Part II
SYMPOSIUM
THE SECOND CONTRADICTION
OF CAPITALISM
This is the second part of a symposium on the thesis of the
"second contradiction of capitalism," first put forth in James
O'Connor's "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical
Introduction," CNS One, Fall 1988, and developed in "The Second
Contradiction of Capitalism: Causes and Consequences," Conference
Papers (Santa Cruz: CES/CNS Pamphlet 1) and "On the First and
Second Contradiction of Capitalism," CNS Eight (2,3), October,
1991. Economists in a number of countries were asked to prepare
comments on this thesis for the first European meeting of
Capitalismo, Natura, Socialismo (Italy), Ecologia Politica
(Spain), Ecologie Politique (France), and CNS Editors and
Editorial Consultants, held in Valencia, Spain, in March, 1992.
Contributions to the debate by John Bellamy Foster, Samir Amin,
Victor Toledo, Kamal Nayan Kabra, Michael Lebowitz and Martin
O'Connor appeared in the last issue of CNS.
A Second Contradiction of Capitalism?
Notes for the Environmental Transformation
of Historical Materialism*
By Enrique Leff
Both conventional economics and historical materialism
marginalize nature, hence when confronted with the environmental
question, face theoretical problems. Nature is manifest in the
philosophical foundations of both doctrines or fields of study,
but it is not an active principle in their accounts of the
productive process. Thus, conventional economics did not take
the initiative to internalize "ecological externalities" and the
"long-run," and Marxism did not consider natural processes as a
constituent part of the conditions of production or of the
development of the forces of production until the ecological
crisis exploded, when "growth limits" became manifest and
environmental conflicts rooted in new social movements made their
appearance. Historical materialism was founded upon an
epistemological break with conventional economics and a critique
of classical political economy. It replaced the theoretical
arguments of naturalism and the mechanicism that had dominated
inquiry into social processes with a specifically social science,
and oriented dialectical thought toward the comprehension of the
contradiction of the concrete. Capital, as a theory of the
_________________________
*Translated by Ruth MacKay.
1
capitalist mode of production, is based upon the contradiction
between labor and capital inasmuch as capital exploits the
worker, who produces more value in a work-day than he or she
receives in the form of a salary for the reproduction of his or
her laborpower. This basic principle of contradiction is
reproduced in the realization process of the merchandise as a
crisis of overproduction and underconsumption. The "second
contradiction" appears as the self-destruction of capital's
conditions of production -- laborpower, space and environment --
and the self-production of resource scarcity and limited capital
accumulation, thus generating an underproduction crisis.[1] Marx
perceived this contradiction this way: The productive forces
generated by the crisis of capital combine in such a way as to
exhaust the natural force of man and nature.[2]
This "second contradiction," manifest as an environmental
limit to accumulation, is hidden from historical materialism
because it was not explicitly developed in Capital. This can be
explained only in part by the relative abundance of nature with
regard to the level of development of the forces of production
and the expansion of capital, which in Marx's time had not yet
broken through the "carrying capacities" of natural eco-systems
nor broken the planet's fragile ecological equilibrium. The very
theoretical structure of Capital holds up nature as an
overdetermined, but not determinant, process of the dialectic of
capital.
Historical materialism opened up a broad field of
understanding regarding various social, technological, and
natural processes that are overdetermined by capitalist relations
of production as a basic contradiction of the social structure.
It was not Marx but rather the dogmatic simplification of Marxism
that could lead one to believe that demographic dynamics,
scientific and technological progress, juridical and ideological
superstructures -- the entire social body -- could be fully
_________________________
[1] O'Connor distinguishes between two types of scarcity:
"First, scarcity arising from economic crisis based on
traditional capital overproduction, i.e., a purely social
scarcity; second, scarcity arising from economic crisis based on
capitalistically produced scarcity of nature or production
conditions generally. Both types of scarcity are ultimately
attributable to capitalist production relations." ("Capitalism,
Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction," CNS 1, 1988, p.
15).
[2] "Capitalist production develops the technique and the
combination of social production processes, at the same time
exhausting the two sources of all wealth: land and labor."
(Capital, Vol. I, in Oeuvres, pp. 998-99). Later Marx wrote: "Big
industry and mechanized agriculture act together. If at first the
former tends to devastate and ruin the labor force, and therefore
man's natural force, while the latter directly attacks the
natural force of the land, both end up in a concerted
effort....The resulting conditions provoke an irreparable break
in the metabolism determined by the laws of life, which causes
wasting of the land's resources and that commerce extends beyond
national borders." (Capital, Vol III, in Oeuvres, p. 1424).
2
explained by the basic and underlying contradiction of capital.
Among the effects of the basic contradiction were ecological
destruction and the loss of soil fertility. The degree of
ecological destruction up to 20 years ago could allow one to
perceive nature as a permanent and free source of resources,
capable of regenerating itself through scientific inputs, in the
same way that the exploitation of workers did not prevent the
maintenance of a permanently available supply (the reserve army)
for capital. Resource exploitation was not reflected in the face
of an endangered nature. The theoretical need to internalize
resource scarcity and ecological equilibrium as contradictions of
capital was not raised. For Marx, as for conventional economics
after the Physiocrats, the natural supply of resources lacked
value and price because it did not involve labor, the only source
and substance of value.
The ecological crisis thus emerged in a field of theoretical
externality and in a temporal horizon distant from the historical
object and social contradiction which constitute the real subject
of Capital. Capitalist accumulation generated a dialectical
transformation of capital brought about by technological
development, which, at the same time that it increased relative
surplus value, also separated the productive process from simple
and direct labor, dissolving the law of value. Marx wanted to
make this moment, in which the explicative power of the science
of capital dissolves, coincide with the disappearance of the
capitalist mode of production. The scientific-technological
revolution would lead to the transition and the construction of
socialism.[3]
Affirming that "the basic cause of the second contradiction
is capitalism's self-destructive appropriation and use of labor
power, space and external nature, or environment"[4] only
_________________________
[3] See Enrique Leff, "La teoria del valor en Marx frente a la
revolucion cientifico-tecnologica," in E. Leff, ed., Teoria del
Valor (Mexico: UNAM, 1980). "The exchange of live labor with
materialized labor...the determination of social labor as the
opposition between capital and wage labor, constitutes the last
development of the value relation and the production system based
on value. Its permanent condition is the mass of immediate labor
time...as a decisive factor in the production of wealth. But as
big industry is developed, the creation of true wealth depends
less upon the time and quantity of labor used than...on the
general state of science and technological progress....When, in
its immediate form, labor has ceased being the great source of
wealth, labor time will cease being the measure of labor, and
exchange value will cease being the measure of use value. Surplus
labor of workers will cease being the condition for the
development of general wealth....From then on, production based
upon exchange value will collapse and the immediate process of
material production will be stripped of its form and its
miserable contradictions." (Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, in Oeuvres, Vol 2, p. 301).
[4] See J. O'Connor, "The Second Contradiction of Capitalism:
Causes and Consequences," Conference Papers (Santa Cruz: CES/CNS
Pamphlet 1).
3
confirms that the second contradiction is the effect of the first
contradiction, which generates a self-destructive process.
Calling a "second contradiction" what others call externalities
or limits on growth opens up an important way of building an
eco-Marxist theory of the environmental crisis of capital, but it
does not supply the theoretical response which the environmental
issue demands of historical materialism.
To postulate the ecological crisis as a contradiction of
capital raises the theoretical problem of uncovering a second
contradiction of capital that was not presented in Capital;
furthermore, one must theoretically develop the capital-nature
contradiction of present-day capital in the context of the
globalization of the economic crisis and ecological changes
(global warming, deforestation, erosion, etc.). This should lead
to a theoretical re-elaboration that challenges the capacity of
the concepts of historical materialism to produce and assimilate
this "new contradiction."
The basis of an eco-Marxist theory of production posits not
only the internalization of this "second contradiction" as an
effect of the widened reproduction of capital in the over-
exploitation of nature, but the construction of the concept of
this new contradiction. This means that the concepts of
historical materialism must be re-worked so as to conjugate the
contradictory relationship between labor exploitation and the
development of the productive forces of capitalism with the
self-destructive processes of its production and reproduction,
and with the emergence of the environment as productive
potential. The forces of nature are articulated with those of
capital and labor in a "tripolar relation of production." One
must comprehend the substance of value in natural processes and
its contribution to the development of productive forces.[5] The
"second contradiction" so far has the heuristic quality of
allowing us to think what was not explicitly developed in
Capital. It remains to be seen if we are dealing with a
contradiction that is subordinate to the capital-labor
contradiction; then we must decipher the proper nature of this
contradiction within contemporary capitalism. That implies going
from a passive concept of nature as a combination of constituent
processes of the general conditions of production to an active,
explicative and co-determinant concept of the current crisis of
capital and the global environmental crisis.
The making concrete of this second contradiction, manifest
in the self-destructive effect of capital accumulation on the
very bases of production, means one must transcend the Marxist
discourse's notion of nature.[6] The general category of labor as
a transforming process of nature, as a metabolic mediator between
natural and social processes,[7] establishes a general condition
_________________________
[5] E. Leff, Ecologia y Capital. Hacia una Perspectiva
Ambiental del Desarrollo (Mexico: UNAM, 1986); E. Leff,
"Ecotechnological Productivity: A Conceptual Basis for the
Management of Natural Resources," Social Science Information, 25,
3, 1986.
[6] E. Leff, "Alfred Schmidt y el fin del humanismo
naturalista," Antropologia y Marxismo, 3, 1980, pp. 139-152.
[7] Alfred Schmidt, El Concepto de Naturaleza en Marx (Mexico:
4
for all modes of production and situates the dynamic of nature
within the perspective of the social use of resources. It is a
critical category that allows us to distinguish social
theoretical perceptions of society-nature relations from
biological or ecological perspectives of the relationship between
population and resources. But one must go beyond this and
construct concepts that can explain the articulation of
ecological, technological, and economic processes determining the
contradictory nexus of capital, labor and nature.
What makes ecological destruction appear as a second
contradiction, as the emergence of something new in the economic
order, is the globalization of the destruction of the resources
necessary for productive processes. In this sense, one must
transcend what O'Connor describes as the "Marxist vision that
capital never encounters absolute limits," being that the "crisis
is mainly localized because of the site specificity of production
conditions."[8] Clearly, the limits are not absolute, and they
are certainly not natural, nor predominantly demographic. Rather,
they are limits generated by the world economic "order." Even
so, as long as the site specificity of production conditions was
maintained, the "second contradiction" of capital did not become
manifest. It emerges only from the global, international and
complex nature of environmental destruction. Site specificity of
production is now being affected by global environmental
conditions (global warming, rise of the sea level, biodiversity,
pollution of environmental services) and not only by its local
environment. Thus, "the actual ecologically driven crisis"
(O'Connor) is not a crisis located in a specific site or
resource, which can be avoided by relocating individual capitals
(e.g., by expanding agricultural borders, exporting polluting
industries, or disposing of toxic waste in the ocean or in
neighboring countries) or by substituting a scarce product with
new resources or energy sources as a result of technological
progress. Rather, it is a crisis of underproduction, of a decline
in the production and productivity of the global economic system,
and also of future opportunities for productive investment, which
combine to create the deterioration of environmental potential
while increasing the ecological costs of development.
Furthermore, the second contradiction, which concerns
production conditions, is not limited to those conditions
produced by the state: urban infrastructure and transport,
environmental restoration, health and education services for
workers (as claimed by O'Connor). The environmental conditions
of production, photosynthesis, ecological balance and potential,
and soil fertility (the conditions that Marx believed were
offered free to capital by nature) are natural processes without
state intervention and, as Marx himself saw, without human labor
(although the state intervenes in these areas to protect nature's
productive and regulative mechanisms or to orient scientific and
technological progress toward the construction of an ecological
technology capable of increasing nature's productive potential).
_________________________
Siglo XXI Editores, 1975).
[8] "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical
Introduction," op. cit.
5
Capital is self-destructive not only because it raises the cost
of production conditions (urban services, health, and the cost of
extracting natural elements of constant capital) but because it
destroys the ecological mechanisms responsible for the natural
supply of resources. It is in this sense that environmental
conditions differ from other production conditions.
Thus a generalized ecological crisis, induced by capital
accumulation, can bring about a catastrophic crisis of the
economic system with far greater consequences than any other
previous form of capitalist destructive creation. Exploited
nature can accumulate greater anger and ignore the offenses of
spoilation and extermination with more difficulty than the worst
genocide, unleashing the rebellion of natural forces that might
become stronger and more uncontrollable than a social revolution.
This leads us to ask if ecological conditions and the
environmental potential of development can be assimilated into
Marxist concepts and categories through an addendum (a second
contradiction) or if they require a theoretical re-working of
historical materialism, including the creation of
interdisciplinary concepts and the articulation of historical
materialism with other sciences. Basically, the limits of nature
consist of the destabilization and rupture of certain ecological
equilibria, the over-use of resources beyond the carrying
capacity of ecosystems, the loss of soil fertility, and
ecosystems' resilience and productivity with regard to resource
use patterns induced by the basic contradiction of capital. The
first and second contradictions of capital are linked by the
confrontation of capital's economic cycles with the productivity
limitations of resource-producing ecosystems.
But the articulation among capital, labor, and nature is
more complex: we must explain how demographic processes
(population growth and distribution) combine with production and
consumption patterns and with the "carrying capacity" or
alternative productivity of ecosystems to generate global
economic-social-environmental crises (with their local
expressions) or to construct the environmental potential for
sustainable development. So explanations for the economic-
ecological crisis self-induced by capital's contradictory growth,
the transformation of complex socio-environmental systems, and
the construction of new environmental relations of production all
require knowledge from different disciplines and the production
of concepts able to articulate historical materialism, ecology,
and cultural sciences.[9]
The same is true, and even more so, regarding an explanation
of the transition from the economic-ecological crisis to the
construction of an "eco-socialism" in which the forces of
production are harmonized with those of nature. This involves
moving from a postulation of the mode of production based on the
_________________________
[9] E. Leff, "Sobre la articulacion de las ciencias en la
relacion naturaleza-sociedad," E. Leff, ed., Biosociologia y
Articulacion de las Ciencias (Mexico: UNAM, 1981); E. Leff,
"Ambiente y Articulacion de Ciencias," in E. Leff, Los Problemas
del Conocimiento y la Perspectiva Ambiental del Desarrollo
(Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1986).
6
social ownership of natural means of production to the
construction of a new productive rationality based on new
principles of productivity; to the implementation of an eco-
technological paradigm based on the articulation of ecological
productivity of the resource system, technological productivity,
and social and cultural productivity -- the latter stemming from
productive and cooperative organizational forms in the labor
process -- under the principle of the socialization of natural
goods, including knowledge regarding their use and
transformation, and participatory democracy based upon the
principles of environmental management.[10]
The "eco-socialist" project must transcend the aim of
establishing a mode of production capable of conserving or
restoring production conditions and internalizing environmental
externalities of productive processes, and build a productive
rationality that can open the way to a socialism based on
ecological sustainability, social equity, political pluralism,
and cultural diversity.
_________________________
[10] E. Leff, "Cultura Democratica, Gestion Ambiental y
Desarrollo Sustenable," Ecologia Politica, 4, Icaria/Fuhem,
Barcelona, 1992.
7
A Flawed and Incomplete Model*
By Albert Recio
James O'Connor's effort to reformulate the analysis of
capitalism to include its relationship to environmental issues
deserves the praise of all of us who are trying to construct an
analytical framework that permits us to understand the world in
which we live, and who reject the academy's sweetened and
conformist vision of the present social system. However, the
praise worthiness of his effort does not mean that we cannot
criticize it with the aim of endowing his theses with greater
analytical precision. This is the spirit in which I undertake
these comments.1
O'Connor posits that the dynamic of capitalist economies is
affected by two kinds of contradictions that impede their
development. The first has its origin in the tendency for labor
costs to decline, provoking a fall in effective demand and the
appearance of a crisis of overproduction. The second
contradiction, which is his original contribution, is
characterized by an increase in the costs of production owing to
the problems generated by what he (following Marx) calls
"conditions of production," among which the natural conditions of
production are particularly important. In this case, the crisis
would manifest itself as an increase in production costs, or a
crisis of profits. In my opinion, this treatment of the problem
is overly schematic and does not permit adequate consideration of
the constrictions and tensions to which capitalist economies are
subject.
Presenting the capital-labor contradiction as a mere problem
of insufficient demand ignores many of the problems that arise
within the world of labor. Marx wrote about the dual character of
wages, which function both as a cost and as the wellspring of
effective demand. When workers manage to obtain wage increases,
there may be a crisis of profits (a "cost-push" crisis); on the
other hand, when wages decline too much, we may see the type of
crisis postulated by O'Connor (a Keynesian-type crisis). Even in
the latter case, the decline in wages does not automatically
provoke a realization crisis, as long as the fall in workers'
demand for consumer goods is offset by the increase in demand in
other sectors (luxury goods, investments, public spending, etc.)
The importance of this last point is crucial for understanding
capitalism's bonanza in the latter half of the 1980s. Indeed, the
question of profit is not limited to the realm of wages. The rate
of exploitation is always a relationship between the product
produced and the cost of labor. It is possible for an
"appropriate" salary level to be unaccompanied by "appropriate"
labor behavior, translated into falling productivity and
_________________________
*Translated by Ruth MacKay.
1 The paper to which I refer is a summarized version of an
article by O'Connor in the first issue of Ecologia Politica.
8
profitability, without there necessarily being problems of
demand. This indicates that the problems posed by the labor force
with respect to the workings of capitalist economies are more
complex than O'Connor's argument suggests.
His overly schematic approach is part of an interpretation
of the dynamics of capitalism which assumes workers are merely
passive subjects who adapt themselves to the impositions of
capital and that market mechanisms are so strong that they
generate inflexible wage and labor discipline. I disagree, and
believe that accumulated historical experience has shown that the
capital-labor problematic has manifested itself in the wide range
of situations, some of which I have mentioned.
Nor does it seem appropriate to group together the variety
of factors he introduces as conditions of production, and I fear
that the attempt to construct a simple and symmetrical scheme
such as O'Connor's is uncritical (O'Connor himself is aware of
the difficulty of fitting a wide range of situations into a
single concept). One particularly unfortunate result, I think, is
the combination of those questions concerning the distribution of
net production among social groups (e.g., the distribution of
surplus between industrial business owners and landlords), as
well as those concerning issues such as the exhaustion of natural
resources. The importance and the manner of addressing these
issues can not be uniform. In the case of distribution, social
reorganization may come about, as, in fact, has occurred with the
fusion of industrial and real estate capital (which can be
clearly seen by observing how new industrial investments are
financed through the reappraisal of old urban factory sites).
More important is the perception that capitalist firms try
to avoid certain costs, thus undermining the "supply" of a range
of inputs that are necessary for the productive process: a
workforce with a given level of capacity, a proper setting, and
so on. But it is not at all clear that these problems always
translate into problems of rising costs.
When discussing the development of capitalism one must
differentiate from the start between those problems that can be
resolved by "internalizing" costs (e.g., workforce qualification,
water purification) and those that, in both the short and long-
run, constitute fixed limits (such as all non-reproducible
resources). The former allow for varied solutions that do not
necessarily lead to greater costs; social and technological
innovations may make cost increases unnecessary. The latter are a
long-run barrier, a real contradiction between a system that
tends toward the expansion of production levels and a world with
limited dimensions.
Although it is true that, in the first case, capitalism's
imprudence can lead to temporary increases in costs, there are
other possible results, e.g., stagnant production (such as when
construction flags due to a shortage of qualified laborers),
which leads to a fall in demand or a shift in economic activity
toward the capitalist periphery. It is far less clear that the
9
long-run disappearance of a non-reproducible good is
automatically translated into increased costs, as is shown daily
in relation to the price of oil. Its price does not depend upon
the destruction of a "condition of production;" a complex social
web that determines the political balance of power sets its
price.
There is yet another question: Insofar as the ecological
disaster has not been caused only by capitalism, it is obvious
that our analysis must be broader. Those, like myself, who
believe that the capitalist system must be replaced by another
type of social organization, are not going to gain credibility if
we only try to explain how the capitalist system affects the
conditions of production. In this sense, there is a need for a
broader theoretical framework that deals with these problems, and
with the kind of society that could overcome them. I have no
doubt that the Marxist insistence on identifying social relations
as the essential factor in the analysis of capitalism will
continue to reap results. However, we must broaden our horizon
and break with the habit of drawing from our own tradition alone.
In this sense, I think O'Connor's work raises relevant questions.
10