regime and the 2018 elections

A statement of the Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores (Revolutionary Workers' Party) on the Mexican elections of 1 July 2018 that I translated into English together with Héctor Agredano River and Fernando Estañol Tecuatl  was just published by MRonline. The article outlines a revolutionary perspective on these historic elections and what they mean for the Mexican Left.

Ecological Marxism vs. environmental neo-Malthusianism

A short piece I wrote for Climate & Capitalism on this age-old debate between Marxism and populationism was just published. It offers a brief overview of the Marxist critique of Malthus's original argument and their contemporary Green permutations. The main thesis is that this ideology misrepresents social and ecological problems, and thereby promotes solutions that exacerbate the underlying contradictions of which these problems are symptoms

Has (even Marxist) political ecology really transcended the metabolic rift?

A brief article advocating for stronger engagement with the concept of metabolic rift in political ecology that I authored together with several colleagues was just published in Geoforum. In this article, we address several of the criticisms of metabolic-rift scholarship that have been made in political ecology by explicating some basic aspects of the concept's underlying materialist dialectic and contrasting this with some of the predominant post-modernist theorization in political ecology. The article details are provided below.