By HENRI ACSELRAD*
The freedom of movement of capital on a global scale was created in order to put workers from all over the world in competition
1.
How was the climate issue constructed as a public problem? At the end of the 18th century, a pioneer of population studies, Jean-Baptiste Moheau, argued that climate should be an issue for government: “It is up to the government to change the temperature of the air, to improve the climate; to give way to stagnant waters and burnt forests that make the healthiest cantons morbid.”[I]
In the early 19th century, the effects of gas emissions on atmospheric temperature, in particular, began to be discussed by scientists, but without any major connections to the political sphere. It was after World War II that climate began to be seen as a strategic element for the great powers: in the USA, atmospheric geoengineering research sought to make possible military uses of triggering rain and diverting hurricanes.
Advances in computer and satellite technologies strengthened the field of climate studies, and in the 1970s, climate issues were introduced into the public sphere. The term climate change began to be accompanied by a repertoire of terms related not only to climatology, but also to the field of disasters, such as risk, vulnerability, emergency, alert, and resilience. Evidence of disruptions in socio-ecological relations was associated with the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events; gradual changes perceived in biomes and territories were attributed to rising temperatures.
Although in recent years the climate issue has become a focal point of the environmental debate, it is important to first observe how it was properly “environmentalized,” that is, included in the field of environmental debate. In the 1970s, environmental movements raised issues such as nuclear winter, chemical pollution, acid rain and the ozone hole, integrating them into the issue of “the implications of human action on the climate and the feedback effect of the climate on living conditions on Earth.”
This statement hides the fact that those responsible for climate change are by no means the same social actors who suffer its consequences. Deforesters and fossil fuel industries are demonstrably identified as the main culprits for greenhouse gas emissions, while low-income, non-white social groups are more than proportionally affected by the harmful effects of these emissions.
From another perspective, one that does not detach society from its environment, we can say that the climate is “environmentalized” when it is seen as a mediator of the cross-effects of the spatial practices of different subjects among themselves. In other words, when it is perceived that certain practices of appropriation of space produce climate changes that, through their effects, compromise the ecological conditions for the exercise of the spatial practices of third parties. In his text on governmentality, Michel Foucault pointed out how the modern State, from the end of the 18th century onwards, began to govern things through political economy and people through “biopolitics”.[ii]
We can say that the environmental issue has brought a new field of action to the table: that of governing relations between humans mediated by things; in particular, by air, water and living systems, shared and non-commercial dimensions of material space.[iii] with strong potential, therefore, for politicization. This is because such relationships cannot be mediated by market transactions and the price system.
With this analytical shift, we can bring to light three issues: (a) the legitimacy of different spatial practices – classified, through controversies, as environmentally benign or harmful –, (b) the unequal responsibility of subjects, according to their respective powers of action over environmental variables, in this case, climate; and (c) the unequal exposure of subjects to the harmful effects of climate events.
In the 1970s, such issues had not yet emerged because the association between environmental and social issues was still weak or non-existent. And also because when the issue of environmental inequality began to emerge, efforts to depoliticize it began, causing expressions such as environmental inequality, climate justice or environmental racism, for example, to only become more visible in the public arena in the second decade of our century.
2.
It is this analytical shift – which introduces political subjects into the plot and which allows us to understand, for example, the discourse of indigenous movements explaining that their fight against climate change is the fight against large projects, against monocultures that silt up the streams, extinguishing flora and fauna, as well as against the smoke from thermoelectric plants that harm living conditions in the villages.
This is the case of the spokespeople of the Indigenous Council of Roraima, for example, who assume their role as subjects, developing plans to confront climate change – they say – “suffered by them on indigenous lands”, pointing out those who they believe are at the origin of the change and rejecting the current discourse of adaptation to the changes because they do not consider themselves responsible for them.[iv]
In turn, the climate problem was constructed as a global public problem. Environmental issues have been globalized since the 1960s, based on networks of scientists, NGOs and multilateral institutions. Some of its milestones were the International Biological Program launched in 1964, followed by UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere program in 1971. Amidst the discourse on Global Environmental Change, the climate issue gained prominence at the First Conference in Geneva in 1979 and, in 1988, at the Conference “Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security” held in Toronto, which coincided with the media coverage of the testimony of a former NASA research director, who was an opponent of coal use, before the US Senate.
These moments paved the way for the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC, in 1988, and the UN Climate Convention in 1992. From then on, scientific discourse prevailed, albeit under the filter exercised by States in the IPCC reports and under pressure from lobbies of oil companies at the Conferences of the Parties. We then saw strategies of dramatization unfold on the part of science, of environmental self-legitimization on the part of corporations, and of depoliticization on the part of States and multilateral institutions.
The climate was thus incorporated into the dynamics of the so-called “ecological modernization of capitalism”, namely, on the tripod of technical proficiency, energy efficiency and green technologies, with the adoption of pragmatic approaches, centered on the carbon market and compensation mechanisms.[v] We can perhaps speak of a process of “climatological modernization of capitalism”, namely, the way in which current institutions have internalized a climate issue, celebrating the market economy, technical progress and political consensus.
In other words, a discursive operation that has sought to transform what is seen as a “technical restriction” on the expansion of capital into a driving mechanism for accumulation itself, building a liberal climate consensus and turning the climate into a business opportunity, for the creation of financial assets and for the environmental self-legitimization of corporations. This environmentalization of capitalism, which anthropologist Alfredo Wagner called a “lexical illusion”, Nancy Fraser called “discursive alchemy” and Ève Chiapello called “financialization of the reasons for indignation”,[vi] we could add that it is a procedure of “vocabulary harassment” due to the corporate appropriation of critical vocabulary.
This whole plot is part, as we know, of the context of what has been called the ecological crisis, an idea now anchored in the Malthusian matrix of the Club of Rome, “of exponential growth in a world of finite resources”,[vii] that is, of a capitalism that would lack inputs, sometimes in the society-nature relationship, through approaches that sometimes lose sight of the discussion about the “nature of society”. Even among Marxist authors, the idea of ecological crisis is evoked by the metaphor of a cannibalistic capitalism, which corrodes the ecological bases of its own existence.
It is this self-evidence of an ecological crisis of capitalism that we propose to problematize here. Such approaches seem to lack consideration of the socio-ecological relations that characterize the environmentality inherent to capitalism; that is, the understanding of the environmental issue as intrinsically relational and conflictual, putting on the agenda the relations between the different practices of appropriation of space and, in particular, the fact that a certain set of practices is pointed out as responsible for compromising the continuity of the exercise of third-party practices.
That said, it is worth asking: are there really elements to characterize a process of destabilization and crisis in the ecological conditions of reproduction of the social relations that constitute contemporary capitalism? We will present below some elements for this debate.
3.
The somewhat common use of the terminology “climate deregulation” suggests that we can understand the so-called environmental crisis as a type of “regulatory” crisis. Certain schools of thought in Political Economy have already done so in the discussion of economic crises.[viii] In the case of the 1929 economy, the amounts invested in the production of capital goods and consumer goods, for example, would not have been compatible with the size of the demand for these goods, in the absence of coordination that would generate an appropriate correspondence between these amounts.
Such systemic deregulation would have been the cause of mass unemployment of resources – labor force and capital. The question that should be asked in the case of climate is: could climate change indicators be seen as a symptom of a systemic deregulation of the socio-ecological bases of capitalism – just as the bankruptcy of companies and mass unemployment were for economic crises? What regulation is actually involved?
In biology, where it originated, this concept refers to a self-regulated adjustment of the parts of an organism to its whole. Imported from biology and applied by the social sciences, instead of the self-regulation of the parts of an organic body guided by the integrity of a whole, we should consider the adjustment in question as a historical – political – action undertaken by institutions and social subjects.
In other words, applied to societies, regulation would be “the process of adjusting, according to a rule or norm, a plurality of movements, acts and effects, in principle strange to each other, which require coordination to ensure the stability/integrity of the social whole”[ix]. From this perspective, the notion of regulatory crisis would designate situations of instability arising from the difficulties of coordinating the parts of a whole – in our case, socio-ecological – in order to maintain its integrity and reproduce it over time.[X]
In the case of the economy, the classic crises studied would have reflected a lack of coordination between the circuits of production, consumption and capital accumulation (commonly called crises of underconsumption or overproduction). The lack of coordination between these circuits would have been such that it would have threatened to compromise the very reproduction of capitalism. Similarly, in the case of the environment, we could speak of a crisis of the “environmentality” of capitalism if it affected the socio-ecological relations on which it rests; that is, if the environment – including the climate – constituted by these relations ceased to materially “environmentally” business.[xi].
This would supposedly occur due to insufficient coordination between the spatial practices of different social agents, or more specifically, when the spatial practices of the dominant classes lost their capacity for reproduction, shaking each other through a multiplication of disasters and disruptive events in the environmental conditions for carrying out these same practices.
It is interesting to remember that in the 1920s, the liberal economist known as Professor Pigou, an organic intellectual of capital, had suggested that the lack of coordination between the decisions of individual companies would represent, for capitalism, a crucial problem, including in its environmental dimensions.[xii]. For him, the economic calculation of each unit of capital, carried out separately, would be distorted by the occurrence of material effects, in the case he exposed, corrosive effects of a certain factory on the equipment of neighboring factories.
The managers of the latter would be led to make mistakes in predicting the time needed to amortize their machines: they would then become unusable sooner than expected and the price of the goods they produce would not cover the effective cost of their replacement/amortization. All this because there would be material – environmental – effects of economic acts that are not mediated by price systems and the market. These effects are mediated, in fact, by the shared non-market space of water, air and living systems.
From this perspective, we can assume that an “environmental” crisis – including a climate crisis – would occur if the reciprocal and undesirable environmental impact of companies’ spatial practices, which are not coordinated with each other, were to cause a multitude of “micro-disasters” capable of affecting the material environment and the overall profitability of businesses. The lack of coordination between individual capitals would thus generate irrationality for capital in general.
In other words, according to Pigou's logic, capitalism would contain within itself the seeds of a kind of “progressive and cumulative disaster” that would threaten the reproduction of its own practices. We should not exclude the fact that Pigou's example was only intended, heuristically, to point out the importance of the non-economic sphere for public goods such as education and health – in the case we mentioned, circumstantially, the shared enjoyment of the “public” atmosphere – for the functioning of the economic sphere itself.
Under the name of “the second contradiction of capitalism”, in turn, the ecological Marxist James O'Connor argued that when individual capitalists lower their costs, externalizing the environmental damage they produce, with the intention of maintaining their profits, the undesirable effect of these decisions is to increase costs for other capitalists, thus reducing the profits of capital in general.[xiii]
For O'Connor, capitalism is heading towards a tendential economic crisis due to the environmental damage it causes to its own conditions of production. This author thus assumes the passage, which seems to us somewhat mechanical, from what he calls an ecological crisis to what would constitute an economic crisis of capitalism. [xiv]. He disregards, for example, the possibility that capital may resort to expedients that prevent, hinder or delay the transformation of the eventual crisis of the ecological conditions for exercising their spatial practices into an economic crisis, in fact, for capital. We will evoke later the forms assumed by this possibility.
The fact is that this type of constitutive irrationality, situated on the same plane as what Marx called the “general collective conditions of social production”[xv] – elements that, although situated outside the capital valorization circuit, are indispensable to it – have never been the object of serious consideration by the capital managers themselves. It was not in the 1920s, with Pigou, and it does not seem to be today.[xvi] But why? We must recognize that in the case of the climate debate – the results considered unsatisfactory at COP 29 do not let us lie[xvii] – States, corporations and multilateral institutions show no sign of seeing the climate issue as a sufficient reason to abandon fossil and extractive capitalism. We can ask ourselves, first of all, whether there are grounds to say that we are, in fact, facing an ecological crisis for capital itself.
4.
Let us move on to our question: in what way could the reproduction of dominant spatial practices be threatened by the supposed exhaustion of the environmental resources on which they depend? We can suppose two paths: first, by the absence of self-limiting coordination between capitals, which would cause an erosion of the resource base of the dominant practices themselves – in terms of soil, water, living systems, climatic conditions – generating falls in the expected return on capital.
In this case, there would have been a lack of supposed coordination that would establish limits to general expansionary processes such as those based, for example, on planned obsolescence and the encouragement of consumerism. A second path – which seems to be missing from the current debate – is the impossibility of dominant agents appropriating the resource base of third parties – peasants, indigenous peoples, traditional communities and residents of urban peripheries.
In other words, through processes that have been called permanent primitive accumulation or spoliation; through the impossibility of transferring to third parties – non-dominant social groups – the environmental damage caused by dominant spatial practices. These two mechanisms – separately or combined – could lead to a crisis in the reproduction of the dominant spatial practices of large-scale industry, agriculture, mining, oil and gas. However, this is not what has been seen to occur with extractive capitalism.
On the contrary, in Latin America, as well as in Africa and Asia, it is the non-dominant social groups that have always been exposed to “environmental crises” that are specific to them, given the difficulty in carrying out their own spatial practices, as they are subjected to the dumping of unsaleable products of capitalist activity in their living and working spaces, through expropriation and territorial enclosure that make the use of their lands, forests, waters and common resources unviable.
In other words, the reproduction of the type of capitalism currently in force in the countries of the South has been carried out, to a large extent, through the exercise of the capacity of the powerful to assign the environmental damage they generate to the most disadvantaged – whether upstream of their productive practices (via expropriation) or downstream (via pollution, that is, imposing on the population a forced consumption of the unsaleable products of capitalist activity).
The spatial practices of dominant groups have, in fact, been reproducing themselves through a flight forward, through which they feed on the unfeasibility of reproducing non-dominant spatial practices. This differentiated and conflicting configuration, strongly present in the experience of social movements, small farmers, indigenous peoples, quilombolas and traditional peoples of the global South, does not seem to be being duly considered in current analyses of the so-called ecological crisis.
Given the ongoing and intensifying conflict between territorialized social movements and extractive capitalism, corporations have increasingly adopted, alongside greenwashing and environmental self-legitimization campaigns, strategies aimed at dividing communities and social movements in order to free up space for the expansion of their business frontiers. Ruralists, for example – at least some of whom are referred to in certain circles as “agricultural people” – do not seem to take responsibility for the forest fires at all, while at the same time focusing their fire on the approval of the time frame that seeks to freeze indigenous rights to their lands.
5.
That said, let us return to our initial question: are the indicators of climate deregulation a symptom of a crisis in coordination between dominant spatial practices? Could the lack of control over the accumulated environmental (in this case, climate) effects of these dominant spatial practices be creating difficulties for the reproduction of these same practices?
Now, if this were the case, we can assume that the instances of global articulation of capital would probably have come into action beyond the visible search for self-legitimation via “green extractivism”, fetishization of CO2, speeches about “net zero emissions”, decarbonization, etc.[xviii] If they have not done so, this could be happening, we can assume, not because of a lack of coordination, but, on the contrary, because a certain type of coordination is in force.
Let’s see. On the eve of the United Nations conference in Rio in 1992, the World Bank’s chief economist, Lawrence Summers, wrote in an internal memo to the Bank: “economic rationality justifies the relocation of activities that generate environmental harm to less developed countries.”[xx]. We see here the formulation of what we could call a “regulatory norm”, a form – perverse to be sure – of coordinating spatial practices in the global space – a form typical of neoliberalized capitalism, with great freedom of international movement of capital.
Lawrence Summers’ economicist and inegalitarian logic – that of an economy that unequally distributes life and death through a relocation of practices that cause environmental harm to places inhabited by the poorest – also manifests itself in national spaces and through the effects of extreme natural events such as hurricanes, cyclones and others. More than that – and this is what environmental justice movements maintain – this discriminatory logic could explain the fact that no substantive action has been seen so far towards changing the “environmentality” of capitalism on the part of political and economic powers, since the environmental harms that are inherent to them – including climate harms – have been “regularly” directed at the most dispossessed, blacks, indigenous people, women and vulnerable people in the peripheries.
Thus, the crisis resulting from the lack of self-limiting coordination of capitalist expansion would be systematically resolved, for capital, of course, by the mechanisms of accumulation through dispossession – that is, by transferring the damages of the accumulation regime to the most dispossessed; by reproducing and worsening environmental inequality. Capitalism is thus “cannibalistic”, of course, by cannibalizing the ecological living and working conditions of others, by feeding on the crisis that it projects onto those social actors who lead non-capitalist ways of life and forms of production.
That said, what Ulrich Beck had called “organized irresponsibility” – according to him, a “system of social interactions in which social actors produce and distribute risks in order to avoid being held responsible for them”[xx], we could add: an “organized irresponsibility of class, race and gender”, namely, a self-defense mechanism by which capitalism seeks to avoid an environmental crisis from occurring for itself by transferring the harmful effects, intrinsic to its expansive, technical and locational pattern, to the spatial practices and ways of life of those who are, by it, dispossessed.
In the case of climate change, which is now on the global agenda, although common sense seems convinced that the impact of greenhouse gas emissions is felt globally, there is still a need to wake up to the fact – and its implications – that it is suffered unequally.
We know that, with the processes of neoliberalization, the freedom of movement of capital on a global scale was created in order to put workers from all over the world in competition. The liberal reforms allowed globalized capital, through the blackmail of localizing investments, operated on an international scale, to implicitly act in favor of the motto: “workers of the world, unite”. The reforms sought to stimulate this through the competition established between the different national scales where wage relations are inscribed – that is, competition for lower wages and loss of rights.
But the same thing has been happening in the field of environmental regulations, through a dumping deregulatory, which can even be presented today in our country as an explanation for the formation of a certain social base for agro-mining-export anti-environmentalism. The freedom that large corporations have to produce inequality on various scales would therefore be an important cause of the maintenance of the plundering model of development. In other words, predation – and the spatial architecture of extractive capitalism that sustains it – would tend to continue as long as those who are suffering its effects are the least represented in the spheres of power.
However, at the same time, in the name of combating climate change, institutions of central capitalism have been pressuring countries of the South to play a subordinate role, of a new kind, in a kind of “international division of ecological labor”, by creating so-called “green sacrifice zones” to offset the continued emissions of countries of the North. In this way, indigenous and traditional communities in countries of the South have been encouraged to establish ties of dependence on companies via the carbon market, updating the role of the expropriation of the peripheries in the reproduction of global extractive capitalism.
In other words, while in the context of Fordism, after World War II, at least in the central economies, social struggles were met with a set of regulatory institutions – unemployment insurance, collective wage negotiations, etc. – in the case of extractive capitalism, the response to social and territorial struggles has taken the form of a new business discourse – the great reset, says the president of the Davos Forum[xxx] – , private social policies aimed at demobilizing affected groups, lawsuits and judicial harassment against alert launchers and researchers who point out irregularities in business projects.
What has been happening is therefore more a response to criticism – with the simultaneous expansion of markets, financial assets and the creation of new types of enclosures – than a reaction by capital and multilateral institutions to a supposed crisis. What could be seen as a factor in a future crisis for extractive capitalism would, in effect, be the territorial and environmental struggles of social actors who defend respect for their rights, their spatial practices and their ways of life threatened by large extractive projects.
* Henri Acselrad is a retired full professor at the Institute of Research and Urban and Regional Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IPPUR/UFRJ).
Notes
[I] Jean-Baptiste Moheau, Recherches et considerations sur la population de la France, Moutard Printer, Paris, 1778.
[ii] M. Foucault, Governmentality, in M. Foucault, microphysics of power, ed. Graal, 1979, RJ, p. 277-296.
[iii] In the transcript of his 1976 lecture, Foucault speaks of “the action at a distance of one body upon another,” of a “space of intersection between a multiplicity of individuals who live, work, and coexist with one another in a set of material elements that act upon them and upon which they act in return.” Michel Foucault, Security, territory, population. Course at the College de France (1977-1978); p. 29.
[iv] Amazad Pana'Adinhan; Indigenous Communities' Perceptions of Climate Change, Serra da Lua Region – RR; Indigenous Council of Roraima, Boa Vista, 2014.
[v] A. Dahan Dalmedico and H. Guillemot. Is climate change an environmental problem? Epistemological and political reflections. Social Sciences and Humanities facing Climate Change Challenges. Conference Maison de la Chimie, Paris, September 22-23, 2008.
[vi] “Le capitalisme ne semble pas capable of intégrer la critique écologique”, Entretien avec la sociologue Ève Chiapello, Philanomist, https://www.philonomist.com/en/interview/capitalism-seems-incapable-integrating-environmental-critique, accessed 10/11/2024.
[vii] Donella H. Meadows Dennis L. Meadows Jorgen Randers William W. Behrens Ill, The Limits to Growth, Universe Book, New York, 1972.
[viii] Among the works that gave impetus to this debate are Michel Aglietta's book, Regulation and crises of capitalism, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1976 and the article by Robert Boyer, in the issue on crises, of the magazine Critiques de l’Economie Politique, n.7-8, 1979.
[X] R. Di Ruzza, La notion de norme dans les théories de la régulation, Economies and Societies, R7, November 1993, pp. 7-19. For Boyer, in turn, regulatory norms consist of institutional forms (laws, rules or regulations – not necessarily formalized) “that impose, through direct, symbolic or mediated coercion, a certain type of economic behavior on the groups and individuals concerned”; R. Boyer, Regulation Theory – a critical analysis, Nobel, 1990, SP.
[xi] We apply here, to the dominant spatial practices, the more generic assertion of Latour-Schwartz-Charvolin, according to which “we speak of an environmental crisis when the environment no longer provides an environment for society”, B. Latour, C. Schwartz, F. Charvolin, Future Anterieur, n°6, 1991, p. 28-56.
[xii] AC Pigou The Economics of Welfare. London: Macmillan, 1920. This author formulated this problem without using environmental terminology.
[xiii] J. O´Connor, 'The second contradiction of capitalism', in T. Benton (ed.) The Greening of Marxism. The Guilford Press, New York & London, 1996, First published in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Issue 1, Fall 1988.
[xiv] The analytical strategies of this subfield do not fail to evoke, in ways that are undoubtedly completely different, that adopted by Herman Daly and other initiators of Ecological Economics, whose discourse targeted the agents of capital themselves, when it sought to raise their awareness of the fact that “capital consumed as income what should be considered as natural capital.” Robert Costanza and Herman E. Daly, Natural Capital and Sustainable Development, Conservation Biology , Mar., 1992, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 37-46.
[xv] In the Grundrisse, Marx evokes the « specific relation of capital to the collective, general conditions of social production » K. Marx, Grundrisse: Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858 – Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro. p. 376. In a previous text, I called the constituent elements of such conditions devalued fictitious capital, that is, elements that, although situated outside the capital valorization circuit, are indispensable to it; H. Acselrad, “Internalization of environmental costs – from instrumental effectiveness to political legitimacy”, in J. Natal (org.), Territory and Planning, IPPUR/Letracapital, Rio de Janeiro, 2011, p. 391-414.
[xvi] “Most companies don’t realize how dependent they are on nature,” says the climate change leader at a consulting firm that calls itself a “community of solvers".Value, 13/12/2024, P. F3.
[xvii] Among analysts who expressed skepticism about the chances of success of the 29th Conference of the Parties, some said it was a “stillborn instrument”; others, the “reflection of an inept multilateral regime improvised by the hasty Climate Convention”.
[xviii] F. Furtado and E. Paim, E. Renewable energy and green extractivism: transition or reconfiguration? . Brazilian Journal of Urban and Regional Studies, 26(1), 2024. https://doi.org/10.22296/2317-1529.rbeur.202416pt
[xx] “Let Them Eat Pollution.”, The Economist,, February 8, 1992.
[xx] U. Beck, Ecological politics in an age of risk. Engl. tr., Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995.
[xxx] Klaus Schwab, Presentation of the report “The Future of Nature and Business”, World Economic Forum, Geneva, 17/7/2020
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