Part VI
SYMPOSIUM
THE SECOND CONTRADICTION
OF CAPITALISM
Contributions to the debate on the thesis of the "second
contradiction of capitalism" by John Bellamy Foster, Samir Amin,
Victor Toledo, Kamal Nayan Kabra, Michael Lebowitz, Martin
O'Connor, Enrique Leff, Sunil Ray, Andriana Vlachou, Albert
Recio, Enzo Mingione, and Martin Spence appeared in the last four
issues of CNS.
The Loss of Agricultural Biodiversity:
An Example of the "Second Contradiction"
By Joan Martinez Alier
The conference in Rio de Janeiro had as one of the main
themes the conservation of biological diversity. In this note, I
shall focus on agricultural biodiversity, and I shall use this as
an example to test Jim O'Connor's thesis on the "second
contradiction" (which readers of CNS already know, and therefore
I shall not summarize again). This note is then an attempt to
show that Jim O'Connor's thesis is fruitful in order to
understand a situation which he himself has not commented upon,
and has not listed in the examples he has given on the "second
contradiction."
Biodiversity was one star issue at the Rio Conference. I
shall focus on agricultural biodiversity which raises
distributional conflicts which are barely understood even by the
social actors themselves since it is only now that a widespread
awareness of the value of agricultural biodiversity is arising in
poor countries. Some of these countries occupy the areas of
Vavilov's original "centres of biodiversity" (e.g., maize in
Mexico and Central America, potatoes in the Andes, cassava in
1
Brazil-Paraguay...). Moreover, in such countries there are still
poor farmers, experts in traditional plant breeding, practising
"clean technology," low-input agriculture based on hundreds of
"landraces" (which Pat Mooney has proposed to call
"folkseeds").[1]
The threat to such agricultural biodiversity comes mainly
from the market advantage to be gained by switching over to
modern agriculture and the High Response Varieties. Questions
arise as to the value that agricultural biodiversity has now and
will have in the future (as assets of "cultivated natural
capital" which cannot be engineered), whether such value which
the market leaves aside ought to have a chrematistic translation,
and who should collect such monetary revenues. Also, what should
be transacted? The right to use such traditionally improved
varieties without excluding other users, or the acquisition of
their property?
There is also the issue of the complementarity between
agricultural biodiversity and the biodiversity of wildlife, which
is the main platform of bodies such as the WWF, and far more
emphasized than agricultural and agroforestal biodiversity in the
IUCN's conservation strategy.[2] Agricultural genetic resources
as "cultivated natural capital" are not a substitute but a
complement to the human-made capital equipment used in modern
agriculture; in its turn, such "cultivated natural capital" needs
the complement of "natural capital," i.e., the wild and weedy
relatives of the same species of cultivated plants.[3]
_________________________
[1] In D. Cooper, R. Vellve and Henk Hobbelink, eds., Growing
Diversity. Genetic Resources and Local Food Security (London:
Intermediate Technology Publications), 1992. See also Daniel
Querol, Recursos geneticos, nuestro tesoro olvidado (Lima:
Industrial Grafica), 1987.
[2] Jeffrey A. Mc Neely, Kenton R. Miller, Walter V. Reid,
Russell A. Mittermeier, and Timothy B. Warner, Conserving the
World's Biological Diversity (World Bank: Gland, Switzerland and
Washington, D.C., 1990).
[3] Herman Daly's classification includes natural capital,
human-made capital, and also, as a special case, cultivated
natural capital. He has discussed the question (which was
raised already by Frederick Soddy, of Oxford, very explicitly) of
whether such categories of capital are substitutes or
2
The ethnobotanical diversity of the poor has been recently
emphasized by different authors, inside a wider framework of
agroecology based on indigenous, peasant knowledge which
continuously evolves.[4] Agricultural biodiversity cannot be
understood unless we also understand the whole human-ecological
complex of each society which has managed to create, preserve,
and further create such wealth of genetic resources. They are
valuable, but such value is not easily translatable into money
terms. The crucial question is whether genetic resources in
general (those from the wilderness, those from traditionally
_________________________
complements. Ecological economists have insisted that natural
resources should be called natural capital, for two reasons.
First, the change in name points to the lack of amortization
provisions for natural resources. Second, the change in name
points to the problematic nature of the substitution of capital
for natural resources in orthodox production functions. However,
the change in name also might mean that resources which were not
produced as commodities and which were not commodities
(traditional agricultural genetic resources, or the Earth's C02
cleaning facilities) should now be treated as capital, i.e.,
commodities.
[4] Paul Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolutions: Ecology
and Food Production in West Africa, (London: Hutchinson, 1984);
Ramachandra Guha and Mahdav Gadgil, This Fissured Land: An
Ecological History of India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1992); Victor Toledo, La sociedad rural, los campesinos y la
cuestion ecologica," in Jorge Zepeda, ed., Las Sociedades Rurales
Hoy, (Conacyt: El Colegio de Michoacan, 1988); also in Ecologia
Polotica, 1, 1991; V. Toledo, "The Ecological Rationality of
Peasant Production," in Miguel Altieri and Susanna Hecht, eds.,
Agroecology and Small Farm Development, (Boca Raton, Florida: CRC
Press, 1989; Daryl Posey, "Indigenous management of tropical
forest ecosystems: the case of the Kayapo Indians of the
Brazilian Amazon," Agroforestry Systems, 3 (2), 1985, pp. 139-
158; Ph Descola, La selva, cultura, simbolismo y praxis en la
ecologia de los achuar (Abya Yala, Quito, 1988); Dianne
Rocheleau, "Gender, Ecology and the Science of Survival: Stories
and Lessons from Kenya," Agriculture and Human Values, winter-
spring, 1991, pp. 156-165.
3
improved varieties, those from modern varieties, and those
genetically engineered) should be commercialized or should remain
the "patrimony of humankind." Genetic resources produced by
traditional plant breeding and collected in the fields up to now
have not been paid for, while firms selling modern improved seeds
insist on payment for them, and the products of genetic
engineering will be not only sold, but monopolized through a
patent system.
The "Mother of all Potatoes"
This is how an Aymara peasant near Lake Titicaca[5] referred
to the wild seed which he crosses on a regular basis with his own
domesticated varieties. This is more than conservation in situ,
it is co-evolution in situ. The wild and weedy relatives play
everywhere an important role. Who are then the social actors,
with differing economic interests and differing political views
and political power, who spontaneously or self-consciously will
defend genetic resources in rural areas and also in the forests,
from the highland areas of the Andes where "the lost crops of the
Incas" are actually under cultivation to the agroforestal systems
of the lowlands of Amazonia?
We are now witnessing the birth of a new, self-conscious
agroecological movement in Latin America and elsewhere, with a
peasant social base and a peasant pride in their own peoples'
biological achievements over thousands of years. This new socio-
political movement (part of a worldwide slowly emerging trend of
ecological neo-narodnism) will be able to use the ecological
critique developed in the rich countries over the last forty
years, against modern agriculture. In Western Europe and the
U.S., agricultural historians and agricultural economists have
paid almost no attention to the biological impoverishment of
modern agriculture, swept under the carpets of "increases in
productivity" of conventional economics or "development of
productive forces" in mainstream Marxist historiography, but
starting even before Rachel Carson in 1962, there had been a
_________________________
[5] Comision Coordinadora de Tecnologia Andina (Apdo. 14.0426,
Lima, Peru), Actas de la reunion del Cusco sobre biodiversidad
campesina y biotecnologias, 1990.
4
number of local episodes against the use of pesticides. For
instance, techniques of integrated pest management were used in
coastal Peru, in the cotton plantations of the Can~ete Valley in
the 1950s,[6] even though at the same time, there was in coastal
Peru a successful campaign in order to erradicate pre-hispanic
varieties of colored cotton, as sources of pests for the
commercial cotton plantations. This campaign is now regretted by
Peruvian agronomists.
Some years after the alarm over the use of pesticides arose
in different parts of the world, another approach was taken in
order to understand and criticize modern agriculture. This was
the study of the flow of energy in agriculture[7] which showed
that modern agriculture made an increasingly inefficient use of
outside energy inputs, while traditional agriculture had used no
other energy source from outside agriculture than sun energy.
The question was immediately asked by ecological economists of
whether the increased economic productivity of modern agriculture
was merely an artifact of the low price of fossil fuels.
Discussion of this issue continues to this day. It figured as a
political argument in the SAM program for food security in Mexico
in the early 1980s.[8]
While a traditional peasant farmer, if he or she has rights
to land, will automatically have also access to sun energy and at
least as much water as it may rain on his or her land, and will
also command a "fourth resource," i.e., the seed for his or her
_________________________
[6] Conference paper in M. Taghi Farvar and John P. Milton,
eds., The Careless Technology: Ecology and International
Development (Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press, 1972.
[7] David Pimentel, et. al., "Food Production and the Energy
Crisis," Science, 182, 1973, pp. 443-49; Gerald Leach, Energy and
Food Production (Guilford Surrey, IPC Science and Technology
Press, 1975; J.M. Naredo and Pablo Campos, "Los balances
energeticos de la agricultura espan~ola," in Agricultura y
Sociedad, 15, 1980.
[8] A. Schejtman, "Analisis integral del problema alimentario y
nutricional en America latina," Estudios Rurales
Latinoamericanos, 6 (2-3), 1983, pp. 141-180; "Campesinado y
seguridad alimentaria," Estudios Rurales Latinoamericanos, 10
(3), 1987, pp. 275-311.
5
crops, modern farmers depend much more on an external energy
subsidy from fossil fuels. They are also more polluting. And
they have lost control over the "fourth resource."[9] Here again
we could do some archeology of ideas,[10] tracing back long ago
the first use of expressions such as "genetic erosion," not as an
exercise in erudition but in order to show how ignorance of the
ecological and social impacts of technical change was socially
hidden under the ideology of progress.[11] Thus, quinua, kan~iwa,
etc., have not been lost in the Andes, and hundreds of varieties
of potatoes remain, developed through peasants plant breeding.
Peasant farmers have insisted in sowing them not because of the
recent efforts by ethnobotanists and the agronomic institutions,
and certainly not because of monetary incentives, but because
their logic has been not only the logic of the market. In
Mexico, hybrid maize has not yet taken over. In the rich
countries, the extension of the market meant great, ignored
losses of genetic resources, rarely mentioned in textbooks of
agricultural history, perhaps in the poor countries an
ecologically-extended market, where genetic resources are
properly valued, would combat genetic erosion.
The economics of technology took as a classic case the study
of the rate of return on the research and development of hybrid
maize in the U.S. fifty years ago.[12] The ecological context was
left out, the complementary inputs for such monoculture were
counted simply at market value, without any item for
_________________________
[9] This is Henk Hobbelink's description. He is the founder of
GRAIN (Genetic Resources Action International), a NGO based in
Barcelona which provides information on the importance of and the
threats to agricultural biodiversity.
[10] As we did for the history of the study of the flow of
energy in agriculture, J. Martinez Alier with Klaus Schluepmann,
Ecological Economics: Environment, Energy, and Society (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 2nd ed., 1991).
[11] Mario Tapia in Peru has been writing a history of the
Andean scholars who started the tradition of collecting peasant
varieties in the 1920s and 1930s.
[12] Zvi Griliches, "Research Cost and Social Returns: Hybrid
Corn and Related Innovations," Journal of Political Economy, 66,
October, 1958, pp. 419-31.
6
externalities from agrochemicals, use of fossil fuels, increased
soil erosion, and no item measured the costs of the loss of
biodiversity which makes hybrid maize in the U.S. dependent on
the imported genetic wealth of Mexican folkseeds and wild
varieties, given away gratis, a beneficial externality to U.S.
agriculture for which there was no market, and which therefore
had no chrematistic value. The development of hybrid maize, and
later of the HYV of wheat and rice, gave a large impulse to the
process of genetic erosion which is contemporary of the new
farming system based on mechanization and a monoculture in every
field.
Since the so-called improved varieties of modern agriculture
cannot do without a continuous flow of new genetic resources in
order to cope with new pests and new environmental challenges,
and since they provide a short-run economic advantage (in the
chrematistic sense) over traditional agroecology, the growth of
production for the market undermines its very conditions of
production, i.e., agricultural biodiversity, and a new
socioecological movement is born in order to resist this
degradation.[13]
Should Agricultural Biodiversity Become a Commodity?
The expansion of market exchange implied not only the actual
inclusion in the market of inputs and products which were outside
it, but it also implied, on another plane (emphasized by Martin
O'Connor, following Baudrillard), the ideological appropriation
by capitalism of elements of nature hitherto external to the
market system. Thus, the ecologically-extended market implies
giving chrematistic significance to environmental resources and
functions which were outside the market. Agricultural genetic
resources were outside the market but they were of great
ecological significance for the human economy (in the sense of
oikonomia). Once humankind has been immersed in a generalized
market system (and it also has grown in numbers, and for some
groups in the exosomatic consumption of energy and materials),
_________________________
[13] This fits in with James 0'Connor's notion of the "second
contradiction" under capitalism, cf. his introduction to the
first issue of the journal CNS, 1988.
7
then the lack of market valuation of such resources and services
which were the common patrimony of humankind has perhaps led to a
wasteful use of them. Hence the idea that, in principle, placing
chrematistic values on environmental resources and services would
be conducive to a more ecological economy, and, in these
instances, it would also favor the poor. Therefore, further
negotiations after Rio on biodiversity, might eventually be
conducted under the proposals outlined in this paper, which imply
a redistribution of income as part of such environmental
policies. How large the redistribution of income would be is
impossible to say, because we cannot know what the price of such
environmental resources and services would be. We are aware,
however, that the poor sell cheap commodities, and they also sell
cheap environmental commodities. There have recently been some
glaring examples of this.
The first example is the low indemnities allocated by the
courts for the victims of the Bhopal disaster, lower (although
the case is still open to revision) than the indemnities paid for
by the memorable Exxon Valdez oil spill. Here one sees the truth
contained in memorandum, "Just between you and me," by Lawrence
Summers, chief economist of the World Bank: "The measurement of
the costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone
earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point
of view a given amount of health-imparing pollution should be
done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the
country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind
dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is
impeccable and we should face up to that."[14] Union Carbide
would have been bankrupt by the damages to be paid, had the
accident taken place in a North Atlantic country.
The second example is the Costa Rican deal with the Merck
company in 1992, through INBIO (Instituto Nacional de
Biodiversidad).[15] It is not a case of agricultural genetic
resources but rather of "wild" genetic resources, but it is most
_________________________
[14] "Let Them Eat Pollution," The Economist, February 8, 1992.
[15] Ernst A. Brugger y Eduardo Lizano, eds., Eco-eficiencia.
La vision empresarial para el desarrollo sostenible en America
Latina (Bogota: Oveja Negra, Business Council for Sustainable
Development, 1992), pp. 289-293.
8
relevant to my discussion. While the World Resources
Institute[16] typically praises the "recent agreement between a
major drug company and Costa Rica (which) deserves to be widely
copied" the deal is creating in Latin America a major uproar, not
least because Costa Rica shares genetic resources with
neighboring countries. The deal implies, of course, the
recognition of rights on genetic resources ("wild" resources, in
this case) but, on the other hand, it gives no assurance that
traditional knowledge and the conservation of biodiversity will
be able to compete by themselves with other land uses which give
a higher rate of return in the market. The deal is for one
million U.S. dollars to be paid in two installments for the
exclusive right to the information and use of genetic resources
in a large protected area of Costa Rica. It is a low price.
Unless there were additional costly measures for conservation
(legal regulation, police vigilance) paid for by the Costa Rican
authorities, plus the self-interest in conservation of parts of
the local populations, the small chrematistic incentive provided
by Merck would be too low in order to prevent deforestation and
genetic erosion. However, it is only normal that Costa Rica
should sell cheap.
There is a parallel here with debates within the feminist
movement some years ago. The analogy is not far fetched since
the debates were connected with the same root economic cause (the
failure of the market to measure services essential to the human
economy, in the sense of oikonomia). Should the reality of
unpaid domestic work, given by women because of their social
subjection, be denounced at the moral and political plane, and
changes be sought to the unequal distribution of labor by moral
persuasion and social changes, or would it be a good idea to give
chrematistic significance to such work by attributing to it a
domestic wage, similar to the wage the market determines for
remunerated domestic work by outside help? Peculiar labor
markets make such remunerated domestic work relatively cheap, but
apart from this, many feminists felt that a domestic wage would
add insult to injury, since the social value for the oikonomia
(for the human economy) of caring for children and for the family
_________________________
[16] World Resources 1992-93 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), p. 10.
9
would not, and could not, be properly reflected in a price
established by market criteria.
In the case of environmental externalities there is the
further issue of intergenerational effects. There is no
guarantee at all that the ecologically extended market in which
today's preferences are expressed will give sufficient importance
to future needs. The unborn cannot come to the market, whether
ecologically extended or not. The implicit discount rates might
be too high, not only because of selfishness but also because of
exaggeratedly optimistic views regarding technical progress and
economic growth. But, apart from the short time horizons they
might share with the rich, there are other reasons why the poor
sell cheap. First, the distribution of assets in the world is
very unequal. Second, the world labor markets are terribly
segmented, by racial discrimination, gender inequality, unequal
access to education, and not least by practically forbidding poor
people to move freely in the world, as we see in the many deaths
at sea in Haiti and Morocco. In the third place, while free
mobility is practically forbidden, on the other hand open markets
are forced upon people, nobody is allowed in practice to live
outside the market. Even subsistence peasants cannot retreat from
the market if they have not enough land, sufficient water, their
own seed. In such circumstances, poor people will have to sell
cheap commodities, they will also sell cheap environmental
resources, and they will accept pollution cheaply. Thus, in the
history of the world economy, even when rights to health
protection are instituted due to pressure from labor unions or
international norms, free wage workers in poor countries who
suffer a disproportionate share of environmental hazards (in
mines, in plantations) accept such hazards cheaply, if not
gladly. It is not an ecologically extended market but eco-social
movements that can give an answer to the destruction of the
conditions of production.
In the discussions on the "second contradiction," some of
the main issues have been whether the increase in costs (when
social movements complain against externalities, or when free
resources or environmental services are given money values) will
produce something similar to what used to be called a "profit
squeeze," and also whether the inclusion in the market of
resources and services which were outside the market will help
capitalism to expand its sphere of action.
10
In this paper, by taking the example of agricultural genetic
resources (which have been lost because of modern agricultural
techniques, and are still preserved in traditional agricultural
practices), I have asked the question of whether paying for such
resources (in the form of farmers' rights, or intellectual
property rights) will stop or aggravate the destruction of such
conditions of agricultural production, and I have also asked who
will benefit from the inclusion in the market of such genetic
resources which up to now were outside the market, as the
"patrimony of humankind." They are relevant questions, for a
politically hot issue as biodiversity has become. Similar
questions could be asked for other environmental resources and
services, for instance, the earth's C02 "cleaning" facilities
provided by new vegetation and the oceans, also considered up to
now the "patrimony of humankind." Should they be brought to the
market? Who would profit from this?
On the Second Contradiction of Capitalism
By Carla Ravaioli
In one version of his theory of "the second contradiction of
capitalism," O'Connor writes: "Global capitalist development
since WW II would have been impossible without deforestation, air
and water pollution, pollution of the atmosphere, global warming,
and the other ecological disasters; without the construction of
megacities, with no regard for congestion, rational land use and
transport systems, and housing and rents; and, finally, without
the reckless disregard for community and family health, physical
and emotional, education, and other `components' of the
socialized reproduction of laborpower -- not to speak of the
welfare of future generations. If global capital had bothered to
reproduce or restore the conditions of production as these
presented themselves at the end of the post-WW II reconstruction
period, world GNP growth probably would have been no more than
one-half recorded rates, perhaps only one quarter of recorded
rates."1 Even more explicitly the concept is reaffirmed in the
_________________________
1 James O'Connor, "The Second Contradiction of Capitalism:
Causes and Consequences," Conference Papers (Santa Cruz: CES/CNS
11
conclusion of the same text, when O'Connor speaks of "the rate of
depletion and pollution of nature as dependent on the rate of
accumulation and rate of profit."
As far as I know, this is the only passage where O'Connor so
clearly focuses on, and give reasons for, the relationship
between environmental disruption and the growth of production.
The thrust of his work is to show and illustrate in great detail
the double crisis which, according to his analysis, strikes
capital today: demand crisis, as a result of labor exploitation,
or the "first contradiction," and crisis from the cost side,
stemming from exploitation of the conditions of production
(including the natural environment), or the "second
contradiction."
Almost casually, almost hidden inside O'Connor's large
output, we find the very crux of the problem. This is that the
environmental problem shows itself as the direct and unavoidable
consequence of the capitalist economic system, where the
production and accumulation of capital -- the basic principle of
capitalist economy -- reveals itself as the main cause of the
ecological crisis. The theory itself is thus forced to ask the
basic question: How can the finiteness of our planet carry an
infinite and continually increasing quantity of goods (and its
consequences, such as consumption of exhaustible resources,
pollution, waste, global warming, ozone problems, etc.)?
I think that this point should be emphasized more and
analyzed in more detail. This doesn't mean that our critique of
capital can be limited to the ecological problem. We can't talk
about the exploitation of nature without also talking about the
exploitation of labor; nor can we forget that both are aimed at
higher accumulation and profit rates. A proper political
struggle for the protection of the environment has to be red
green (perhaps the hypothesis should be red green pink, looking
for common points, similarities, and connections between social,
environmental, and women's problems).
Nevertheless, I don't think that the two problems, the
social and the environmental, can be put on the same plane, or
confronted as the same kinds of problem. They both start from
the same root. They both can be solved only if we're able able
_________________________
Pamphlet 1).
12
to overcome capital, or, at least, change it deeply. But I
believe that we must distinguish between the two phenomena, which
do not proceed at the same pace. On the contrary, they
frequently appear in different times and places; they can even
conflict with each other. So I would distance myself from
O'Connor's assertion, "the more capital exploits labor, the more
it exploits nature, and vice-versa." This is not always true, at
least, not as a rule.
Think of the Eastern European countries, where environmental
disruption is no less serious than in the West, and frequently is
much worse. This fact cannot be explained by saying that these
countries were not "socialist," except in name. This is true,
but it's also true that in these societies the often dreadful
exploitation of natural environment is related quite differently
to the exploitation of labor, in comparison with Western or Third
World realities. Let's remember also how many times the workers
and their unions fiercely opposed anti-pollution measures, i.e.,
how many times -- in the immediacy of the given situation --
reduction of environment exploitation means increase of labor
exploitation.
To understand this, I think we have to look for other and
more distant causes, deeply rooted in the world economic
organization. As we know, and as O'Connor has noted, the left
historically regarded the basic values of capitalism as positive
ones -- industrialism, productivism, GNP growth, international
competitivity, and so on -- and pursued them as the left's own
aims, identifying them with social progress, and considering them
as absolute priorities.
This did not happen without reasons. For a fairly long
period, the coming of industrial society was on the whole a
positive event, one which allowed many more human beings than in
previous societies to live on the planet. Also, until a certain
moment, in the West industrial society has resulted in a
remarkable improvement in general living conditions of most
people. Despite exploitation and alienation and enormous
differences in distribution of wealth, and despite all the well-
known negative consequences of the intensive urbanization
process, not all but most Western people have enjoyed
considerably higher standards of living (in food, housing,
education, sanitary conditions, disposable income, etc.). I want
to stress "until a certain moment" and only in Western
13
industrialized countries.
In fact, the same production growth and accumulation, which
resulted in a remarkable improvement of conditions in the West,
were causing a continuous attack on the balance of ecosystems --
because production means pollution of the natural environment and
consumption of exhaustible resources. Pollution and consumption
of energy and raw materials can be controlled and restrained, but
not completely avoided. Continuous production growth means
continuous growth of ecological disruption, even if the most
refined ecofriendly rules and processes are observed.
Exploitation of labor and exploitation of nature therefore
do not proceed at the same pace, at least, not in a directly
proportional sense, as we would infer from some of O'Connor's
passages. On the contrary, we can have a mounting ecological
crisis while accumulation is in good health, which is exactly
what happened in the last two centuries in the Western
industrialized world.
Capitalist accumulation (as O'Connor says) is based on the
maximum externalization of social and ecological costs. But
these two categories of costs did not attract the same attention;
they also had quite different fortunes in the history of
industrial relationships and government policy. Social costs
have been partly paid by the state (through welfare and the like)
and partly have been internalized by capital under pressure from
workers' struggles. But ecological costs have been practically
ignored till a few decades ago.
So deeply rooted in culture and in common sense was the
belief in the human right of free and predatory use of nature, on
one hand, and its inexhaustible generosity and strength, on the
other hand, that almost no one worried about the damage caused by
industrial activity. This damage became more serious as
production increased and as the composition of production
changed, with the more massive use of synthetic, heavily toxic
and non-biodegradable materials.
Then the carrying capacity of ecosystems started to falter
under the pression of increasing pollution, and the environment
became unsustainable, not only for nature, but also for people
(who are part of nature). In this way, society's exploitation by
capital began to pass not only through labor, but also through a
worsening in the quality of life.
When taps give you trichloroethylene water; and at the
14
market you buy pesticide-treated apples and mercury-poisoned
fish; and "no bathing" signs stand on seashore and rivers; and
urban congestion paralyzes traffic; and even breathing becomes
dangerous -- when everyone in his or her life experiences what on
a planetary scale are destroyed forests, spreading deserts,
lessening of biodiversity, changing climates, and weakening the
ozone layer -- at this moment the same undeniable improvements
that industrial society has brought to people in the Western
countries must be questioned, or at least firmly reconsidered.
So it is not true that capitalist accumulation is such an
unconditional benefit for workers. And left policies based on
growth-as-progress reveal themselves as founded on illusion. A
car, a boat, a second house, a microwave oven, a pocket phone,
etc., for almost everybody mean not only a progressive
devaluation of commodities which were highly appreciated insofar
as they only belonged to the few (as Fred Hirsch wrote). They
mean also the progressive poisoning of the world, and of the
human species.
It is at this moment that -- proceeding on the trail of
O'Connor's theory -- the first and the second contradiction tend
to meet and to compound each other, first, in strictly economic
terms, as O'Connor explains, with increasing costs (caused by
environmental disruption which companies are in some measure
obliged to internalize), and second, with stagnation of demand.
This is a double crisis that hinders accumulation mechanisms, one
that more hysterical quests for "new" production processes and
products are not able to solve. Environmental crisis and
accumulation crisis now take place at the same time.
In this convergence of environmental and social
exploitation, a historical, cultural, and anthropological crisis
has emerged -- one that questions not only the production system,
but also our habits, our way of living, consuming, wasting, and
thinking about nature and about ourselves as part of nature. In
short, we are questioning the very way of being that we have
inherited from history.
So, "if we regard the rate of depletion and pollution of
nature as dependent on the rate of accumulation and rate of
profit," as O'Connor suggests (and I agree), it is logical and
necessary to stop or at least drastically reduce the growth of
production. But, given the organization of modern Western
economies, is this possible? How to propose such a change
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without running the risk of a serious rise in unemployment,
poverty, marginalization, and violence? In a word, can we (and
if so, how) save the environment from more dreadful disruption,
and at the same time satisfy the needs of modern societies,
without abandoning the improvements in our standard of living
that the industrial system undeniably provided us with?
As I pointed out, the appearance of the environmental crisis
as an urgent and inescapable problem marks a time border between
the positive consequences of industrialization and increasing
ecological damage which frequently overwhelmed and negated these
consequences. But other boundaries have always limited the
"goodness" of accumulation, namely, those that separate developed
countries from Third World, the more than three quarters of the
population of the planet who received little or no advantages
from the arrival of capitalist industrial economy and its social
consequences. On the contrary, at the same time that an
increasing number of people became better off in the West, in the
South masses have become more impoverished.
Even after the end of the most savage colonialism, when
Western intervention has presented itself as a donor of
civilization, with intentions to genuinely improve conditions,
these countries have been obliged to accept the import of foreign
models, which have destroyed previous economic, social, and
ecological balances without permitting the development of new
ones. So the Third World has been paying for Western
development, as the environment as been paying for it all over
the planet.
But here lies a real problem. The hypothesis of restraining
accumulation, highly problematic even in affluent countries,
looks decidedly unthinkable for countries where people are
starving, where goods to fulfill basic needs are missing, and
where the need for material growth imposes itself as an absolute
priority for peoples unable to enjoy a barely decent level of
life, or even survival. This is an indisputable truth, but it
does not exempt us from thinking that even a quite modest
development in the South, if it copied the Western model,
inevitably would mean an overwhelming increase of pollution,
consumption of exhaustible resources, and ecologic disruption in
all its many terrifying aspects.
Such is the problem that humankind has to confront nowadays
-- a problem which has no comparison in the past, and which is
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becoming more serious given the continuous growth of the world
population. So far, no one has the solution. But we can now
point out some certainties on the negative side: the industrial
capitalist system is no solution; the planet can not survive an
economy based on the unlimited production of goods, on the
accumulation of capital.
Some remarks on trends pertaining to recent world social
changes thus might be useful. We know that the environment and
the Third World are bound to suffer the highest costs of
accumulation. For some time, doubts about the viability of
production growth have become visible, as a result of the
dreadful and increasing poverty of poor countries and ecological
disruption. Recently, the positive effects of two centuries of
industrialization -- higher incomes and more consumption in the
West -- are rapidly diminishing, or at least being restricted to
fewer people.
The United Nations, World Bank, U.S. Federal Reserve Bank,
and other official sources affirm this. Recent reports speak not
only of a tremendous polarization of wealth and income between
the North and the South. They also note the same polarization in
the Western industrialized world. So the growth of production
doesn't guarantee rising living standards even in Western
industrialized countries. Meanwhile, everywhere the ecological
quality of life is decaying.
Don't these trends argue that the world needs a different
economic system? Shouldn't economic science begin to question
itself? As Claudio Napoleoni (a famous Italian economist, now
dead) used to say, economics, as an autonomous discipline, was
born as a theory of capital, and such it remained. Perhaps
changing the theory could help change the reality?
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