The Robbery of Nature

Capitalism and the Ecological Rift

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781583678411
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Comunismo, post-comunismo e socialismo

Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism
In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism's relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism's degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism's plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.

1

The Expropriation of Nature

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY monopoly-finance capitalism constitutes what Karl Marx once called an “age of dissolution.”¹ All that is solid in the current mode of production is melting into air. Hence, it is no longer realistic to treat—even by way of abstraction—the crucial political-economic struggles of our day as if they were confined primarily to the exploitation of labor within production. Instead, social conflicts are increasingly being fought over capitalism’s expropriation and spoliation of its wider social and natural environment.² This historical shift and the deepening fissures that it has produced can be seen in the growth of what David Harvey has termed “anti-value politics,” directed at the boundaries of the system and visible in such forms as the ecological movement, growing conflicts over social reproduction in the household/family and gender/sexuality, and global resistance to the expansion of imperialism/racism.³ To understand these rapidly changing conditions, it is necessary to dig much deeper than before into capital’s external logic of expropriation, as it was first delineated in Marx’s writings during the Industrial Revolution.⁴ Most important, because at the root of the problem, is the extreme expropriation of the earth itself and the consequent transformation in social relations.

Like any complex, dynamic system, capitalism has both an inner force that propels it and objective conditions outside itself that set its boundaries, the relations to which are forever changing. The inner dynamic of the system is governed by the process of exploitation of labor power, under the guise of equal exchange, while its primary relation to its external environment is one of expropriation (“appropriation … without exchange” or “without equivalent”).⁵

Capitalism, or generalized commodity society, had its origins in the mercantilist age from the mid-fifteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. Mercantilism was a period dominated by expropriation under the hegemony of merchant capital, including robbery, enslavement, and the outright seizure of the title to real property—a process misleadingly dubbed by the classical economists “previous [also primary or primitive] accumulation”—whereby vast numbers of human beings were separated from the natural conditions of their existence, through the alienation of both land (nature) and labor.⁶

This historic transformation required the forcible dissolution of all earlier property forms and relations of production via the enclosure of the commons and the expropriation of small peasant holdings, enforced by the “gallows, pillory and whip,” and extended worldwide to the “extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines” of indigenous populations.⁷ The emerging “bourgeois order,” as Marx put it, was “a vampire that sucks out its [small-landholding feudal peasants’] blood and brains and throws [them] into the alchemistic cauldron of capital,” imposing new private property relations.⁸ The reenslavement of women in the transition to capitalism took various forms, including the burning of witches and wife selling, both of which enforced capitalist patriarchy.⁹ Nature, or what Marx termed the “universal metabolism of nature,” was itself expropriated wherever possible by the emerging capitalist system, reduced to a mere “free gift … to capital” to be used and “abused” at will.¹⁰

But if capitalism thus came into being “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” in a violent process of expropriation that commercialized the soil, enslaved populations throughout the periphery, and created the modern working class, thereby making the systematic exploitation of labor possible, expropriation did not simply cease at that point.¹¹ Rather, it continued to define the external logic of the system, establishing, maintaining, and extending capitalism’s boundaries through its relations to households, colonies, and elemental natural processes—all of which lay outside the circuit of capital. As Sven Beckert writes in Empire of Cotton, “war capitalism” in the mercantilist period rested on “the violent expropriation of land and labor in Africa and the Americas. From these expropriations came great wealth and new knowledge, and these in turn strengthened European institutions and states—all preconditions for Europe’s extraordinary economic development by the nineteenth century and beyond.”¹² Such “war capitalism” continually metamorphosed into new historic forms.

At various points in the development of the system, this dialectic of exploitation and expropriation, or the relation between the system’s inner and outer dynamics, shifted in emphasis from one to the other, even though both invariably characterize the operation of capitalism. In its early period, under mercantilism and colonialism, expropriation principally defined the system. In 1770, at the outset of the Industrial Revolution, overall profits from slavery, according to Robin Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery, were sufficient to cover a quarter to a third of British gross fixed investment needs.¹³ However, by the mid-nineteenth century, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism had metamorphosed into a developed mode of production centered on impersonal value relations and based on the systematic exploitation of what Marx called “formally free labour.”¹⁴ In its descending phase of monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, distinguished by a tendency toward stagnation in the accumulation process, the overall thrust of the capital system shifted back toward profit upon expropriation, while maintaining the myth of a system based on (equal) exchange, or quid pro quo.¹⁵ Monopoly profits became dominant while the imperialist expropriation of surplus under conditions of enforced inequality was extended to the entire global periphery, and given a systematic basis through alliances between multinational corporations and imperialist states.

In today’s phase of globalized monopoly-finance capital—characterized by secular stagnation in the capitalist core, planetary ecological crisis, and the rise of neoliberalism as a system of financialized redistribution—relations of expropriation have further asserted themselves, to the point that the system seems at times to have entered a period of the forcible dissolution of everything in existence: an age of structural crisis and exterminism, extended to the web of life itself.

PROFIT UPON EXPROPRIATION

For Marx, as for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in The Philosophy of Right, appropriation, that is, property, was an inherent feature of human life. It was present in all societies, constituting the material condition of human existence, making production possible.¹⁶ Marx observed in the Grundrisse that “all production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of production. … That there can be no production and hence no society where some form of property does not exist is a tautology. An appropriation that does not make something into property is a contradictio in subjecto.”¹⁷

Particularly absurd, in Marx’s view, was the attempt in bourgeois ideology to associate appropriation in general with the formation of private property, as, for example, in John Locke’s political theory of appropriation in The Second Treatise on Government, or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—both of which saw private property as emerging out of the state of nature in isolation from society. Seeking to justify the bourgeois economy, Jean-Baptiste Say wrote in his Treatise on Political Economy that property was originally a “gratuitous gift” of nature but that all men had “consented” to the appropriation of these gifts of nature as private property by a few individuals, “to the exclusion of all others.”¹⁸ In sharp contrast, Marx insisted that the appropriation of nature was a universal phenomenon of social life, of the social metabolism of humanity and nature, while the alienated “laws of capitalist appropriation” gave rise to bourgeois private property and capital accumulation. Few ideas were more grossly distorted than that of the liberal conception of the “free gift of Nature to capital”—or the subordination of the entirety of human metabolic interactions with nature through production to the narrow laws of capitalist appropriation.¹⁹

Although Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had declared in What Is Property? that all property, and hence all appropriation, was theft, Marx pointed to the illogic of such a position, since there could be no theft, that is, expropriation, without the prior appropriation or property. Proudhon’s view, with its lack of historical analysis, failed to account for numerous, varied property forms, including common or communal property, and even small peasant holdings. Hence, in characterizing property or appropriation as theft, Proudhon mistakenly associated all property with bourgeois private property, particularly landed property.²⁰ Nevertheless, while Proudhon’s analysis was much too crude, there was no doubt that bourgeois private property rested on the alienated appropriation or expropriation of the elemental conditions of production, and that since this was a product of the historical class struggle, it could be transcended.

Expropriation in Marx’s conception is specifically identified with “appropriation … without exchange”—appropriation minus the equality in all actual exchange relationships.²¹ Expropriation thus meant theft of the title to property. In pre-capitalist or tributary modes of production, including feudalism, the forced appropriation of the surplus product from the direct producers is transparently a form of expropriation.²² Under mercantilism, expropriation was often direct, as in the enclosures, where common property was confiscated—and as in the enslavement and extirpation of populations and the looting of land and resources throughout the world.

In ordinary commercial transactions in the mercantilist era, this reliance on the forced confiscation of property was only somewhat more hidden. Thus, Marx quoted Benjamin Franklin’s statement that “war … is robbery, commerce … is … cheating,” as representative of the mercantilist view. The cheating that constitutes merchant capital in its normal commerce, Marx explained, occurs by means of “a long series of intermediate steps” in the circulation of commodities, including commercial capital’s domination over production throughout the mercantilist period. It is not to be explained “merely by frauds practiced on the producers of commodities.”²³ In the organization of “modern manufacturing” (capitalist handicraft), with its historical roots in the prior mercantilist form, expropriation could be seen as occurring at every step, “because a whole series of plundering parasites insinuate themselves between the actual employer and the worker he employs.”²⁴

In developed capitalist production, class-based expropriation is disguised by a system of formally equal exchange within the market, in which workers, via the wage contract, are said to be paid an amount equal to their labor. Workers in the “hidden abode” of production are, it is true, paid the value of their labor power, equal to the necessary, historically determined costs of their reproduction, during the portion of the working day necessary to cover this. Yet capital nonetheless extracts a surplus product from the unpaid labor in the remainder of the working day—during which there is only “apparent exchange,” hence the labor is “appropriated without an equivalent”—a disguised form of “tribute.”²⁵ But given the specific form in which this expropriation occurs within the value circuit in capitalist production, under the guise of equal exchange, Marx distinguishes the exploitation of labor power in developed capitalist industry as a specific type, sui generis, not to be confused with expropriation in its more general historical sense as robbery or theft outside the process of production and valorization.²⁶

In the transitional stage represented by mercantilism up to the mideighteenth century, profit was often identified in political economy with buying cheap and selling dear. The most “rational expression” of the mercantilist view in this respect was to be found in the work of James Steuart, with whom Marx was to commence his Theories of Surplus Value. In his 1767 Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, Steuart distinguished between the “real value” of commodities rooted in labor and production costs and what he called “profit upon alienation”—or what Marx preferred to call “profit upon expropriation.” Profit upon alienation/expropriation derived from buying cheap and selling dear (what today is called arbitrage). This meant, in effect, appropriating without exchange a part of the surplus produced by labor by purchasing the commodity below its value (as determined by the costs of reproduction), and then selling the same commodity at what the market would bear, yielding exorbitant gains.²⁷ The tendency to see profit upon alienation as an explanation of profits in general formed the principal economic fallacy of mercantilism, pointing to both its methodology and its limits. Insofar as profits are made simply by expropriatory gain, such profits are canceled out at the level of the economy as a whole by the losses elsewhere. Hence, no general theory of profits could be derived from the mere notion of profit upon expropriation, requiring rather an analysis of value and production. It was only the rise of value in the form of abstract labor, the crystallization of socially necessary labor time, that made the system of unlimited capital accumulation possible. Still, Marx sa...