Abstract
In the Introduction, I identified some of the multiplicity of inter-linked crises caused, directly or indirectly, by late capitalism. In responding to these many manifestations of crisis, there has, of course, been, within academe, no shortage of research that has attempted to describe or, at best, to attribute proximate causality to these diverse symptoms of the social and biophysical malaise inflicted by, and to some extent inflicting, late capitalism. Such efforts to describe, or ascribe proximate causality to, these symptoms have been paralleled by policy recommendations and prescriptions that, within the new ‘post-sustainability’ discourse of resilience, attempt not so much to resolve, but rather merely to ameliorate and mitigate, the socio-natural contradictions of capitalism in order to secure the latter’s relational sustainability (Drummond and Marsden, The condition of sustainability. Routledge, London, 1999; Tilzey and Potter, Productivism versus post-productivism?: modes of agri-environmental governance in post-fordist agricultural transitions. In Robinson (ed) Sustainable rural systems: sustainable agriculture and rural communities. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp 41–63, 2008; Weichselgartner and Kelman, Prog Hum Geogr 39(3):249–267, 2014; Watts, Now and then: the origins of political ecology and the rebirth of adaptation as a form of thought. In Perreault T, Bridge G, McCarthy J (eds) The Routledge handbook of political ecology. Routledge, London, pp 19–50, 2015). Moreover, within the prevailing imaginaries of bourgeois social and natural science, this enterprise has typically been undertaken within the dichotomous frameworks of anthropocentrism or social constructionism, on the one hand, and of ecocentrism, reductionism, or vulgar materialism, on the other (Foster et al., The ecological rift: capitalism’s war on the earth. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2011). This hegemony within orthodox scholarship of the pre-supposing antinomies of anthropocentrism and vulgar materialism has effectively hobbled understanding, most particularly, of the causality underlying, and, therefore, of potential escape routes from, the socio-natural crises that threaten to engulf us all unless comprehensive and expeditious countermeasures are undertaken.
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Notes
- 1.
Rather, the rule for egalitarian societies, or for peasantries when relieved of the burden of supplying lords with surplus, is the desire for basic material and social needs to be satisfied with the minimum expenditure of effort. So, if there is a technological improvement that is labour-saving, it will be employed typically to reduce the amount of time spent satisfying those needs, not to increase production (where those basic production needs are already met, of course). Marshall Sahlins noted this principle in respect of the ‘original affluent society’ in his Stone Age Economics. This observation runs counter to both neoclassical economic theory and orthodox Marxism , both of which assume an original condition of deprivation and poverty that can be alleviated only through technological advance and economic development. Rather, it is the case that deprivation and poverty arise from the exploitation of one class by another, and the unequal distribution of resources that goes along with this.
- 2.
Affordances and constraints may be described as the capacity or incapacity of biophysical nature to supply resources to enable the (re)production of a particular social system such as capitalism and to supply the sinks necessary to absorb waste from that system. Affordances simultaneously define constraints on the (re)production of a social system. Affordances are not, of course, simply pre-given but may be enhanced or diminished by human action on them, such that they become socio-natural hybrids.
- 3.
Ecological surplus is the ability of human labour power to generate surplus over and above the consumption needs of the producers by means of the productive capacity of the biophysical domain, this productive capacity being itself dependent, in part, as we have seen, upon human actions to enhance carrying capacity. Thus, for example, ecological surplus may be enhanced by increasing the nutrient status of soil for greater crop production, initially by building its organic content through manuring, and so on, and subsequently, as under industrial processes of ‘substitutionism’ (Goodman et al. 1987), by mineral and fossil fuel-derived substitutes. As we shall see, the greater the ecological surplus, the greater the theoretical feasibility of extracting, under capitalism, the surplus value from human labour power, although this can be realized in practice only via political means. And this (theoretical) feasibility is, of course, the prime motive behind the impulse to increase ecological surplus under capitalism, something that has been enabled thus far by ‘cheap’ fossil fuel. The number one question for capitalism is whether, with the demise or ‘political unavailability’ of fossil fuel, a ‘cheap’ substitute can be found. If not, then the days of capitalism are surely numbered.
- 4.
This has similarities to the ‘political’ reading of capital by Cleaver (2000), for example, where the key dynamic is ‘class struggle’ between capital and labour. As we shall see, contestation between fractions of the exploiting classes is also important.
- 5.
Semi-proletarianization means that part of the labourer’s subsistence needs is still derived from food production for home consumption, but this is insufficient, due to lack of land, to supply in full the subsistence needs of the family, generating the need to sell labour.
- 6.
Use value is the qualitative dimension of ‘things’ of use to human and non-human nature, including both commodities and non-commodities.
- 7.
Exchange value is the quantitative aspect of value in commodities, derived principally from embodied human labour, as opposed to their qualitative use values.
- 8.
Surplus value is the excess of value produced by the labour of workers over the wages paid to them.
- 9.
Crudely expressed, entropy may be described as the degradation of useful energy to unavailable energy, as for example, in the consumption of fossil fuels, the process of consumption itself having adverse impacts on the biophysical domain by, for example, increasing the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
- 10.
Simply stated, the organic composition of capital is that element of capital embodied in machinery, as opposed to human labour power.
- 11.
We employ the term ‘subaltern’ classes to refer to populations lying outside the hegemonic influence of capitalism due to their continuing material/ideological attachment to an independent means of production—most particularly land. Nonetheless, the majority of these populations are dominated by capitalism through their formal subsumption into its relations of production. Consumer class refers to those classes that lie within the hegemonic influence of capitalism due to their complete severance from the means of production—they have suffered real subsumption into capitalist relations of production.
- 12.
Hegemony is the ideological neutralization or co-optation of opposition forces by, in this case, capitalism, by means of compromising with the opposition whilst ensuring that fundamental social-property relations (capitalism) remain, in their essentials, unchanged. This has often been secured by improving working-class wages or working conditions, a scenario typical of the global North, but secured only by means of imperial relations with the global South where worker suppression continues to be the norm and whence ‘compensatory’ surplus is channelled to the North.
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Tilzey, M. (2018). Political Ecology and Social Systems: An Integrated, but Differentiated, Theory of Socio-natural Dynamics. In: Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64556-8_2
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