The making of ‘green’ capitalism in Europe’s marginal regions: renewable energy production as territory grabbing for accumulation

It is no mystery that we are living in times of multiple ecological crises. Not only are phenomena such as climate change, widespread pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil artificialisation threatening irreversibly the ‘natural’ world. They imperil human society too, for human society is part of nature.

Taking a historical materialist perspective, this thesis understands those crises as originating in capitalist social relations, which maximise the exploitation of both human labour and the ecosystems. By the same token, the thesis maintains that mainstream responses to the crises are fully framed within the capitalist paradigm of perpetual and privatised ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’, only now legitimised through ‘green’ credentials. Building on theoretical and political approaches calling for the incorporation of an ‘ecological’ rationality within capitalist relations, these responses articulate faith in and commitment to the modernisation of productive cycles and governance systems, from which a more sustainable – ‘green’ – capitalist economy can apparently arise.

Differently, this thesis interprets such a ‘green’ turn as capitalism’s adaptation and expansion in the context of the ecological crises, with the overarching purpose of furthering our understanding of these dynamics. More accurately, the thesis deploys and innovates a range of historical materialist categories to analyse the hitherto under-explored relationship between the ‘green’ as an accumulation opportunity and its leveraging as a legitimation framework.

Empirically, the thesis investigates the accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy generation at the level of production areas, the enclosure and trans-formative processes it triggers, the class and factional cleavages it entails, and the regulatory mechanisms and legitimation narratives to which it is associated. Methodologically, it combines a comprehensive theoretical elaboration with case studies of two generation systems, one in southern Italy focused on wind energy and a second in eastern Germany focused on agricultural biogas.

The thesis’s main argument is that under capitalism, renewable energy generation expands accumulation frontiers over not yet or ‘inefficiently’ commodified spaces and natures. This occurs through their privatisation and abstraction into fictitious capital –that is through their commodification and financialization. In contrast with marginalist approaches, this thesis reconciles the socially necessary labour time theory of value with political ecology. It rejects the assumption that privatised spaces and natures might ‘innately’ provide exchange value, maintaining conversely that they serve as a collateral to capture –by way of rent- surplus value produced in society at a different point in time and space.

Secondly, the thesis offers a definition of ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project in the making. This is characterised by two interrelated dialectics: one tending to restructure the forces and relations of production; the other to re-build hegemonic narratives and apparatuses, around re-significations of the ‘green’ made compatible with sustained ac-cumulation.

Thirdly, the thesis advances the category of territory grabbing, intended as a spatiotemporal process whereby a territory, or places within or of it, is abstracted from its stratified historical identity, reduced to exchange value, and transposed into the accumulation function of an investment scheme.

As a principal contribution, this thesis offers an elaborate and original framework, broadening the range of theoretical and analytical instruments needed to decipher con-temporary capitalism and its ‘green’ variant, both conceptually and empirically. In continuing the historical materialist tradition, as the concluding chapter explains, that framework, and the empirical findings it has produced, are not merely intended to enrich specialised literature, but most importantly to strengthen scholar and activist debates and practices towards a social and environmental justice beyond the inequalities of capitalism.