19 History of Capitalism
19.1 Monbiot
Capitalism was arguably born on a remote island. A few decades after the Portuguese colonised Madeira in 1420, they developed a system that differed in some respects from anything that had gone before. By felling the forests after which they named the island (madeira is Portuguese for wood), they created, in this uninhabited sphere, a blank slate – a terra nullius – in which a new economy could be built. Financed by bankers in Genoa and Flanders, they transported enslaved people from Africa to plant and process sugar. They developed an economy in which land, labour and money lost their previous social meaning and became tradable commodities.
As the geographer Jason Moore points out in the journal Review, a small amount of capital could be used, in these circumstances, to grab a vast amount of natural wealth. On Madeira’s rich soil, using the abundant wood as fuel, slave labour achieved a previously unimaginable productivity. In the 1470s, this tiny island became the world’s biggest producer of sugar.
Madeira’s economy also had another characteristic that distinguished it from what had gone before: the astonishing speed at which it worked through the island’s natural wealth. Sugar production peaked in 1506. By 1525 it had fallen by almost 80%. The major reason, Moore believes, was the exhaustion of accessible supplies of wood: Madeira ran out of madeira.
It took 60kg of wood to refine 1kg of sugar. As wood had to be cut from ever steeper and more remote parts of the island, more slave labour was needed to produce the same amount of sugar. In other words, the productivity of labour collapsed, falling roughly fourfold in 20 years. At about the same time, the forest clearing drove several endemic species to extinction.
In what was to become the classic boom-bust-quit cycle of capitalism, the Portuguese shifted their capital to new frontiers, establishing sugar plantations first on São Tomé, then in Brazil, then in the Caribbean, in each case depleting resources before moving on. As Moore says, the seizure, exhaustion and partial abandonment of new geographical frontiers is central to the model of accumulation that we call capitalism. Ecological and productivity crises like Madeira’s are not perverse outcomes of the system. They are the system.
Madeira soon moved on to other commodities, principally wine. It should come as no surprise that the island is now accused of functioning as a tax haven, and was mentioned in this week’s reporting of the Pandora papers. What else is an ecologically exhausted island, whose economy depended on looting, to do?
In Jane Eyre, published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë attempts to decontaminate Jane’s unexpected fortune. She inherited the money from her uncle, “Mr Eyre of Madeira”; but, St John Rivers informs her, it is now vested in “English funds”. This also has the effect of distancing her capital from Edward Rochester’s, tainted by its association with another depleted sugar island, Jamaica.
But what were, and are, English funds? England, in 1847, was at the centre of an empire whose capitalist endeavours had long eclipsed those of the Portuguese. For three centuries, it had systematically looted other nations: seizing people from Africa and forcing them to work in the Caribbean and North America, draining astonishing wealth from India, and extracting the materials it needed to power its Industrial Revolution through an indentured labour system often scarcely distinguishable from outright slavery. When Jane Eyre was published, Britain had recently concluded its first opium war against China.
Financing this system of world theft required new banking networks. These laid the foundations for the offshore financial system whose gruesome realities were again exposed this week. “English funds” were simply a destination for money made by the world-consuming colonial economy called capitalism.
In the onshoring of Jane’s money, we see the gulf between the reality of the system and the way it presents itself. Almost from the beginning of capitalism, attempts were made to sanitise it. Madeira’s early colonists created an origin myth, which claimed that the island was consumed by a wild fire, lasting for seven years, that cleared much of the forest. But there was no such natural disaster. The fires were set by people. The fire front we call capitalism burned across Madeira before the sparks jumped and set light to other parts of the world.
Capitalism’s fake history was formalised in 1689 by John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government. “In the beginning all the world was America,” he tells us, a blank slate without people whose wealth was just sitting there, ready to be taken. But unlike Madeira, America was inhabited, and the indigenous people had to be killed or enslaved to create his terra nullius. The right to the world, he claimed, was established through hard work: when a man has “mixed his labour” with natural wealth, he “thereby makes it his property”. But those who laid claim to large amounts of natural wealth did not mix their own labour with it, but that of their slaves. The justifying fairytale capitalism tells about itself – you become rich through hard work and enterprise, adding value to natural wealth – is the greatest propaganda coup in human history.
As Laleh Khalili explains in the London Review of Books, the extractive colonial economy never ended. It continues through commodity traders working with kleptocrats and oligarchs, grabbing poor nations’ resources without payment with the help of clever instruments such as “transfer pricing”. It persists through the use of offshore tax havens and secrecy regimes by corrupt elites, who drain their nation’s wealth then channel it into “English funds”, whose true ownership is hidden by shell companies.
The fire front still rages across the world, burning through people and ecologies. Though the money that ignites it may be hidden, you can see it incinerating every territory that still possesses unexploited natural wealth: the Amazon, west Africa, West Papua. As capital runs out of planet to burn, it turns its attention to the deep ocean floor and starts speculating about shifting into space.
The local ecological disasters that began in Madeira are coalescing into a global one. We are recruited as both consumers and consumed, burning through our life support systems on behalf of oligarchs who keep their money and morality offshore.
When we see the same things happening in places thousands of miles apart, we should stop treating them as isolated phenomena, and recognise the pattern. All the talk of “taming” capitalism and “reforming” capitalism hinges on a mistaken idea of what it is. Capitalism is what we see in the Pandora papers.
19.2 Hickel
SMM: Less Is More includes a really fascinating section on the creation story of capitalism. The story is basically of peasants who threw off the rule of aristocrats and built egalitarian communes that also were quite animistic, with an ecologically-minded relationship to non-human (or your great phrase “more-than-human”) life. Rulers invented capitalism to basically extract more from the peasant communities and compel farmers to extract more from the land. The takeaway seems to be that in the absence of such psychopathic aristocrats and autocrats, people generally self-organize into more or less eco-anarchist democracies. There are many examples of Indigenous societies incorporating social tools to maintain democratic politics and prevent wealth and power hoarders from taking over. Are there practical mechanisms (that you didn’t include in Less Is More) that you’d point to for achieving such enviable accountability in modern fossil states, or do we just need to hope for collapses and fragmentation?
JH: It’s worth remembering that the ecological ontologies that characterize many Indigenous communities today are not some kind of timeless trait. They have been formulated in response to capitalism. In most cases these communities, or their ancestors, have had first-hand experience of the violence of colonial capital. They know how destructive it is, to both humans and ecologies, especially on the frontiers of the world-system. Consider the devastation wrought by the European invasion of the Americas, which wiped out 90% of the population and turned vast tracts of land into plantation monoculture and strip mines. That’s the context here. Indigenous communities have seen apocalypse up close, and their ontologies have been formed accordingly, with an acute awareness of the values that are required if we are to thrive together on this planet.
For the first 400 years of its history, capitalism caused immiseration virtually everywhere it went: enclosure, dispossession, genocide, mass enslavement, colonization, famine. It wasn’t until 1870 that we began to see any improvement in life expectancy in Europe, and that was the product of the labour movement and related struggles for democracy, municipal socialism, and basic interventions like public sanitation, public housing, and public healthcare. We don’t see improvement in the global South until progressive movements succeed in achieving decolonization. This history is important, because it reveals that what’s required for progress isn’t growth as such (as in, an aggregate expansion in the commodity economy), but rather a fair distribution of income and opportunity, and access to universal public goods. It’s not rocket science, but it does require a political struggle. So one might say that degrowth redefines progress. The goal is to achieve well-being for all, in balance with the Earth’s ecosystems, and any step we take in this direction (i.e., degrowth) represents progress.
19.3 Pre-History
19.3.2 Slavery
Colgan
As norms and laws changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to prohibit the slave trade, and eventually, slavery itself, the value of slaves as an asset declined toward zero. Slave owners bene- fited materially from slaves’ labor, but this practice weighed heavily on the con- science of abolitionists. In Britain, Parliament compensated slave owners when it abolished slavery, while in the United States bargaining failures led to a civil war (although compensation occurred in slave-holding states that remained loyal to the Union).
Colgan (2020) Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change (pdf)
Francis
Economists dislike the idea that slavery facilitated growth in the American South because the foundation of their faith is that FREEDOM leads to GROWTH, which is GOOD. Consequently, the idea that SLAVERY led to GROWTH produces a lot of cognitive dissonance.
19.4 Bourgeois Democracy feeds Fascism
Milanovic Review of Krishnan Nayar’s Liberal Capitalist Democracy
Bourgeois revolutions frequently failed to lead to democracy, a view strongly embedded in the Anglo-American Whiggish history and in simplified Marxism. Rather they provoked aristocratic reaction and the authoritarian economic developments which in many respects were more successful than those of bourgeois democracy. In other words, democracy does not come with capitalism and, as we shall see, capitalism often destroys it. The authoritarian modernizers (Nayar studies four: post-1848 Germany, Louis Napoleon’s France, Bismarck’s Germany, and Stolypin’s Russia) enjoyed wide support among the bourgeoisie who, fearful for its property, preferred to take the side of the reforming aristocracy than to throw in its lot with the proletariat. This indeed was one of the disappointments that surprised Marx and Engels in 1848-51, when they noticed that the propertied classes sided with Louis Bonaparte rather than with the Parisian workers.
Second, Nayar argues that the unbridled Darwinian capitalism always leads to social instability and anomie, and that social instability empowers right-wing parties. He thus argues that Hitler’s rise to power was made possible, or was even caused, by the 1928-32 Depression, and not as some historians think by either the fear of communism or bad tactics of the Communist Party which instead of allying itself with Social Democrats fought them.
Third, and for the present time perhaps the most interesting, Nayar argues that the success of Western capitalism in the period 1945-1980 cannot be explained without taking into account the pressure that came on capitalism both from the existence of the Soviet Union as an alternative model of society, and from strong left-wing parties linked with trade unions in major European countries. In that sense the period of les trente glorieuses which is now considered as the most successful period of capitalism ever occurred against the normal capitalist tendencies. It was an anomaly. It would not have happened without socialist pressure and fear of riots, nationalizations, and, yes, defenestrations. But with the rise of neoliberal economics after 1980 capitalism gladly went back to its original 19th and early 20th century versions which regularly produce social instability and strife.
The lesson to be taken from Nayar is in some ways simple. Capitalism, if it’s not embedded in society and does not accept limits on what can be commodified, has to go through recurrent slumps and prosperities.
Neoliberalism felt emboldened by the internal dynamics that marginalized the working class and then by the precipitous fall of the Soviet Union and communism. Once capitalism was without a rival, it promptly went back to its past policies, manifesting many of its worst features that were forgotten during the trente gloirieuses.
Because if capitalism continues along the current trajectory that Nayar believes almost preordained, it must again produce instability and rejection. And that would—again–play into the hands of right- wing movements. We may replay a century later the same story that we have seen in the 1920’s Europe. History seldom repeats itself word-by-word or drum-by-drum: we are not going to see the black shirts or different-color uniformed movements which inundated Europe in the ’twenties but we might see, as we already do, parties with roots in nationalist or quasi fascist movements coming back to power and undoing globalization, fighting immigrants, celebrating nationalism, cutting access to welfare benefits to those who are not “native” enough. Is it fascism? Its light variety? This is the melancholy conclusion that can be made based on this sweeping study of western political and economic developments in the past two centuries.
19.5 Corporations
On September 24, 1599, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to finish Hamlet, the first corporation with tradable shares was born. Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy was to celebrate the virtuous neighborhood butchers, bakers, and brewers in order to defend all the East India Companies that have since made a mockery of freedom.
Confronting rentier capitalism and fashioning firms for which social responsibility is more than a marketing ploy requires nothing less than re-writing corporate law. To recognize the scale of the undertaking, it helps to return to the moment in history when tradable shares weaponized capitalism, and to ask ourselves: Are we ready to correct that “error”?
The moment occurred on September 24, 1599. In a timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, a new type of company was founded. Its ownership of the new firm, called the East India Company, was sliced into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely.Tradable shares allowed private corporations to become larger and more powerful than states. Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy was to celebrate the virtuous neighborhood butchers, bakers, and brewers in order to defend the worst enemies of free markets: the East India Companies that know no community, respect no moral sentiments, fix prices, gobble up competitors, corrupt governments, and make a mockery of freedom.Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, as the first networked mega-companies – including Edison, General Electric, and Bell – were formed, the genie released by marketable shares went a step further. Because neither banks nor investors had enough money to plough into the networked mega-firms, the mega-bank emerged in the form of a global cartel of banks and shadowy funds, each with its own shareholders.Unprecedented new debt was thus created to transfer value to the present, in the hope of profiting sufficiently to repay the future. Mega-finance, mega-equity, mega-pension funds, and mega-financial crises were the logical outcome. The crashes of 1929 and 2008, the unstoppable rise of Big Tech, and all the other ingredients of today’s discontent with capitalism, became inescapable.In this system, calls for a gentler capitalism are mere fads – especially in the post-2008 reality, which confirmed the total control over society by mega-firms and mega-banks. Unless we are willing to ban tradable shares, first introduced in 1599, we will make no appreciable difference to the distribution of wealth and power today. To imagine what transcending capitalism might mean in practice requires rethinking the ownership of corporations.
19.6 Compensation to Slave Owners
When the United Kingdom abolished slavery, the government compensated slave owners for the value lost from freeing enslaved people. The Bank of England only recently paid off these debts.
In 1834, the British government outlawed slavery in Britain and its American possessions, though not in its Asian colonies such as British India and what would become Sri Lanka.
The British government also paid 20 million pounds – the equivalent of around 17 billion pounds today – to compensate slave owners for the lost capital associated with freeing slaves. This payout was a massive 40% of the government’s budget and required many bonds to slave owners to effectuate the law. These obligations to slave owners and institutions are the debts that were paid off by the UK government only in 2015.
While the British government hasn’t disclosed a complete list of the recipient individuals and firms of bonds related to compensation for slaves, researchers at University College London have compiled a list of over 46,000 current individuals and groups who have received government payouts related to the abolition of slavery. Many powerful British families, including current business and political elites in the United Kingdom, are among the recipients uncovered by the UCL team.
Yet not all recipients were already wealthy or became so due to the payouts; UCL records show many middle-class Britons also benefited from the bonds.
Britain stood out among European states in its willingness to appease slave owners, and to burden future generations of its citizens with the responsibility of paying for it. Recently, economists and political scientists have debated whether the payouts were necessary for the successful abolition of slavery, some arguing that political will would have been better used to compensate Black slaves instead.
19.7 World System Theory
** Arrighi, Braudel, Wallerstein -Brenner **
Reifer
Bob Brenner (1977, 1981) is of course one of the leading critics of world-system analysis, which Brenner early on criticized as a form of “neo-Smithian Marxism.” His work on the origins of capitalist development later gave rise to the so-called Brenner debate (Aston & Philpin, 1987). In many ways, in terms of their analysis of the origins of capitalist development, Arrighi and Brenner could not be further apart. The burden of Brenner’s critique of Wallerstein’s world-system perspective was largely to focus on the centrality of class relations and the class struggle in agriculture, to the exclusion of virtually everything else, locating the origins of capitalist development in the English countryside. In contrast, Wallerstein and Arrighi both locate the origins of capitalism in the context of an expanding world-system, tied together by a single division of labor, one which transgresses the territorial boundaries of individual nation-states.
In contrast, Braudel’s version of capitalist history, following Oliver Cox (1959), located capitalism on the top level of world trade and high finance – and only to a lesser extent in industry – and that is the position to which Arrighi largely adhered.
19.8 Anthropocene - Capitalocene
Soreno
Karl Marx was able, scientifically, to demonstrate that the planetary crisis is inevitable under capitalist production by revealing the causal concatenations of the metabolic rift, as a potential planetary crisis, with the particular form of labor exploitation under the capitalist mode in the context of his labor theory of value.
Earth System scientists are generally unaware of the scientific character of Marx’s theory of value. Studying the fundamentals of the capitalist mode in order to investigate whether the planetary crisis is inherent or not to this production mode is certainly outside of the realm of the natural sciences, and often of the expertise of Earth System scientists. In fact, many scientists from the natural and social disciplines believe that social production in general, and capitalist production in particular, do not proceed under deterministic—if nonetheless historical—laws that are analogous to those of nature. Marx’s theory of value demonstrates the opposite. Earth System scientists claim that an “integration of biophysical processes and human dynamics” is needed for a scientific understanding of the Earth System and hence, of the planetary crisis. In practice, however, they reject incorporating the only truly scientific corpus available regarding the capitalist system, which is Marx’s theory of value. By unfolding the essential contradiction of the value system—that is, the contradiction between value and use value, and the concrete mediations intervening in its phenomenological expressions (for example, in the profit rate and in the capitalist population)—Marx is able to show the finite nature of the capitalist mode. He concludes that under this production mode, human social metabolism is not only mediated by the reproduction of capital, but also the reverse: the social metabolism is an alienated mediation insofar as it becomes a mere means for capital’s metabolism.
The planetary crisis expresses this fundamental contradiction in the form of a final dilemma—the capitalist system or the human system. However, the finitude of the capitalist mode appears to be somewhat inconceivable for Earth System scientists, and they seem to adhere only to the first part of the famous Fredric Jameson quote, “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”17 As a result, the current understanding of the earth’s “functioning” by Earth System science incorporates the earth’s “biophysical processes,” but excludes those views of the “human dynamics” that seriously question the validity of the capitalist mode and its seminal role in the crisis. This is outside Earth System science’s agenda. Claims that “collective human action is required” to stabilize Earth in habitable conditions and that “such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes and technological innovations, new governance arrangements and transformed social values” is not much more than a collection of vague statements. It is clear from this and other statements—and from the affinity between Earth System scientists and the field of ecological economics, which is strongly influenced by the neoclassical school—that the so-called global economy is nothing more than the capitalist economy, and that any other socioeconomic order than capitalism is automatically discarded.18 While stewardship of the earth based on science will likely be necessary to mitigate the planetary crisis, it is easy to imagine that a stewardship determined by the reproduction of capital, in which profit is the only goal, could devolve into a kind of green-technological fascism.
Earth System scientists do not have a proper concept of what social production is. However, in defense of Earth System science, it can be said that not all Marxists have a well-developed concept of nature, for nature has been largely considered non-dialectical in most Western Marxism, including the so-called philosophy of praxis.
The problem of Earth System science is that until now, it has failed to achieve integration because it proceeds on a incorrect theoretical basis regarding human dynamics.
The Capitalocene and other “-cenes” propose approaching the Earth System as a totality, without distinguishing between the social and the natural, humans and nature, in order to study the particularities of these realms and their mutual interactions. This is methodologically incorrect and prevents any understanding of the Earth as a dynamic system.
The problem “of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the spirit to nature—the paramount question of the whole of philosophy” has had different formulations through the history of philosophy, including the classic body-and-soul division by René Descartes, and the relation of the material to the ideal by Ilyenkov.28 The question of the relationship between thinking and being could not be solved by modern philosophy, until Marx and classical Marxists addressed it from a dialectical and materialist perspective. Neither the theorists of the Anthropocene nor those of the Capitalocene have been able to solve the concrete bonds between human society and nature, which, under the capitalist mode, are expressed as a planetary crisis stemming from the ontological incompatibility of humans and nature. In the case of Anthropocene theorists, this is because they have approached the natural side of the problem with an unconscious dialectic and materialist basis, but their approach to the social side is idealistic and non-dialectical. As a result, they consider capitalism as the only mode of production, and therefore believe there may be some compatibility of humans and nature under capitalism. Capitalocene theorists fail because they are not able to approach either side of the problem on a materialist and dialectical basis.
The Capitalocene narrative cannot provide an understanding of the concrete interrelations of society and nature that have spurred the planetary crisis, either. This is because it rejects the abstraction of nature and society as particular objects for study. But it is not possible to conduct successful research on the modes of social organization in general, and on the capitalist mode in particular, without abstracting society from nature, just as it is not possible to develop a successful understanding of Earth’s dynamics without abstracting nature from society. Only after nature and society have been independently investigated and social production laws and natural laws—that is, the general principles of social reproduction and of capitalist reproduction, and the general principles of nature and its evolution—have been understood is it possible to integrate both realms into a comprehensive understanding of the human impact on Earth and of the planetary crisis.
Marx’s concepts of social metabolism and metabolic rift identified the concrete causes underlying the early manifestations of the crisis, like the rupture of the nutrient cycle and the impoverishment of soil fertility. In doing this, Marx abstracted society from nature and then reassembled the common understanding of natural sciences and natural processes available at the time with his own research on capitalist production. As a result, Marx’s social metabolism and metabolic rift are concepts of his labor theory of value, and are fully integrated with other concepts, such as the proletarian and capitalist classes, the industrial reserve army, profit, the concentration and centralization of capital, and so on. All of these concepts and many others are articulated within and by the general laws of capitalist production, including the law of capitalist accumulation, the law of capitalist population, and the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, showing their concrete mutual determinations and concrete relation to the incipient phenomena of the planetary crisis, as revealed by the natural sciences of the nineteenth century. In summary, Marx’s approach is scientific, dialectical, and materialist, and he deliberately took nature as a given to reveal the laws of capitalist production, and then investigated the particular relations of capitalist production with nature by considering the early manifestations of the planetary crisis in the nineteenth century. From a gnoseological perspective, it is impossible for Marx or anybody else to develop a scientific understanding of Earth, or any other real, material object, without abstractions and without proceeding through formal logic and dialectical logic.
The Capitalocene and other “-cene” discourses reject the operational abstraction of nature and society to understand the Earth System as it plunges into crisis. Regarding the historical evolution of the cognitive processing of reality and the concomitant evolution of logic, all these “-cene” approaches place themselves before Descartes and before modernity. They are closer to medieval scholasticism and various forms of mythological thought that see reality as an ideal totality in which the constitutive parts need not be distinguished through particular and formal analysis in order to carry out research on the concrete interactions among them. Because “-cene” theorists specifically deny abstracting nature and society, they are unable to undertake a critique of political economy, much less a critique based on materialism and dialectics as in the case of Marx. Economy, understood as the material production that all societies must undertake to reproduce themselves, needs to be abstracted from nature for its particular study if the concrete interactions between any socioeconomic organization and nature is to be understood.
By rejecting such abstraction—and despite the references to Marx and other Marxist authors—the Capitalocene proposal lacks a proper understanding of Marx’s theory of value. This is a narrative with a profusion of new terms and concepts—apparently radical—that are juxtaposed without concrete determinations of causality and necessity among them. Such radical conceptualization is brought together with Marxian categories usually conceived of in an upside-down manner relative to Marx’s own analysis. In this way, the Capitalocene discourse ends up with a simplistic view of the interaction between capitalist humans and nature that, paradoxically, is more reductionist than the supposed reductionism of the Cartesian dualism that this narrative attributes to Earth System science. From an epistemological perspective, the “-cene” approach is today a form of bourgeois idealism regarding the issue of the planetary crisis.
Actually, “-cene” theorists themselves consider the Capitalocene a narrative, a move, a discourse, but it is a discourse filled with plenty of apparently radical neologisms that leaves untouched a fundamental problem: the material reproduction of society (that is, the economy) upon which the planetary crisis is based. In this way, the “-cene” approach is closer to postmodern idealism and linguistic turns than to any materialist-based understanding. Hence, it is not surprising that some of the proposals to overcome this crisis seem naïve. It is also not surprising that the scientific understanding of nature and its fundamental laws by positive sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and so on—during modernity is seen by the Capitalocene narrative as a “geopower,” “aimed at ‘discovering’ and appropriating new Cheap Nature” in general, and particularly the “Cheap four” (labor, food, energy, and raw materials). In this view, the sole purpose of a scientific understanding of nature is to serve capitalist appropriation. Nature is abstracted from society and an “abstract social nature” is socially constructed, with the only function being to secure capital’s access to “Cheap Natures.” In other words, “abstract social nature” is an ideal created on the basis of Cartesian dualism and the abstraction of nature and society that is aimed at allowing “geo-managerialism” of nature for profit.
n summary, the Capitalocene narrative conflates appropriation without exchange of equal value (that is, expropriation) and accumulation with exchange of equal value (that is, exploitation) without a proper distinction of the two processes. Therefore, it is not able to understand the causal concatenations throughout the history of capital accumulation, in which the first is a necessity for the second, and the second is the determinant moment over the first.
What is important for developing the right strategies to surmount the planetary crisis is knowing the particular interactions of the mechanisms of capital accumulation that have led us to the ongoing planetary crisis. The present-day systemic crisis of the capitalist mode that we are increasingly facing is anchored in a long-term decreasing rate of profit as the background causative mechanism by which each crisis unfolds with its own particular expression, but all of them showing common regularities and common essentials. The accumulation of capital with these background determinations leads to a systemic crisis of capital valorization. When the analysis of the reproduction of capital in terms of value is considered in terms of the physical and chemical properties of nature, the planetary crisis appears as a necessary manifestation of capital’s valorization and of its systemic crisis. On the contrary, misleading claims about nature depletion or the difficulties of accessing “Cheap Natures” as the pivotal determinations of capital accumulation and of capitalist crisis relies on a misunderstanding of Marx’s theory of value and does not allow undertaking the right strategy to leave the planetary crisis behind.
19.9 2020s Poly-Crisis
Isikara
An important lesson that tends to be forgotten is that the cuts in social services, decoupling of real wages from productivity, aggressive expansion of commodity frontiers and similar interventions as to extend terrains of accumulation in the last few decades are precisely the collected outcomes of capital’s backlash to the profitability crisis in the imperialist center in the 1970s, a crisis which followed from the attempts to tame capital and establish a class compromise within the larger context of growing ‘threat’ of socialism. It is therefore difficult to understand how critical scholars today can commit to the possibility of another ‘Golden Age’ capitalism, while the driving force and regulating principles of the capitalist system itself are left unchallenged in any substantial way.
The conceptual frameworks for viewing ‘crises’ discussed above have the common feature of ‘reshaping’ capitalism or ‘stabilizing’ the global economy in the face of multiplying crises dynamics. Rather than interrogating the structural forces that shape systemic outcomes, these frameworks suggest that the pressing manifestations of the ecological breakdown, geopolitical tensions and wars, supply bottlenecks, inflation, or other discussed phenomena result from policy mistakes, greedy powerful corporations, bad intentions, or a lack of historical knowledge, and not from the accumulation imperative constitutive of capitalism.
Isikara (2022) Beating around the Bush: Polycrisis, Overlapping Emergencies, and Capitalism
19.10 Techno-Feudalism
Varoufakis
Capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first but which I hope to show makes perfect sense: the thing that has killed capitalism is … capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host. What caused this to happen? Two main developments: The privatisation of the internet by America’s, but also China’s, Big Tech. And the manner in which Western governments and central banks responded to the 2008 great financial crisis.
This book is about what has already been done to capitalism, and therefore to us, by the screen-based, cloud-linked devices we all use, our boring laptop and our smartphone, in conjunction with the way central banks and governments have been acting since 2008.
Capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous – indeed, markets and profits were ubiquitous under feudalism too – they just aren’t running the show any more. What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicentre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud-rent.
As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. As we shall see, they have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform.