Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
or properly represent via money. The second contradiction illuminates a universe of
use values, in other words, that when recruited into capitalist exchange relations
incites a good deal of push back. The second contradiction, in the form of counter-
movements, exposes capitalism as a system that does not provide all good things, and
ruins a good many. 'Listen to yourselves! Look at what your own movement show
you! Take yourselves seriously!' would perhaps be O'Connor's injunction.
The problem of course is that these common use values (healthy ecosystems,
functioning human bodies, a functioning society) are treated as if they come rolling
right off the conveyor belt: they are treated like commodities for sale or as if they
can only be sustained if commodity production is sustained, and are thereby laid
waste. Examples are many and varied: the warming of the atmosphere, acid rain,
salinisation of water tables, toxic wastes, soil erosion, urban congestion and soaring
rents, hazardous and dehumanising workplaces, decrepit infrastructure (O'Connor,
1997, p. 166). Where certain strands of environmentalism might construe these as
scarcities induced by population growth - the Malthusian Myth - O'Connor argues
that capitalism in effect produces its own scarcity and its own environmental prob-
lems, in so far as it degrades its own conditions.
5
See Box 17.2 on how this myth
relates to water resources.
The degradation caused by capital produces an underproduction of capital,
O'Connnor argues. 'We can . . . introduce the possibility of capital underproduction
once we add up the rising costs of reproducing the conditions of production'
(O'Connor, 1997, p. 166). Indeed vast sums are expended on health care, environ-
mental remediation, policing of the social environment, research and development
monies to develop substitutes for degraded or depleted natural substances, oil and
other resource wars.
No one has estimated the total revenues required to compensate for impaired or lost
production conditions and/or to restore these conditions and develop substitutes (much
less how much of these 'costs' actually fall on capital. It is conceivable that total reve-
nues allocated to protecting or restoring production conditions may amount to one-half
or more of the total social product. . . . Is it possible to link these unproductive expen-
ditures...to the vast credit and debt system in the world today? To the growth of
fi ctitious capital? To the fi scal crisis of the state? To the internationalization of produc-
tion? The traditional Marxist theory of crisis interprets credit/debt structures as the
result of capital overproduction. An ecological Marxist approach might interpret the
same phenomena also as the result of capital underproduction and unproductive use
of capital produced (O'Connor, 1997, p. 166).
These are interesting issues to be sure. But why do they matter? It is not so that
traditional and ecological Marxists can each crunch the numbers to see who is more
correct. Nor is it to suggest that these two independent lines of inquiry should
forever run in parallel. As a Marxist - traditional
or
ecological - O'Connor's point
is that the crises which capitalism generates are also forces that goad it to restructure
and rebuild. (Crisis is itself a use value, one might cynically venture, to be folded
back into the circulatory apparatus of capital). At the same time, he is arguing that
the sources of crisis are more plentiful than Marxists have realised and the crises
generated through the second contradiction have enhanced potential for generating
and nurturing the possibility for a socialist transition, or at the very least a height-
ened awareness of capitalism as exorbitantly problematic. Because the second con-
tradiction already calls upon the state to mediate capital's domination of production
