Explaining global-unevenness of environmental degradations: Monopoly economy and spatial injustice

This dissertation presents an ecological critique of capitalism. The aim is to develop a theoretical frame that can explain globally-uneven degradations as opposed to global risks. I conceptualize the global-unevenness of environmental degradations as a problem of spatial injustice, and argue that this spatial injustice is systemically produced under the current capitalist economy, which is a global monopoly economy.;In order to theorize injustice distributed along the logic of spatial hierarchy, power relations between different actors should be specified. Taking large corporations as a primary analytical unit, this dissertation theorizes the current economy in terms of monopoly power. I argue that, in an economy characterized by a high level of concentration, the market division-of-labor does not necessarily represent decentralized/uncontrolled coordination as portrayed in mainstream economics. Instead, the market is instrumentally organized by monopoly power, and the resultant market configuration is highly controlled and hierarchical, at least highly enough to avoid being regarded as subject to competitive conditions. In particular, focusing on the firm-to-firm market, I explore how large corporations actively shape their relationship with other firms in their upstream- and downstream- industries.;Analysis of monopoly power reveals that, in an economy with vastly asymmetric power relations, the economic activities of large corporations that produce market-captured positive values also produce and distribute uncaptured negative values. This process of cost externalization is, I argue, the central mechanism forcing uneven distribution of environmental hazards.;This dissertation, then, applies the monopoly approach to a globalized economy under neoliberalism. I argue that neoliberalism has little to do with the expansion of the competitive market principle and much to do with the global division-of-labor driven by large transnational corporations (TNCs). Based on this analysis of the global monopoly economy, I explore the social and environmental consequences that result from the cost externalization performed by TNCs through globally hierarchical production networks.;If large TNCs are the power units significantly responsible for the grave degradations observed in many parts of the world, the legal immunity that TNCs are enjoying for the problems they induce requires a separate explanation. Transnational injustice is difficult to deal with especially because political systems are nationally organized while the problem at hand has a transnational quality. The Alien Tort Statute (ATS) of the US provided a small opportunity to overcome the limitation of nationally-organized legal systems by allowing foreign (non-US) nationals to file their suits in the US courts. However, the ATS raised challenges to the Westphalian notion of sovereignty, and the small opening for TNC-liability provided by the ATS has shut over the last three-decade period, as those challenges were settled in such a way to reaffirm Westphalian sovereignty. By analyzing court decisions on selected ATS cases against TNCs, and with specific focus on the rationales for TNC-immunity under international law, I point out that the concept of nominal statehood based on the Westphalian ideal produces real effects that pose serious obstacles in efforts to address transnational injustice.;Based on the analysis of monopoly power and its negative consequences, this dissertation also provides a critique of depoliticization trends shown in contemporary economic- and social- theories. First, I argue that mainstream economic theories adhere to the competitiveness assumption by treating corporations, regardless of their sizes, as individuals, without capturing the fact that a market dominated by large corporations operates through qualitatively different dynamics from competitive market dynamics. Economically-induced spatial injustice has thus become an irrelevant topic in mainstream economics, as the power issue, which should be a major implication drawn from the consideration of firm size, has become analytically negated.;Second, this dissertation also points out how contemporary social theories, too, have lost their critical quality. I argue that social theories, both mainstream and leftist alike, came to negate the concepts of structural unevenness and antagonism in their theorization of critical consciousness and agency when they departed from the Marxist tradition of analyzing class structure. This trend is closely related to the fact that recent social theories take the rise of so-called "new social movement" agendas in advanced countries as their primary empirical base. Given that the problem at hand is transnational injustice, i.e. injustice that is hierarchically distributed in a globally-uneven fashion, I argue, over-generalization of the advanced world's experiences runs the risk of under-theorizing the critical consciousness that does and should develop from the unevenness itself, that is, from the experiences of the more oppressed people.