The question whether the state has the capacity to enact significant enviromental legislation is more than ever of crucial importance. This especially the case based on the premise held in relevant critical literature (cf. Altvater 2007a) that the capitalist logic is depend of a fossil fuel based, acceleratory and nature-blind economic development, i.e. not itself capable to significantly alter the present society-nature relations.
My Paper will build on the threefold assumption that (a.) the key to overcoming the ecological crisis is an energy transition towards a solar-based society and (b.) this would require exceptional changes in societal infrastructures which (c.) can only be affected by a central political authority like the modern state. I will propose the thesis that this state is unable to affect this change as it is chiefly a capitalist state. Materialist state theory can help us to corroborate this claim. In particular, the state-derivation debate, whose initial desideratum was the capacity of the capitalist welfare state to achieve socialist transformations, has yielded arguments that can fruitfully be applied to the question at hand. Based on the form adequacy of the political and economic forms, the limits of state intervention can be assessed. This implies the distinction between formal and activity limits (Blanke 1976, 197ff ) or as recent literature it ‘formal and functional adequacy’. My Paper will apply the insights on the issue of energy transition and argue that the latter is a system limit, not an activity limit, as fossil energy system, capitalist economic forms and modern political forms are interlocked.
Altvater, E. 2007a. The Capitalist Energy System and the Crisis of the Global Financial Markets: the Impact on Labour. LABOUR, Capital and Society 40, 1&2: 18-35.
Blanke, B. 1976. Entscheidungsanarchie und Staatsfunktionen. In: Bürgerlicher Staat und politische Legitimation, Hrsg. Ebbighausen, Rolf, 188-216. Frankfurt a.M
