Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (38 page)

Under the pressure of continued exponential growth, cancerous degradation will most likely accelerate. I do not preclude apocalyptic-seeming moments in this process. The frequency of severe weather events is increasing, for example. But catastrophic localised events can readily be accommodated by capital since a predatory ‘disaster
capitalism’ is raring to respond. Capital in fact thrives upon and evolves through the volatility of localised environmental disasters. Not only do these create new business opportunities. They also provide a convenient mask to hide capital’s own failings: it is that unpredictable, capricious and wilful shrew called ‘mother nature’ who is to blame for misfortunes that are largely of capital’s making. By contrast, it is the slow, cancerous degradations that are the big problem for which capital is so ill-prepared and for the management of which new institutions and powers have yet to be created.

The temporal and geographical scales of capital’s ecosystem have been shifting in response to exponential growth. Whereas the problems in the past were typically localised – a polluted river here or a catastrophic smog there – they have now become more regional (acid deposition, low-level ozone concentrations and stratospheric ozone holes) or global (climate change, global urbanisation, habitat destruction, species extinction and loss of biodiversity, degradation of oceanic, forest and land-based ecosystems and the uncontrolled introduction of artificial chemical compounds – fertilisers and pesticides – with unknown side effects and an unknown range of impacts on land and life across the whole planet). In many instances local environmental conditions have improved, while it is the regional and above all the global problems that have deteriorated. As a result, the capital–nature contradiction now exceeds traditional tools of management and of action. It relied in the past on some combination of market forces and state powers to deal with problems, like the catastrophic London smog of 1952, which produced remedial action in the shape of Battersea Power Station, which dispersed the sulphurous pollutants of coal burning into the upper atmosphere (thus later producing the regional problem of acid deposition in Scandinavia which required complicated regional cross-national agreements to manage). Pollution problems do not only get moved around. They are also resolved by shifting and dispersing them to a different scale. This was what Larry Summers proposed when chief economist at the World Bank. Africa, he said, was ‘under-polluted’ and it would make sense to use it to dispose of the advanced countries’ wastes.
To the degree that so many of the contradictions have already ‘gone global’ over the last decades, so there are fewer and fewer empty spaces (except for outer-space dumping). This may become a serious problem as compound growth picks up.

Who now speaks and takes effective action for complex interactive problems on a global scale? Periodic international meetings to discuss environmental problems typically go almost nowhere. Occasionally, as in the cases of acid deposition and CFCs, transnational agreements are reached so action is not impossible. But these are drops in the bucket of major problems gradually emerging within capital’s global ecosystem. If capital does not successfully manage these contradictions it will not be because of barriers in nature, but because of its own economic, political, institutional and ideological failings. In the case of climate change, for example, the problem is not that we do not know what is happening or that we do not know in very broad terms (complicated though it may be) what to do. The problem is the hubris and the vested interests of certain factions of capital (and of certain capitalist state governments and apparatuses) that have the power to dispute, disrupt and prevent actions that threaten their profitability, competitive position and economic power.

Capital’s ecosystem has, of course, been global all along. International trade in commodities entails either a real or a virtual transfer of inputs (water, energy, minerals, biomass and nutrients, as well as the effects of human labour) from one part of the world to another. This trade is the glue that holds capital’s ecosystem together and it is the expansion of this trade that expands and intensifies activities within that ecosystem. The category of virtual ecological transfer is important. It refers to the way in which, say, energy used in aluminium smelting in Canada ends up in the USA in the commodity form of aluminium, as opposed to the direct transfer of energy from Canada to the USA through the power grid or an oil pipeline. Capital’s ecosystem is riddled with inequalities and uneven geographical developments precisely because of the uneven pattern of these transfers. Benefits pile up in one part of the world at the
expense of another. Transfers of ecological benefits from one part of the world to another underpin geopolitical tensions. This also helps explain why the Bolivian approach to the use of ‘their’ nature is so radically different from that in the USA. The Bolivians want to keep their oil in the ground. Why permit its extraction for use in, say, the United States for a mere pittance of royalties? Why should my resources subsidise your lifestyle?

The valuation put on nature or, as ecological economists prefer to conceptualise it, the monetary value put on the flow of services that nature provides to capital is arbitrary. It leads on occasion to indiscriminate exploitation of available use values to the point of ecological collapse. Capital has often exhausted and even permanently destroyed the resources latent in nature in certain locations. This has been particularly true when capital is geographically mobile. When the cotton growers in the American South or the coffee growers of Brazil exhausted their soils they simply moved on to other more fertile lands where the profitable pickings were even easier. Colonies were mined for their resources without regard to the local (often indigenous) population’s well-being. The mining of minerals and the exploitation of energy and forestry resources often follow a similar logic. But the ecological effects are localised, leaving behind an uneven geographical landscape of abandoned mining towns, exhausted soils, toxic waste dumps and devalued asset values. The ecological benefits are located somewhere else.

These extractive and exploitative practices become doubly rapacious and violent under systems of imperial and colonial rule. Soil mining, soil erosion and unregulated resource extractions have left a huge mark upon the world’s landscapes, in some instances leading to irreversible destructions of those use values needed for human survival. A more benign capitalist logic can be constructed in certain places and times that combines principles of sound environmental management with sustained profitability. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s in the USA, for example, was followed by the spread of conservationist land practices (sponsored by the state) and the design of a more sustainable agriculture, though based on the
capital-intensive, high energy, chemical and pesticide inputs characteristic of profitable contemporary agribusiness.

The existence of destructive ecosystemic practices in one place does not necessarily betoken similar practices elsewhere and vice versa. Doomsayers highlight rapacious and destructive practices here and the cornucopians point to well-balanced ecosystemic practices there. Both coexist within the dynamics of capital’s ecosystem. Unfortunately, we lack the knowledge and the instruments to arrive at a full accounting of planetary benefits and losses in use value or even in monetary terms (though satellite imagery will help with some aspects of the former). It is also extremely difficult to account for the real and the virtual ecological transfers occurring through the trading in commodities over space. The steel mills of Sheffield and Pittsburgh close down and air quality miraculously improves in the midst of unemployment, while the steel mills of China open up and contribute massively to the air pollution which reduces life expectancies there. Once again, pollution problems do not get solved but moved around. The uneven benefits and losses nearly always redound, however, to the benefit of the rich and powerful while leaving the vulnerable and the poor far worse off than before. This, after all, is what an extractive imperialism has always been about.

In the absence of any secure knowledge of how capital’s ecosystem is actually functioning as a whole, it is difficult to make any clear judgement on how fatal environmental degradations may be for the further continuous expansion of capital. This situation in itself signals, perhaps, a pivotal danger: not only do we lack the necessary instrumental arrangements to manage capital’s ecosystem well, but we also face considerable uncertainty as to the full range of socio-ecological issues that must be addressed. We do know that both the spatial and temporal scales at which environmental issues are now being posed have shifted radically and that the institutional framework to handle management at these scales is clearly lagging. We also know the measures necessary to ensure against catastrophic changes may not be designed and implemented in time, even presuming the political
willingness on the part of contentious parties to take precautionary action.

The general stance that it seems sensible to take in the face of these reservations is this: there is nothing natural about so-called natural disasters and humanity knows just about enough to ameliorate or manage the threat of most (though never all) environmental catastrophes. But it is unlikely that capital will take the necessary action without a struggle, both between its warring factions and with others who are affected by the cost-shifting that so conveniently goes on. The reasons problems persist are political, institutional and ideological and are not attributable to natural limits.

If there are serious problems in the capital–nature relation, then this is an internal contradiction within and not external to capital. We cannot maintain that capital has the power to destroy its own ecosystem while arbitrarily denying that it has a like potential power to cleanse itself and resolve or at least properly balance its internal contradictions. Usually prodded or mandated by state powers (that are often thoroughly incoherent with regard to environmental policies when taken in aggregate) or influenced by pressures emanating from capitalist society more generally, capital has in many instances successfully responded to these contradictions. The rivers and atmospheres of northern Europe and North America are far cleaner now than they were a generation ago and life expectancies are generally rising and not falling as in northern China. The Montreal Protocol restricting the use of CFCs curbed (though by no means perfectly) a serious environmental threat through international agreement. The harmful effects of DDT have likewise been restricted, to cite one more example out of many. In the case of the Montreal Protocol on CFCs, it was the conversion of the conservative and otherwise free-market cheerleader Margaret Thatcher to the role of an active supporter (in part because she was trained as a chemist and understood the technical issues involved) of the intergovernmental agreement that made all the difference. With climate change, there are simply too many ‘deniers’ in positions of power to permit ameliorative actions and so far no Margaret Thatcher figure has
ridden to the rescue. It has been left to some of the poorer and immediately threatened countries, like Bolivia and the Maldives, to plead the cause of climate justice. We are therefore not in a position to find out if capital could accomplish the massive adaptations required to deal with this problem effectively.

The bulk of the evidence now available does not support the thesis of an impending collapse of capitalism in the face of the environmental dangers. We will not run out of energy in spite of ‘peak oil’; there is land and water enough to feed an expanding population for many years to come even in the face of exponential growth. If there are specific impending scarcities of this or that resource, we are smart enough to find substitutes. Resources are technological, economic and cultural evaluations of use values in nature. If there seem to be natural shortages then we can simply change our technology, our economy and our cultural beliefs. Even problems of global warming, waning biodiversity and new disease configurations – which today have to be accorded the status of the premier threats to human life – could be handled adequately if we could overcome our own short-sightedness and political shortcomings. This is, of course, a tall order for our political institutions to respond to. There will therefore doubtless be resource wars, famines in some places and environmental refugees by the millions elsewhere, and frequent disruptions to commerce. But none of this is dictated by limits in nature. We have no one to blame but ourselves if much of humanity is reduced to penury and starvation. If that happens, it will be more a measure of human stupidity and venality than anything else. There is, alas, abundant evidence that there is plenty of that to go around and that capital itself thrives upon and even foments it. But this has not put an end to capital.

This brings us to the nub of what might be so threatening to the future of capital within the contradictory metabolic unity of capital and nature. The two answers are somewhat surprising. The first concerns the rising power of the rentier class to appropriate all wealth and income without paying any mind to production. The ownership and commodification of land and its ‘natural’ scarcity
allow an unproductive landlord class to extract monopoly rents at the expense of productive capital, ultimately reducing the profit rate (and hence the incentive to reinvest) to zero. This fits, as we have seen, with a broader concept of the rentier, which combines the traditional landlord with all forms of property ownership which are in themselves unproductive but which facilitate the appropriation of wealth and income. The appropriation of natural forces and the occupation of key points in capital’s ecosystem may threaten the strangulation of productive capital.

The second reason this contradiction could become fatal lies in a different dimension entirely. It rests on the alienated human response to the kind of ecological system that capital constructs. This ecosystem is functionalist, engineered and technocractic. It is privatised, commercialised and monetised, and oriented towards maximising the production of exchange values (rents in particular) through the appropriation and production of use values. Like all other aspects of capital, it is increasingly automated. It is capital- and energy-intensive with often very little labour input. In agriculture, it tends to be monocultural, extractive and, of course, perpetually expanding under the pressures of exponential growth. In urbanisation, the suburbs are just as monocultural, with a lifestyle that maximises the excessive consumption of material goods in an astonishingly wasteful manner and with isolating and individualising social effect. Capital dominates the practices whereby we collectively and even individually relate to nature. It disregards anything other than functionalist aesthetic values. In its ruinous approach to the sheer beauty and infinite diversity of a natural world (of which we are all a part) it exhibits its own utterly barren qualities. If nature is fecund, given over to the perpetual creation of novelty, then capital cuts that novelty into pieces and reassembles the bits into pure technology. Capital carries within itself a desiccating definition not only of the teeming diversity of the natural world but of the tremendous potentiality of human nature to evolve freely its on capacities and powers. Capital’s relation to nature and human nature is alienating in the extreme.