Elmar Altvater und die ökologische Frage

The main arguments of the ecological marxism of Elmar Altvater are presented referring to key publications in their historical context. Altvater’s work on ecology starts in the 1980s, developing along a critique of the contradictory social forms of capitalist nature relations. His approach articulates world market and international politics with the spatially differentiated development of regional societal formations, capturing the materiality of nature by thermodynamic categories while highlighting the properties of fossil fuels. Contours of a critical reception of how Altvater conceptualizes societal relations with nature are outlined.