Ecological Contradictions of Capitalism: Explaining Finance Capital without Productive Bases

• In Event: 4322 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Political Economy

Abstract

This paper interrogates the ecological contradictions of capitalism, focusing on the finance capital’s domination of productive capital. Just in 2014, the notional amount of outstanding derivatives in the United States was valued at $700 trillion, an amount that surpasses the global economy many times over. The paper draws upon eco-Marxist and eco-socialist theories, including but not limited to Marx’s ecology, the metabolic rift, the treadmill of production, the second contradiction of capitalism, the world system perspective, and world ecology. It grounds capitalism’s ecological crisis in these theories to explain its escape from productive capital to finance capital. In specific terms, it examines the global climate change as the unprecedented threat to capital’s productive bases, and its implications for global capital accumulation. It argues that capital’s productive bases have reached the point of exhaustion, while new productive frontiers are contracting faster. The result is a crisis of capitalism that is being putatively rescued by finance capital with such instruments as derivative and speculative capital markets. Although historical capitalism has outlived the crises of production and underproduction in the past, the environmental crisis it faces now has imperiled its sustainability. How much more the global climate change worsens the crisis of ecological underproduction (ecological scarcities) and how it affects the global accumulation process will determine the future (un)sustainability of capitalism. The paper argues that ecological depletion and degradation is embedded in the historical capital accumulation process, and it is hard to see the 21st century capitalism heal the ecological rift, step off the treadmill of production, work its way out of ecological underproduction, forsake imperialist appropriation of global nature, and reorganize human-nature relations in a sustainable way. This tendency of capital defines its very crisis that risks the survival of the planet and all that exists on it.

Author

• Tarique Niazi, University of Wisconsin