The Imperial Mode of Living

Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism

Markus Wissen, Ulrich Brand

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788739139
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia politica

With the concept of the Imperial Mode of Living, Brand and Wissen highlight the fact that capitalism implies uneven development as well as a constant and accelerating universalisation of a Western mode of production and living. The logic of liberal markets since the 19thCentury, and especially since World War II, has been inscribed into everyday practices that are usually unconsciously reproduced. The authors show that they are a main driver of the ecological crisis and economic and political instability.The Imperial Mode of Living implies that people's everyday practices, including individual and societal orientations, as well as identities, rely heavily on the unlimited appropriation of resources; a disproportionate claim on global and local ecosystems and sinks; and cheap labour from elsewhere. This availability of commodities is largely organised through the world market, backed by military force and/or the asymmetric relations of forces as they have been inscribed in international institutions. Moreover, the Imperial Mode of Living implies asymmetrical social relations along class, gender and race within the respective countries. Here too, it is driven by the capitalist accumulation imperative, growth-oriented state policies and status consumption. The concrete production conditions of commodities are rendered invisible in the places where the commodities are consumed. The imperialist world order is normalized through the mode of production and living.

1

At the Boundaries of a Mode of Living

No common is possible unless we refuse to base our life, our reproduction on the suffering of others, unless we refuse to see ourselves as separate from them.

Silvia Federici¹

THE OCCASION FOR THIS BOOK

In February 1994, an article entitled ‘The Coming Anarchy’ by the journalist Robert D. Kaplan appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.² Kaplan used the example of West Africa to consider the political and social development of the ‘underdeveloped world’ and painted an extremely dark picture. The effect of his description was only strengthened by the bluntly suggestive photographs that accompanied his article: overcrowded streets in southern megacities, slums, child soldiers, polluted rivers and scenes of civil war. The message was clear: with the end of the Cold War, the global North had lost interest in the global South, which now threatened to sink into chaos and was becoming a hotbed of violence, failed states, epidemics, ‘overpopulation’ and ecological devastation.

The intention of the article was not to point out human suffering or to trace the links between the prosperity of the North and the conflicts of the South. Instead, Kaplan intended to outline a world order in which open competition between nation states was superseded by an anarchic myriad of ‘culturally’ and religiously motivated conflicts. He also warned that the spread of anarchy from the South posed a threat to order and to the countries of the North and warned of the tensions this anarchy would provoke in the culturally heterogeneous societies of the North themselves.

Kaplan attached special significance to ecological problems stemming from rising resource scarcity and environmental destruction:

It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh – developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts – will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War.³

Twenty-five years after the appearance of Kaplan’s article, European politicians vie with one another over proposals and tangible measures of deterrence and defence against human beings, who, driven by existential desperation and the desire for a better life, attempt to enter the EU. The rejection of what is, by any international comparison, a manageable number of refugees is framed as a question of national security.⁴ Fences are built, a ‘community of destiny’ is conjured up and ‘upper limits’ are called for. In attempting to make an example of refugees, it seems as if the European political elite, divided by deeply conflicting interests, has united to counter this threat to the national – and in this case also supranational – order with all the power at its disposal.

In addition to this scenario, another reminder of Kaplan’s diagnosis appeared in 2016: many people who are or may be denied refugee status seem to be fleeing for fundamentally ecological reasons. Rising temperatures and conflicts deriving from ever-scarcer resources in agriculture and mining have robbed them of the chance to lead a life free of poverty and violence. The war in Syria must also be included in this account, because it was preceded by a long drought, which raised the potential of social conflict.⁵

Thus the year 2016 seems to have confirmed the catastrophic scenario that Kaplan predicted. Even more, it also provides justification for Europe’s fortress policy. If ‘the environment’ becomes a question of national security, if it is the global South on whom ‘the environment’ plays prank, and if the South, moreover, sinks into such chaos that future political stability and economic development as nation seem unthinkable, then the global North must ostensibly concentrate on defending the achievements of its civilization. And for the sake of this lofty aim, it must keep the people of the global South at bay.

However, the problem with this is that both the plausibility of Kaplan’s diagnosis and the legitimacy of today’s refugee policy hinge on ignoring two decisive links. First, human beings are not simply driven to flee their homes by the ‘scarcity’ of natural resources and by ‘climate change’. Rather, it is unjust social relations – unequal access to land, water and the means of production – that make resources scarce and turn climate change into an existential threat. Second, these relations can only be understood by looking beyond the immediate conditions of the affected regions to the bigger picture and seeing the South in its global context. Only then can we begin to understand these ecological crises and violent conflicts in all their complexity.

Behind the conflicts of ‘hostile’ ‘ethnic groups’ in Congo lies the global North’s demand for coltan ore, a necessary material for the production of mobile phones and laptops. In many parts of the world, water conflicts seem to be an inevitable consequence of increasing aridity brought on by climate change. They become comprehensible, however, when seen as a result of the destruction of small-scale farming, which is increasingly replaced by industrial agriculture operated by enterprises from the global North in accordance with the interests of local and national elites of the global South. And for a cause of the migration of small-scale African farmers to Europe – branded ‘illegal’ because the reasons for their flight are not recognized by authorities – we should turn our attention to the EU’s agricultural and export policies. Under these policies, highly subsidized agricultural products are sent to Africa, destroying the markets there and the farmers’ ability to earn an income.⁶

In this light, Kaplan’s analysis loses its plausibility and the EU’s policy loses its legitimacy. EU policy can be understood as an attempt to defend a level of prosperity, built on the backs of others, against the demands of the very people who made that prosperity possible. It is the logical consequence of a mode of living that depends upon the worldwide exploitation of nature – and wage and non-wage labour – while simultaneously externalizing the social and ecological consequences arising from it: in the form of CO₂, which is emitted in the production of consumer goods for the global North and absorbed by the ecosystem of the southern hemisphere (or concentrated in the atmosphere); in the form of metallic raw materials from the global South which represent an indispensable requirement for digitalization in the global North; or in the form of the labour forces of the global South, who risk their health and lives in the extraction of minerals and metals, in the recycling of our e-waste or in drudgery on pesticide-polluted plantations that yield the fruits of the South for consumption in the global North.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

We call a mode of living and production that depends on these preconditions imperial. With this term we want, first, to make visible the forces that facilitate the everyday life of production and consumption of people in the global North, as well as of a growing number of people in the global South, without necessarily passing the threshold of conscious perception or crossing into critical reflection. Our aim is to understand how normality is produced precisely by masking the destruction in which it is rooted. In other words, the subject of this book is an investigation of the practices of everyday life and the social and international relations of power that under-gird them, generating and maintaining domination over human beings and nature.

We want to explain, second, how and why this sense of normality is produced in a time when problems and crises are accumulating, intensifying and overlapping in so many different areas: social reproduction, ecology, the economy, finance, geopolitics, European integration, democracy, etc. In this regard, the imperial mode of living seems central to us. It is a paradox located in the very centre of multiple crisis phenomena: this mode of living affects and exacerbates – see above – worldwide crises such as climate change, the destruction of ecosystems, social polarization, widespread impoverishment, the destruction of local economies and geopolitical tensions which seemed until recently to have been overcome with the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, this mode of living creates these crisis phenomena. At the same time, however, it stabilizes social relations in the countries where its benefits are concentrated. Thus it would have been vastly more difficult after the deep economic crisis of 2007 to ensure the reproduction of the lower social classes of the global North without the cheap food produced elsewhere at such high cost to humans and nature. This is not meant at all to downplay the social inequality that was accelerated in the global North by this crisis.⁷

Third, we would like to show how contemporary crises and conflicts are a manifestation of the contradictions at the heart of the imperial mode of living. That so many problems are intensifying today can be attributed to the fact that this mode of living is in the process of succeeding even at the cost of self-destruction. By its nature, it implies disproportionate access to natural and human resources on a global scale – in other words: an ‘elsewhere’. It also demands that others abstain from their own proportional share. The less these others are prepared to accept this situation, or the more they themselves depend on access to an ‘elsewhere’, to external resources and the imposition of costs on this external world, the sooner the imperial mode of living will undermine the very conditions of its existence.

And this is exactly the situation we find ourselves in today. As emerging countries such as China, India and Brazil develop as capitalist economies and their local middle and upper classes adopt the ‘northern’ images and practices of the ‘good life’ as their own, so these countries’ demand for resources and their need to externalize costs, such as CO₂ emissions, grows. Consequently, they become the global North’s competitors, not only in economic but also in ecological terms. The results are eco-imperial tensions that crystallize in global climate and energy politics, for example. Additionally, fewer and fewer people in the global South will be prepared to risk their own lives for the sake of the North’s imperial mode of living. The current movements of refugees and migrants should also be seen in this light. They furthermore emphasize the unbroken attraction that the imperial mode of living possesses among those who until now have not been able to participate in it: refugees seek security and a better life, which is more easily accomplished under the conditions of the mode of living in the centres of capitalism than anywhere else.

This also explains why the repressive and violent sides of the imperial mode of living – such as conflicts over raw materials and the rejection of refugees – appear so clearly nowadays. The imperial mode of living is based on exclusivity; it can sustain itself only as long as an ‘outside’ on which to impose its costs is available. But this ‘outside’ is shrinking as more and more societies access it and fewer people are willing or able to bear the costs of externalization processes. The imperial mode of living is thus becoming a victim of its own appeal and universalization.

All that remains for the centres of capitalism is to try to stabilize their mode of living through isolation and exclusion. The forces that execute this policy, ranging from social democrats to liberals and conservatives, generate precisely what they take to be their enemy: authoritarianism, racism and nationalism. That reactionary forces are on the rise in many places is also due to their ability to present themselves as the better guarantors of the exclusivity of the imperial mode of living, an exclusivity that is now under threat. And, by contrast to their bourgeois establishment competitors, the authoritarian, racist and nationalist groups can both offer to consign their supporters to a subordinate position and, at the same time, free them from their post-democratic passivity. Nora Räthzel has aptly termed this mechanism ‘rebellious self-subjugation’, referring to the racism that emerged in Germany in the early 1990s. People are enabled ‘to establish themselves as agents in circumstances that are beyond their control.’⁸

If this diagnosis is correct, then – fourth – demands for an alternative would have to be phrased more radically than has been the case hitherto in the mainstream socio-ecological debate. It is, then, no longer enough to push for a ‘green revolution’⁹ or a new ‘social contract’ and,¹⁰ despite all the strong rhetoric, to leave the political economy of the problem as well as the imperial mode of living itself untouched. Nor will it be enough to hope, implicitly or explicitly, that official politics will finally draw the correct conclusions from the irrefutable and scientifically ever more exactly proven fact of an ecological crisis – this only disregards the reality that the supposedly governing body of the ‘state’ is in no way a potential challenger to the imperial mode of living, but, rather, an essential aspect of safeguarding it institutionally.

Instead, the ecological crisis must be recognized for what it is: a clear indication that the global North’s norms of production and consumption, which evolved with capitalism and have now become universal, can be maintained in their ecologically modernized form only at the cost of ever more violence, ecological destruction and human suffering, and, at that, in an ever-smaller part of the world. We now see an unprecedented accumulation of contradictions as a result of an authoritarian politics that is increasingly based on the exploitation of nature and on social inequality. The reproduction of society and its biophysical foundations can be guaranteed less and less by the capitalist growth imperative. We are living through a crisis of crisis management, a crisis of hegemony and the state.

Proceeding from this insight, the manifold existing alternatives must be surveyed for their possible generalization and connection, such as to increase their social efficacy: to what extent do movements for energy democracy, food sovereignty and a solidarity economy indicate a process of societalization that is democratic in a strong sense, i.e. grounded in the principle that all people have equal rights in decisions whose consequences affect them? This is, in our view, one of the central questions, because it points to a principle of social organization to which the imperial mode of living is diametrically opposed.

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

We have now sketched the main themes to be discussed in the text that follows.¹¹ In the second chapter, we will begin by analyzing the problems that have recently been condensed into the idea of ‘multiple crises’ and that are managed in increasingly authoritarian ways. The fact that this form of crisis management is not only authoritarian but also fiercely contested is particularly striking here. Within the nation states of Europe, at the level of the EU, in its relations with the US or within the institutions of global environmental politics, there are opposing ideas on how to cope with the economic, political and ecological tremors of the past few years. Even increasing authoritarianism, which reached a new height with the election of politicians such as Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, could be viewed as an expression of the uncertainty that has spread among the political elite.¹² The bourgeois ‘middle’ appears to have lost its ability to formulate hegemonic projects and to lead politically. Meanwhile, a consensus is emerging among the left-liberal political and scientific communities that all of these crisis phenomena can be addressed collectively through ecological modernization of the national economy. Unfortunately, these approaches are not only too tentative: they also leave untouched the core problems of the multiple crises that we see in the imperial mode of living.

The third chapter presents a more detailed conceptual definition of these core problems. We introduce the ‘imperial mode of living’ as a category that mediates between everyday life and the basic social structures. In doing so, we want to expose the mechanisms that normalize power relations and the domination inherent in these structures. Based on several traditions of critical thought, above all Marx, Gramsci, feminist theory, Bourdieu and Foucault, we distinguish between different dimensions of the concept of the ‘imperial mode of living’. In doing so, we emphasize not only the phenomenon of externalization, which we have already outlined here, but also the pattern of social hierarchization in the global North as a central aspect of the imperial mode of living. We want to show how class, gender and racialized r...