Review of Radical Political Economics

Heterodox debates already accept that market-centric “green” fixes are limited; what is missing is a mechanism-level account of how they misrecognize regulatory informality and autonomous communitarian societies. This article makes three contributions. First, it offers a typology separating regulatory informality from communitarian societies, showing why formalization-centric governance criminalizes the former and encloses or bypasses the latter. Second, it synthesizes four heterodox traditions, Original Institutional Economics, Feminist Political Economy, post-Keynesian macro, and Ecological Economics, into a comparative table that specifies pathways from informal/communitarian practices to environmental outcomes and predicts where price-centric tools will fail. Third, it applies these mechanisms to three emblematic cases, Delhi’s methane-to-energy waste project, Ecuador’s Yasuní “leave-oil-in-the-ground” effort, and community forestry in southern Mexico, demonstrating capital bias, enclosure, and the systematic undervaluation of reproductive and commons labor. The article advances a policy agenda that (a) builds value-articulating institutions, (b) recognizes/remunerates care and commons work, (c) channels adaptation finance to community-governed enterprises, and (d) aligns Northern degrowth with Southern sufficiency. Rather than treating “informality” as deficit, we reconceptualize informal economies and communitarian societies as sites of ecological reproduction, autonomy, and justice.

JEL Classification: B52, B59, P16, Q57, Q01

The paper contributes to the ongoing debates on capitalist climate governance by drawing from a case study of Gilgit Baltistan (GB), Pakistan. The article underscores what has been largely ignored by economists, namely, that agroecological farming practices of small peasants offer useful insights for sustainable climate governance because they are rooted in a holistic conceptualization of nature that transcends the ontological separation between human and nonhuman nature. Further, it illustrates that a meaningful analysis of climate governance in the Global South should be grounded in the historical and localized socio-institutional milieu. As the power balance between capitalists and the local community has steadily shifted against the latter, climate governance has degenerated into green grabbing and carbon colonialism. This climate governance regime has undermined both the agroecological livelihoods of small peasant communities and environmental sustainability in GB.

JEL Classification: B510, B520, Q56, Q57

This article examines the global clean energy transition through the lenses of world systems theory and historical materialism, situating contemporary energy system shifts within broader histories of economic struggle and geopolitical contestation. Extending existing frameworks of energy transitions as products of economic conflict, it traces how energy security concerns produced divergent responses among oil importers, embodied by US market-led shale extraction versus China’s state coordinated renewable dominance. While the US approach continues to facilitate imperial decline, China’s renewables strategy has catalyzed its rise as a global power while simultaneously enabling the resurgence of resource nationalism and the developmental state across the Global South. The renewable transition thus emerges not as a technical shift but as a geopolitical rupture signifying radical economic transformation at the global scale.

JEL Classification: Q40, P16, F59, Q54

Ecologically unequal exchange theory highlights the asymmetric transfer of environmental pressures and economic benefits between core and peripheral countries. This study provides empirical evidence of these dynamics in Argentina’s trade with Brazil, China, and the European Union from 2000 to 2016. Using an environmentally extended multiregional input-output model, it estimates greenhouse gas emissions, natural resources, and value added embodied in trade flows. The findings reveal significant disparities: Argentina, as an exporter, bears environmental costs while receiving limited economic compensation in trade with core countries, whereas the latter avoid emissions but capture greater economic benefits. These results underscore ecologically unequal exchange as an aspect of trade between core and peripheral countries.

JEL Classification: D57, F14, F18, Q56

In the context of ecological crisis and ecological transitions, socio-ecological conflicts are increasing. While their material causes are often attributed to socio-metabolic changes, I argue they also arise from the continuity of capitalist social metabolism, reflecting longstanding contradictions. Using a revised metabolic rift approach, I link disruptions of natural cycles to rifts in social metabolism, reinterpreting the term “social metabolism” based on Marx’s Capital as the process by which labor products reach human needs. To study the material roots of socio-ecological conflicts, I propose identifying the natural and social aspects of metabolic rifts and situating them historically, considering metabolic changes in relation to ongoing capital accumulation. This approach provides a broader perspective on conflicts, connecting them to wider social and environmental issues.

JEL Classification: B, P

Mainstream economics is ill equipped to deal with systemic issues such as the climate crisis. Yet there is no shortage of approaches that extend neoclassical principles to nature-economy relations, and they hold considerable currency in policy discourses. This article interrogates neoclassical thought on climate change from the perspective of economics imperialism, the expansion of economic analysis onto new subject matter at the expense of other approaches. Drawing on the work of William Nordhaus and Nicholas Stern, I argue that climate change economics has been underpinned by economics imperialism in its second “market imperfection” and third “suspension” phases. Economics imperialism has thus contributed to excluding considerations of power, race, class, gender, and other systemic inequalities from the field, and underpins solutions that delay radical climate action.

JEL Classification: B41, B50, Q50, Q54

This article reinterprets the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s with reference to climate change and planetary boundaries. It argues that the full significance of Mises’s critique of central planning has not been fully appreciated or rebutted by his leftist critics. The core of his argument concerns the lack of a performance evaluation criterion: While capitalism measures its success by profit rates, socialism has no metric to gauge its own outcomes. Acknowledging the reality of ecological destabilization, the article concludes, allows us to respond to Mises’s challenge in a more complete way by substituting sustainability for profitability as a criterion for centralized planning.

JEL Classification: B1, B2, P5, Q5

Latin America offers a fruitful breeding ground for producing radical thought and practitioners. With a millenarian history of peoples who developed extraordinarily rich cultures, the Spanish conquest and independence movements wreaked havoc that only now is being overcome by peoples who are now recuperating their heritages and societies. Submerged into this setting, my formation as a radical confirmed Marx’s late musings: Those societies that were able to retain and strengthen their communal organizations and mutual responsibilities to themselves and their territories were most likely to be the successful examples of the revolutionaries he struggled to support during his lifetime. This essay offers a glimpse at the path I fashioned during more than one-half century that is spawning some of the new worlds to which radicals must contribute.

JEL Classification: O13, P32, Q57, Z13

In a world that is characterized by climate denialism, eco-fascism, and fossil capitalism, green capitalism has captured popular imagination as a silver bullet that will deliver humanity from annihilation. Yet its failure to deliver leaves open the question of “what is to be done.” I argue that focusing on the crisis of social reproduction experienced by working people decenters the productivist understanding of economy and society. It offers a more expansive understanding of the potential motivations of working people and their ability to resist and build. It could also help radical political economists shape a political vision that would replace one driven by concerns of profitability.

JEL Classification: B51, B54, Q54, Q56