Revisiting Capital and Class in the Ecological Crisis: Toward an Expanded and Historical Approach

ABSTRACT This article offers a critical review of recent literature examining the entanglement of ecological crisis, capitalism, and class struggle, and proposes the incorporation of an expanded and historical perspective on class. First, we offer an introductory conceptual mapping of the anticapitalist ecology and some of its most significant controversies and contributions. The second section explores in greater depth the work of several key authors in this field—Nancy Fraser, Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, Adrienne Buller, Kohei Saito, and Matthew Huber—whose publications have deliberately sought to broaden and sharpen the notions of capital and capitalism. The last section argues that any such redefinition remains incomplete without a parallel reassessment of class, for which we propose a class‐formation approach inspired by Marxist social history. We suggest two avenues for this work. First, to integrate analyses that examine class conflicts beyond the point of production and beyond debates over distributive or climate justice. Second, to draw on perspectives from British Marxist historiography, which allow us to understand class not only in terms of its objective determinants but also as a collective subject constituted through concrete struggles.