Can We Afford Capitalism?

1. In many of your texts relatively to energy crisis, the Hubbert curve and the relevant literature around the peak oil theory is mentioned. At what extent do you believe that there is objectivity in this theory or is it an ideological construct of the scientific lobby for the management of energy crisis? Do you believe that something similar happens with the literature concerning climate change?

 

A. This is conceptually loaded question and so, before I answer, it would be wise of me to take a step back and review the concepts used in the question-- objectivity, ideology, scientific lobby, etc.--and to ask some questions of my own of you. You seem to think that there is something suspicious about “the scientific lobby” constructing “ideological constructs” instead of objective theories to defend their interests as managers of the “peak oil energy crisis” or the “climate change crisis.” You are right, but your suspicions and scepticism rest on the ability to make a clear distinction between objectivity (true claims that are products of unbiased research) and ideology (false claims that are motivated by selfish interests) in science and between a scientific lobby and something like an unstated, unbiased scientific “truth commission.” But can these distinctions be clearly made? If so, how? What happens to your suspicions and scepticism, if the distinctions cannot be clearly made?

To begin to answer these questions we need to get back to basics and review the notions of science and knowledge. The view that scientific knowledge is the product of a disembodied and progressive “General Intellect” operating according to a priori laws of reason (be they inductively or hypothetico-deductively based) was abandoned decades ago. Since the 1930s, at least, the view of science and scientific knowledge has increasing been “socialized.” What now is standardly called scientific knowledge is an “immense accumulation” (to paraphrase Marx) of propositions and know-how routines produced in a huge number of sites by credentialed members of a so-called “scientific community,” with the academic laboratory and classroom and the peer-reviewed scientific journal as their paradigmatic institutions.

How has scientific knowledge been socially produced? In my view, there are two prominent models of science that have developed, echoing different aspects of Solomon’s House in Bacon’s “New Atlantis” that eventually inspired the formation of one of the first scientific societies, The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, in 1660.

One, the “communist,” takes science be an exemplary institution of cooperative labor whose products are openly available to humanity and especially to other scientists to continue the knowledge accumulation process. It is the perfect realization of “the common producing the common” that Hardt and Negri call “biopolitical production” in Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri 2009).

The other is the “neoliberal” model that sees science as a competitive struggle of scientists (individually and in temporary league with other scientists) to gain wealth, fame and priority for their “discoveries.” Scientific knowledge, in this view, is the set of propositions and know-how routines that are the “winners” of the struggle in the scientific marketplace. In the past this “marketplace of ideas” view of science was taken in a metaphorical way, but since the 1980s this “market” view is rapidly becoming literally true, because increasingly scientific knowledge is being commodified and considered “intellectual property.” (For a recent history of science based on this approach see (Fara 2009) and for a critique of this view see (Federici and Caffentzis 2011))

I disagree with both these models of science. As with every other productive organization in a capitalist society, science is a contested terrain on many levels. For example, who is in and who is out of the scientific “community”? What constitutes a professional scientist? Is a fisherman or fisherwoman an ichthyologist simply because s/he knows a lot about the behaviour of fishes or must s/he have a degree from a graduate program in marine biology? Is the common knowledge of the medicinal powers of certain plants possessed by mothers in Southeast Nigeria scientific knowledge or must they study biochemistry and express their knowledge in dissertations written in an accredited university for it to be scientific?

Whatever the answer to such questions, it is clear that professional scientists are wage-workers, for the most part, and do not control the means of production; (although there are capitalists among them like Craig Venter, whose companies have patented hundreds of human genes). As with every other worker, their work products are shaped by both the demands of the capitalist environment they inhabit (e.g., what companies and government agencies are funding and/or hiring this year) and the struggles they embark on to define an autonomous space of action for themselves and their fellows. Sometimes the struggles are open, e.g., in the anti-nuclear power movement there were many “traitors” and “whistle-blowers” who revealed from the inside the dangers of the nuclear power cycle, from beginning to end. In most cases, however, it is not easy to distinguish the lineaments of struggle in the edifice of science, but it is there, just as it is difficult to see the struggle along the assembly line in the shiny automobile emerging from the line and awaiting in the showroom to be sold...unless you look carefully under the hood to find its traces! The history of this hidden class struggle in science remains to be written.

Scientific knowledge is the accumulated pool of propositions and know-how routines produced by scientists that are open to appropriation by those who have the capacity to decode them and, increasingly, the wealth to purchase them. This knowledge is not an “objective” mirror of Nature, it is simply the accredited product of this social production process. Thus, there is no clear distinction between true unbiased objectivity in science and false interest-driven ideological interpretations. It is simply that some propositions and routines of know-how are more central to the present field of knowledge than others and centrality is a continually shifting position. Thus, for example, “The Second Law of Thermodynamcs” or “The Entropy Law” refers to a limit in the transformation of heat into work (appropriately defined) in closed systems. It is a proposition that has been close to the center of the contemporary field of scientific knowledge for almost a century and a half. But that does not mean that its interpretation, both technologically and politically, and its use in support for a political-technological end is not ideological. The Entropy Law has been used by elitists to argue for the necessity of preserving the class privileges of the rich (Henry Adams) and it has been used by ecologists to call for conservation of resources (Jeremy Rifkin). Similarly, the finitude of the fossil fuel in the earth might have a central position in contemporary geology (after all, up until the early modern era precious minerals were seen to be able to re-grow like vegetables once they were mined), but that does not mean that the use of this finitude to justify bio-fuel or solar panel production is “objective.” Finally, the climate change hypothesis is undoubtedly based on certain well attested-to processes like the “green house effect,” the key question is whether this effect will lead to the consequences predicted in the time frame claimed.

After all, the inevitability of death sets a limit for each of us, but that does not stop a potentially infinite number of conflicting interpretations of this inevitability from being proffered that can enhance one or another interpreter’s power in this life!

Consequently, I would share your scepticism of Peak Oil enthusiasts who see in the price increases of petroleum over the next century and a half as an inevitable outcome and I would try to find the class motivations that animate their discourse (and seem to make many of them blind to M. King Hubbert’s completely mistaken projection of nuclear power development in his famous 1956 paper entitled “Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels”). What I have been doing in my writings is defetishizing and denaturalizing the Peak Oil hypothesis. I have not done this, however, to simply fetishize and natualize my own position on the transition from a capitalist energy economy pivoted on petroleum. I argue for a transition that leaves workers with more control of the means of energy production (with the meta-level assurance that whatever the flaws of working class power, its increase will be better than what the intensification of capital’s power has to offer). Does that make me a member of the anti-capitalist lobby? And if so, am I biased in making this response?

 

 

2. In debates taking place at local level in Greece there is a lot of discussion for the upcoming local struggles concerning the management of energy, the economic crisis and the impending social restructuring. For example, we might see struggles on the occasion of the rise in prices of petrol, electricity, heating, etc. At the same time, announcements take place for large development projects and investments based on the need for profitability for the exit from the crisis, seeking the local social consensus. Also, we know that similar issues arise in other countries, particularly in the developing world with the emergence of movements like the MST, Via Campesina, etc. How can all these local struggles and their claims be communicated and understood as part of the growing social movement?

 

A. The path to a “worldwide energy revolution” is neither simple nor straightforward. The local forms of resistance will not automatically accumulate around some political node. Moreover, there are many divisions in the movements aiming to wrest control of the exploitation of oil and gas resources from the energy corporations.

And, unfortunately, no “crisis” (whether geo-physical or financial) will be the deus ex machina that will recompose the resistance and guide the course of the struggle to a victorious end. For, as you point out, capital still has the social-economic structure in place to create large development projects around the world and use the present crisis to attempt a leap in the accumulation process, even though it is facing a tremendous variety of oppositional forces, from local communities (e.g., in the Niger Delta and the Amazon basin) claiming the collective ownership of the oil and gas below their feet as well as Islamic movements that claim for the umma a divinely ordained ownership of oil reserves located in Islamic countries from Algeria to Indonesia. These struggles constitute a “political Hubbert’s curve,” i.e. a price function measuring the intensity of the struggle that is not as well-behaved as Hubbert’s old bell curve. These struggles are being prodded into existence by the energy corporations’ search for new sources of fossil fuel at the geological and political “margins” of the planet (from the deep ocean floor, to the Arctic, to tar-sands, to the Amazon).

The confrontation between a very dispersed oppositional field and a highly organized form of capital is having a major impact on the price of oil. Let’s remember that good part of the price of oil is made up of rents and transferred value, but the cost of production includes an ever-increasing military (and legal) expenditure that must be factored in when assessing the cost of production. Consider the case of planning for a pipeline in Western Canada. The moment indigenous people began to raise objections to the project, a wave caution passed over investors and their advisors. “Native land claims scare the hell out of investors,” Robert Johnson, who belongs to senior management at Eurasia Group, which claims to be the “world’s leading global political risk research and consulting firm,” recently told an Alberta energy conference, according to an Edmonton Journal report. “My level of confidence [in the project] has gone down quite a bit, unfortunately.” (Dembicki 2011). True, there is no empirical index that I know of (yet) that could measure the impact of indigenous people’s struggles is having on the oil and gas industry, but there is no doubt in my mind (and in the minds of people like Robert Johnson) that it is enormous and growing larger by the year.

A little reflection on the economic consequences of the political resistance that the oil corporations are encountering is worthwhile. Since it is in this matter that Nassau Senior got the best of Marx by soberly recognizing capital’s essential reliance on the means of violence long after the original primitive accumulation. For Senior claimed that a soldier who, because of the “unsettled state of the country,” must stand guard over the fields is as productive as the farmers that sow and reap. The soldier is as crucial as the stoop laborer, his gun is as essential as the hoe, Senior claims. Now it might be true that “you can't dig coal with bayonets”, but what if it were the case that you cannot dig coal without them, wouldn't bayonets and their wielders be as productive as shovels and coal miners?

Marx's retort to Senior displays one of his great failures of categorization that unfortunately was characteristic of much of his work concerning the concepts of productive and unproductive labor. He writes:  "The soldier belongs to the incidental expenses of production, in the same way as a large part of the unproductive labourers who produce nothing themselves, either spiritual or material, but who are useful and necessary only because of faulty social relations--they owe their existence to social evils" (Marx 1963: 289). If the "faulty social relations and evils" disappear "the material conditions of production, the conditions of agriculture as such, remain unchanged." Is it because military presence is not part of the "normal conditions of production" and so it does not effect the "labor-time social necessary" which determines the value of the commodities produced under the shadow of the gun, that military expenditures (e.g., the wages of the soldier and the cost of his/her rifle) are incidental?” But what if the “faulty social relations and evils” were simply capitalism itself? What if the armed force’s “fire and blood” that was required to enclose some territory is still needed long after the fences were put up to keep out the displaced ones? What if the “norm” of capitalist social relations is never accepted as “normal” by large parts of the ones whose land was enclosed and community destroyed? Capital’s dream of becoming a “second nature” is increasingly turning into a nightmare especially throughout the oil producing territories of the planet.

Certainly capital has long ago reconciled itself to its contingency and historical abnormality. But it has also socialized many of the costs of production, especially the cost of military support to keep control of the terrain and flow of oil and natural gas around the planet. This socialization process is a bit like the “gift” the British state gave to capitalist in India in the form of military expenditures in the mid-19^th century. Many anti-imperialists of the 19^th century like Marx criticized Britain’s military investment in the Opium Wars as being “wasteful.”  But Marx also realized that this critique was pointless, since the protection of the opium trade (and the financing of the Opium Wars) was being paid for by tax money, i.e., it was a “gift” from the British proletariat to capital. Today the hundreds of military bases from Colombia to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Kuwait are the US proletariat’s “gift” (or, perhaps, human sacrifice) to the oil and gas gods--the energy corporations that still post the largest income of any in the world (dwarfing the revenues of exemplary “cognitive capitalist” firms like Microsoft and Cisco included).

 

3. In your text "Everything must change so everything can remain the same" you mention that one of the risks that capitalism has to face during the transition from oil to alternative sources is “to blocking any revolutionary, anti capitalist turn in the transition”. Are there signs of a potential non-capitalist management for the alternative sources of energy, when expert knowledge is needed for the construction of these facilities and large funding to construct them? Would you like to give us some examples? Will the leading role in this march of events be played by the local communities or by the renewable energy workers?

 

A. In responding to your question, I luckily have in my hands a recently published book edited by Kolya Abramsky, Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World (Abramsky 2010). It is literally an encyclopaedia of energy transition politics and struggle that lists some alternative energy projects and evaluates their anti-capitalist potential throughout the world.

You are right, many alternative energy projects require substantial sums of money and technical knowledge. Wind turbines and solar panels producing electricity are not cheap. For example, a commercial 2MW wind turbine costs approximately $3 million while a smaller 10kW turbine (appropriate for powering a home) is about $40,000 while a single 225 Watt solar electricity panel can be about $600 and it might cost $20,000 to power a home with these panels. This cost does not include repairs (turbine gear boxes are notorious weak spots and repairing solar electricity panels is not a job for the technophobe). We should also remember that the longevity of wind turbines is about 20 years and that of solar panels about 30 years and that the irregularity of the winds and of the sunshine that might require a hook up to the grid.

There are a couple of strategies for dealing with the problem you mention that are described in Kolya Abramsky’s book: (1) to devise a non-capitalist way to appropriate the monetary investment and technical expertise on the level that the contemporary alternative energy industry enjoys, (2) to create a way of generating alternative energy at a much lower cost than the industrial average and with a diffusion of de-expertized (my coin word) knowledge.

A good example of the first model is presented by the Yansa Group (cf. Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution, pp. 698-627). They have launched a very elaborate structure that includes (i) a “global foundation” that would negotiate with communities that were rich in alternative energy resources (especially wind) to provide the finances and technical expertise to build “large-scale production for the grid” on the basis of terms that were dramatically better than capitalist firms, (ii) a “community interest company that will develop technological expertise, undertake research and development on renewable energy, and manufacture and sell renewable energy equipment,” and (iii) “a low-profit limited liability company” that would be a mutual fund financing (i) and (ii) and supported by investors (institutional and individual) that “are interested in making a positive social and environmental impact through their investments, while obtaining a [low] return.”

In a nutshell, the Yansa Group is attempting to use capitalist institutions-- foundations, community interest companies, mutual funds--against themselves to build a network of communities that eventually will constitute a “community-led transition to renewable energies, and therefore to a more fair, equitable, and sustainable economy.” The jury is still out as to whether this “Trojan Horse” approach to using the energy transition for anti-capitalist ends will work. However, the continuing pressure of the crisis on profitability, the halting pace of the “Green New Deal” and the dynamic entrance of Chinese capital into the wind power industry are putting the prospects for the strategy (1) in peril.

A good example of strategy (2) is from your own country, the FARMA collective in Athens, that presented its experience with building cheap wind turbines in Greece and in Chiapas, Mexico. The collective has an article describing its activities in Abramsky’s book (pp. 600-607). FARMA is one of many initiatives throughout the planet to try to escape the constraints of money and expert knowledge that are posed by the adaptation of alternative energy production. The path involved learning how do build and install “Do It Yourself” (DIY) wind turbines after many experiments and with the help of the Escanda collective in Spain. This knowledge made it possible to use spare parts and cheaper materials to cut the cost of the wind turbines. FARMA estimates, for example, “a handmade DIY approach to the construction of the turbine runner and casing of the 8kW generator can reduce costs significantly, typically a savings of up to 10,000 Euros compared to products made in the US or Europe” (p. 604).

Another aspect of the FARMA effort is to “de-expertize” technical knowledge and make it broadly available by organizing workshops both in Athens and Chiapas on building and maintaining wind turbines with the intent of making the transmission of technical knowledge anti-hierarchical.

Although this DIY approach to the energy transition has an obvious connection with anti-capitalist ideals (autonomy, egalitarianism, solidarity), it has its limits, however, both in terms of its distribution and intensity.

The distribution problem is rooted in the fact that though some places are rich in wind and solar radiation, while others are not. How is the uneven “natural resource” endowment to be equitably distributed in a non-capitalistic manner? Should there be regional electrical grids? How should the transmission of electricity from high wind and solar areas to low ones be “compensated”? Should it operate on a gift economy basis?

There are also energy intensity limits that contemporary DIY technology faces (either happily or with resignation) that make certain forms of production inoperative. This might not be so bad with forms of productions like aluminium smelting that are inherently polluting and ought to be severely restricted, but there are forms of technology that many would not happily part with. For example, there is now an intense interest in using computer technology to solve many of the planning as well as design problems of a post-capitalist world. But computers do not run on “air” (as they used to say), they require immense amounts of electricity at the moment and this requirement cannot obviously be met by the use of DIY technology.

The final question you pose cannot be given an either/or answer, of course. As countless studies of the revolutionary factory workers of the 19^th and 20^th century have shown, there is no political separation between the workers’ community and the factory. The success of the great sit-down occupations of the factories in Detroit depended on the support of the workers’ communities (especially the women) and, vice versa, the urban rebellions of the 1960s in Detroit depended upon the active participation of auto-factory workers. I am sure that similar coordination will be the rule in the coming transition.

 

4. For the majority of the energy workers’ unions (although there are exceptions) issues such as climate change do not exist or they are discussed reluctantly in terms of job security. Which will be the organizational form that will address issues such as climate change and the depletion of natural resources? Meaning, which form of social organization could express a fruitful critique of capitalism with perspectives of social autonomy that gives answers to ecological and social issues? Is it something that will come up from local struggles, neighbourhood assemblies and through procedures that will claim the management of energy resources in the areas where the struggle takes place or this can only happen after a general awareness of a common workers’ identity and organization into unions both for energy workers and workers in green jobs in general and from the denials that arise against green capitalism?

 

A. The situation we find with the issues of climate change and natural resources is typical of our era: there is now a recognition of the existence of a “planetary commons” (the atmosphere, the subsoil, the open oceans, the electro-magnetic spectrum, the genome) posing immense promise and at the same time apocalyptic threats. I put the phrase “planetary commons” in quotation marks, however, simply because there is no planetary community that can reasonably claim to have effective control of and a mutually agreed upon access to these realms.

Indeed, the planetary commons is a commons in name only. It certainly is not yet an anti-capitalist commons, since there is no anti-capitalist global community to organize access to it. The only organizations that claim and act on this right are organizations like the United Nations (and its subsidiaries like the World Bank and IMF) that are direct tools of capital and of the most powerful nation states. In other words, if we survey the field of forces surrounding the issues you mentioned, we do not find an alternative organizational form that can claim legitimacy for the planetary realms. Capitalist relations of ownership and rent are now pervading the field, but they face an enormous resistance that has not coalesced in one organization or organizational form. Indeed, much of the open resistance is in the form of less powerful nation states, like that of Bolivia, and local communities that are demanding a greater return from the transferred value and rents that ought to be coming to their citizens and commoners.

I see neither a trade union of workers producing transitional energy technology nor a network of local assemblies self-consciously taking control of the planetary realms mentioned. I am keeping my eyes open.

 

 

 

5.  Which is the prospect of a solid labour consciousness among workers in renewable and generally in the green jobs, to emerge, since these workers are far different from the classic workers who formed the trade unions both for the coal and the oil industry?

 

A. You seem to believe that there is a one-to-one relationship between the technical composition of work and the political composition of the workers. True, there is much insight in showing, as Sergio Bologna did in the early 1970s, the relationship between factories composed of largely skilled workers and Council Communism movements in the early 20^th century (Bologna 1972).

But there is no given technical composition that guarantees a “solid labor consciousness.” For example, does such a consciousness develop in big or little factories? Capitalists were convinced in the 16^th and 17^th centuries that big factories would generate this mental virus. And for many centuries capitalists were very worried by efforts to centralize masses of workers in the same venue for fear of their revolutionary potential and there were laws in England, for example, limiting the number of workers per enterprise. The most famous one being the Weavers’ Act of 1555 which thwarted experimenting with enlarging the factory system. This  was “discountenanced by the Government...because the collection of large numbers of workpeople under one roof provided them with the opportunity for combination and insubordination” (Clark 1982: 99-100). But in the face of a continual theft of raw materials and direct appropriation taking place in cottage industry and in the customary forms of manufacture, capitalists decided that large factories enclosing and keeping under surveillance hundreds and even thousands of workers was more profitable even given their primordial anxiety concerning the revolutionary consequences.

However, with the defeat/accommodation of the great revolutionary movements of the late 18^th and early 19^th century, this primordial capitalist fear of bringing together too many workers began to lessen. Factories were enlarged and new political compositions developed from the Luddites to the Chartists to the International Working Men’s Association, stirring revolutionary forebodings in the ruling classes.  But for the rest of the 19^th century capitalists experimented with “democracy” and working class suffrage to create mass workers who had no “solid labor consciousness” and would even vote to keep their oppressors in political power--a paradox that neither Aristotle nor Plato could conceive of! The capitalists’ fear of democracy was only to be re-awakened again in the 1970s that led to formation of the Rust Belt from Yafnet in Thessaloniki to the River Rouge plant in Detroit.

Thus, whatever correlations exist between the technical and political composition of workers, they are far from hard-and-fast. That is my general response to your question, but I should point out that the work in the construction of solar panels and wind turbines require workers whose characteristics are not so different from the classic “mass workers” we remember in the assembly lines of the 1930s. It is not clear that there is a major difference between work in the production of wind turbines and work in the production of autos and airplanes. True, workers in the “green energy” equipment sector might support “green” political programs in the way that workers in armament plants might be tempted to support militarist policies, but there is no necessary connection. What is also true is that workers in the renewable energy equipment sector need to take care to not be used in undermining the power of workers in the coal and oil sectors to make the capitalists to pay for a transition out of their industries. As we have seen with the “We won’t pay for your crisis!” movement of the last few years, it is not easy to make capital pay.

 

6. In the period we live, capitalism is trying to expand into new fields establishing new enclosures (e.g., wind, solar, genes). Many of these are associated with the much-advertised green development. Do you think that the trend of green capitalism is a new cycle of profitability that could lead the system to an exit from its crisis or is it more an ideology that is trying to incorporate environmental movements and struggles so as to ensure social consensus?

 

A. An entrance to answering this question is to remember the hype of the nuclear energy industry in the 1970s. It was to become the vertex of the vector that was to get capitalism out of its crisis then. During that time there were predictions that there would be about a thousand nuclear plants in the US and a proportionate numbers of plants in Europe and parts of the Third World by the beginning of the 21^st century. Certainly the investment in the construction of plants and the accompanying fixed capital as well as the social control mechanisms that would be “required” were seen to be, by many, the basis of an exit from the crisis of that time.

This was not to be. The ideology of the nuclear energy industry was not able to convince millions of workers (especially those who lived near them) of the “safety” of the plants. Nor were they able to convince thousands of investors that capital in general needed the huge investment nuclear energy plants and the long-term returns were attractive given the risk, especially as the anti-nuclear power movement began to take off. True, the nuclear power industry tremendously enhanced the police powers of the state, but it also created concentrations of high organically composed capital that was hostage to class struggles. Putting together all these elements, the Reagan Administration decided to revive the oil path to overcome the crisis instead of taking the nuclear road. The conspicuous sign of the change in strategy was the taking down of the solar panels on the roof of the White House in 1986, But the real sign was the Reagan Administration’s secret interventions in the Iran-Iraq War in 1985 and its funding of oil prospecting in the US.

This reversal of the nuclear power juggernaut shows that even energy policies with enormous state and capital support are vulnerable, if the class forces evoked create “bad surprises.” That is why it is important to speak of “the work/energy crisis” and not simply of “the energy crisis,” for two reasons: (1) forms of energy are crucial to capitalism only if they can increase the absolute and relative surplus value in general, and (2) forms of energy are more or less vulnerable to historically specifiable working class struggle.

Will the same thing happen to “green” that happened to “nuclear”? It is not clear to me that the kind of investment and subsidies that the nuclear energy industry received from the US federal government over the years has been devoted to the alternative, renewable, transitional technology during the Obama regime. We have to remember that the condition for the profitability of a high-tech firm is dependent not so much upon the capacity to exploit its immediate workers (however intelligent, creative, and cooperative they are), but it must also be able to demonstrate that what it produces is functional to capital in general in order for the firm to receive surplus value transferred from the rest of the system. The nuclear power industry proved unable to demonstrate this functionality to most of the capitalist class over the long haul. The Fukushima nuclear catastrophe’s $300 billion price tag for the reconstruction costs is only a small part of the true cost, given the enormous disturbance of production throughout Japan and the state’s loss of ideological legitimacy. In other words, there is no inevitability about “the green deal.”

The place to look for an answer concerning the viability of a “green deal” is in China. Although the Obama Administration has not been able to impose a “green deal,” it appears that China’s government is investing and subsidising “green” technology to a much greater proportion than the US. Chinese investment in clean energy soared by more than 50% in 2009 to reach $34.6 billion while total U.S. investment that year was about half that at $18.6 billion, the first time in five years that the world's largest economy lost the top spot in renewable energy technology (Tandon 2010).

 

 

7. We believe that there is a growing alarmist literature for the definition and the management of the so-called environmental refugees, which separates the issue of immigration from its social and political implications. Do you believe that this is a trend of depoliticisation of immigration is similar to the rhetoric of peak oil and climate change to manage the energy crisis?

 

A. The “management” of environmental refugees that leads to the “depoliticisation” you mention is a special case of the capitalist class’ general refusal to assume the cost of the proletariat’s reproduction (and the consequences of its deficiencies) especially in the neoliberal era. In this regard, we should remember an even earlier distinction between “political” and “economic” migrant that has been at the center of the legal and political discourse concerning immigration certainly since the end of WWII. We all recognize the bogus nature of the older distinction--for in general the distinction in a capitalist society between politics and economics obfuscates their identity, given the all-pervasive character of class struggle and the necessity of adopting a class optics to analyze economic categories (like wages, profits, rents and interest) as well as political notions (from states to commons, from revolution to counter-revolution, from fascism to anarchism). Adding to this obfuscation between “political” and “economic” an additional one, “environmental,” is to create a further confusion of responsibility that is, however, typical of capitalism which is continually transforming value from one end of the system to the other, making those capitalists who exploit the most keep the least of the surplus value their workers’ create and those workers who create the most value appear to be the least valuable.

The analogy that you make between the politics of immigration and that surrounding climate change and peak oil is important. In all these discourses, there is a continually ricocheting between denial (“there is no climate change,” “there is enough oil in the ground for a thousand years,” “there are no environmental refugees”) and apocalypse (“the earth will heat up so much the human ecological niche will be eliminated,” “the price of oil will be $100 a gallon,” “there will be billions of environmental refugees clamouring to come into Europe”). Consequently, it is important to continually defetishize and denaturalize when dealing with these issues, to avoid these antinomies.  For it is no longer possible to speak of “brute facts” when dealing with geology and meteorology. There has been a fundamental erasure recently of the fact/value, natural/artificial and subject/object distinctions in so many areas of science and life. These metaphysical calamities merely echo on a conceptual plane a social transformation that capital is trying to both paralyze and evade. These conceptual and practical developments pose a question for us all: can we afford capitalism?

Bibliography

Caffentzis, George 2010. The Future of the Commons. New Formations, n. 69: Imperial Ecologies, pp. 23-41.

 

Clark, A. 1968. Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge &  Kegan Paul.

 

Dembicki, G. 2011. Native land claims scare the hell out of investors’: energy expert (May 19), accessed on May 23, 2011 at http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/Environment/2011/05/19/native-land-claims-enbridge-expert).

 

Federici, S. and Caffentzis, G. 2011. Review of Patricia Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History,” Science and Society, vol. 75, no. 2  (April 2011), (co-authored), pp. 279-282.

 

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 

Marx, K. 1963. Theories of Surplus Value, Part I. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

 

Tandon, S. 2010. China Overtakes U.S. in Green Investment. Accessed on May 23, 2011 at http://www.industryweek.com/articles/china_overtakes_u-s-_in_green_investment_21415.aspx?ShowAll=1.