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"The Curse of Capitalism

ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM: THE CURSE OF CAPITALISM JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER AND BRETT CLARK In the spring of 2003 the United States, backed by Britain, invaded Iraq, a country with the second largest oil reserves in the world. The United States is now working to expand Iraqi oil production, while securing for itself an increasingly dominant position in the control of this crucial resource as part of its larger economic and geopolitical strategy. Earlier, the same US administration that invaded Iraq had pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, designed to limit the growth in the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases respon- sible for global warming a phenomenon threatening all life as we know it. It is no wonder, then, that the last few years have seen a growth of concern about ecological imperialism, which in many eyes has become as significant as the more familiar political, economic and cultural forms of imperialism to which it is related. In 1986 Alfred Crosby published a work entitled Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, that described the destruction wrought on indigenous environments most often inadvertently by the European colo- nization of much of the rest of the world.! Old World flora and fauna introduced into New World environments experienced demographic explosions with adverse effects on native species. As the subtitle of Crosby's book suggested, his historical analysis dealt mainly with 'biological expansion' and thus had no direct concern with imperialism as a political-economic phenomenon. It did not consider how ecology might relate to the domination of the periphery of the capitalist world economy by the centre, or to rivalry between different capitalist powers. Like the infectious diseases that killed tens of millions of indigenous peoples following Columbus' landing in the Americas, ecological imperialism in this view worked as a purely biological force, following 'encounters' between e ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM 187 regions of the earth that had previously been separated geographically. Social relations of production were largely absent from this historical account. The ecological problem under capitalism is a complex one. An analysis at the level of the entire globe is required. Ecological degradation at this universal level is related to the divisions within the world capitalist system, arising from the fact that a single world economy is nonetheless divided into numerous nation-states, competing with each other both directly and via their corporations. It is also divided hierarchically into centre and periphery, with nations occupying funda- mentally different positions in the international division of labour, and in a world-system of dominance and dependency. All of this makes the analysis of ecological imperialism complicated enough, but understanding has also been impeded by the underdevelopment of an ecolog- ical materialist analysis of capitalism within Marxist theory as a whole.? Nevertheless, it has long been apparent and was stipulated in Marx's own work that transfers in economic values are accompanied in complex ways by real 'material-ecological' flows that transform relations between city and country, and between global metropolis and periphery.* Control of such flows is a vital part of competition between rival industrial and financial centres. Ecological impe- rialism thus presents itself most obviously in the following ways: the pillage of the resources of some countries by others and the transformation of whole ecosystems upon which states and nations depend; massive movements of popu- lation and labour that are interconnected with the extraction and transfer of resources; the exploitation of ecological vulnerabilities of societies to promote imperialist control; the dumping of ecological wastes in ways that widen the chasm between centre and periphery; and overall, the creation of a global 'meta- bolic rift' that characterizes the relation of capitalism to the environment, and at the same time limits capitalist development. THE 'METABOLIC RIFT' The main ecological contradictions of capitalism, associated with ecological imperialism, were already evident to a considerable extent in the writings of Marx. The accumulation of capital is in some respects a self-propelling process; the surplus accumulated in one stage becomes the investment fund for the next. One of the crucial questions in classical political economy, therefore, was where the original capital had come from that set off the dynamic accumulation that characterized the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. This raised the issue of prior, primary or 'primitive' accumulation. Taking Britain as the classical case, Marx saw primitive accumulation as having three aspects. First, the removal of peasants from the land by land enclosures and the abrogation of customary, common rights, so they no longer had direct access to or control over the material means of production. Second, the creation by this means of a pauperized pool of landless labourers, who became wage labourers under capitalism, and who flocked to the towns where they emerged as an indus- trial proletariat. Third, an enormous concentration and centralization of wealth 188 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 as the means of production (initially through the control of the land) came to be monopolized by fewer and fewer individuals, and as the surplus thus made avail- able flowed to the industrial centres. Newly proletarianized workers were available to be exploited, while 'Lazarus layers' of the unemployed kept down wages, making production more profitable. The whole process of primitive accumulation involving, as Marx put it, 'the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil', and the 'sweeping' of them, as Malthus expressed it, into the towns had deep ecological implications.* Already land under feudal property had been converted into 'the inorganic body of its lord'. Under capitalism, with the further alienation of the land (and nature), the domination of human beings by other human beings was extended. 'Land, like man', Marx noted, was reduced 'to the level of a venal object'.? Marx's concept of a 'metabolic rift\" was developed in the context of the alarm raised by agricultural chemists and agronomists in Germany, Britain, France and the United States about the loss of soil nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium through the export of food and fibre to the cities. Rather than being returned to the soil, as in traditional agricultural production, these essen- tial nutrients were being shipped hundreds or even thousands of miles away and ended up as waste polluting the cities. The most advanced form of capitalist agri- cultural production at the time, British 'high farming', was, the German chemist Justus von Liebig contended, nothing but a 'robbery system', due to its effects on the soil .6 Marx, who was a careful student of Liebig and other soil chemists, saw this antagonism between human beings and the earth as an important problem. Capitalism had, as he put it, created an 'irreparable rift' in the 'metabolic inter- action\" between human beings and the earth; a 'systematic restoration' of that necessary metabolic interaction as a 'regulative law of social production' was needed, but the growth under capitalism of large-scale industrial agriculture and long-distance trade intensified and extended the metabolic rift (and still does). Moreover the wastage of soil nutrients had its counterpart in pollution and waste in the towns.\" Marx treated both primitive accumulation and the metabolic rift as embodying global implications fundamental to the understanding of the development of capitalism as a world system. As he famously put it: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslave- ment and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capi- talist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. The genocide inflicted on the indigenous populations went hand in hand with the seizure of wealth in the New World. \"The treasures captured outside Europe ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM 189 by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother- country and were turned into capital there.\" Great fortunes were built on robbing the periphery of its natural wealth and exploiting ecological resources. In India 'the monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities were inexhaustible mines of wealth.\" In his famous 1848 speech on free trade Marx observed, \"You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugar-cane nor coffee trees there.'!" The creation of such monocultures for the export of cash crops to Europe and the enslaved or semi-enslaved labouring populations that worked them were products of the development of the capitalist world economy, with its open plunder of the periphery for the benefit of the centre. Monoculture plantations constituted, in the words of Eduardo Galeano in his Open Veins of Latin America, a sieve for the draining-off of natural wealth ... Each region, once inte- grated into the world market, experiences a dynamic cycle; then decay sets in with the competition of substitute products, the exhaustion of the soil, or the development of other areas where conditions are better. The initial productive drive fades with the passing years into a culture of poverty, subsistence economy, and lethargy .... The more a product is desired by the world market, the greater the misery it brings to the Latin American peoples whose sacrifice creates it.!! But tropical monoculture was not the only mode of ecological imperialism in the nineteenth century. British 'high farming' or early industrialized agricul- ture robbed the soil of England of its nutrients, and then sought to compensate for this by robbing other countries of the means to replace them. Marx was again well aware of this. Following Liebig, he noted that British agriculture in effect imported the soil of some countries by shipping soil nutrients and natural fertilisers from these countries back to Britain. British agriculture had become dependent on imported guano. This illustrated precisely the 'rift' in the natural metabolism that Marx iden- tified, as Jason Moore notes: 'With the transition to capitalism, a new division of labor between town and country took shape on a world scale and within regions whereby the products of the countryside (especially, but not only in the peripheries) flowed into the cities, which were under no obligation to return the waste products to the point of production. Nutrients were pumped out of one ecosystem in the periphery and transferred to another in the core. In essence, the land was progressively mined until its relative exhaustion fettered profitability. At this point, economic contraction forced capital to seek out and develop new ways of exploiting territories hitherto beyond the reach of the law of value.'? mretivea vimis Aarasialecanman Fa vaad A A A Al elA) | 190 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 FROM THE CURSE OF NITRATES TO THE CURSE OF OIL British cotton textiles, as Galeano noted, were exchanged for the hides of Rio de la Plata, the copper of Chile, the sugar of Cuba, and the coffee of Brazil, but also for the guano and nitrates of Peru.! In 1840, the same year that Liebig first pointed to the issue of the loss of soil nutrients, a French scientist, Alexandre Cochet, discovered that valuable quantities of nitrate of soda could be extracted from guano and nitrates (saltpeter), both of which were abundant in Peru. In 1841, shortly after Cochet's laboratory results were published, an international guano rush began, as European (especially British) and US agriculturists sought the precious fertilizer to compensate for the soil nutrients that they were losing. In the early 1850s a British officer reported witnessing the simultaneous loading of guano on ships from the following countries from a single island off the coast of Peru: forty four United States ships, forty English, five French, two Dutch, one Italian, one Belgian, one Norwegian, one Swedish, one Russian, one Armenian and three Peruvian. Loading the guano into ships required digging into deep mounds of excrement that covered rocky islands. Acrid dust penetrated the eyes, the nose, the mouth of a worker, and the stench was appalling. After slavery was abolished in 1854 tens of thousands of Chinese coolies were contracted for through Macao and Hong Kong. By 1875 some 80,000 were working under conditions of virtual slavery in the desert and islands of Peru.!* Then in 1853 a process was discovered for efficiently mining the nitrate fields in the Tarapaca desert province of Peru, and soon afterwards rich deposits were also found in the adjacent Bolivian province of Atacama. By the 1860s these nitrate fields had become even more important as a source of fertilizer than guano, the availability of which had began to diminish. Nitrates were in high demand not only for fertilizers, but also for the recently invented TNT and other explosives, crucial to the expanding war industries of the industrial capitalist states.'> By 1875 British investments primarily in the nitrate industry in Peru totalled 1,000,000. The Peruvian ruling class grew enormously wealthy as a result of the guano trade and the mining of nitrates. This wealth did not, however, flow significantly into economic development, apart from the building of railways; for the rest of the population the nitrate resource soon proved to be a curse. Peru became heavily indebted, in a classic pattern, primarily to British investors, with its guano exports mortgaged well into the future. In 1875, attempting to get out of its debt trap, Peru imposed a state monopoly in its nitrate zones in Tarapaci, expropri- ating the holdings of private investors (many of whom were foreign, particularly British) and offering them government certificates of payment. Subsequently the Peruvian government also sought to regulate the output of guano and nitrates so that they would not compete against each other. This led to the War of the Pacific (also sometimes called the Nitrate War), which broke out four years after the Peruvian expropriation of the nitrate industry, when Bolivia, breaking a previous treaty, attempted to raise taxes on ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM 191 exports by Chilean intermediaries of nitrates from its Atacama province. Chile, backed by British investors, declared war on Bolivia but also on Peru, with which Bolivia was allied. With its more modern, British-built navy and French-trained army, Chile was soon able to seize Bolivia's Atacama province and Peru's Tarapaci never to leave. Before the war Chile had almost no nitrate fields and no guano deposits. By the end of the war in 1883 it had seized all of the nitrate zones in Bolivia and Peru and most of Peru's coastal guano deposits.' Before the war British controlled 13 per cent of Peru's Tarapaci nitrate industry; immedi- ately after the war given Chile's possession of the region the British share rose to 34 per cent, and by 1890 it was 70 per cent.!\" As the former US Secretary of State James G. Blaine told a congressional committee investigating the US diplo- matic role during the war, the war was about guano and nitrates: 'Nothing else .... It is an English war on Peru, with Chili as the instrument .... Chili would never have gone into this war one inch but for her backing by English capital, and there was never anything played out so boldly in the world as when they came to divide the loot and the spoils.\" Having lost its two principal resources for export, the Peruvian economy collapsed after the war. As the great Peruvian Marxist Jos Carlos Mariategui noted, defeat in the War of the Pacific increased Peruvian dependence on British capital. \"Very soon [after the war] the capitalist group that had formed during the period of guano and nitrates resumed its activity and returned to power....The Grace Contract [which they negotiated] ratified British domination in Peru by delivering the state railways to the English bankers who until then had financed the republic and its extravagances.'!\" Now that the Peruvian government no longer had the same wealth of resources to exploit it had no other way to pay off the foreign debts with which it was still encumbered except by handing its railroads over to British investors who had themselves clandestinely backed Chile in its seizing of much of Peru's territory and its most valuable natural resources. As Bruce Farcau observed, the guano and nitrate deposits in Peru turned out, 'like the Midas touch', to be 'a curse disguised as a blessing', first in creating a debt-laden economy, and then giving rise to a war and the loss of these resources.? As a result of its seizure of the nitrate territories in the War of the Pacific Chile was to take on the curse of nitrates in the decades that followed. Europe still needed guano and nitrates in vast quantities to maintain its agricultural produc- tivity and sought to control this trade imperialistically for the benefit of its own capitalists, exploiting these ecological resources to their limit while siphoning off the bulk of the economic wealth they generated. In 1888 the Chilean President Jos Manuel Balmaceda, who had carried out modernizing reforms including extensive public works and support for education, announced that the nitrate areas of Chile would have to be nationalized through the formation of Chilean enterprises, and blocked the sale of state-owned nitrate fields to the British. Three years later a civil war broke out, with British and other foreign investors supporting the opponents of Balmaceda with money and armaments. The press 192 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 in London characterized Balmaceda (in tones very recognizable today) as a 'dictator of the worst stripe'. When the defeated Balmaceda committed suicide in 1891 the British ambassador wrote to the Foreign Office: 'The British community makes no secret of its satisfaction over the fall of Balmaceda, whose victory, it is thought, would have implied serious harm to British commercial interests.\" State control of industries and economic infrastructure in Chile quickly receded after the civil war, as the British extended their investments. In the early 1890s Chile was delivering three-quarters of all its exports to Britain while obtaining almost half of its imports from Britain, creating a trade dependence on Britain greater than that of India at that time. When the First World War broke out in Europe, two-thirds of Chile's national income was derived from nitrate exports primarily to Britain and Germany. The British monopoly of the nitrate trade through its control of the Chilean economy had put Germany at a serious disadvantage in its competition with Britain, since nitrates were necessary for explosives as well as fertilizer. Like Britain, Germany had worked to have Balmaceda ousted, but Chile remained largely under British control, creating a problem for Germany. Just prior to the First World War, however, the German chemist and nationalist Fritz Haber devised a process for producing nitrates by fixing nitrogen from the air. The result within a few years was to destroy almost completely the value of Chilean nitrates, creating a severe crisis for the Chilean economy.?! But the curse of nitrates (and nitrogen) did not end there; it was transferred to the world at large, including the rich countries themselves. Nitrogen fertilizers, used on an ever-increasing scale (currently around 100 million tons annually) to maintain agricultural productivity, now pollute more and more of the world's groundwater, lakes and rivers through fertilizer runoff, giving rise to one of the major ecological problems facing the world today.?? Outside Latin America the history of the curse of nitrates is now forgotten. But the modern history of the curse of oil, with its all too close parallels with that earlier history, is still very much ongoing. As the New York Times noted in its June 7, 2003 issue, in an article entitled 'Striking it Poor: Oil as a Curse', 'schol- arly studies for more than a decade have consistently warned of what is known as the resource curse: that developing countries whose economies depend on exporting oil, gas or extracted materials are likely to be poor, authoritarian, corrupt and rocked by civil war.\" The mainstream argument attributes this persis- tent 'curse' to bad governments in poor countries, which supposedly lack the capacity to utilize the enormous and potentially corrupting economic benefits provided by such resources in a productive manner. The root explanation of the 'curse of oil', however, like that of nitrates, is to be found in ecological imperialism. As Michael Perelman has cogently stated, The origins of the curse of oil do not lie in the physical properties of petro- leum but rather in the social structure of the world ... 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