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Globalization and Green Growth: Green Growth as the Ecological Modality of Globalization
International Studies Association
March 1998
1. Globalization: The Image of Capitalism
Globalization is the mantra of the day. It sweepingly characterizes aspects of modern socioeconomic life as diverse as time/space compression (Harvey 1989), technological-informational innovations, post-Fordism (Amin 1994), transnational corporatism, lean and flexible production, cross-border outsourcing, global financial governance (Altvater 1997), cultural cloning, the internationalization of the state (Cox 1981), and the awareness of global concerns (Beck 1995). The concept has become such an all-purpose explanation for a great variety of economic, social, and political change, that its ubiquity invites the ridicule implied in terms like globaloney and globe-babble.
Yet globalization is not a sudden phenomenon. Capital as the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society (Marx 1973: 107) has asserted itself through its incessant expansion into the uncharted dominions of the globe. As usual with other historical contingencies, globalization is a process, always implicit in the logic of capital accumulation. Marx and Engels eloquently articulate the point.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . All old-established national industries . . . are dislodged by new industries . . . that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. . . . In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (Marx & Engels 1978: 476)
Written one hundred and fifty years ago, the Communist Manifesto draws a surprisingly accurate picture of globalization. The above quotation refers to transnational corporations, frontier technology, intellectual property rights, cultural homogeneity, global communication network, and worldwide consumerism--all features characterizing the contemporary stage of capitalism. The global aspiration for the universal inter-dependence of nations is a characteristic peculiar to capitalism as an ever-expanding system, both internally and externally. Globalization is the image of capitalism.
Why do we now hear so much of globalization? The ubiquitous allusions to globalization go beyond the historical consequence of global integration. Some even dispute that the world is more globalized now than it was a century ago: the historical evidence of world trade and capital flows in relation to output, degrees of financial and monetary integration and the character of governance in the international economy show that the level of globalization in the present era is not unprecedented (Mann 1997; Hoogvelt 1997; Hirst & Thompson 1996).
Conceptual clarification is needed to highlight a radically new quality which globalization allegedly adds into an already global society. How distinct is globalization from the long-standing process of capital accumulation? Why is it that the term goes current in the way it does? Who puts the concept on the agenda of our times? This paper explores the distinctive features of globalization at this point in the history of capitalism, and how they are intrinsically related to the current permutations of capitalism.
2. The Ecological Modality of Capitalism
I will argue that the globalization at issue is a political projection of a neoliberal program which attempts to reconstitute the material infrastructure and the social structure of accumulation in order to reap the greatest benefits for the development of capitalism. Specifically I will examine how capitalism, faced with expansionary limits, recuperates the dynamic of accumulation in terms of its ecological modality, that is, the way it exploits nature, both physical and human. The ecological modality of capitalism could be categorized into three historical stages of globalization: (1) the primitive plunder, (2) the modernization masquerade, (3) the green growth of capitalism. I will explore how the ecological modality has altered, to a certain extent, the basic structure of capitalism, and how far the third wave of globalization--globalization3--is intertwined now with green growth as an ecological modality.
Each stage of capitalism has its own ecological modality of globalization, not just as part of the whole mechanism but as the innermost essence of capitalism. The ecological modality, varying depending on material and historical conditions, aims to regulate the potential of nature for maximum utility. It enhances the functioning of the capitalist system by establishing a set of norms with regard to nature, norms which make sense of certain practices toward the given ecological conditions.
It might be argued that the ecological modality could apply to the whole history of homo faber, since human beings are supposed, in any form of society, to subjugate nature for their survival. The appropriation of nature to the benefit of human beings is the very history of homo faber. Yet capitalism is the only system in history that keeps people, a part of nature for millions of years, apart from nature by transmuting nature’s capacities exclusively into exchange values and disregarding all other potentials of nature which our predecessors enshrined. The ecological modality (of a subject exploiting the object called nature) develops as people, now separated from nature, are set to view nature as a storehouse of exchange values. Capitalism appears on the scene with its ecological project which assures a certain facet of nature by caging up disenchanted imagination in market vocabulary. The protagonist is capitalists as the incarnation of capital.
According to Marx, capital has its raison d’être as means of domination over the labor process and thus as means of exploitation of nature. It has no value in and of itself, despite its material manifestation that varies at different moments of the process. Its value exists only in making profits from the labor process between man and nature, that is, from the process of value expansion (M-C-M’) (Marx 1976: 283ff). In its despotic sway over the world, capital encloses, controls, excavates, transforms, subjugates, and destroys both human and non-human nature.
The ecological modality, based upon the market nexus of capitalism, precludes the reproduction of labor and nature which are not themselves subject to exchange evaluation (Marx 1976: 166). It discards (or undervalues) the prior social ties of labor and nature, for the value abstracted from labor and nature in capitalism does not contain the necessary part of the reproductive man-nature metabolism. The abstract infinitude of exchange value overwhelms the concrete world of use value. Profitability, as the motor of capital, replaces social needs--and ecological sustainability--in determining what and how to produce and how to distribute. As growth is the key to raising profits, the system continually engenders the expansion of production, consumption, and waste. The ecological modality of capitalism has always caused various patterns of ecological destruction on an ever-increasing scale.
a. Primitive Plunder
How distinct is capitalism as a historical socioeconomic system from other previous systems in the way it exploits nature? In pre-capitalist societies the peculiar evolutionary character of labor regulated and controlled the material reactions between nature and labor. The labor process, conscious and purposeful, ended in products which were not only results of labor, but also its essential conditions (Marx 1976: 287). To perpetuate the process, pre-capitalist societies allocated their productive activities to a whole system of material reproduction. In short, there existed a social mediation of man-nature relations (Polanyi 1957).
In contrast, capitalism was determined, from its genesis, to collide violently with nature. The historical process of forcible expropriation of the peasant from the soil in England is a classic example. Marx describes how the rapid expansion of wool manufacture in Flanders transformed arable land into sheep-walks--what we call the enclosure of commons--and created for urban industries the necessary supplies of free proletarians (Marx 1976: 878ff). The subsequent monocultures of capitalist farmers paved the way for agricultural plantation in the colonies, attended by ecological degradation on various levels--soil erosion, water contamination, and biodiversity destruction, to name a few. And the uninhabitable conditions the expropriated were exposed to in urban areas--such as infernal noise, adulterated food, raw sewage, foul odor, poisonous wastes, rampant cholera, and much more (Ridgeway 1970: 18ff; Engels 1968)--have multiplied all over the world.
However, the main thrust of primitive plunder is with colonialism. As Alfred W. Crosby describes comprehensively, the process of colonization began with a biological warfare: colonization set out with diseases, before sending out missionaries and gunpowder. It was Old World maladies--such as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, cholera, and the others--that underlaid the success of European imperialists in sweeping aside the indigenes in Americas and Australia (Crosby 1986: 195ff). The genocidal catastrophe overtook not only the human roots but also the ecological basis, replacing the fauna and flora of New World by European cows, pigs, crops, plants, and weeds.
Natives in Asia and Africa who withstood the biological invasion with their strong immunity to European germs were subject to the well-known process of colonial plunder. The colonial system, preoccupied with short-term profits, had no reason to take into consideration the future of indigenous fauna and flora, or even indigenous people. Colonists regarded all nature as a vast stockpile of resources for the production of commodities. They homogenized local ecology, unique in spatial composition, into quantifiable terms, disregarding indigenous modes of production which had maintained the reproductive metabolism between man and nature. It was a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play[ed] the greatest part (Marx 1976: 874) of globalization1.
Ecological pillage was, from the first, a function of the capitalist commitment to expansion. Whether incubated in a pre-existing society or imposed forcibly from outside, capitalism has always destroyed the social mediation of man-nature relations everywhere it nestled and settled. The breakdown of nature’s self-redeeming capacity has proceeded in direct proportion to the development of capitalism. The ecological modality of globalization has changed the face of the earth, while dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt (Marx 1976: 926). The formula of primitive plunder continues, even after the dividing up of the world among capitalist associations around the turn of century.
b Modernization Masquerade
Cecil Rhodes once frankly declared that we must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories (Mander & Goldsmith 1996: 254). The prescription of imperialism--raw materials, cheap labor, and market outlets--does not cease to be the norm of the Hobbesian jungle where the haves exploit the have-nots. It only adds new dimensions to its enshrined formula when most of former colonies declared independence from their ravaging rulers.
Capitalism’s ecological modality in its earlier stage assumed the boundless abundance of nature at the discretion of Western capitalists. One had only to take advantage of nature which had always existed out there from time immemorial. There were mines to be excavated, forests to be cut out, and slaves to be picked up aboard. Over the centuries, capitalists enriched themselves immeasurably by drawing human and natural resources from the colonies.
Yet a twist of the ecological modality occurred as John Locke’s assumption of natural abundance increasingly had its weaknesses exposed by internal development within both the colonizing powers and the colonies. Some of the former colonies, following a capitalist route of development, accelerated themselves into a predictable shortage of natural resources and waste depositories in proportion to their devotion to modernization. The others, slower in copying the capitalist path, remained as the hinterland of capitalist powers, which continued ravaging forests and fisheries in exchange for industrial products.
While a local elite, trained by its colonial masters, destroyed whatever remained in nature within the reach of sovereignty, the capitalist powers turned money itself into a major commodity which went around the globe for new markets and investment areas other than colonial territories--globalization2. Lending large sums of money to the compliant elite of the Third World has been the most effective method to gain control indirectly over the exploitation of nature. Those colonized countries, once hooked on the trap of the debt circuit, devastate more and more ravishingly their free gift to pay the interests of the unrepayable debt.
In fact, modernization--the idea of progress through a diffusion of capital and technology from the more developed to the less developed countries--was a mask which obscured the requirements of chief capitalists. What one terms toxic terrorism (Mische 1993: 110) is the case. Most of the Third World countries were in competition to provide a favorable climate in order to attract foreign smokestack industries. Following the unilinear model of modernization, they made no scruple to greet chemical facilities, oil refineries, auto factories, pulp mills, power plants, and a myriad of other industries, all discarded by sunrise technologies in advanced countries. Toxic industrial wastes were also exported to the pollution havens of the Third World. For fear of global corporations fleeing out, the local elite in the developing countries loosened all regulations that might have discouraged transnationals from mutilating ruthlessly the fauna and the flora, not to mention the inhabitants of their countries. Modernization has meant the migration of misery on a grand scale.
Global capital has worn the mask of modernization to lead the local elite, by institutional means, to extract relentlessly what remained in the already exhausted nature and to accept willingly hazardous industries and toxic wastes to the already degraded environment. The modernization masquerade adhered to the golden rule of trickle-down--that the accumulated wealth at the top would eventually bring about more prosperity to the rest of the world below. The optimism that a rising tide shall lift all boats merely disguised an institutionalized exploitation of nature. On reflection, modernization has fostered the largest part of ecological disaster in history along with an increasing polarization of haves and have-nots, domestically and internationally. Muto Ichiyo of the Pacific-Asia Resource Center remarks, [Modernization] which was supposed to raise the world out of poverty, has so far only transformed undeveloped poverty into developed poverty, traditional poverty into modernized poverty designed to function smoothly in the world economic system (Ichiyo 1993: 148). The developed and modernized poor, while lured to watch Baywatch or Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, become more vulnerable to global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, resource exhaustion, soil erosion, oil spills, urban congestion, water contamination, air pollution, and much more.
c. Green Growth
Primitive plunder was to slaves, metals, crops, and lumber what the modernization masquerade was to cheap labor, industrial markets, land leasehold, and investment acquisitions. The former was a robbery from non- or pre-capitalist spheres, while the latter a trade, though unequal, between core and peripheral areas. Politically, the former is called colonialism; the other, neo-colonialism.
However, the two different stages share a common consequence--that capitalism incorporates increasingly non- or pre-capitalist dominions under its ruthless orbit, causing the resultant ecological debacle on various levels. Primitive plunder came to an end not because the colonial powers had decided to forego the economic advantages it provided, but because these could now be obtained more effectively through the modernization masquerade. 1 Both modalities of globalization were posited upon the imperative of profit extraction, on which the harmful side effect of ecological degradation attended.
Yet a third stage of capitalism’s ecological modality seems to reverse the causality: the ecological crisis renders a fountain of profit extraction. Capitalism is now making its way into a new level of exploitation--green growth.
At the peak of the modernization masquerade, capitalism has penetrated nearly every aspect of human life and nature itself: it has become a truly universal system for the first time. Contrary to the unswerving conviction of Marxists--that capitalism collapses before it matures--capitalism asserts itself, at last, in full blossom. Rosa Luxemburg predicted: Capitalism is the first mode of economy . . . which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself (Luxemburg 1963: 467). This is because it requires a non-capitalist milieu as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labor power for its wage system (Luxemburg 1963: 368).
We are situated at a nodal point of capitalist expansion. As its global reach comes to an end, capitalism has no more escape routes, no more safety valves or corrective mechanisms (Wood 1997: 8). The days are gone when colonials used to sit around a table and carve colonies like steak (Visvanathan 1991: 378). The high time is over when overripe economies exported capital to backward countries in pursuit of high profits (Lenin 1975: 226). Capitalism now proceeds by assimilating the very conditions which alone can ensure its own existence (Luxemburg 1963: 366)--globalization3. The frontier of capitalist expansion is replaced by a deepening of intensive colonization or by what may be called recolonization (Raghavan 1990). In short, capitalism consumes its own constituents.
What does it mean that capitalism feeds on itself? Capitalism subordinates under its juggernaut not only pre-capitalist modes of production; it also turns to the un- or undervalued part of man and nature in terms of exchange valuation which, though a prerequisite to the labor process, cannot be produced as commodities with the laws of the market. Defined as the conditions of production by James O’ Connor, the undervalued part of nature constitutes comprehensively biophysical nature (the earth and its life-forms) which yields raw materials for capital and receives the debris of capital (O’Connor 1994: 163). For a human laborer, the undervalued part designates a living source of power, such as human reproduction, household labors, and noncommodity subsistence production, that is, what is left over when a standardized commodity called labor-power is extracted from him.
Green growth identifies the incorporation of this previously unclaimed sphere of nature within the expanding orbit of capital, as primitive plunder did that of the pre-capitalist sphere. It suggests a global dream of a green future drawing upon a diffusion of ecological sensibility, as the modernization masquerade did that of progress through the spread of European values. How does capitalism claim to sustain itself with the way it exploits nature? More specifically, how does it draw profits from ecological degradation which it has caused?
Confronted by the danger of ozone depletion, capitalists have defended themselves by showing, in sequence: (1) that there is no situation of ozone crisis, (2) that the source of the situation is not identified, (3) that they are not responsible for the danger, (4) that they are doing their best to root out the danger. They jump from one posture to another with new scientific proof or disproof, engendering doubt and complacency in the public--what is called the ozone backlash. 2 At the phase (4) of the grudging recognition, green growth makes its way largely in three patterns--full-cost pricing, green technology, and capitalized nature.
First, green growth affirms the virtue of full-cost pricing--that is, the doctrine that prices should reflect fully marginal social opportunity costs. It suggests that capital internalize the entire burden of production which it has externalized to nature with no charge--the internalization of externalities. How can we know the total cost of externalities? This proposal refers to environmental costs rather than social costs; still worse, environmental costs are based not on the precautionary prevention but on the end-of-pipe solution. 3
Herman E. Daly distinguishes three independent goals of economic policy: efficient allocation of the resource flow; just distribution of embodied products; and sustainable scale of the matter-energy throughput (Daly 1993: 177). He reaches the conclusion that the price mechanism merely ensures an optimal allocation, not an optimal distribution nor an optimal scale of resource uses. For example, MBIs (market-based incentives)--such as marketable pollution rights--may force auto companies to invest more on technological innovation, but will not prevent them from producing more cars. MBIs also obfuscate the historical role of the market which has caused the conditions we are now in.
As with every previous shift of their stance, capitalists make virtue of necessity--this time by disguising themselves in green. The procrastination game--of denial, equivocation, evasion, and fraud--continues, a game often overlapped with the so-called science wars. 4 Yet there is now added a new spin of green growth based on pollution, penitence, profits.
Larry Pratt and Wendy Montgomery observe, Many of the dominant firms in the environmental technologies industry are involved in the competition to clean up the hazardous wastes, control the pollution, repair the damage which as resource producers, chemical manufacturers and utilities they themselves created (Pratt & Montgomery 1997: 76). 5 Now the industry, nearing maturation in the developed countries, creates a demand for environmental technologies and services in the so-called emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and East Europe. According to Pratt and Montgomery, the industry, especially in its classic end-of-pipe structures, faces rising costs and problems of overcapacity, and in order to maintain its growth it must export its technologies and services, together with Northern legislation and regulations, to the rapidly-industrializing emerging markets, particularly in Asia and parts of Latin America (Pratt & Montgomery 1997: 76).
The political economy of green technology prescribes: first, that one impose models of modernization; second, export legal and administrative capacity; third, offer environmental norms; finally, generate demand for green equipment and services (Hoyt 1996: 56). The late Ron Brown, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, explained in simple terms: The more pressure that we put on ourselves, on Mexico and on every place else in the world to do something about the environment, the more they’re going to reach out for environmental technology. And where are they going to get it? They’re going to get it from us! 6 The North teaches, the South learns; the latter learns, the former earns.
Green growth validates an approach that most, ideally all, problems should be solvable by creating and enforcing tradable property rights in environmental goods and bads (Anderson & Leal 1991). Property rights is here a key term that runs through the hidden agenda of green growth. Historical materialism demonstrates that a particular class which dominates a given society attempts to freeze it into place through manipulation, ideology, and institution. The last ecological modality of capitalism focuses on stabilizing the current relations of production--what may be called the display value of capital--by providing an outlet for overaccumulated capital. The privatization of nature, proposed by green growth, shows that the inherent tendency of capitalism to turn everything into a commodity has asserted itself.
Green growth proposes earth for sale: that there is a need for property rights over owls, salmon, whales, bears, as well as air and water, in order to protect them from pollution (Tokar 1997). It commodifies and patents biological genes in Western laboratories, the seeds of plants and animals which people in the Third World have kept for thousands of years (Shiva 1993). Wildlife reserves, which demarcate habitats and species so as to protect them for posterity, are often just a form of nature tourism. Pollution rights are traded at a profit on the market. It is no wonder that we often hear the claim that there is trade in human organs--such as corneas, kidneys, livers, skin, pancreases and lungs. 7 The degree of exploiting nature is dictated by the prevailing rate of interests, not by other conceptions of present or future well-being.
Karl Polanyi observed, in The Great Transformation, a double movement in the dynamics of modern society: the market system based on the commodity fiction that labor and land are produced for sale, and the countermove which checks the action of the market that attacks the fabric of society. According to him, the double movement can be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods. The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market--primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes--and using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods. (Polanyi 1957: 132)
Green growth as a modern formula of accumulation shows the decisive victory of the principle of economic liberalism over that of social protection. The transfer of the conditions of production into a historically created necessity is the tendency of capital (Marx 1973: 528). Such artifices as full-cost pricing, green technology, and capitalized nature--all break up protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention which aim to meet with the needs of local ecology. Instead, they portray rhetorically a convergence of profits and greening in capitalism, which spawns a system so perfect that no one needs to be good, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s mordant words. 8 These patterns of green growth shape ecological concerns in terms of the sustainability, not of man in nature, but of capital against nature. Green growth means the glory of greed.
3. Globalization3 as a Green Regime
Globalization as the image of capitalism set out with primitive plunder, has deepened with modernization masquerade, and paves the way for green growth. Globalization3 emerges as an acceleration of historical dynamics, hastened by the advent of increasingly sophisticated and rapid communications and transportation technologies, the decline of the nation-state, the absence or ineffectiveness of democratic systems of global governance and the rise of neoliberal economic ideology (Karliner 1997: 3-4). It gains an impetus, like globalization1 and globalization2, from breakthroughs in communications and transportation technologies. The intensification of worldwide social relations by electronic-based technologies forces capital to move from market to market and then back again in the time it takes to make a keystroke.
The fierce competition among capitalists for profit maximization accelerates the breakdown of spatial barriers and the circuit of turnover period. Since competition is a relative concept, capitalists cannot but speed up the production process by consuming more materials and creating more wastes. Globalization3 confirms business practices which make frantic efforts to reduce input costs and commodity prices by constant revolutions of production techniques and methods. It provokes new needs, invents new products, creates new markets, and forges new spheres for surplus production--all providing necessary and sufficient conditions for green growth. Thus, globalization, faced with the limits of the expansionary frontier, portends the ultimate form of capitalism, that is, the triumphant capitalism which finally subjugates not only nature, but also its revenge, under the inexorable market.
Globalization3 and green growth, both denying the capitalist impasse of overaccumulation, take different shapes in different temporal/spatial conditions. The globalization3 we are now witnessing is based upon the rapid movement of corporate capitals in search of a favorable business climate to exploit human and non-human nature. Basically it is committed to the modernization masquerade, in seeking profits to the detriment of nature. In contrast, green growth reformulates the ecological modality of capitalism--from the traditional antinomy of capital-labor to the tripolar relation of capital-nature-labor--and goes into a renovation of material infrastructure to rescue a capitalism in the throes of collapse. A grassroots activist comments on the U.S. chemical giant DuPont’s claims of eco-technological leadership: You are selling poison on one counter, and you are selling the cure on the other counter. For both your motive is the same: making money (Kaliner 1997: 35). Both globalization and green growth aim to maximize the operations of transnational corporations without being impeded by ethical or moral consideration, the former by inflicting injury on nature and the latter by selling placebos for the wound.
However, it is an oversimplification to distinguish globalization3 and green growth, one preceding the other, in a sequential order. Globalization is not a disposable program of capitalism, neither is green growth a new horizon whereon to resuscitate what Joseph Schumpeter termed the creative gales of capitalism. Those who have a stake in globalization also put green growth on the agenda. It should be noted that the entrepreneurial interests of global corporations set the debate of sustainability in Agenda 21 (UN 1993) and the Earth Charter (UNCED 1993) in Rio 1992.
Globalization works in one direction: the creation of a completely liberalized world market where, as local governments and communities lose the role of social protection, global capital privatizes everything and everyone in every nook and corner of the world and finally destroys its own conditions for survival. The magic words are liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. These neoliberal principles are geared to the demands of global capital which expands desperately the narrow constraints of the economy into the uncharted territory of nature.
Yet the neoliberal creed cannot work of itself. As Polanyi argues, free market could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course. . . . laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state (Polanyi 1957: 139). As a matter of fact, our society is hardly one in which prices are set by the invisible hand: for instance, the auto-industrial economy enjoys the sprawling network of visible and hidden subsidies, from government-subsidized roads to militarily supported oil prices (Athanasiou 1996: 264).
Green growth requires an institutional framework which assures the enforcement of full-cost pricing, the trade of green technology, and the value of capitalized nature. A green regime becomes a prerequisite to the buildup of the ecological modality of globalization3--a regime which enhances functional cooperation by establishing a complex of organizations, agreements, and norms with regard to a whole set of ecological concerns, and which imposes a model of green growth, especially on the developing countries, by various means of sanctions: such as pollution quota treaties, green-earmarked aids, process-based trade restrictions, and so on.
Indeed, institutions which globalization3 makes frantic efforts to establish do to green growth what the Bretton Woods institutions did to the modernization masquerade. They commit themselves to the ultimate form of capitalism which renders a relic the principle of social protection in the face of the tremendous acceleration of capital mobility. The Uruguay Round of GATT opened the commercial possibilities of genetic manipulation by legitimizing biotech corporations to patent all kinds of life-forms. The WTO (World Trade Organization) became a bastion to deepen the liberalization of trade and secure intellectual property rights for transnational corporations. The controversial MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investments), should it be signed in its current forms, will mean the rolling back of existing environmental protection legislation by providing rights which allow transnational corporations to sue governments directly. 9
The age of corporate rule opens with globalization3 and runs headlong into green growth. Globalization establishes an institutional setting for green growth to reconstitute the material infrastructure of capitalism in impasse. With all other actors discredited--fascism, Stalinism, fundamentalism, and recently, Confucian capitalism--corporate capitalists pose themselves as the saviour of the world. With no rivalry in sight, they have become increasingly aggressive in asserting their freedoms (liberalization), overcoming government controls (deregulation), and taking over public activities (privatization) (Verzola 1998). Even the state, once regarded as a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels 1978: 475), takes a back seat to the authority of global capital. Much remains to be seen how the global fox could guard, as it claims to do, the planetary hen house (Kaliner 1997: 53).
4. Whither Capitalism?
Capitalism is both crisis-ridden and crisis-dependent. It gets over endless crises by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented (Marx & Engels 1978: 478). How far could the widening spiral go on? What if capitalism wins a complete victory everywhere? Marx’s analysis of capitalism as a self-enclosed system may not find a better opportunity for its relevance to the reality than in the contemporary global economy.
Apparently green growth helps stabilize the accumulation process over extended periods through full-cost pricing, green technology, and capitalized nature. Pollution permits, fishing quota, toxic-hauling equipment, air-restoring facilities, life-forms patents, and possibly, human organs--all these provide another way to define property rights. But, they are largely fictitious capital, whose value represents only accumulated claims, legal titles, to future production (Marx 1981: 599). Global wealth increases only in numbers, while adding no use value at all. Then how could the self-deceiving claims be realized in the last analysis? In other words, how could the investment in green growth be remunerated?
Nikolai I. Bukharin states: The gaining of extra profit means realization. Yet the essential economic fact is that we are not faced with any realization, but the realization of extra profit. That is the specific point of the phenomenon of capital expansion (Bukharin 1972: 247; italics original). The idea that capitalists do not have to sell all commodities produced to consumers--that is, the possible perpetuity of internal trade among capitalists 10 --is essential to the understanding of green growth as a feasible modality of capitalism. It means that green growth, as an outlet of overaccumulation, could serve to form new productive forces in niches that have been outside of capitalist development, at the same time producing commodities not for consumptive use values, but for exchange values in property relations. The idea also accords with Marx’s argument that the realization problem could be resolved only through an expansion of production. Under capitalism, contradictions are constantly overcome, but just as constantly reborn in more severe forms. Green growth simply moves the dilemma of the production treadmill onto an expanded scale, as does globalization.
Then how long and to what extent could capitalism go on the expanded reproduction of contradictions? 11 Fictitious capital is backed by social labor only as long as there is an expectation that capitalism will remain in good shape. Marx says facetiously: The monetary system is essentially Catholic, the credit system essentially Protestant (Marx 1981: 727). It is faith that brings salvation: [f]aith in money value as the immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its predestined disposition, faith in the individual agents of production as mere personifications of self-valorizing capital. Yet Marx goes on, the credit system is no more emancipated from the monetary system as its basis than Protestantism is from the foundations of Catholicism. Likewise, green growth, though based on faith in capitalism, demands the foundations of material base, since mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter, and clothing. 12 How could green growth keep a direct link with the needs of a sensuous creature, that is, the material processes of actual commodity production?
Fictitious capital, determined independently of the real capital value it represents, demands its own share of surplus value. It follows that monetary society weighs heavily upon labour society (Altvater 1997: 59). 13 In other words, the more successful green growth becomes, the more it devours its own conditions to feed the monetary society. Accordingly, the capitalist endgame will begin with devaluation. Harvey notes, If overaccumulation takes on such surface forms of appearance, then we can expect its nemesis--devaluation--to strike in the same tangible ways (Harvey 1982: 196). The bubble inevitably bursts.
In order to avoid a sudden devaluation, capitalism allows multiple and minor adjustments over the lifetime of fixed assets as well as labor, producing what Marx calls the accumulation of misery which corresponds to the accumulation of wealth. 14 The Asian Contagion (Newsweek 3/2/98: 56), the recent financial turmoil caused by excessive liquidity, gives a preliminary warning to the global glut, inherent in capitalism’s laws of motion. One may hear a whisper from hell that war is the splendid and immediate means of devaluation through destruction (Harvey 1982: 329). Capitalism, while its technologies enable people to take sudden leaps into modernity, may promote the renewal of once-forbidden barbarisms.
Globalization3 augments the globalization of ecological crisis, accompanied by a dazzling globalization of prosperity side by side with a depressing globalization of poverty. The principle of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization alienates even further the rights of local communities and removes all remaining ecological limits and social constraints, all only for the glory of greed. The capitalist endgame looms large as the first fully globalized corporations run the first fully globalized markets. The oxymoronic coinage of green growth claims to be capitalism with a human face, concealing its brute aspects behind a green mask.
5. Concluding Remarks
This paper has examined the consistent logic of capitalism in terms of its ecological modality, while periodizing the historical process into three distinct stages--primitive plunder, modernization masquerade, and green growth. The processes of colonization, neo-colonization, and recolonization show the way capitalists nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The rule of transition expresses the limits of the geographical extension which transforms the ecological modality of capitalism from immediate extraction to product-cycle mechanism, and to intensive exploitation. Green growth is distinguished from its predecessors in terms of the causality between economic profits and ecological debacles. Critics of the functionalist or systemic theorization take issue with the idea of turning points between distinct stages. According to them, a logic based on arbitrarily derived guiding principles may obfuscate a more evolutionary interpretation of history.
To complement the drawback of stage periodization, my paper posits globalization as a long-standing process, always implicit in the nature of capitalism. It is capital, the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society (Marx 1973: 107), that aspires to the global expansion and the glory of greed in green growth. Yet the evolutionary exposition also has its own trap. The fallacy of ahistorical (or less historical) essentialism reveals itself in either of two theses--Fukuyama’ s end-of-history thesis that the present is forever or a vulgar Marxist version that the future is a foregone conclusion (Hoogvelt 1997: 11).
However, the future is not inscribed in the present, though constrained by the past. Capitalism as the defining institution certainly disciplines all dissident voices to the tune of the invisible hand. But this does not mean that capitalism can be comprehended in terms of a single set of its imperative categories which remain unchanged from its inception to its death. There is always a rift which somehow escape[s] the dominant logic, the disciplinary apparatus, the dead weight of history, the problematics of linguistic incarceration or whatever (Harvey 1996: 96), or a surplus which remains outside of the wide sweep of the dominant paradigm.
Experiential agencies rooted in local realities retain transformative potential even after all subversive elements have been subdued under the colossal authority. Issue-oriented struggles against corporate-caused ecological problems may ultimately be a losing battle. Still the planetary awareness, caused by the process of globalization, may help establish a global solidarity, an effort which could reverse the negative trend. Against capitalism in its highest development, friend is what is left over when foe is subtracted.
I am deeply grateful to my advisor Richard P. Hiskes and my editor Sydney Plum for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.Notes
Note 1: According to an administrator of the UNDP (United Nations Development Program), Today, the net worth of the world’s 358 richest people is equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 percent of the world’s population--2.3 billion people. See James Gustave Speth (1996), Global Inequality: 358 Billionaires vs. 2.3 Billion People, New Perspectives Quarterly 13.4: 33. Back.
Note 2: D. K. Fieldhouse says succinctly, Colonialism was not a preference but a last resort (Fieldhouse 1973: 462). There was no reason to impose direct control on the colony which once established a legal framework to maintain capitalist relations for the market. Global institutions--such as GATT, IMF, World Bank, and G7--set the modernization recipe on the rest of the world. The idea of modernization was a towering monument which the South ran after in the lathered pursuit of profit as the ultimate and the sole purpose of mankind. Back.
Note 3: John Passacantando & Andre Carothers (1995), Crisis? What Crisis?: The Ozone Backlash, The Ecologist 25.1: 5-7. An automobile manufacturers’ association spokesman even argues that [t]he effects of ozone are not that serious. He goes on, I hate to say that. But what we’re talking about is a temporary loss in lung function of 20 to 30 percent. That’s not really a health effect. See Al Kamen (1997), Lost in the Ozone, The Washington Post, February 3. Back.
Note 4: The precautionary prevention means that polluters should prove the non-harmful effects (including the unknown probability of risk) of a production process. In contrast, the end-of-pipe solution refers to the burden-bearing based on the statistical risk of known probability, ignoring the production process. As regards the science wars, see Stanley Aronowitz (1996), The Politics of the Science Wars, Social Text 46/47.1/2: 177-97; and Tom Athanasiou (1995), Science Wars? . . . A Book, a Conference, and a Bit of a Polemic . . . , Socialist Review 25.1: 17-23. Back.
Note 5: For example, several of General Electric’s factories have been dangerous sources of air pollution, but G.E. is now among the top manufactures of air pollution equipment. Westinghouse, which once thrived on nuclear weapons contract, now competes for Department of Energy bids to clean up the radioactive dumps the nuclear industry left behind. See Karliner (1997), 35. Back.
Note 6: Speech delivered on June 8, 1993, at the Founding Conference of the Environmental Business Council of the U.S. Quoted in Joshua Karliner (1994), The Environmental Industry: Profiting from Pollution, The Ecologist 24.2: 62. Back.
Note 7: For a recent story with regard to the alleged trade of human organs, see CNN’s China Denies Trade in Human Organs, in http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9802/24. Back.
Note 8: See Choruses from The Rock, in T. S. Eliot (1970), T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World), 160. Eliot writes, They [people] constantly try to escape/ From the darkside and within/ By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. Back.
Note 9: For more in details, see Globalization ’98 Schedule, article no. 27087 in owner-imap@chumbly.math.missouri.edu. Back.
Note 10: Marx’s formula of the expanded reproduction in Capital, vol. 2 (Marx 1978) shows an ideal equilibrium between the rate of growth of demand for consumer goods (department I) and that of constant capital (department II). I agree with Ernest Mandel that Marx’s basic assumption implies that the conditions of equilibrium are marginal exceptions to the normal conditions of disequilibrium. See Mandel’s Introduction to Capital, vol. 2, 31. Back.
Note 11: As Bukharin stresses, the process of expanded reproduction is a process of the expanded reproduction of [capitalist] contradictions (Bukharin 1972: 264; italics original). Back.
Note 12: The quotation comes from Engels who summed up Marx’s contribution at his graveside: Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. (Marx & Engels 1978: 681). Back.
Note 13: According to the Bank for International Settlements, the quantities of financial transactions on the international gold, currency and money markets exceed $1200 billion daily, whilst around $10 billion per day would suffice for the circulation of world trade (Altvater 1997: 55). Back.
Note 14: Marx adds, Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital (Marx 1976: 799). Back.
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