Acceso usuarios
City of Binghamton, Estados Unidos
Este artículo vincula dos grandes acontecimientos histórico-mundiales: el auge del capitalismo tras 1492 y su crisis epocal actual, al final del Holoceno. El autor sostiene que la interminable acumulación de capital ha sido, desde el principio, posibilitada por la interminable conquista de la Tierra: la Gran Frontera. La ecología-mundo capitalista es un tipo peculiar de sociedad de clases que combina la acumulación monetaria con la apropiación excepcionalmente rápida del trabajo humano y planetario. La Gran Frontera es la zona de la Naturaleza Barata, uniendo dialécticamente la valorización del capital y la desvalorización ético-política de los humanos y del resto de la naturaleza, así, el racismo, el sexismo y el prometeísmo revelan ser pilares ideológicos fundamentales de la acumulación de capital. De manera crucial, la Gran Frontera ha permitido a las burguesías imperialistas avanzar en la productividad del trabajo, reducir los costes de los insumos y resolver las recurrentes crisis de sobreacumulación del capitalismo. Hoy en día, estamos asistiendo a la inversión geohistórica de la estrategia de la Naturaleza Barata del capitalismo. Se trata de la transición de la red de la vida como una dinámica de reducción de costes y aumento de la productividad a otra de maximización de costes y reducción de la productividad. La clase dominante y los economistas marxistas han entendido sus primeros signos como el “Gran Estancamiento”. Pero esto es sólo el principio; podríamos llamarlo una “crisis de señalización”. El Gran Estancamiento indica los primeros momentos de la Gran Implosión. Al igual que el cambio climático se entiende como un proceso no lineal que confunde los modelos biosféricos, la Gran Implosión es una dinámica no lineal a través de la cual las contradicciones del capitalismo en la red de la vida confunden los modelos lineales del cambio histórico. El capitalismo, frente a este panorama, es mucho más vulnerable de lo que creemos, y, sobre todo, lo es a la revuelta que el Proletariado Planetario está cociendo a fuego lento.
This article reconceptualizes the history of the capitalist world-ecology through the enclosure of the Great Frontier. Conceptualizing capitalism as a world-ecology of power, profit and life, the author argues that the underlying source of capitalism’s success has been its capacity to “put nature to work” — as cheaply as possible. This Cheap Nature strategy combines capitalization (the logic of capital) with extra-economic appropriation, including the socially-necessary unpaid work of humans. At the core of every great wave of capitalist development has been the Four Cheaps: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. Those Cheap Natures were appropriated — through the dynamics of imperialism and militarized accumulation — through great waves of planetary enclosure, what I call the Great Frontier. These enclosures allowed imperial bourgeoisies to win the worldwide class struggle; to reduce the costs of production and therefore to advance the rate of profit; to resolve the surplus capital problem; and to sustain labor productivity growth. Today, the continuation of these four great bourgeois accomplishments are in question.
The climate crisis represents the biospheric contradiction of the worldwide class struggle in the web of life. The en-closure of the atmospheric commons is a pivotal moment in the epochal crisis of capitalism — understood through the dialectic of planetary life and world accumulation. The more that capital and the imperialist forces seek to sub-ordinate the biosphere to the logic of endless accumulation, the more that webs of life find creative and non-linear ways to defy and resist the planetary dictatorship of capital. This dialectic prefigures the Great Implosion. The Great Implosion thesis contends that the dynamics of non-linear change attributed to the climate crisis apply also to capitalism’s unfolding epochal crisis. The geohistorical transition now underway is an epochal inversion of capitalism’s defining relation with and within the web of life. This is the transition from the web of life as a cost-reducing and productivity-advancing dynamic to a cost-maximizing and productivity-reducing one. Its early signs are now widely grasped as the Great Stagnation. But this is only the beginning; we might call it a signaling crisis. The Great Stagnation signals the first moments of the Great Implosion.The author constructs the rise and ongoing demise of the Great Frontier in three parts, focusing successively on environmental history, Civilizing Projects, and today’s climate crisis. In Part I, I reprise the historical-geographical outlines of the Great Frontier in the rise of capitalism. The author revisits core elements of the commodity frontier argument, developed to interpret the epochal shift in world environmental history after 1492. From this historical-geographical sketch of the rise of capitalism, I unpack a twofold argument. One is that com-modity frontiers are not strictly about commodities or commodification. They are about imperialism, which is always the world bourgeoisie’s favored mode of class formation. Imperialism is the world politics of the tendency (and countertendency) of the rate of profit to fall. It is premised not only on armed force but also on the geocultural hegemony and violence of Civilizing Projects. This is the focus of Part II. To be sure, commodification is in play; but to reduce the story to market forces replays a neo-Smithian error. It fails to grasp the centrality of imperialism and its mechanisms of class power in forging capitalism’s major commodity frontiers. Capitalist relations of Nature — I use the uppercase to underscore the real abstraction — are always politically-mediated by states that pursue the creation and reproduction of a “good business environment.” The (geo)political project of managing and securing webs of life for capital depends upon a geocultural project that makes possible the practical violence of commodity fetishism on the Great Frontier. This is civilizational fetishism. Its expressions are found the successive and over-lapping Christianizing, Civilizing, and Developmentalist Projects of great empires, given intellectual expression over the longue durée by figures ranging from Francisco de Vitoria to Walt W. Rostow. These projects reproduce and reinvent the ruling abstractions of Civilization and Savagery. After 1949, this was President Truman’s “Point Four” declaration on the divide between the “developed” and “undeveloped world.” A second argument foregrounds the connective tissues binding our historical-geographical assessments of capitalist frontier-making and today’s climate crisis. In Part III, I frame the planetary crisis as joining two fundamental mo-ments: an unfolding crisis in life-making, registered widely in the climate and biodiversity literatures; and an unfold-ing crisis in profit-making, registered widely in the Great Stagnation discourse. Those two moments are unevenly combined in the geohistorical character of climate crisis, one in which the geophysical turning point finds expression in the destabilization of a trinity born in the seventeenth century: the climate class divide, climate patriarchy, cli-mate apartheid. The seventeenth-century’s climate crisis hothoused the Great Frontier as accumulation strategy, assuming its modern form between 1550 and 1700 as a climate fix to the era’s “general crisis”: an era of intermi-nable war, endemic political crisis, and economic instability. In this era we find the maturation of capitalism’s Plane-tary Proletariat, joining socially necessary “paid” and “unpaid” work by humans and the rest of nature: the differen-tiated unity of Proletariat, Femitariat, and BiotariatThe blossoming of the Great Frontier as a full-fledged productivist revolution — the Plantation Revolution — inaugu-rated the Great Cheapening, a long-run secular decline in the price (value composition) of the Big Four inputs: la-bor-power, food, energy, and raw materials. A specifically capitalist historical nature was born, and its epoch-making service to world accumulation was to allow the systematic reduction of re/production costs for capital. Today we are witnessing that strategy’s implosion. The web of life is rapidly moving from a source of Cheapness to an unavoidable vector of rising costs. The Biotariat is in open revolt. In place of the “limits to growth,” the world-ecological alternative offers an alternative: Not only is “Another world possible” — the unofficial slogan of the World Social Form — but: Another class struggle is possible. We have in the Great Stagnation the revolt of the Biotariat — whose contribution to the revolutionary destabilization of capitalism has been underestimated by Environmentalists and Marxists alike. Although easily romanticized, grasping the web of life through the oikieos — the creative, gener-ative, and multilayered pulse of life-making — asks us to reexamine human solidarity with the rest of nature in ways that challenge the Promethean domination of life and that explore the communist possibilities for liberation: “the creatures too should become free.” Foregrounding the oppressive and exploitative dynamics of work, life, and power, Planetary Justice prioritizes the abolition of the Proletarian-Biotarian-Femitarian relation created through the Great Frontier after 1492. This is the challenge of the planetary class struggle in the last days of the Holocene.
