Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 17.5 The 2nd Contradiction of Capitalism, Production of Nature, and
Plane of Immanence: Propositions and Politics
The '2nd contradiction of capitalism'
• Capital subsists on conditions (e.g. ecosystems, labor power) outside itself,
which are treated like commodities. The emphasis on making surplus value,
forces capital to degrade these very conditions: capitalism produces
scarcity.
• Social movements and/or the state are forced to step in as counter-movements
to regulate capital's excesses, on a more rather than less frequent basis. Capi-
talism is shown to be unable to subsist on its own.
• Politics: If capitalism is destructive of entities that society acknowledges are
valuable and useful, can there emerge a social movement or political collective
powerful enough to dislodge capitalism and sustain social reproduction and
environmental conditions?
Production of nature:
• Capitalism intervenes in the nature-based conditions upon which it depends;
little pure nature is left. Nature is thus said to be produced. But production
of nature is incomplete. Capitalism and nature are locked up in each other,
refusing each other a pure state of being.
• Production of nature nonetheless emphasizes that
more elements
of nature
are found for capital's circuits, from plant and animal DNA to human body
organs to seeds and water. Even degraded nature is grist for capital's mills
(e.g., pollution credits).
•
Politics: The clock cannot be turned back. We will continue to live in a world
where nature is produced. Who participates in that process and how, whom
does that process serve and whom not? Why should these questions be settled
on capitalism's terms?
The plane of immanence
• Entities (things), whether 'natural' or 'social' (the distinction may be artifi cial)
are not the building blocks of processes, but the effect of processes. Entities
and relations among them have emergent qualities: they are in a continual
state of becoming, though they are not free to form any which way.
• Capital (the 'law of value'), while real enough, is irreducibly heterogeneous:
it does not fully internalize the elements that enter into it. To the extent it
has a territory within which to operate, capital seems, but only seems, the
central organizing force of the heterogeneous processes that comprise it.
• Politics: Radical efforts to address environmental problems must not reduce
them to 'capitalism', nor can they address the injustices of 'capitalism' by
invoking a pre-given state of nature.
