Nirmalya Deb
The crisis of capitalism today is primarily ecological and environmental, a fact that traditional historical materialist analysis has failed to grasp. The basis of the traditional analysis of the mechanics of the capitalist economy was the historical materialist understanding of the sociological role of classes in capitalist society and the slow germination of “class consciousness”, as the Hungarian philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs tried to identify in the late 1920s and 30s in his essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”. But the consequent development of finance capital and the global metropolitan centres of capital in the world economy that Lenin had strived to explain as the basis of the global capitalist or imperialist tendencies of capital at an “advanced stage of capitalism” in 1917 in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage Of Capitalism, gave a fresh impetus to capital to expand rapidly, and the tendency of the global capitalist system as a whole turned out to be an aggressive exploitation of the ramparts of the global economy. This historical trend of capital expanding far beyond the metropolitan centres of capital in the world economy occurred simultaneously with the dismantling of the formal colonial structure of the world economy and British and European imperialism.
It is interesting to trace the journey of the valorization of finance capital in the contemporary world economy largely divided along national parameters. However, it is also essential to remember that the emergence of nationalism in the 19th century was given a shot in the arm by the monopoly centres of capital concentration. The period was one of the rapid emergence of gargantuan centres of global power and capital concentration and competition between nations to outdo each other in financial and military might. The post-WW II fallout was the rapid stabilization of finance capital in the Anglo-American metropolitan centres of the world economy and a renewed impetus on exploring the entire circle of the hitherto unexplored periphery of the economy to find out resources and other geo-strategic benefits. The global chessboard of power in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s was centred on the middle-east and West Asia and the political conflicts today in the whole region are a direct fallout of the over-zealous attempts of the expansion of greedy capital.
It is poignant to observe here that Karl Marx had thought he would supplement his Theories of Surplus Value, or what is commonly the third section of the magnum opus called Capital which is the origin of that branch of contemporary historiography and social-political philosophy known in academic circles as historical materialism, with a fourth one dealing with the developments in the world economy and the kind of indirect imperialism that we see in the post-WW II scenario where global cartels of capital and highly powerful and influential networks of global capital coexist with sovereign nation states. There has been significant debate in the domain of political economy of both the role of the capitalist state and its expansionist policies such as those of the USA and its elaborate strategic, security and military network, and the weak and dependent states that have been drained of their power to adopt free capitalist development and that are usually starved of resources. These states mostly fall prey to global predatory capital on the prowl and exist merely to serve the metropolitan centres of the network. States are geared to safeguard the interests of foreign capital and hungry businessmen sniff out all the ripe opportunities that the so-called underdeveloped world offers in terms of accumulation of resources, for example the highly precious oil of the gulf.
We will look at the Marxist theses of the conflicts in advanced capitalist economy in order to offer a classical explanation of the ecological crisis emerging at the forefront of the worldwide democratic and humanitarian endeavour to save nature from the rampaging advances of capital. Over-production as a tendency within capitalism was noted by the revolutionary Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg who equated it with militarization and the competition between powerful nation states to accumulate the latest military hardware and technology. This created, what she noted, superfluous production (that is still reflected in the huge budgetary outlay for the defence sector) sustained merely by the ever-hungry urge of capital to expand. That this persisted well into the nuclear age and the age of the Cold War shows a lot about the dynamics of the capitalist economy to find the outlets of its growth and to satisfy its instinct of finding out ways to expand the rule of capital and subsequent exploitation of labour and immovable resources like land and environment.
The greedy instinct of capital does not take into account the sustainability of nature and its ability to tolerate its marauding advances. This fact was also noted by the economist Harry Magdoff who was associated with the Monthly Review magazine in New York which was founded by the joint efforts of the economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. Their efforts to understand the expansionist nature of capital in the post-War period in their book Monopoly Capital and Magdoff’s subsequent book, a collection of essays entitled Imperialism & Globalization, considered the theoretical implications of rampant military stock-piling and the imminent threat of nuclear war in a volatile world scenario characterized by geo-political tussles for power and the immanent refusal of nature to tolerate the wild and beastly aspects of capitalism as an economic system.
This effort to locate the environmental struggle within the theoretical web of Marxism and pose it as an immanent feature of the contemporary world economy is also found in the works of the Marxist social philosopher Istvan Meszaros. His most recent book argues for the necessity to rework the system in such a way as to stave off the contradiction of a global ecological upheaval. The Necessity of Social Control by Meszaros and its introduction in the Monthly Review magazine by the present editor John Bellamy Foster sometime in the middle of 2014 are vital guides for scholars working in the field of global ecological and environmental studies. This is a progressive theoretical movement and should be rapidly assimilated by the revolutionary class that is throwing its weight behind the struggle to overthrow the hegemonic political domination of
capital.