It is a common assumption in American ecopolitical discourse, it seems, that those who claim to be either critical of, or indeed steadfastly against capitalism are therefore, by apparent technicality, promoting socialism, anarchism, or some other non-capitalist ism. I seek to destroy that concept in this short essay.
Capitalism is not just an economic system, nor a socially constructed dogma, or an evil system created by greedy men bent on hoarding the Earth's sources of capital accumulation. It is far more powerful than that, and I use that term power in the Foucauldian sense. That is, power is a product of knowledge, just as surplus profit (capital) is a product of the capitalist mode of production. Jason W. Moore (1) tells us capitalism is a system for organizing all of nature; it is a world-ecological paradigm unto itself. Power is organized knowledge. Capitalism informs nearly every decision the modern urban (and to a large extent exurban, suburban and rural) human makes every day, from the decision of whether or not to buy the local eggs or the cheap eggs, to whether or not a person should pursue their dream of higher education. Much of it is conscious and arguably most of it is a mix of subconscious and completely unintentional, with no rectifying in sight.
Professors Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins (2) remind us that the human species is "obviously not in equilibrium with its environment. We are a young species, a scant 5,000 generations out from the savannas where we took shape, some 500 generations into agriculture and a mere twenty generations or so afflicted by capitalism." One does not have to have a PhD in biology, ecology, bioethics, or environmental science to say that most of the degradation visited by humanity upon the Earth has in fact happened during that span of time that saw twenty generations of agriculture. Karl Marx was already deep into this realization toward the end of his life. The point here is that capitalism, as a world-system, or to stay with Moore's perspective, a world-ecology, is so vastly much more than the economic arrangement that "capitalists" have worked out among themselves. It is scarcely possible to make the choice to be anything but capitalist in the post-modern world. Even individual nation-states that have resisted capitalism have themselves either had to become willingly dominated by it as a world-ecology or forced to live in a self-imposed exile from the global market, like a North Korea. Capitalism organizes knowledge, because it actually is the system that decides by way of its dominant knowledge framework, for better or for worse, what research projects get funded, what university programs get cut or extended, how many homes get built, how many schools get closed, how much to pay people who clean bathrooms AND the people who's job it is to profit off of the low hourly wage they get, and on and on the list goes.
All one has to do is attempt to think of one thing in your daily life that is not directly or indirectly related to the system of capitalism. I wish you luck. But that's not it. There's more to this story. If we are to move forward with this logic, namely capitalism as more then an economic system for the delivery of commodities; capitalism as world-ecology, we can then state that some alternative massive meta-system is probably not going to be any better. Even if socialism or anarchism were better, the chance of shutting down the omnipotence of the capitalist world-ecology at the humanity level is about as likely as engaging in an ethical conversation with the director of labor relations for Tommy Hillfiger. What is much more logical, and indeed practical, is to engage in a humanity-level re-examination of the underlying assumptions we have as animals on this planet; re-examining the binary understanding of the human-nature nexus that has been force-fed to us by the captains of industry; re-examining how knowledge is organized to suit the system's needs over those of humanity and the Earth system we all depend upon.
What is being argued here is that capitalism has been, for the bulk of world-history since the long sixteenth century (roughly late 1590s-1700) the dominant knowledge framework of the increasingly urban human. Taking it down is not an option. Reforming it is not an option either, in my opinion; not enough, at least, to adequately deal with the global problematics of humanity. Therefore, socialism, anarchism, or whatever other ism one may want to suggest, I argue is of no consequence. Beyond capitalism? I'm not sure we can get there until humanity is on board.
(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr799S-caHs&noredirect=1
(2) Lewontin, Richard and Richard Levins. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health. (New York: MRP: 2007), 162
2 comments:
I think you're going to run into trouble with this argument until you're anle to effectively address Datwin/natural selection as a widely contributing cause of the human traits you attribute solely to capitalists! Your theory isn't off, I think it's just incomplete.
Hey Dean. Yeah, you are right. I decided not to completely go down that road yet, because it is quite a can o' worms. :) I'm also just getting familiar with this whole capitalism as world-ecology discourse. However, I'm not really arguing - or at least I didn't intend to - that capitalists are all to blame. I am more saying that the capitalist system itself is what has to be taken to task. Everyone is a capitalist when we are all living under the tyranny of the capitalistic framework of knowledge. As for Darwin, one of the biggest things nobody knows is how much of an influence Darwin was on Marx, and even more so on Engels. Darwin's early writing, ultimately leading toward the Origin writings, actually dealt heavily with the effect of man on the health of the soil! Also Justus von Liebig. I don't actually think that Darwin's theory of natural selection goes against what I'm saying. The way natural selection happens is not un-reflective of the way in which species live on the planet. What separates us from many of our other animal relatives is that we have the ability to change our behavior to go against the natural grain if we must.
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