Showing papers in "Socialist Register in 2007"

Nature as Accumulation Strategy

Abstract: A commodity, according to the classical political economists, comprises and combines a use value and an exchange value. Value, they recognized, was the product of human labour; for Marx it was measured by socially necessary labour time. Capital, he argued, was 'value in motion', and capital accumulation was the process by which capitalist societies multiplied social value through the exploitation of labour. Capitalism has always employed labour power to invest value in use values harvested from nature, and so what could it mean to suggest, as the title of this paper does, that nature has become an accumulation strategy? It is increasingly evident, I want to argue that in the past three decades a new dimension of the capitalist production of nature has considerably transformed the social relationship with the natural world.

The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism

Abstract: The 'westernization' of the world has led to a pattern of production and consumption which builds intensively on the nearly limitless availability of matter and energy, sophisticated technology, and the existence of natural 'sinks' in which solids, liquids and gas-emissions can be dumped. The effects on the local, national and global natural environment are mostly negative. Global transportation is responsible for the consumption of large quantities of fossil energy and thus for an increase of CO2-emissions, thus aggravating the climate crisis. Labour-intensive production processes are located where labour is cheap, and environmentally harmful processes where environmental laws and regulations are least exacting, and so least expensive.

The Political Economy of the Kyoto Protocol

Abstract: Climate change is a profound crisis of society and of the capitalist mode of production to which there can be no simple reaction which is adequate to the problem or without contradiction. Nevertheless, hegemonic forms of the regulation of the crisis emerge which correspond to neoliberal political concepts. Measures which fit into the existing economic system are more successful than those which call into question the existing fossil energy system. In climate policy these mechanisms are the result of diplomatic negotiations, technical-control optimism and a political-economic strategy which follows a 'win-win' logic. The mechanisms are constructed in a 'flexible' form, so that within the framework of a skilful CO2 bookkeeping balance-sheet the reductions appear to take place, when in absolute terms no reduction at all has in fact occurred.

Feeding the World: Agriculture, Development and Ecology

Abstract: How and why does 'development' privilege a global agricultural system that is socially limited and ecologically unstable? This essay examines the ways in which 'development' has been represented and applied to the task of feeding the world, and its ecological consequences. 'Development', a term with universal appeal, has been appropriated as an ideological expression of capitalist development. It actually represents the political relations of global capitalism, though not of course without being contested. This essay frames capitalist development in terms of three successive historical 'projects': the colonial, development, and globalization projects. The contradictions of each successive project condition the one that follows, just as the crisis-ridden globalization project is today shaping an emerging, unstable, 'imperial project', focused on securing resources to sustain US military power and the global consumption relations of a minority class.

The Limits of Eco-Localism: Scale, Strategy, Socialism

Abstract: As neoliberalism has come to dominate the global market and regulatory framework its institutionalization and logic has fuelled developments in agriculture that drive rural people into urban slums, while at the same time fostering inter-local competition to reduce wages and environmental regulation. This also means, however, especially when we remember that most urban life on the planet bears no resemblance whatever to Richard Florida's image of yuppified city centres for the 'creative class', that the burden that 'the local' carries in strategies for a pro-sustainability, anti-neoliberal (and even an anti-capitalist) agenda is enormous. If 'place' and 'local space' are where the 'tangible solidarities' necessary to build an alternate way of life, and an anti-neoliberal politics, must form, then we cannot avoid confronting the systematic obstacles that have to be overcome in realizing such a project. Claims that sustainable local ecologies can serve as the foundation for political action and social alternatives at least require careful scrutiny.

The Ecological Question: Can Capitalism Prevail?

Abstract: Apocalyptic visions of resource exhaustion forcing capitalism's final crisis rest upon overly narrow understandings of what, exactly, constitute natural resources. Natural resources are posited to be out there, natural things that can be picked up, cut down, mined or otherwise gathered, processed, and used. They are finite, and once used up will be gone. There is some hedging of this position, of course: forests can be re-planted, tin cans and bottles can be recycled. But this view takes resources to be strictly natural, rather than just as much social. That is, it overlooks how things found in the natural world only become useful to human societies in the context of particular socio-technical frameworks. It thus fails to adequately grasp technology and especially the dynamism of technological innovation and change under capitalism. Furthermore, these visions of final crisis tend to confuse particular manifestations of capitalism--that is, particular historical social formations--with capitalism itself, thus underestimating the flexibility of the beast. This short essay will unpack both of these assertions to argue that capitalism very likely will survive the 'ecological challenge', though this need not imply that the future will be rosy, utopian, or even based upon some kind of post-resource (as in post-industrial) political economy. Finally, the almost exclusive focus of the debate on the ways that capitalism must be regulated by the state into adopting solutions, should be shifted to take better account of the ways that capitalism could very well accumulate its own way to solutions--at whatever cost to humanity.

Eco-Socialism and Democratic Planning

Abstract: Ecosocialism is an attempt to provide a radical civilizational alternative to what Marx called capitalism's 'destructive progress'. It advances an economic policy founded on the non-monetary and extra-economic criteria of social needs and ecological equilibrium.According to O'Connor, the aim of ecological socialism is a new society based on ecological rationality, democratic control, social equality, and the predominance of use-value over exchange-value. I would add that these aims require: (a) collective ownership of the means of production ('collective' here meaning public, cooperative or communitarian property); (b) democratic planning, which makes it possible for society to define the goals of investment and production, and (c) a new technological structure of the productive forces. In other words, a revolutionary social and economic transformation. For ecosocialists, the problem with the main currents of political ecology, represented by most Green parties, is that they do not seem to take into account the intrinsic contradiction between the capitalist dynamics of the unlimited expansion of capital and accumulation of profits, and the preservation of the environment. This leads to a critique of productivism, which is often relevant, but does not lead beyond an ecologically-reformed 'market economy'. The result has been that many Green parties have become the ecological alibi of center-left social-liberal governments.

China: Hyper-Development and Environmental Crisis

Abstract: China's spectacular economic growth has been one of the most dramatic developments in the global economy over the past quarter century. Between 1978 and 2004 the Chinese economy expanded at an annual rate of 9.4 per cent. However, China's economic growth has taken place at an enormous social and environmental price. A rapid increase in social and economic inequality, environmental degradation, mounting rural crisis, growing urban unemployment and poverty, pervasive government corruption, deteriorating public services (especially in basic education and health care), as well as escalating social unrest, have grown to dangerous levels and could potentially lead to an explosive situation. We focus in this essay on the environmental impact of accumulation and profit-oriented development in China. Given its enormous population and its growing importance in the global economy, the implications of China's environmental crisis go far beyond China itself. It has become an important and growing element in the developing global environmental crisis. It is unlikely that either the Chinese environmental crisis, or the global crisis, can be effectively addressed within the existing institutional framework. To build an environmentally sustainable society the economic system has to be fundamentally transformed so that production and consumption activities are oriented towards meeting the basic needs of the general population rather than the pursuit of profit and wealth accumulation.

Neoliberal Hurricane: Who Framed New Orleans?

Abstract: Working off a series of well-established scripts, the conservative think tanks were within days constructing a 'principled response' to Hurricane Katrina, predicated upon fiscal restraint and 'offsetting' budget cuts in Washington, DC, but extending into what amounts to an audacious neoliberal reconstruction agenda for the Crescent City. This includes an enlarged role for private enterprise in market-led development, governmental outsourcing, and city governance; selective institutional roll-backs, focused on the social state; redoubled crime control, making the city safe for tourists and gentrifiers; and an interventionist program of 'moral reconstruction', aimed at those stranded in the storm's wake. Yet if this is to be the fate of New Orleans, it was never a pre-ordained one. Katrina presented an urgent and challenging problem for the conservative think tanks, and they committed significant resources to the response. Recognizing the significance of the events on the Gulf, key players in the think tanks were back at their desks immediately after the storm, even while Bush Administration officials completed their vacations. While the conservative think tanks may have been relatively successful in 'reframing' Katrina, and supplying a package of workable policy rationales and ruses to the Bush Administration, their strenuous efforts also reveal the politically constructed--if not jerrybuilt--nature of this 'free-market' response. The character and content of their response, my focus in this essay, also speaks to fissures and fault lines within the neocon/neoliberal project itself. But, for now, let's see how the conservative intelligentsia told the story.

Unsustainable Capitalism: The Politics of Renewable Energy in the UK

Abstract: In the final chapter of his influential book, The Future of the Market, Elmar Altvater seeks the genesis of a new kind of socialist project in a 're-moralization of resource allocation' which he thinks neither markets, nor the 'thin' democracy permitted by markets, allow. He concludes: '(t)oday the further evolution of society is possible only if the economic rationality of market procedures is firmly embedded in a complex system of social, non-market regulation of money and nature'. Energy must be central to such a project, but the systems properties of its fixed physical infrastructure exemplify the formidable obstacles it faces. For many good reasons nuclear energy is an unacceptable option; and if energy conservation (or so-called 'energy efficiency') is recognized as insufficient, we are left with renewable energy generation. It is from renewable energy that Altvater's alternative of a low impact, 'entropy-minimizing', democratically-regulated social infrastructure might be developed. Any alternative must start from where we are now. This essay describes how the market-driven politics of energy in the UK (whose economy is now powered by coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy) are blocking the development of renewable energy, which has physical and technological properties consistent with new, lower-waste forms of capitalism and also with a sustainable socialist economy.

Social Metabolism and Environmental Conflicts

Abstract: Capitalism (or, in general, the industrial system) advances into commodity frontiers because it uses more materials and energy, therefore it produces more waste, undermining the conditions of livelihood and existence not only of future generations but also of contemporary peripheral peoples, who complain accordingly. Such movements for environmental justice cannot be subsumed under the conflict between capital and labour. They may become a strong force in favour of sustainability and eco-socialism, and also against market-fundamentalism, because conflicts over the use of the environment are expressed in many languages of valuation. For instance, we know that economic growth goes together with increased emissions of greenhouse gases. Some social actors see climate change as an 'externality', the (damage or abatement) costs of which can be calculated in economic terms and compared to the benefits of economic growth. Others will appeal instead to the livelihood and rights of local peoples and/or future generations, or to the sacredness of nature, or to ecological and landscape values measured in their own units, or to the equal dignity of all humans when confronted by 'environmental racism'. Why should all evaluations of a given conflict (e.g. over gold or bauxite extraction in Peru or Orissa, over hydro-electrical dams in the North-East of India, over mangroves in Bangladesh or Honduras sacrificed to shrimp exports, or over the determination of an acceptable level of carbon dioxide emissions by the European Union), be reduced to a single dimension? People who are poor, and whose health and lives are cheap, often appeal to non-monetary languages of valuation. It is only capitalism, with its fetishism of commodities (even fictitious commodities, as in the 'contingent valuation' methods of neoclassical environmental economics), that sees only one way to value the world. Ecological economics rejects such a simplification of complexity, favouring instead the acceptance of a plurality of incommensurable values. By rejecting money-reductionism in favour of value pluralism, ecological economics can contribute to the success of struggles over distribution. For instance, Via Campesina denies that modern agriculture really achieves productivity increases, pointing to its decreased efficiency of energy use, chemical pollution, loss of seed varieties, and loss of local cultures.

Garbage Capitalism's Green Commerce

Abstract: In American capitalism today, more than ever, the mass consumption of commodities lies at the heart of social life and economic growth, and intrinsic to consumption is garbage. Since the years after World War II, when the US began mass production and consumption in earnest, industry has exerted tremendous effort to manage public perceptions of waste and, beginning in the late 1960s, the more far-reaching ecological impacts of a high-trash system. Garbage is a miniature version of production's destructive aftermath, which inevitably ends up in each person's hands; it is proof that all is not well. Since rubbish has the power to reveal to consumers the realities of an economy that pushes many of its costs onto the environment, garbage has become a key site for corporate 'greenwashing'. Manufacturers neither pay the full price for the raw materials they use in production, nor do they accurately account for the costs of pollution, energy use and the future environmental impacts of their activities. To maintain their relatively unfettered access to nature, as both a resource and a dumping-ground, US companies have had to convince the public that the castoffs they can see--and, by extension, wastes they cannot see, like those created by industry--are benign, and not an indication of crisis.

Africa: eco-populist utopias and (micro-)capitalist realities

Abstract: Of all the world's regions today, sub-Saharan Africa is seen as most emblematic of 'disaster' and 'tragedy'. All that can go wrong in the human condition seems to be concentrated with particular bleakness here, in an apparent combination of the effects of the worst of nature and the worst of society. This essay aims to probe some of the realities behind such widespread generalities which are uniformly negative, and frequently pejorative too, conveying the sense of a place where the miseries of the human condition are self-inflicted. We first sketch some issues of environmental change in Africa and perspectives in the debates they have generated. While the 'new ecology' of African environments, and how African farmers use them, has much to commend it, it is called on to support an eco-populism that ignores the dynamics and effects of 'actually existing capitalism' in Africa. This includes commodity relations in the countryside (and in urban areas, with which they are so closely bound up), and the class and other social inequalities they inevitably generate. In particular we focus here on petty production in savanna environments, for reasons explained below, after first sketching some global forces in environmental change in Africa.

Party-building for Eco-Socialists: Lessons from the Failed Project of the German Greens

Abstract: From 2002 to 2005 the German Greens were a party of a government in a reunited Germany vying for international respectability by sharing a renewed 'white man's burden' by sending troops to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, and, soon, to the Congo, or by sending its navy to participate in the 'anti-terrorist' controls around the horn of Africa. The 'humanitarian interventionism' of NATO against Serbia was legitimized by a majority of former radical pacifists; and a debt guarantee has been given to the nuclear industry in Germany by former radical ecologists and anti-nuclear activists. German Green parliamentarians have been avidly implementing neo-liberal 'reforms', in coalition with a social- democratic party in which a translated Blairism has won the day. Within the (very much weakened) social movements of contemporary Germany, the example of the Greens is cited in order to refute any idea of intervening in party politics at all. Their negative example is actually important in reinforcing prejudices against a new German left party which is in the process of being formalized, after an impressive first presence in the 2005 federal elections. Can anything be learnt from the Greens' failure? Apart from the simple statement that there is no better way of learning strategically than from the analysis of past defeats and failures, there are some specific lessons to be drawn from this historical experience (which for this author is also quite personal). And as we shall see, these lessons are of considerable relevance to contemporary international left debates on party-building.

Water, Power and Money

Abstract: Providing safe and clean water to communities is not exactly rocket science: the basic technologies and engineering principles are known and mastered, management systems understood, aquatic bio-chemical and physical processes reasonably well comprehended. Despite the relative technological and managerial ease of providing clean water for all, and of evacuating and treating wastewater, it is remarkable that more than one billion people worldwide are still suffering from inadequate, unreliable (both in quantity and quality) and/or difficult access to clean water, and almost two billion from unsatisfactory sanitation. While the humanitarian and socio-economic costs of inadequate water and sanitation services are well known, progress in alleviating water problems remains excruciatingly slow. Meanwhile the supply of water is increasingly embedded in processes of economic globalization. Whether publicly or privately owned, water businesses are expanding their operations geographically and they have become involved in an international competitive process.