Part IV
SYMPOSIUM
THE SECOND CONTRADICTION
OF CAPITALISM
The thesis of the "second contradiction of capitalism" was
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 Europe, Asia, Africa,
Latin America, and North America 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, Martin O'Connor, Enrique Leff, and
Albert Recio appeared in the last two issues of CNS.
Poverty and Production Conditions: Some
Reflections on the Second Contradiction
of Capitalism
By Sunil Ray
Is capital, owing to its universal tendency of self-
expansion, incapable of controlling its tendencies when it comes
to impairing its own production conditions? Are these production
conditions threatened by an "absolute, general law of
environmental degradation,"[1] leading to what James O'Connor
_________________________
[1] John Bellamy Foster, "The Absolute General Law of
Environmental Degradation Under Capitalism," CNS, 3,3, Issue
calls the "second contradiction of capitalism?" Can the
resolution of this contradiction lead to another path to
socialism? To be more precise, has capital reached the stage of
commodifying its own production conditions in general and ecology
in particular in ways that lead to economic crisis?
This explanation of the connection between Marxism and
ecology contributes to a new theory of economic and political
change, hence, has a significant bearing on the understanding and
interpreting of the reality.
However, I have two comments to make on O'Connor's
theoretical postulates. First, capital not only has a tendency to
expand but also the capabilty to restructure itself, if
necessary, to prepare the objective conditions favorable for its
existence, i.e., control over production and consumption and
hence growth. O'Connor talks of restructuring of the production
conditions in terms of more social forms of production of these
conditions. But, the validity of the restructuring hypothesis
needs to be tested, especially in a context where "privatization"
is recognized as the major force of economic development. This
appears to be true in countries like India where individual forms
of production are gaining momentum under government patronage.
This, I think, exerts considerably adverse impact on the
possibility of more social forms of production conditions. For
example: "Forests were transformed from village commons to state
reserve forests, they were managed to serve the interest of the
private pulp and paper industry by ensuring cheap and regular
supply of raw material. Similarly, while dams are built by
public funds and state bureaucracies, they aim to satisfy the
energy and water needs of private industry or the irrigation
needs of cash crops cultivation. Credit from public sector banks
is essentially used to finance the private tube-wells or private
trawlers of economically powerful groups."[2] If "privatization"
is accorded full legitimacy as the major force of development,
what social form of production condition can one visualise at
this stage?
_________________________
Eleven, September, 1992.
[2] Vandana Shiva, Ecology and the Politics of Survival
Conflicts Over Natural Resources in India (New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1991), p. 333.
2
Second, when we talk about a "second contradiction of
capitalism," we must take note of the differences in the level of
development of capitalism in the developed North and the
developing South. Developing countries have different
environmental systems than most developed countries. Climatic
circumstances and geographic locations have a distinct impact on
the respective eco-systems. Also, developing countries are still
predominantly rural while the developed world is largely
urbanized. Furthermore, the majority living in the developing
countries is poor, and lives in the rural areas. Given the
differences in income levels and patterns of income distribution,
what is important is how the evolving process of production and
consumption interact with the given environmental system in two
different situations. Of course, one may not see any significant
difference when attention is paid only to global capitalism and
to the ecological crisis at the global level. Globalization of
capital is possible; what is not possible is the globalization of
eco-systems. Hence, one has to recognize differences with regard
to the level and extent of capital's commodification of nature in
developed countries compared to the developing ones. Apart from
this, in developing countries, for instance, India, there still
exists various indigenous forces, e.g., traditional value
systems, non-market transactions, local political organizations,
community tribal groups, etc., which directly or indirectly
contribute to preserving production conditions. This is much
less important a factor in developed countries. In these
contrasting situations, there may be a kind of overlap between
the first and second contradiction, especially in the context of
the developing countries. They are poor not primarily because of
environmental degradation but due to existing socio-economic
systems. The first contradiction of capitalism still appears to
be the principal contradiction. This does not, however, reduce
the importance of the second contradiction, which is yet to be as
well-developed as it is in developed countries. The problem that
I feel needs to be resolved is: if the first contradiction of
capitalism is the principal contradiction in the developing
countries, how can social movements oriented around ecology (as
postulated by O'Connor) resolve the first contradiction? Or, is
the resolution of the first contradiction implicit in the
resolution of the second contradiction? If this is so, which
comes first in the context of the developing countries? Poverty
3
then ecology or ecology then poverty?[3] Reducing the two
contradictions to one, however, as Michael Lebowitz has done in
his paper (the contradiction between the needs of capital and the
needs of human beings), does not lend credibility to the
exploration of linkages through which the needs of capital are
satisfied at the cost of human needs.[4] But, when he says
"understanding the unity of those two forms is an important
step," he perhaps shows considerable insight in the context of
dealing with poverty and unemployment, on the one hand, and
destruction of production conditions, on the other, in the Third
World countries. The question, therefore, is how to identify the
unity of the two forms of contradictions?
Although the root remains the same (i.e., the tendency of
capital to expand at the cost of human needs), expansion takes
place via two routes -- the socio-economic system, and the
commodification of nature. By commodifying nature, capital
destroys its own base and by doing so it accentuates poverty.
But then can one attribute the basic cause of poverty to the
destruction of production conditions?
The two different contradictions need to be recognized in
two different ways. The important task is to discover the
process through which convergence of the two contradictions take
place, and at what stage of development of the Third World
countries.
The Contradictory Interaction of
Capitalism and Nature
By Andriana Vlachou
The appropriation of nature under capitalism is complex and
contradictory and gives rise to serious ecological problems.
Ecological problems are the outcome of many diverse natural,
economic, political and cultural processes that are taking place
_________________________
[3] Kamal Narayan Kabra, "The Second Contradiction of
Capitalism: Some Reflections," CNS Issue Eleven, op. cit.
[4] Michael A. Lebowitz, "Capitalism: How Many
Contradictions?" in ibid.
4
within capitalist society and which interact with each other.
However, as O'Connor has pointed out,1 bourgeois naturalism,
neo-Malthusianism, Club of Rome technocratism, romantic deep
ecologyism, and United Nations one-worldism -- despite their
interesting insights on different aspects of ecological problems
-- fail to address the class dimensions of these problems.
Moreover, as these analyses both ignore class exploitation and
effectively reduce the nature/society relationship to a single
ultimate determinant, they cannot produce a satisfactory
knowledge of how the interaction between nature and society is
shaped, and thus changed, over time and across different
societies.
I consider the class process2 -- the production,
appropriation and distribution of surplus labor -- as an
important aspect of capitalist society that shapes the
relationship between nature and society. In turn, natural
processes, along with other non-class processes, condition and
bring into existence the class process. Thus, transformations
wrought in nature by capitalism are articulated with the
capitalist class process; this interaction can become a point of
departure for a Marxist discourse on capitalism and nature.
However, before I comment on some of the economic aspects of
capitalism's interaction with nature, I would like to emphasize
that in no way do I embrace the economism of traditional
Marxism.3 I conceive of society as an overdetermined totality
_________________________
1 James O'Connor, "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A
Theoretical Introduction," CNS, 1, Fall, 1988, p. 13.
2 The theorization of class as a social process
overdetermined by all other natural and social processes has been
developed by Steven Resnick and Richard Wolff in Knowledge and
Class: A Marxist Critique of Political Economy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
3 I have developed an overdeterminist account of the
relationship between society and nature in "Reflections on the
Ecological Critiques and Reconstruction of Marxism" (University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, May, 1992). An overdeterminist
standpoint does not render theorizing impossible or meaningless;
on the contrary, it calls for complex social analyses. In this
sense, to produce a knowledge of the interaction of capitalism
and nature -- and also to change this relationship -- is to
5
which cannot be reduced to a mere effect of economy or any other
of society's constituent aspects. Moreover, for me, the class
process itself comes into existence only out of the interaction
of different natural, political, cultural and other economic
processes; thus, every aspect of society should be accounted for
in class analyses.
A Marxist discourse on nature can preserve, I think, the
centrality of the class concept since the interaction between
society and nature is mediated by social labor, which is
performed within class relations in class societies. Thus, as we
experience nature in historically produced forms,4 we can start
producing a knowledge of capitalism's appropriation of nature by
directly addressing, instead of ignoring, the class aspects of
this process. Moreover, nonreductionist Marxism is well-situated
to theorize all the aspects of the relationship between nature
and society, and we should encourage Marxists from different
disciplines to produce such specific knowledges. I, as an
economist, shall try to discuss some economic aspects of
capitalism's interaction with nature.5
Capital needs natural conditions and resources to be
available in requisite quantities and qualities. Land, minerals,
water, clean air and other natural conditions are conditions of
existence for the capitalist class process; they constitute
elements of constant capital and they also sustain life, and, for
that matter, they secure the existence and the reproduction of
the valuable commodity labor power. However, capitalist
development itself is contradictory and uneven; thus, capital's
expansion over time might threaten the very conditions of its
existence, including its natural ones.
Environmental degradation, as experienced today, has been
caused, among other factors, by the technical and economic modes
_________________________
unfold the many ways in which social processes interact with
natural ones, their effectivity in their mutual constitution and
the contradictions that are brought about by their complex
interaction.
4 O'Connor, op. cit.
5 I have presented many of the arguments that follow in "A
Marxist Analysis of Environmental and Natural Resource Problems,"
Theses, 33, October-November-December 1990 (in Greek).
6
in which nature is appropriated by the capitalist class process.
Technology, an overdetermined social process, is closely
associated with the extraction of relative surplus value and cost
reductions. Many environmental resources were ignored in the
shaping of capitalist development. These resources were common
property, and did not command a market price. They were easily
appropriated by capital in the form of waste receptacles.
Pollution abatement technologies (to the degree that they were
available) raised costs, so that they were not introduced on the
basis of the initiative of individual capitals. In this way,
capitals tended to jeopardize their own existence as they
exceeded the "carrying capacity" of nature, resulting in the
destruction of natural processes and conditions.
Individual capitals may also deplete nature as a source of
elements of constant and variable capital as they extract natural
resources in a very short-sighted manner imposed on individual
capitalists by virtue of the structure of capitalist competition
pertaining to accumulation rates, technical change, size of
capital, etc. In their search for cheap raw materials and wage
goods, they first use high quality or easily accessible natural
resources without any consideration for their availability in the
future. In this way, they succeed in keeping their cost of
production low and maximizing their profits. However, since many
strategic natural resources are reproduced by nature at a slow
rate they run up against "limits." They tend to exhaust first
the high quality or easily accessible reserves and then use other
resources of lower quality giving rise to higher costs of
production. This kind of "scarcity," however, is socially and
historically produced; it is clearly related to the way that
natural resources are appropriated by the capitalist class
process.
Another kind of "scarcity" in the case of natural resources
is created by the existence of monopolies in resource industries.
Exclusive private or "state" property of certain strategic
resources, whose reproduction by nature is not easy, restricts
access to these resources and creates a natural monopoly. High
rents might be charged to individual capitals or consumers who
want to gain access to these resources. Individual capitals
experience the increases in the monopoly prices of natural
resource commodities that they buy as increases in costs, while
workers with constant nominal wages find their real wages
7
falling. The case of oil in the 1970s was an excellent example
of changes in monopoly positions resulting in higher prices. At
the time, however, a significant effort was made to convince the
public that higher prices were related to an increased natural
scarcity of oil. But "natural limits" in certain epochs have
been the outcome of historical processes that shape society's
relation to nature and cannot be defined only by reference to
"natural conditions." This was especially true for the 1970s.
The degradation of nature produced by capitalism, on the
other hand, reacts back upon the class process as it threatens
capital's conditions of existence and produces changes towards
securing these natural conditions. However, these changes are
shaped by class and non-class struggles that are fought at all
the levels of society. Moreover, their outcome is uncertain as
various changes might be conducive or inimical to further
capitalist development.
These struggles contain political, ideological, economic,
and other aspects. But I would like to emphasize some of the
economic aspects. There is an intercapitalist struggle, i.e.,
competition between individual capitals for survival, which leads
in the first instance to pollution or depletion of natural
resources. In the absence of any regulation, if some capitals
choose to control their emissions, they might find their economic
position deteriorating, hence risk being driven out of business.
In the second instance, however, as some individual capitals
experience increases in costs due to ecological degradation, they
start fighting other capitals in an effort to make these capitals
"internalize" environmental costs or reduce the monopoly prices
they charge. The tourist industry, for example, struggles
against industrial firms that use lakes, rivers, or the sea as
sinks for their waste, causing damages to the former. Non-energy
firms fought against oil companies in the 1970s to keep the price
of oil low.
The state might also be called upon by different capitals to
mediate access to nature. The state then becomes the site of
different struggles over nature; it both shapes and is shaped by
these struggles. For example, the state can nationalize or
regulate the energy industry; in this case it does not simply
secure the political and ideological conditions for capitalist
extraction but also the economic ones.
Ecological destruction has direct consequences on working
8
people as well. People find out that the means of life are not
so easily available any more. Pollution, for example, has
significant negative effects on human health resulting in various
diseases and increased medical care costs. Certain wage goods or
services, for example, or heat, or houses in relatively clean
areas, become more expensive. In other words, environmental
degradation increases the cost of the reproduction of labor
power. Consequently, capitalist firms also experience these
developments in different ways. Absence from work due to health
problems and declines in productivity are two forms. Or, people
may start fighting at the point of production for wage increases
to compensate for the cost increases in wage goods and services,
or people organize in local movements to fight for regulation
against polluting firms in an effort to protect their conditions
of life. All these struggles, no matter where they start, have
corresponding class movements and shape the extraction process as
well. In addition, all of these struggles may be fought inside
or outside the state. Social movements, state agencies, and
production sites are all loci for the shaping of the society-
nature relationship. The struggle, for example, over the
establishment of the operation of a nuclear power station is
fought at the local level, within and against the state, and at
the production site.
Historically, these struggles gave rise to environmental
regulation by the state, and "environmental" industries producing
commodities or services that "protect" the environment or
mitigate "scarcity," and, at the same time, make a profit just
like any other business. An ecological ethic may propel not only
social movements, but environmental business as well. Pollution
might be reduced and "scarcity" might be mitigated. In this
sense, I think there is no a priori tendency for capitalism to
produce environmental crises. It is possible for capitalism to
develop new modes to secure its natural conditions of existence.
However, as a result, capitalism might threaten other aspects
which are important for its existence. For example, pollution
abatement or environmental education might absorb a significant
part of surplus value, which would otherwise be available for
technical restructuring and the expansion of profits, not to
mention other social or natural needs. As the capitalist
appropriation of nature is complex and contradictory, as well as
mediated by all other processes of society, there is a real
9
possibility that crises of capitalism can emerge out of
ecological problems.6
It should also be noted that under capitalism measures to
protect natural conditions cannot simply be considered to be the
product of successful struggles on the part of the ecological
movements. Many of them might be compatible with the long-run
existence of capitalism. This point was also made by T.
Kyprianidis as a critique of certain Greek ecologists who tend to
ignore the interactive nature of ecological problems as both
causes and effects of the shaping and reshaping of capitalism
today.7
Nor are these measure the simple result of a state agency's
effort to regulate capital's access to nature, especially when
this agency is considered primarily as a political and
ideological site. This line of thinking might avoid economism
but it may end up with voluntarism as it privileges the state and
its political and ideological aspects or, alternatively, non-
state institutions, especially the social movements.
Environmental issues, and struggles over them, are as much
political and cultural as they are natural and economic.
Involved in them are social movements as well as capitalists and
workers and in many cases they occupy different and contradictory
positions in these struggles. Thus, the outcomes become
overdetermined.
Moreover, in socialism, new political and ideological
processes need to be combined with alternative post-capitalist
economic (productive and distributive) processes in order to
create a new articulation between nature and society. Social
movements and struggles can effectively pave the road to (and
shape) the new society. But capitals are also in constant change
and readjustment with the aim of meeting these challenges. This
contradictory interaction, however, is open-ended. It is in this
open-endedness in which the significance of social movements and
struggles is grounded, so that the transcendence of capitalism
_________________________
6 Similar points were also made by Stephen Resnick and
Richard Wolff in "Nature, Class and Crisis," Mimeo, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.
7 "Notes on Ecology and the Left," Theses, October-December,
1989.
10
can be hoped for and worked for.
11