Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
second: devaluation and expansion. Losses (devaluation) are endemic to capitalism,
but so is expansion: expansion of markets into new geographical territories so that
more goods may be off-loaded, expansion of the working class, so that more people
will become consumer-producers sopping up the ready-made, expansion of the
kinds of things that become commodities, so that the source of profi ts will be aug-
mented. The last of these, what Marx called primitive accumulation and David
Harvey has recently termed accumulation by dispossession is of renewed importance
as an environmental issue - witness the commodifi cation and patenting of genetic
materials and privatisation of common water resources, not to mention fossil fuels
(Castree, 2003; Harvey, 2003; Swyngedouw, 2006, for a wider, very useful discus-
sion of the commodifi cation of nature). There is no sense, as yet, that devaluation
and expansion harmlessly balance out. Quite the contrary, the history of capitalism
in the 20th and 21st century is fraught with crisis. If anything, the surprise is the
degree to which capitalism accommodates itself to crisis, perhaps beyond what
Marx imagined. Looming especially large are fi nancial and credit instruments by
which to extend production-consumption circuits well beyond current earnings. (See
Box 17.4 below for an appreciation of the important role fi nance capital plays in
'nature-based' economies such as agriculture). That these sometimes come crashing
down (e.g. the spectacular failure of the subprime mortgage market in the United
States in 2007-2008), and that they are currently a central part of the economic
imaginary regarding solutions to the climate crisis (e.g., the brisk market in so-called
carbon credits) alerts us to the heightened role fi nancial instruments play.
If the expansion of surplus value is manifested as the proliferation of goods (and
the transformation/exploitation of nature that is involved), will we see a point where
capitalism will have produced 'enough' goods and consumed enough resources in
the process?
Individual workers may well decide to scale back their consumption
(though scaling back is problematic for reasons already noted). Capital, capitalists,
as such, cannot, at least not in the aggregate. Capital is forced to expand: capital
is that which expands. Money is not traded for money, it is traded for more money.
It is not interested in things as they are useful for provisioning life, nor in things by
which the measure of a suffi cient life might be made. It is interested in more-of-the-
same money. And it must embark on this venture spatially and temporally. This is
the systemic nature of capitalism, beyond what individual, well-meaning, philan-
thropic capitalists may intend. Capital simply
is
the expansion of economic value
throughout the fi eld of those interacting aspects of nature (people, raw materials,
etc.) that comprise the matter of capitalism. Capitalists as much as workers are
caught up in these interactions. But these interactions are in process, so to speak.
In Marx's view capitalist social relations set in motion the possibility for their own
erasure. How this might happen is the subject of huge debate, well beyond the scope
of this chapter (though see the discussion on O'Connor below).
3
Can the self-expansion of value move forward indefi nitely; does it encounter any
obstacles or limits set by nature
-
doesn't nature matter in a more than trivial way?
Although we can deny (and should deny) that there is an unvarnished anthro-
pocentrism at work in Marx's ideas, different aspects of nature (the human) seem
to be given more agency than others (see Benton, 1996b). The effect is to make it
seem that people are indeed the active player on a fi eld of more pliant non-humans,
though we cannot for a moment forget that the human being's becoming was only
through relations with other entities. Elmar Altvater (2006; cf. Benton, 1996b;
Coronil, 2000) offers an interesting effort to insert this idea more directly into the
concept of value. He writes about a 'fossil capitalism'. Capitalism, he advises, has
