Eric Pineault
Éric Pineault holds a PhD in economics and sociology from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (ÉHESS) in Paris and the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where he teaches economic sociology, ecological economics and critical theory. Eric Pineault's research focuses on financial institutions, extractive economies, the issue of ecological transition and degrowth as well as the general macroeconomic and social transformations of advanced capitalism. He is a member of the research Collective for the analysis of the Financialization of Advanced Capitalism (CAFCA), research partner with the Corporate Mapping project and Senior Fellow at the “Postgrowth society “ College of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He has recently published with David Murray, Le Piège Énergie Est.
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Papers by Eric Pineault
For ecological economics, one of the challenges of the Anthropocene debate, is to explain the specific growth drivers that propelled the developed economies into the Great Acceleration. We know that the Great Acceleration cannot be attributed to humanity in the abstract, societies with a metabolism that was shaped by advanced capitalism are largely those that participated in this historical process. And even in the advanced capitalist core, such as the USA, Canada or Western Europe, it is difficult to attribute to all in an equal manner the responsibility for this metabolic shift or transition: the poor, the racialized, the marginalized do not evidently have the same ecological footprint as the rich, well off, and prospering middle or even the integrated working class. But is there is a specific and recognizable macroeconomic regime that can be identified as the growth engine of the Great Acceleration ? And if so, what are the analytical tools needed to understand this regime’s institutional features, microeconomic and sociological foundations and biophysical basis, sociocultural and political relays and effects ? IPAT in this instance is profoundly insufficient, as an analytical construct it is too crude, and finally overly descriptive. A growing number of ecological economists are drawing on heterodox macroeconomics - postkeynesian approaches in particular - to shed light on the growth drivers of capitalism that can explain the Great Acceleration, and my contribution can be situated in this research program. My specific contribution will be to highlight how the “over-accumulation” school of analysis of advanced capitalism that grew out of Kalecki’s attempt to understand monopolistic forms of accumulation in a capitalist economy dominated by large corporations and organized labour, can provide a model of capitalist growth based on a “deep treadmill effect” articulating over-production to over-consumption through waste. This rather pessimistic assessment of advanced capitalism’s dynamics attributes the material throughput to an economy that is constrained since the 1950’s to “absorb the surplus” it produces or fall into a state of prolonged stagnation and eventual crisis. The analytical advantage of this approach, on the normative and ethical front, is to shift the critique of overconsumption from the individual to the structural level, and to move from an environmental politics of shame and guilt to one of collective action and mobilization against entrenched power structures. Two deep treadmill circuits have developed over the course of the Great Acceleration, one through the so-called fordist accumulation regime where real wages validated over-production through over-consumption and a second neoliberal or financialized accumulation regime where this validation is meditated by public/and or private debt, asset inflation and financial innovation. Both regimes are stabilized by accelerating growth, both also have been the economic - fiscal foundation for social and environmental policies as initially argued by the “Treadmill of production" school of the 1980’s. A third possibility is a secular growth slow down, the prolonged disarticulation of the deep treadmill’s validating mechanisms and the tendency towards stagnation, this implies over-capacity on the one hand and purely financial forms of accumulation on the other. The socio-economic effect of this breakdown is the emergence of “growth demanding” social movements inside society, not only among progressive segments of the labour movement but also among reactionary neoconservative movements promising a return to “greatness”. Many on the progressive side consider green growth, ecological modernization and transition as a solution to the current stagnationnist tendencies of advanced capitalism, and this is received with enthusiasm by environmentalists. The model outlined above - much more pessimistic in its implications, would tend to predict that growth through ecological modernization would have similar waste based throughput effects as those that marked advanced capitalism’s more dynamic decades- unless substantial institutional change breaks down the social structures that depend on and accumulate through the deep treadmill.
L’œuvre de Pierre Dansereau et l’avenir des sciences de l’environnement"
Sous la direction de Normand Brunet, Paulo Freire Vieira, Marie Saint-Arnaud et René Audet
Résumé:
Après plusieurs décennies de recherches écologiques, Pierre Dansereau en était venu à la conclusion que l’avenir de l’humanité serait marqué par la nécessité de «consentir à de multiples contraintes avant que nous ne soyons obligés de nous y soumettre». Il reformulait ainsi la «question de la limite» qui est au cœur des réflexions sur le rapport société/nature qui marque les sciences de l’environnement. Cette question s’exprime d’une double manière: premièrement, comment découvrir et reconnaître des limites environnementales aux pratiques économiques des sociétés humaines, et ensuite, comment instituer une politique et (ou) une culture qui régule ces activités afin qu’elles se tiennent à l’intérieur de ces limites. Nous souhaitons examiner comment cette question des limites se déploie dans les rencontres contemporaines entre économie et écologie à travers l’examen de trois cas de figure: l’écologie humaine de Dansereau, les approches en économie écologique centrées sur le marché et celles qui mobilisent un cadre analytique biophysique.