As a student, Altvater studied economics and sociology in Munich, and attained a doctorate with a dissertation on "Environmental Problems in the Soviet Union". At the Otto-Suhr-Institut, he was active in socialist research groups, working with among others Klaus Busch, Wolfgang Schoeller and Frank Seelow, and he gained fame as one of Germany's most important Marxist philosophers, who strongly influenced the political and economic theory of the
1968 generation of radicals. Altvater argues that the state performs four general maintenance functions particular capitalists cannot undertake: providing an initial legal system with property and contract law, regulating the class struggle between workers and owners of capital, enforcing terms of international trade and market expansion through military presence, and providing infrastructure. In 1970, he co-founded the German journal
PROKLA - Journal for Critical Social Science of which he remained an editor. In 1971, he became university professor in political economy at the Otto-Suhr-Institut. Apart from questions of development theory, the debt crisis, and the regulation of markets, he remains preoccupied with the effects of capitalist economies on the environment. Altvater was a noted critic of the
political economy and author of numerous writings on
globalization and critiques of
capitalism. A standard work is his book
The Limits of Globalization (1996), written with his companion Birgit Mahnkopf. Altvater supported the
German Greens for some time, but after the
1999 military intervention in Kosovo (which as a member of the governing coalition the party had to support) increasingly maintained a critical distance. He was a member of the
Bundestag Commission of Inquiry
The World Economy - Challenges and Answers (1999–2002). Altvater was a supporter of
ATTAC (he was a member of its Scientific Advisory Board) and the
World Social Forum. Altvater has employed the term "
Capitalocene", which is used by environmentalists as an alternative to the
Anthropocene. == Primary literature ==