Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (37 page)

The ecosystem is constructed out of the contradictory unity of capital and nature, in the same way that the commodity is a contradictory unity between use value (its material and ‘natural’ form) and exchange value (its social valuation). Recall, also, the definition of technology as a human appropriation of natural things and processes to facilitate production. The nature that results is something that is not only evolving unpredictably of its own accord (because of the autonomous random mutations and dynamic interactions built into the evolutionary process in general) but actively and constantly being reshaped and re-engineered by the actions of capital. This is what Neil Smith has called ‘the production of nature’ and these days it is production ‘all the way down’ into the level of molecular biology and DNA sequencing.
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The direction this production of nature takes is an open and not a closed question. It has long been apparent, also, that it is full of unintended consequences. The refrigerators that facilitated the delivery of non-contaminated food supplies to burgeoning urban populations were many years later identified as the source of the chloro-fluorocarbons – CFCs – that were destroying the stratospheric ozone layer that protects us from excessive solar radiation!

The third main point is that capital has turned environmental issues into big business. Environmental technologies are now a big-ticket item on the world’s stock exchanges. Once this happens, as with the case of technologies in general, the engineering of the metabolic relation to nature becomes an autonomous activity relative to actual existing needs. Nature becomes, again in Neil Smith’s words, ‘an accumulation strategy’. When, for example, a new medicinal drug is invented or a new way to reduce carbon emissions is devised, then uses have to be found for them. This may entail need creation rather than need satisfaction. A drug like Prozac initially had no disease available for it to address so one had to be invented, giving rise to the so-called ‘Prozac generation’. The same ‘combinatorial evolution’ as prevails in the case of technological change comes into play. New drugs create side effects that require other drugs to control them and new environmental technologies create environmental problems that call forth other technologies.

For its own profit, capital seeks to capture the dialectics of how we can only change ourselves by changing the world (and vice versa). All ecological and environmental projects are socio-economic projects (and vice versa). Everything then depends on the purpose of the socio-economic and ecological projects – the well-being of people or the rate of profit? In fields like public health and clean water, this dialectic has worked for the benefit of people, sometimes at the expense of profits. Popular support for big business environmentalism has consequently been helpful both to capital and to environmental politics. Some of this politics is, unfortunately, symbolic rather than substantive. This is known as ‘greenwashing’ – disguising a profit-driven project as a project to enhance human welfare. Al Gore’s great gift to the environmental movement as it sought to do something about global warming was to create a new market in carbon trading that has been a grand source of speculative gain for hedge funds but done little to curb total global carbon emissions. The suspicion lurks that this was what it was designed to do all along. New organisational forms developed to conserve fish stocks entail a mode of privatisation that privileges large-scale financial and corporate capital at the expense of small-scale fishing.

Fourth, and this is perhaps the most uncomfortable thought of all, it may be perfectly possible for capital to continue to circulate and accumulate in the midst of environmental catastrophes. Environmental disasters create abundant opportunities for a ‘disaster capitalism’ to profit handsomely. Deaths from starvation of exposed and vulnerable populations and massive habitat destruction will not necessarily trouble capital (unless it provokes rebellion and revolution) precisely because much of the world’s population has become redundant and disposable anyway. And capital has never shrunk from destroying people in pursuit of profit. This was true of the recent appalling tragedies of fires and building collapses in the textile mills of Bangladesh that have claimed the lives of more than a thousand workers. Toxic waste disposal is highly concentrated in poor and vulnerable communities (some of the worst sites in the USA are in Indian reservations) or in impoverished parts of the world (toxic batteries
are taken care of in China in insalubrious conditions and old ships dismantled at considerable human cost on the shores of India and Bangladesh). Deteriorating air quality in northern China is reported to have reduced life expectancy in the population by more than five years since 1980. Unfair distributions of environmental damages of this sort may add fuel to an environmental justice movement. But the resultant social protests do not, as of now, constitute any major threat to the survival of capital.

The big underlying question is: under what circumstances might these internal difficulties be dangerous, if not fatal, for the reproduction of capital? To answer this question we have to understand more fully how the contradictory unity between capital and nature works. It is helpful here to look at how the seven foundational contradictions of capital affect matters. Nature is necessarily viewed by capital – and I must stress that it may be and is viewed very differently within capitalism as a whole – as nothing more than a vast store of potential use values – of processes and things – that can be used directly or indirectly (through technologies) in the production and realisation of commodity values. Nature is ‘one vast gasoline station’ (to cite Heidegger) and natural use values are monetised, capitalised, commercialised and exchanged as commodities. Only then can capital’s economic rationality be imposed upon the world. Nature is partitioned and divided up as private property rights guaranteed by the state. Private property entails enclosure of nature’s commons. While some aspects of nature are hard to enclose (such as the air we breathe and the oceans we fish in), a variety of surrogate ways can be devised (usually with the help of the state) to monetise and make tradable all aspects of the commons of the natural world. State interventions are also often developed to correct for market failures. While these interventions may seem progressive, their effect is to further promote the penetration of market processes and market valuations into all aspects of our lifeworld. This is the case with carbon trading and the growing market in pollution rights and ecological offsets. When the natural commons are privatised, then all things, objects and processes therein are assigned a value (sometimes
arbitrarily by bureaucratic fiat) no matter whether any social labour has been expended on them or not. This is how capital creates its own distinctive ecosystem.

Private individuals are then free to extract social wealth from their ownership of a commodified nature. They can even capitalise it as monetary wealth. This creates a basis for the formation of a potentially powerful rentier (including landowning) class, which regulates access to the store of use values by virtue of its class monopoly power and the rents it extracts from the land. This class ‘owns’ the nature we need in order to live and it can threaten the perpetuation of capital by monopolising all wealth for itself. Ricardo (following Malthus) thought that capital was doomed, as we saw earlier, because profit rates would inevitably fall as rental extractions and food prices rose. The power of rentiers is magnified by the fact that many resources, being found in geographically specific locations, are subject to monopolistic competition and therefore open for the extraction of monopoly rents. Urban land and property markets as well as the world of so-called ‘natural’ resources are fecund sites for a flourishing rentier class to amass more and more wealth and power. This power of the rentier carries over to that aspect of nature which is internalised within the circulation of capital as technology. Patents and ownership rights have been established at the behest of those producing nature in the form of new technologies. Privately owned genetic materials (for example, seeds), new methods and even new organisational systems are privately licensed out to others in return for a monopoly rent. Intellectual property rights have become a vital field of accumulation over the last few decades.

The stranglehold that the rentier class (for example, landlords and owners of mineral, agricultural and intellectual property rights) has over so-called ‘natural’ assets and resources allows it to create and manipulate scarcities and to speculate on the value of the assets they control. This power has long been in evidence. It is now generally accepted, for example, that almost all famines over the last 200 years have been socially produced and not naturally ordained. Every time rising oil prices provoke a chorus of commentary on the natural
limits of ‘peak oil’ it is followed by a period of rueful remorse as it is realised that it was the speculators and the oil cartel who together pushed the oil prices up. The ‘land grabs’ now going on around the world (particularly in Africa) have more to do with escalating competition to monopolise the food chain and resources with an eye to extracting rents than with fear of impending natural limits to food production and mineral extractions. The rising food prices that have sparked so much unrest in recent times (including the revolutions in North Africa) are mostly attributable to the ways the exchange value system is being manipulated for reasons of profitability.

Capital’s conception of nature as a mere objectified commodity does not pass unchallenged. A perpetual battle ensues between how capital conceptualises and uses the metabolic relation to nature to construct its own ecosystem and the different concepts of and attitudes towards nature held in civil society and even within the state apparatus. Capital cannot, unfortunately, change the way it slices and dices nature up into commodity forms and private property rights. To challenge this would be to challenge the functioning of the economic engine of capitalism itself and to deny the applicability of capital’s economic rationality to social life. This is why the environmental movement, when it goes beyond a merely cosmetic or ameliorative politics, must become anti-capital. The concept of nature that underpins various philosophies of environmentalism is radically at odds with that which capital has to impose in order to reproduce itself. The environmental movement could, in alliance with others, pose a serious threat to the reproduction of capital. But so far environmental politics has not, for a variety of reasons, moved very far in this direction. It often prefers to ignore entirely the ecology that capital is constructing and nibble at issues that are separable from the core dynamics of what capital is about. Contesting a waste dump here or rescuing an endangered species or a valued habitat there is in no way fatal to capital’s reproduction.

We can now better understand two things. First, how important it is that capital seizes the environmentalist mantle for itself as the legitimate foundation for the big businesses environmentalism of the
future. In this way it can dominate ecological discourses – define nature in its own (usually monetised, with the help of cost benefit analysis) terms – and seek to manage the capital–nature contradiction in its own broad class interests. Second, the more dominant the economic engine of capital is within the various social formations that constitute world capitalism, the more the rules of capital’s metabolic relation to nature must dominate public discourses, politics and policies.

On what grounds, then, might I upgrade this question of capital’s changing metabolic relation to nature to a dangerous, if not potentially fatal, contradiction? Capital’s successful past negotiation of this difficulty does not guarantee that things will be the same this time around. ‘Successful’ is here defined, of course, in capital’s terms and those are of sustained profitability. This is an important qualification, because the cumulative negative ecological aspects of capital’s past adaptations remain with us, including the legacies of damages inflicted in the past. At each historical step the baseline from which capital’s ecosystem functions is very different. Much of the tropical rainforest, for example, is already gone and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising for some time. Suburbanisation and the suburban lifestyle are expanding (for example, in China of all places). This way of life is deeply embedded in the cultural preferences, the psyches of people and in a physical landscape lubricated by high energy consumption and wasteful use of land, air and water.

What is different this time is that we are now at a key inflexion point in the exponential growth rate of capitalist activity. This is having an exponential impact upon levels of environmental stress and distress within capital’s ecology. To begin with it puts intense pressure on commodifying, privatising and incorporating more and more aspects of our lifeworld (even life forms themselves) into the circuits of capital. Even genetic identifications are now claimed as private property. It also leads to an intensification of pressures most notably in areas such as climate change, loss of habitat diversity and the volatile and stuttering capacity to assure food security and
adequate protections against new diseases. There are strong indications, I would argue, of an increasingly cancerous spread and degradation in the qualities of capital’s ecosystem. Much of this is associated also with rapid urbanisation and the construction of built environments (sometimes referred to as a ‘second nature’) of a very low quality (this has been very much the case in Asia’s rapid recent urbanisation).

The struggle within capital over how to ameliorate its own ecological conditions is ongoing and sharpening. Ecological effects are typically experienced by capitalist firms as cost-shifting or as what economists call ‘externalities’ – defined as real costs for which capital does not have to pay (for example, the pollution that is unloaded into the environment or on to others free of charge). Even right-wing economists recognise that there is a problem of market failure here and that there is just cause for state interventions, compensatory taxes and regulatory action. But, as always, uncertainties and unintended consequences attach to both action and inaction on such issues. The greatest danger is that necessary action will be delayed by recalcitrant political and corporate powers and that we might go beyond some irreversible tipping point before the problem is identified, let alone resolved. The reproductive cycle of sardine populations off the California coast, for example, was unknown and overfishing blithely continued in the 1930s to the point of zero reproduction before anyone realised there might be a problem. The sardines have never returned.
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In the case of the Montreal Protocol, to take another example, the time horizon was long because the CFCs in the stratosphere take many years to dissipate. Capital is understandably not good at dealing with time horizons of this sort. This is one of the big problems with combating the long-term repercussions of climate change and the loss of planetary biodiversity.