L-I: Immanent Limits to growth?

Sat, 25 Jul 1998 14:54:31 +0100
Mark Jones (Jones_M@netcomuk.co.uk)

Internal or External Limits

If you take Marx's view that ‘[c]apital develops adequately’ on
the basis of ‘unlimited competition and industrial production,’
[Marx (1973) p.559] and that its purpose is not the production of
goods but of profit -- not use-values, but value -- then there can be
no external limits to capitalist accumulation. [Marx (1976) p.725:
‘the employment of surplus-value as capital, or its reconversion
into capital, is called the accumulation of capital.’]

Capital is vampiric: but vampires don't have any natural
life span, do they? ‘Money attempted to posit itself as
imperishable value,’ Marx said, in the hallucinatory language of
the Grundrisse:
‘as eternal value, by relating negatively towards circulation, i.e.
towards the exchange with real wealth, with transitory
commodities, which ... dissolve in fleeting pleasures. Capital ...
alternates between its eternal form in money and its passing form
in commodities; permanence is posited as the only thing it can be
.... But capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in
living labour as its soul, vampire-like...’[Marx (1973) p.646]

Marx is at pains to develop the idea that the limits to capitalism
can only be internal. It is central to the closure of his system that
this should be so. At the same time, he gives no theoretical guarantees
that in practice capitalism ever will bump up against its limits.
Those who think he did, and that subsequent history
therefore disproved him, are wrong. For Marxism, as with neo-classical
economics, there are tendencies ... and counter-tendencies. Which
wins out, history will decide. Marx said 'the integument must
burst asunder' and his work is infused with that thought,
but far from taking it for granted, he endeavours to
find out why it may NOT happen, i.e., what are the preconditions
for equilibrium.

His attempt to define equilibrium states led Marx to devise models
of capitalism -- in fact he was the first macroeconomist, the first
to utilise multi-sector modelling. Almost single-handed, Marx
made equilibrium the main subject of study among a generation
of political economists.

Marx concluded that over time two related things will
happen: despite frequent crises, capital will go on
accumulating until it confronts us with an alternative
world of mysterious and potent technologies, embodied
in a gigantic accumulation of technical and industrial
processes, machinery and networks.

Confronting this social-other is the inflated reserve
army of labour. This confrontation is the presence
of history in Marx, for it is obvious that this strange
bifurcatory world cannot last, although it was never clear to
Marx or his successors what would come after;
Lenin and the Bolsheviks never rose above capitalism's own
programme of urbanisation and factories. Equilibtrium
is real, but it cocneals an inexorable historical progression.

‘The greater the social wealth [Marx said], the functioning of
capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the
greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of
its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army... The more
extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class
and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism.
This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.’
[Marx (1973) p.798]

And still more clearly: ‘Accumulation of capital is
therefore multiplication of the proletariat’[Marx (1976) p.764].

The result a century later is a world where less than 200 million
employees of transnational corporations and big capital produce
three-quarters of the profit which valorizes the world's social
capital, while four billion workers and landless peasants form a
largely-immiserated mass of humankind with an average income
of less than $5,000 per annum, one billion on less than a dollar a
day.

Endless population growth pose its own problems. Eco-catastrophe seems
likely before capital is desroyed by its internal contradictions.

Ecological damage and Malthusian limits are on Marx's agenda. But
these are not the limit-point he means when he says 'the integument
must burst asunder'. Internal contradictions -- falling rate
of profit, rising organic composition of capital, creation of a
reserve --form the limits to growth. Marx did anticipate environmental
destruction as an external limit. Examples of ancient world collapses
due to salinisation, desertification, deforestation were there. The impact
of capitalist agriculture on English soil fertility was also clear. If the
use of clove and legumes in the Agrarian Revolution of the 18th C had
fixed nitorgen in depleted soils, ensuring adequate harvests for the
burgeoning cities of the Industrial Revolution, by the mid 19th C these
gains had been lost and English agriculture begin to import guano in
competition with European powers. This race to overcome soil depletion
has characterised capitalist agriculture and is still its central drama.

Why did Marx not incorporate these externalities into his
totalising social logic of capitalist accumulation? His work was
incomplete, the planned studies of the formation of classes,
of the state, and of imperialism, left as sketches and notes;
the studies in natural science and mathemetics still more
preliminary. Marx's views on Darwin and the German agronomist
Liegig ('more important than all the economists') leave no
doubt that he would have continued this work if he'd had time.

But Marx left us all that is needed to continue. Capitalist
accumulation reproduces its contradictions in more intense forms.
Therefore the progress of capitalist science and technology,
reflected in increased factor productivity, would never be
sufficient to jerk the system free of its limits. No materr how
much agronomy increased soil fertility, the gains would inevitably
be absorbed by accumulation itself. Gains are short-term and illusory
and only bring closer the day of reckoning, when accumulated
environmental deficits result in insurmountable, final crisis.

Marx was thus a deep ecologist, sure that the logic of accumulation
is bound to lead to planetary disaster unless capitalism is displaced
by communism.

The counter-arguments to Marxian doomsaying depend upon
continuing uncertainty about the longterm outcome of capitalist
accumulation.

The uncertainties operate at all levels. If population stabilises
and the demographic transition does happen, for example, then Marx's
predictions about increasing reserve armies of labour
wil be falsified. In this case, sustainable capitalism seems
possible after all. If the world's population peaks and stabilises, as
many demographers predict [IIASA, The Future Population of the
World (1996)] -- and at the same time capitalism converts
to renewable energy-systems, as the World Bank now says it can
[Fuel for Thought: A New Environmental Strategy for
the Energy Sector, World Bank, draft, June 1998] then what's to
stop capitalism continuing in a stable state?

That's one prognosis: capitalism will survive the upheavals
of the next decades and in a century or so the world will
have uniform high standards of life. People enjoy near-
immortality amid wired-up techno-splendour. Enthusiasts from
as Wired! argue that nothing short of runaway warming or
general nuclear war can prevent this utopia.

Of course the fate of the planet has possibly
already been decided by anthropogenic changes to the ocean
conveyor. But short of that, capitalism can survive almost
anything: Massive human die-offs, the collapse of entire regions
(Russia, Africa) -- all this is either new business opportunities, or
can be ignored as evil but unavoidable friction-costs.

Markets can be restructured to favour green-capitalism. Pollution-
permits will drain the carbon from the energy system. Even if Marx
was right and capitalism must Grow or Die, growth will be virtualised
and GNP dematerialised as services grow, informatics substitute for
matter and energy per unit of output falls. Is this another way Marx's
predictions might be falsified? Even Herman Daly believes in the
sustainable market-based economy.

Crisis gives capital the chance to retire obsolete plant
and restructure with 'greener' systems.

It no longer greatly fears popular resistance, which
can be recuperated. Systemic shocks, if severe enough,
produce not revolt but passivity, withdrawal
and helplessness, as in Russia. The extent of the collapse
has paralysed collective responses and reduced the population
to socially-excluded spectators at the bacchanalia of
the criminal oligarchy. Hopelessness, despair and impotent
passivity is expected; the West counts on it, and that is clear
from many public pronouncements. The strategy
of permitting the Russian people to sink or swim was deliberate.
Preoccupied with the problems of immediate survival, and
lacking any faith in popular institutions, the Russian people
could not resist what was done to them.

In the socially-inclusive and politically-integrated core countries,
the destruiction of obsoleted proletariats, squeezing of wlefare budgets
and widening of income and wealth differentials has continued for
two decades without signs of serious social resistance. Meanwhile
efforts have been made in the ideo-cultural sphere
to construct new personality-templates and to adjust mass-
psychology accordingly. Capitalism has long ago abandoned
universalist ideas of development and rising standards for all.
No-one objects.

Under the guise of abandoning the neurosis, guilt and parsimony
of the patriarchal personality, which was a principal social
invention of 19th century capitalism, and stimulated by the mass
conscription of women into the labour-force, there has been a
resolute attempt to deconstruct the family as a residual instance of
solidarity against capital, and to pull away the psychic supports of
a personality-template organised around a psychic centre of
sacrifice, heterosexual gender identity, sexual control and
repression of the feminine. In its place we are witnessing the
creation of a new personality-type adequate to global capital
which has subordinated the family as well as the nation,
commoditising their functions and liquidating the arsenal of
atavistic symbols of community, mystery, sacrifice and other-
directed struggle, seen as no longer required to legitimise
bourgeois hegemony and objectively now only the rags of archaic
value-system, absorbed by the deceitful misogynies of the New
Right and no more than a menace to Neo-liberalism.

The new ludic, androgynous personality, playful, self-regarding,
narcissistic perhaps, is meant to be incapable of solidarity or
commitment; post-modern feminism has made of the great
feminist issues a study in misanthropic self-glorification and
gender-hatred. Conceiving of emancipation as freedom from
biology (universally misunderstood as 'sociobiology' by writers
like Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Kaja Silverman, whose
followers amplify their own profound ignorance of real science),
they wilfully reject any notion of genetic determination of the
personality or gender-identity.

Only a dramatic social crisis, removing many social support-
systems and throwing individuals back on their own resources, is
likely to revive collective forms of activity which in any case are
likely to seem contradictory, anachronistic and ineffective, even
ludicrously so. The introjection of capitalist-spectacle has
overwhelmed forms of mass resistance even in semi-colonial
peripheries where people have far less to gain from collusion;
nevertheless the symbolic power of capital and its self-
aggrandising brand name-imagery and its pervasive suasion of
self-provision, even in circumstances where no form of self-help
makes any sense, has swept all before it.

The counter-revolution in Russia has emboldened capital
to persevere in its deconstruction of residues of older forms of
proletarian or class-based subjectivity. At the same time, the
leading imperialist countries retain strong and socially-inclusive
states. In France, Australia and Germany the centre-right has
begun to collapse under the insidious pressure of long-term
deflation and chronic high unemployment; in these countries, as
also in Britain, Italy and the USA, it will be left to
centre-left populist governments of the Blair type to bear the
brunt of the impending slump, an economic tsunami which
will sweep across the world market and strengthen right-populist
movements, backed by finance capital.

Thus, strong states may survive and become more repressive
in the short term; elsewhere, in parts of Asia, the former
Soviet Union, Africa and Latin America, states will weaken
and sometimes collapse. The reconsolidation of world imperialism
in one or two super centres requires a radical redistribution of
the power and reach of states. At the same time, Manuel Castell's
visions of an inverted, global gulag of enclaves and networks
of wealth, disregarding borders and and cutting across the
historic and spatial limits of every ethnos, will also
appear to be a determining instance of global, post-national
capitalism. The overarchign eco-crises, combining energy and
water shortages with flooding of densely populated coastal regions
and with massive new effects of anthropogenic climate change, will
further darken the picture, further deepen the extremes of human
misery and of grotesque, obscene wealth.

The rediscovery of the ecological imperative at the heart of
Marxism enables us to reconsider its emancipatory agenda. Instead
of urbanisation and development, the revolution will inaugurate
a historical cycle of defending and repairing ecological networks
and of reconfiguring our absorption of the landscape and our
construction of locales, based or reordered archietctures of
space and time and radically different uses of energy inputs.
The task of reversing entropy will prove extraordinarily complex
and challenging and embraces reversing four millennia of
urbanisation. Taking the energy and materials flows out of the
'urban gulag', reconverting exurbia into truly ruralised
spacetime and energy flows (dismantling the suburbs, or
allowing ecosystems to encorach on them and reabsorb them) -- these
will be the forms of reappropriation of wealth, the forms of
redistribution of power and privilege, and the way in which
'the countryside surrounds the city'.

This is to invert the strategic preoccupations of Bolshevik
marxism. It is to repudiate the marxism-leninism which John Gray,
author of 'False Dawn', defines this way: "Classical Marxism,
its Soviet embodiment, and western neo-liberalism,
also share a cavalier attitude to ecological and environmental
limits. They are radical technological optimists - arguing that
whatever the short-run damage to the environment, it will be
more than compensated for by the advancement which rapid
industrialisation and the displacement of older types of economic
life allow. So both of these philosophies embody a radically
modernist attitude to humankind's relations with the earth, to
cultural forms and types of economic life standing in the way of
its increasing mastery." [New Times, Number 146, 9 May 1998]

In fact blind faith in progress is already confined to
crackpots like Julian Simon and Rush Limbaugh.
Instead of the golden uplands of communist plenty we faced a
future of resource-depletion, ecosphere collapse and a potential
inability to sustain the exurban infrastructures of the postmodern
city. Socialism is not even a question of redistribution; there may
be nothing to distribute. As was shown in Russia, when urban
systems begin unravelling they do so with terrifying speed and
leave little behind. Cities are parasitic as they always have been.
They depend upon enormous fluxes of energy and material inputs.
They give back only entropic waste: that, and improved
technology. If the technology starts to lag behind the accumulated
disorder which increasing complexity brings, then cities swiftly
become unsustainable. But there is no longer a viable countryside
to retreat to. The exurban postmodern society has been involuted,
decanted itself into the country and made of wilderness a
besieged enclave within itself. We are tied to the fate of the city
as we have never been, the more so now that more than half the
world's bloated human population live in cities, as Marx
predicted. Yet the city is no longer viable. It has to be
replaced. That's the scale of the challenge, the problem and
the drama.

Capitalist production is simultaneously the production of 'surplus'
population; capitalist enrichment of the few is always and
everywhere also the pauperisation of the majority.

Marx called the production of surplus population, 'the absolute
general law of capitalist accumulation'.(Cap I p798, Penguin ed.).

This 'absolute general law' of population is central to
understanding the conjuncture: 'The production of a relative
surplus population, or the setting free of
workers, therefore proceeds more rapidly than the technical
transformation of the process of production that accompanies the
advance of accumulation ... in proportion as the productivity of
labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more
quickly than its demand for workers'. (p789) 'The constant
movement towards the towns presupposes, in the countryside
itself, a constant latent surplus population, the extent of which
only becomes evident at those exceptional times when its
distribution channels are wide open... The third category of the
relative surplus population is the stagnant population...' (p796).

It is impossible to analyse tidal movements of people which are
at the heart of so-called immigration crises, without
understanding the general law of population in the first place.
That is why Marx spent so much time analysing the matter.
Immigration into the US is the direct result of the previous
creation of a surplus population, principally by driving peasants
off the land in the process of extending capitalist agriculture.
There is a one-to-one connection between the aggressive
extension of monopolised agriculture in the oppressed peripheral
countries, and the creation of the megacities in the South which
are the sumps of stagnant surplus population, and the ultimate
source of contemporary tidal immigration into the US, Europe
etc.

The argument from social justice begins with the proposition
that as of now, we have enough food production capacity to feed
people all over the world comfortably. All that is needed is more
equitable distribution, meaning among other things less meat in
Western diets.

This is the classic Green argument: if we eat more wholesome
beans and vegetarian foods, there is enough food for everybody.
But it is utopian. The call for social justice involves not just
redistribution, but a structural change in the mode of food
production itself. What will this change entail, and how can it be
implemented? Once you start to examine the problem in detail,
you discover that the level of food production we have today,
which is historically very high, depends upon the inputs which the
total capitalist system provides: everything from chemical inputs,
pharmaceutical, pesticides, stock breeding, biotech -- to
distribution methods, the vertical organisation of agriculture, the
existence of a large scale, powerful agronomy research sector, the
existence of sufficient energy inputs etc. Third World food
depends on the 'Green Revolution' in agriculture which is itself
just an aspect of modern capitalism.

This 'Green Revolution' which produces an abundance of food
also produces new 'surplus' populations, i.e., former peasants
made landless and driven into the cities. But if people object on
spurious grounds even to the terminology 'surplus population' the
we are unable even to define the problem, which is that the
productivity of modern capitalist agriculture creates excess
population as a by-product.

This surplus population is a hostage to imperialism and it
guarantees that modern capitalist agriculture, far from becoming
sustainable or green/organic, will be still more intensified,
capitalised, and imbued with the technologies of gene-
modification, germplasm patenting, chemical saturation of soils
etc.: because there will be no other way to feed the hostage
populations of the megacities which their very process creates.
Pools of hunger, scarcity, malnutrition, epidemic disease etc. are
produced by capitalism alongside and together with the enclaves
of prosperity.

Over-population confronts the world with multiform
crises whose scale and intensity make alternatives to capitalism
almost unthinkable. Socialism's law of population must begin with
the fact that the population cannot exceed Earth's carrying capacity,
and all economic processes including food production must be
sustainable. The population already exceeds carrying capacity, yet
it may rise to 10 bn. within forty years. This huge surplus population
will be hostage to capitalist agronomy, science and technology, to
monopolised agribusiness with its complete dependence on
unsustainable technologies, on chemical and pharmaceutical
inputs, biotechnology and gene-manipulation, to the monopolistic
food producing centres which will be concentrated in the
temperate zones of the rich North. The tempo of change, too swift
to plan or vary; and the structural imbalances which will only
deepen over time, make this fate seem all the more inescapable.
But this only means that capitalism's crises will become still more
explosive and dangerous.

--
Mark Jones
http://www.geocities.com/~comparty

--- from list leninist-international@lists.econ.utah.edu ---