This post is written by Gordon Peters and is a paper he gave to the recent Historical Materialism Conference
In this short paper I am taking as a starting point the ecological
rift, or metabolic rift in Marx’s own phrase, at the heart of the way in which
capitalism appropriates the natural world and alienates humanity from its
species being and from nature in the process. This is elaborated at
considerable length by John Bellamy
Foster and Brent Clark [but not exclusively by them] and what I hope to do here
is while accepting their recovery of ecological balance and its disturbance in
Marx, give an overview of an ecological praxis related to that theorization.
What does restoring ecological value look like?
In their article in Monthly Review, Bellamy Foster and Clark [1]
mention – although they do not explore – two useful concepts to challenge the
metabolic rift and the separation of humanity from nature, accelerating as it
is with capital accumulation and reproduction. One is ‘metabolic
restoration’ and the other is ‘sustainable
co-evolutionary ecology’. I think it is worth exploring the social and
political interventions which are called for by these concepts. To do so we
need to see clearly what is happening, what processes are taking place, what is
irreversible, what can be refused, what can be overcome.
I want to look at four important tendencies in modern capitalism
and what can constitute ecological challenges which are not themselves already
determined by capitalist relations, or are likely to be re-shaped in managing
capitalism to maintain its power or hold.
These are:
1] Automation and precarity
2] Despoliation and species reduction
3] Commodification and fetishism –reification
4] Ecological debt and unequal exchange
They are discussed only in broad outline as there is vast
empirical evidence now in many places, and the point here is to orientate a
praxis.
Automation and precarity
The labour saving aspects of technological innovation may be seen
as positive and the value adding as negative, albeit that the exchange
relationship demanded by capitalism appropriates huge surplus profit from new
technological applications and makes more workers redundant or precariously
self employed. There are now various projections of how far automated labour
processes will go, and how far professional, middle class as well as
conventional working class jobs will be lost and lives will change [e.g.
Snricek and Williams [2], Standing [3]. For this purpose I think it is safe to
say that the world of waged and salaried work is changing to an extent that
most livelihoods based on paid work will become precarious, middle as well as
working class people will suffer emisseration, and ever more unequal
concentrations of wealth [and absence of wealth] will form, geographically
uneven within countries and between countries.
Where family wage, job security and increasingly the social safety
net for periods of worklessness and ill health are less and less viable, or in any
sense dependable [and the decline of social democracy in government or as a
main opposition to rampant capitalism confirms this] then the demand for basic or citizens income becomes not
just a ‘left field’ or idealistic one but potentially central to a social
discourse, and politics, which seeks to establish and protect rights of
ordinary wellbeing and human dignity. There are numerous technical approaches
to basic income, depending partly on different elaborations of welfare state or
their absence, and what transitional arrangements will look like and affect
groups of people, but essentially they take away the dependence on the exchange
relationship of work and its extraction of surplus value to maintain the
livelihood of people, fit or unfit, young or old, and replace that with a
guarantee of sustainability of the means of life with no-one denied, and rights
to earn or accumulate beyond that which may then be regulated [or not]
according to prevailing circumstances. The argument about distribution of surpluses
then remains but is no longer linked to peoples very survival. In more
immediate and practical terms, the fight against discrimination and benefits
capping and for a real living wage, and supporting trade unions in this is
linked to the argument for citizens or basic income as the medium to longer
term way of dealing with such discrimination and poverty.
The fight for decent work
standards, and against zero hours precarity such as that taken up by
Deliveroo workers in the UK, or the Walmart $15 hour campaign in USA, is one
ecosocialism has to be allied to in challenging the way in which capitalism
depends on further exploitation and denial of basic rights to its workforce.
Minimum wage and employment rights, coupled with a social safety net, may be
increasingly undeliverable by neo-liberal capitalism and to the extent that is
the case, unifying the interests of those in low paid work and those
unemployed, or periodically and unsustainably employed, is a vital transitional
task in building demand for an alternative.
Complementary to a basic income approach, restoring ecological
value envisages not only protecting but celebrating
the commons.
Mutual aid
and networks of skills exchange can make the limited applications
of time banking possible within capitalism into a social norm of the use value
of work, freely exchanged and not part of the commodity form. The uncompensated
work of informal care in the political economy of welfare [currently estimated
to involve over six million people in UK either part time or full time as
carers] can be recognized as economic and social value. Voluntary commitments of solidarity and support for the health and wellbeing of all as well
as work to establish plant and animal preservation and balanced urban
environments which recognize the biosphere
as primary, not secondary, consideration to living well can be established
as ecological value. The extent to which surplus value extraction from labour
power continues, from those with capacity and willingness to engage in amassing
some wealth – in its exchange value form – is of course very much a matter of
how far anti-capitalist struggles go and balance of forces pertaining in any time
and place.
Despoliation and species reduction
As Bellamy Foster [4] has long been at pains to point out, Marx
was anything but dismissive about the exploitative and potentially and
increasingly actual ruinous effects of capital accumulation on the natural
world. Rather the reverse, that the metabolic rift was central to capitalism’s
mode of production and as explained by Marx in Capital on the denuding of soils
and the strong link between that denudation and the guano and fertilizer trade.
Despoliation has of course now gone much further, with extinction
of species, acidification of oceans, toxic wastes dumping and entering food
chains, plastic molecular interference with life, air pollution, massive
mineral and oil extraction, particularly fracking, and climate warming and its
ramifications. Many of these processes are not new – oil extraction from shale
sedimentary strata for instance was pioneered by ‘Paraffin Young’ in West
Lothian in the mid nineteenth century. What is new is the much accelerated pace
to meet the worldwide extension of commodification and the rise in population
with demands for inclusion within that commodification and reproduction of a
capitalist mode. *
While global warming may now be inevitable by at least 2 degrees C
this century, and CO2 parts per million irreducible below 450 [ICPCC, Stern,
McKibbin] [5] mounting evidence says
such capital extraction and energy generation is extending the metabolic rift
to a catastrophic conclusion for many and a denuded future for all humanity,
even those with amassed wealth in secluded places.
In this situation, a refusal
strategy – no more fracking, keeping oil in the ground, the stranding of
fossil fuel assets, i.e. a general policy of carbon sequestration has to be
allied to a viable energy transition towards renewable resource dependence.
Much of this is even accepted within the recent Paris Agreement, even though
the pace necessary and sanctions to achieve a turnaround are quite lacking.
The ownership and control of investment remain largely untouched,
though there are community owned outliers such as The Cochabamba Project in
Bolivia and community energy generation projects of considerable size in
Germany, and still at a micro level in the UK.
McKibbin reckons that there are seventeen years left in the USA in
which to get alternative renewables up and running as main sources of power
generation, before the worst effects for the rest of the century are made
irreversible by fossil fuel extraction and its consequences. And he takes as
confirmation the US Government report of the OCI [6].
The means of production of capitalism have not yet been altered
significantly in the energy sphere. But they are not immune to oppositional
pressure. Divestment demands and
policies introduced into pension funds or other large investors, through Keep
It In The Ground and through ethical policy demands, have sequestered billions
of pounds of assets [Carbon Tracker, 2013] [7]. Divestment, Boycott and
Sanctions are clearly useful weapons of political economy as witness the
current Bill of the UK Government to outlaw local authorities from attempting
to change their pension fund investments from corporate entities whose policies
they oppose to ones of which they approve.
The way in which jobs are traditionally defended, and trade
unionism tied up [or bundled – see below] with the latest requirement of
monopoly capitalism, for instance Unite supporting Trident on the Clyde or the
Hinckley B nuclear power plant investment, would seem to work against a
class-based opposition. But just as the Lucas Aerospace workers challenged war
production forty years ago, a green investment policy [TUC’s one million jobs][8]
and climate unionism are emerging to
provide an alternative – ‘’the rise of climate unionism offers a new direction
for the labour movement’’ [Sean Sweeney, US]. In the UK there is a growing, if
still embryonic, movement of trade unionists for carbon reduction.
Community
energy generation and municipally owned power distribution networks, along with
house insulation and maximizing solar cell installation, will combat fuel
poverty and bring control of energy policy back to its use value rather than
exchange value for profit making from a common or public good. Even within
capitalist relations, the extent of such in Germany suggests it is already a
viable proposition.
Commodification and fetishism
De-commodifying is trickier to find instrumental ways of changing
and of transitioning. Dealing with more people made surplus to capital’s
requirements and out of work and with increasingly unhealthy environments has
more obvious traction than challenging methods of consumption, and the value
and price correlation of a world in which commodification is a universal norm.
Food
sovereignty The
definition by Global Justice of this is: ‘’It could create a food system that is designed to help people and the environment rather than make profits for
multinational corporations. The food sovereignty movement is a global alliance of farmers, growers,
consumers and activists’’[9]
Moves towards more locally grown, organic and sustainably managed
food as both healthier for people and for the biosphere can help challenge
commodification linked to the need to stem air pollution [over 9,000 Londoners
per year now die prematurely from the consequences of nitrogen di-oxide and
particulate inhalation] and awareness of what corporate expansion and sovereign
wealth funds are doing through mass monoculture in countries of the South,
depriving local farmers and forcing a ruinous commodification on whole swathes
of land and population. The struggle against corporate seed control [e.g.
Monsanto GM policies] and vast distributional network control [such as by
Cargill] is a struggle to maintain both biodiversity and livelihood, in the
South and North.
Bellamy Foster and Clark excoriate Jason Moore [10] for his
monistic approach to modern capitalism, a social determinism which sees capitalism
and the modern Anthropocene taking all before it in ‘’bundles’’ which erase any
basic nature. For Moore it’s as if now that it is difficult to talk of unspoiled
nature or wilderness, as capital has so obviously spread everywhere, then it is
hopelessly ‘dualist’ to consider nature as separate. The human and extra-human
may be bundled up in many ways now, but that in no way should deny the
fundamental given of the natural world.
Foster and Clark go on to suggest that seeing nature as internalized by
society [e.g. Neil Smith] [11] or appropriated ‘’all the way down’’ {Moore] is
deterministic hubris, and a denial of a dialectic. We could also add that flash
flooding on an epic scale, excessive hurricane occurrences and certain volcanic
reminders are a kind of ‘return of the repressed’ or empirical disproof of
Moore et al.
Where Moore talks of ‘bundles’, it might be more useful to use the
term ‘tangles’. With bundling,
capitalism wraps things up, but if the natural and the social – and what’s
in-between - are entangled, then things
are unresolved. There is a dialectical space for antagonisms to play out. The
geographer, Paul Routledge, refers to a politics of entanglement [12], of
different social forces at work in particular environments. It is proposed here
then that in discussion of capitalism and its Anthropocene manifestations the
notion of tangles is more grounded, descriptively accurate, and allows for
thinking about unraveling. Think of salination in the Ganges-Meghna delta
through the spread of shrimp farming and resistance of traditional fishers and
rice growers, or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch round Midway in the Pacific [13].
Or encroachment on the Green Belt driven by property prices and desire for
space in a countryside setting, and resisted by various interests with commons
preservation at heart.
A further danger of the discourse of people like Moore, and
‘hybridists’[14] , is that class conflict seems overcome. The forward march of
labour [Hobsbaum] may have been halted some time ago, but then neo-liberal
capitalism and its global expression, following the 2007-8 crises, are now
facing setbacks and inducing turmoil. And war economy persists, with its own
despoliation and effects on biodiversity.
Accelerating inequality, displacement and migration do not fit much of the conventional narrative
of class conflict, and indeed tend to fuel right wing, populist demagogy which
preys on a wider precariat, not any recognizable class alliance. But it is
precisely at this point that Marx’s concepts of alienation and reification need
recovering.
The alienation from the product of work through the exchange
relationship of capitalism is ever more elaborated through the satisfaction of
manufactured wants. And these wants are more and more controlled in their
satisfaction by corporations, and internet monopolies, or cartels, who devise
the very algorithms to complete the individual’s ‘lifeworld’ [to adopt
Habermas’s term for what goes on in reality distinct from what is discursive
knowledge]. Commodity fetishism drives much behaviour and takes up increasing
leisure time. Reification, or becoming absorbed in the thing in itself, takes
over more and more time – from ‘the medium is the message’ [McLuhan] to ‘the
app. Is the message’. But things break down, debt is accumulated, possessions
are re-possessed, much of the commons are lost, and addictions, severe stress
and mental illness multiply. Meanwhile the society of the spectacle throws up
projected demagogy – real life spectres like Trump and Farage as reified
answers to the hard felt alienation of many.
Disentangling this alienation in its many different and uneven forms
is itself a multi-faceted industry and the life work of much informal care. To
the ‘free gift’ to capital of land and nature as seen by classical value theory
[15], and as criticized for that by Marx, we can add the free gift of domestic
and informal care, subsidizing profit taking and rentier capitalism. The under
estimation of care work, and emotional labour, is a direct concomitant of
exchange value trumping use value.
The return of
use value is the answer to alienation [if only it were that simple, as a
politically engaged psychoanalyst might say].
But if ‘’rationally
regulating the social metabolism of nature and society….in the service of
advancing human potential’’ [Foster and Clark] is the ecosocialist aim where
associated producers are relied on to restore the balance, then undoing
commodification of all that exists must be part of the process. Transitional
policies such as reducing to thirty,
then twenty, hour working weeks for those in waged work, and co-operative
production and distribution networks, including common source and open space on
the internet, can be part of such an approach [16]. Allied to moves to basic
income, more food sovereignty and community or municipal energy generation we
have the engendering of an ecosocialist value system and a workable alternative
to capitalism.
Ecocentric production and prefigurative practice [in Koel’s phrase
– ibid.] within existing capitalism,
are both possible and necessary as transitional means to a more steady state.
Without scaling up in global terms plus new community and inter-regional
transactions which can negate corporate growth, state supported divestment,
climate unionism as a mass not marginal activity, and reduced consumption they
will not be sufficient.
Ecological debt and unequal exchange
An ecosocialist practice should recognize that disastrous
situations for populations across the world are in significant measure the
result of what Hannah Holleman [17] calls ecological imperialism. The global
South has been made dependent on the global North – and theories of imperialism
from Marx to Gunder Frank have set out to explain this dependency. Ecological imperialism specifies the unequal
ecological exchange which has taken place, and is ever intensified, and
explains why looking to technological fixes, fair trade and greener agreements
between global elites cuts off significant segments of the ecological movement
‘’from those with the greatest interest in transforming the system, the global
working and dispossessed class’’ [18]. There is an elite, or class-based, and
racialized, ‘’division of nature and humanity at the heart of the ecological
rift of capitalism’’[19]. There is an under-compensated transfer of ecological wealth which maintains the ‘’cycle
of poverty, debt and ecological destruction’’ [20] and the sum of this is the
ecological debt owed by the global North to the global South. Ecological solidarity then is with
those** engaged in ‘’active struggle to protect land, livelihoods, and indeed
lives in the face of the encroachment of capital’’ [21].
NOTES:
* It would be interesting to
consider how far population rise, uneven and unequal as it is, and the demands
arising, contribute to formations of capitalism as much as capital determining
the nature of population growth, but that is another discussion – which it has
to be said is much neglected on the left, thereby leaving population pressure
theorizing too much to neo-Malthusians such as Population Matters.
1- John Bellamy
Foster and Brett Clark : Marxism and the Dialectics
of Ecology in Monthly Review, Vol.68, Issue 05, 2016
2- N. Snricek
and A. Williams: Inventing the Future
– Post capitalism in a World without Work, Verso [London] 2015.
Also Paul Mason
: Postcapitalism – A Guide to Our
Future,[Allen
Lane], 2015
3 - Guy Standing: The
Precariat, Blackwells, 2014
4- See John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York: The Ecological Rift – Capitalism’s War on the Earth; Monthly
Review Press [NY], 2010. Other writers who have worked to ‘rehabilitate’ the
ecological insights in Marx for too long neglected by Western Marxism are Joel
Kovel: The Enemy of Nature,
Zed Books, 2002, and Martin Empson: Capitalism
and Ecology – Socialist Worker pamphlet
5- Bill McKibbin in https://newrepublic.com/article/136987/calculating
-climate-math
And Damian Carrington, 27 0ctober, 2016 in The Guardian on ten
years after the Stern Report , 2006, on effects of climate change commissioned by UK Government https://www.theguardian.com>Environment>Green
6 – ‘’Expansion of existing fossil fuels amounts to
climate denial’’ in
www.climatechangenews.com/carbon Report of Oil Change International, 22 September, 2016
7- Carbon Tracker Initiative and
Grantham Research Insitute, LSE :
see http://www.carbontracker.org
on the 2 trillion dollars of stranded assets in Unburnable Carbon, 2013.
8- See for instance Mike Hales: Living
Thinkwork –where
do labour processes come from?[CSE
Books]1980. It is now[November 2016] the fortieth anniversary of the Lucas
Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Report, on The
Lucas Plan and the campaign round that. In
Birmingham on November 26, 2016 there is a day anniversary event.
See also the review of 22 January, 2014 in
The TU report on One Million Climate Jobs supported
by PCS, CWU, UCU, TSSA, Unite:
10 - Jason W. Moore: Capitalism
and The Web of Life, Verso [London] 2015 and The Capitalocene, Part 1, 2014 in http://jasonwmoore.com
11 - Neil Smith : Uneven
Development in Socialist Register [London] 2007
12 - J.P. Sharp, P. Routledge, C. Philo, R. Paddison, [Eds]; Entanglements of Power, Routledge
[London], 2000.
and the vimeo – A Message
From the Gyre on the Midway Island land pollution.
14 - Hybridism can be a useful concept to challenge essentialist
discourse, but in the context of
political economy and ecology, Foster and Clark cite Erik Swyngedouw, Modernity and Hybridity in Annals of the Association of American Geographers as an example of the
monist or undialectical approach in hybridist theorizing
15- - Bellamy Foster and Clark [ibid.] point out Marx’s exposition
of the Lauderdale Paradox in classical value theory where the Earl of
Lauderdale wrote that the amassing of private wealth was at the expense of
public good and led to monopoly and scarcity.
16 - The much reduced working week, and choice of period of years
in which to perform an allotted amount of wage work, was proposed by Andre Gorz
in the 1970s –Ecology as Politics,
South End Press, 1979, and has been re-introduced to the discourse on economic
and social policy by Anna Coote for the IPPR and more recently with the New
Economics Foundation www.neweconomics.org
17 - Hannah Holleman: Interview in Left Voice, October 16, 2016 at
www.leftvoice.org/Hannah-Holleman-627
and The Ecosocialist Alternative in londongreenleft.blogspot.com , October 16, 2016
18- ibid.
19 – ibid.
20- ibid.
21 – ibid.
** It may be worth noting the Cochabamba Declaration of 2010, in
Bolivia, as a first attempt to make a global challenge to the privileges of
capital encroachment by declaring the sanctity of natural and human rights. And
this led by a national government in the global South. Of some relevance to
this discussion is the fact that it is the organized campesinos and indigenos
in Bolivia who have kept the Morales government to its stance against rapacious
wealth extraction, and it is the organized campesinos
and agricultural and forest workers in Ecuador who continue to fight for
the policy of keeping oil in the ground now that Correo, the Ecuadorian
president has capitulated to big oil interests in part if not completely in the
Yamani national park.
Gordon Peters in a member of Haringey Green Party and a Green Left Supporter
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