Del gran abaratamiento a la gran implosión. Clase, clima y la Gran Frontera

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 enclosure 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 subordinate 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 commodity 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 overlapping 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 moments: an unfolding crisis in life-making, registered widely in the climate and biodiversity literatures; and an unfolding 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, climate 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 interminable war, endemic political crisis, and economic instability. In this era we find the maturation of capitalism’s Planetary Proletariat, joining socially necessary “paid” and “unpaid” work by humans and the rest of nature: the differentiated unity of Proletariat, Femitariat, and Biotariat The blossoming of the Great Frontier as a full-fledged productivist revolution — the Plantation Revolution — inaugurated the Great Cheapening, a long-run secular decline in the price (value composition) of the Big Four inputs: labor-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, generative, 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.