Elmar Altvater facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Elmar Altvater
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| Born | 24 August 1938  |
| Died | 1 May 2018 (aged 79) |
| Employer | Otto-Suhr-Institut |
| Political party | The Left (Die Linke) Formerly: Alliance 90/The Greens |
Elmar Altvater (born August 24, 1938, in Kamen, Germany – died May 1, 2018) was a German professor. He taught political science at the Otto-Suhr-Institut of the Free University of Berlin. He retired in 2004 but continued to work and write articles and books.
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Who Was Elmar Altvater?
Elmar Altvater was a very important thinker in Germany. He studied economics and sociology in Munich. He earned his doctorate by writing about environmental problems in the Soviet Union.
His Main Ideas
At the Otto-Suhr-Institut, he became famous as a leading Marxist philosopher. He greatly influenced the ideas of students in the 1968 generation. He looked at how governments (the state) help the economy work, especially in a capitalist system.
Altvater believed that the state does four important things that individual businesses cannot do alone:
- It creates a legal system, including laws about property and contracts.
- It helps manage disagreements between workers and business owners.
- It helps with international trade and expanding markets, sometimes using military power.
- It provides important things like roads and other public services.
His Work and Writings
In 1970, Altvater helped start a German journal called PROKLA - Journal for Critical Social Science. He remained an editor there for many years. In 1971, he became a university professor in political economy.
He was very interested in how countries develop, how debt crises happen, and how markets are controlled. He also focused a lot on how capitalist economies affect the environment.
Altvater was well-known for criticizing the global economy. He wrote many books and articles about globalization and capitalism. One of his most famous books is The Limits of Globalization (1996), which he wrote with Birgit Mahnkopf.
Political Involvement
For some time, Altvater supported the German Greens political party. However, he became more critical after the 1999 military action in Kosovo. The Greens were part of the government that supported this action.
He was also a member of a special commission in the German parliament (the Bundestag). This group studied the world economy from 1999 to 2002. Altvater supported groups like ATTAC and the World Social Forum, which work for social justice and a fairer global economy.
The "Capitalocene" Term
Elmar Altvater also created the term "Capitalocene." This word is used by environmentalists as another way to describe the Anthropocene. The "Anthropocene" refers to the current geological age where human activity has a major impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems. Altvater's term "Capitalocene" suggests that it's not just human activity in general, but specifically the way capitalism works, that has caused these big environmental changes.
