The Blood of Capital: An entirely speculative and unreferenced consideration of my future research path

Moving on from my thesis – which I still hope to publish in another form, one day – I am beginning to develop another research project. Although not far removed from the concerns of my thesis, it nonetheless marks a new beginning and a renewed appetite for political theoretical investigation.

The plan, essentially, remains to highlight the plight of those members of the global polis who die and suffer for the continuation and growth of profit and capital. My initial hypothesis, developed during my thesis, is that there exists an abstracted yet material grouping which directly suffers for the ‘success’ of global capital and the wealth required for the continuation of our ‘way of life’. Through an theoretical examination I wish to evoke the violence of this exclusion within the security of the ideological imagination of the global West. The central change from my thesis to this new project is that I plan to be more specific in regards to the excess population who suffers from capitalism and to focus more critical attention to both theories around this excess and geopolitical developments.

Centrally, I argue that such a group is suffers, necessarily, through the functioning of capital because;

1. A reserve army of labour is required for capital to reproduce the wage-labour system;
2. Environmental limits mean that capital cannot expand for everyone.

To paraphrase Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, this is a concern for human waste (the consequences of production and consumption) and wasted humans.

Whilst capitalism is an entirely man-made, modernist and contingent production, I argue that it has taken on a necessity of its own. That is, the axiomatic structures of capital requires certain functionalities, the most central of which – its symptom or element of universality – is the extimate exclusion of a ‘part with no part’, a reserve army of labour which maintains the pressure of supply necessary for workers to submit their labour to the wage system: material and ideological exclusion, and most certainly inequality, is constitutive of capital.

Those most apologetic for capital, principally the United Nations and the likes of development economist Jeffery Sachs, like to promote the image of a development ‘ladder’ which excuses inequality as progress towards a universal standard of living.  If the ‘West’ is developed, than Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa, amongst others, can be classified as developing: the assumption being that they will reach the point of being developed. Moreover, the ladder metaphor assumes that once other national economies attain a position on the ladder (it is assumed that this position is obtained by capitalistic structural reform) they too will be able to live like the West. Under this ideological imagination, the exportation of Western manufacturing to the ‘sweatshops’ of the developing world is a positive advance, as is the Bretton Woods inspired restructuring of subsistence farming into what Fredric Jameson has described as ‘agricultural fieldwork’ that has created such a large surplus of labour as out of work and out of land rural populations have begun to swamp urban slums in undeveloped areas.

What this notion omits, however, is that for sweatshops to operate efficiently –that is, profitably – they have to pay very low – generally subsistence or below (the subsistence of the worker being of no concern for the employer in conditions of strong labour supply) – wages in order to justify the movement of production away from the main areas of consumption. Workers, disposed of the means of production by what David Harvey has described as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ have no choice but to accept these conditions because of the presence of  a surplus of workers who are able to take their place. Whilst this is excellent for the profitability of production in developing countries, it ignores the fate of those in the position of excess. If sweatshops wages are at the level of subsistence, those who provide a reserve of labour are reduced to the status of human waste, living a marginal existence of suffering and premature death.

The presence of a reserve army of labour is a well-developed Marxist concept  and has been generally accepted within neo-liberal economics, in a more palpable and abstract conception, as the structural unemployment and the ‘flexibility’ of the labour market. It has also been expanded upon by world systems theorists who have viewed the global economy as interconnected, suggesting that labour supply is not only linked to local markets but the ever present possibility of relocating production to cheaper markets. As such ‘surplus’ labour should not be considered a local phenomena but, rather, considered as part of a globalised economy. Much of my work in the following months is to consider whose labour (or lack thereof) fits this category.

I wish to extend upon these considerations in regards to both my own particular theoretical perspective and existing geopolitical conditions. Essentially, I wish to develop the exclusion of this reserve army in terms of a necessary exception from capitalism using Slavoj Žižek’s notion of universality, in combination with a number of other continental philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and  Hannah Arendt. In addition, I seek to understand the plight of these wasted humans in terms of material developments, principally climate change.

It is climate change which provides the second limitation to the emancipation of the reserve army within capitalism. Without developing the science of climate change, carbon emissions and the associated with production at this point, it is clear that the global population cannot continue to consume at current levels. By most estimates if all were to reach the top end of the development ladder (which now becomes a ceiling?), another four-five planets worth of resources would be required. Moreover, with the global population predicted to rise from six to nine billion by 2050, the vast majority of which occurring in urban slums of developing countries, it is exceptionally clear that the level of global economic activity will rise to put extra-ordinary pressure upon the supporting environment. This rise may be offset to a degree by advances in technological efficiency but not nearly enough to stop the growth of carbon emissions, distribution of pollutants and exploitation of natural resources.

This is not an abstract or speculative proposition; that the poor cannot develop because of future environmental limits. Rather, the poor are beginning to feel the effect of global warming. Primarily this effect will be felt in reduction in food production caused by both the effect of increased temperatures upon crops and the consequences of these increases on water availability; as temperatures rise and snowy mountains melt, rivers dry and irrigation becomes increasingly difficult. In effect the consequence of rising temperatures is a narrower range of fertile food production areas.

Naturally, the availability of these areas does not favour the already poor and hungry and the powerful have nuclear weapons to settle any dispute that might arise.

Although we must be careful not to reduce the environmental degradation caused by capital to  global warming and the ‘greenhouse effect’, it remains the most apparent and wide-ranging environmental issue.  Measured in terms of carbon parts per million (ppm), the industrial era began at 280ppm and the consensus is that we have reached a level of 380ppm. If 350ppm is considered a sustainable level for human reproduction then 450ppm is considered the absolute tipping point. This point is considered to be the level at which the global temperature would have risen by 2° (with more substantial changes in the extremes), producing a number of hazardous feedback effects.  Such a rise would, amongst other effects, cut food production in India by 25%, a catastrophe for the wasted populations of the world and a consequence of global capitalism. With the amount of carbon rising more quickly than previously expected, it is more than likely that we will pass this 450ppm mark before the mid point of this century.

Through the environmental damage caused by economic activity under capitalism, we can see the central contradiction of the capitalist mode of production in the 21st century  -admittedly a contradiction only if capitalism is considered to reference itself to justice in any way – in order for the poor to develop their standard of living, substantial economic growth is required, increasing both the standards of the poor and the rich, whose wealth ‘trickles’ down. In order to maintain a climate which is conducive to human civilisation – what is known as the Holocene epoch – it is clear that economic activity must strongly decrease (as well as technological advances increasing). Such a decrease, however, can only have negative effects upon the poor.

As a consequence of both the growing number of the excess human population and the growing stresses upon this population,  it is highly likely that undocumented population movements from poorer to wealthier areas will be a notable and highly debated feature of the 21^st century as the West comes to face its disavowed foundations. As has been seen in the fate of ‘boat people’ across the world, most notably in Australia and in and around North Africa and the Mediterranean, the consequences can be disturbing.

Growing urban slum populations, decreased food production and water availability does not project a positive future for those in the red zone of capitalist exploitation.  Clearly, barring a black swan technological event our only chance of surviving in any form of civilisation similar to the past lies in either radical geo-engineering with humanity playing the part of a planetary life-system machine or a transformation in the mode of production such that the poorest can develop an adequate standard of living.

My planned research seeks to understand and evoke these conditions by way of a theoretical investigation. Whilst often using empirical scientific evidence and constantly founded in geopolitical conditions, the heart of my enquiry remains theoretical.  Specifically, I seek to use a Marxist-psychoanalytic framework to suggest that the fate of the poorest member of humanity is not a distant tragedy but is rather intimately linked the ‘way of life’ of the Western world. It is a natural consequence of the capitalist mode of production.

So, that is my stream of consciousness, entirely unverified research project for the foreseeable future.