The opening statement of Jeffery Sachs’ seminal text, Common Wealth (2008), announces that ‘the Twenty-First Century will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life’ (ibid:3). With this declaration, Sachs says far more than he desires. Sachs’ work identifies a multi-dimensional problematic that faces humanity, which he defines as the challenge of sustainable development; ‘protecting the environment, stabilising the world’s population, narrowing the gaps between rich and poor, and ending extreme poverty’(ibid: 3). Sachs conceives of these problems as shared by all of humanity; ‘a common fate on a crowded planet’(ibid).
Amongst the changes Sachs proposes is the end of American hegemony, the emergence of new technologies and the end of the notion of competing nation-states, as a new era of global cooperation comes to dominate this enlightened planet. Capitalism, once drunk on its own excesses, will look in the mirror Sachs provides and emerge clean and triumphant. What he cannot acknowledge, however, is the kind of overturning of economic life that would be necessary to response to his own problematic. Sachs is simply unwilling to overturn his assumptions about economic life.
Sachs is no marginal figure and his identification of the material deprivations and contradictions which current plague humanity is the problem of today. Sachs is head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and director of the United Nations (UN) Millennium Project. This project announced the setting of 15 ‘Millennium Development Goals’ to be achieved by 2015 (Sachs, 2005b). Amongst these goals are targets to ‘Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger’, ‘Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources’ and ‘Have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers (ibid: xviii-xix)[i]’.
Sachs suggests that progress towards these goals has been obstructed by four demands; Human pressures on ecosystems and the climate, world population growth, extreme poverty and the process of global problem solving. These problems do not exist in isolation. The interactions of population and economic growth produce unsustainable pressure upon the environment. Sustained economic growth, both from the Western world and from the developing world – primarily China and India, but also Brazil and Russia – combined with continued growth of the world economy has meant that global economic production has risen by eight times from 1950-2008 (Sachs, 2008: 19).Given further economic growth and population increases, gross world product is predicted to rise by 6.3 times over the period 2005-2050 (ibid: 23).
Characteristically, Sachs reduces these pressures to a simple economic equation[ii], used to determine environment impact: total population (P), income per person (A) and the environmental impact per dollar of income (T), otherwise known as the level of technology. From this equation the total impact (I) on the environment can be calculated by the equation I= P x A x T (a high T value signifying a high environment effect) (ibid:29).
Using this equation, Sachs suggests that since the global population is predicted to rise by 40% and global income quadrupling, the impact on the environment with unchanged technology would be six times that experienced today (ibid). Sachs argues that since current human impact on the environment is unsustainable, a six fold impact would be ‘devastating’, leading to environmental catastrophe. Sachs, however, rejects the view that he attributes to ‘some environmentalists’ that the only solution to this apparent contradiction is a reduction income levels (ibid: 30). Certainly, a sudden reduction in income is not the appropriate solution as reductions in economic output tend to hurt those on the bottom more than the top. Unfortunately, neither contraction nor expansion will solve this problem. Capitalism is stuck between attempts to raise large portions of the global population out of poverty and the environmental consequences of this move. If this appears to be an impossible quandary, Sachs’ saviours are technology and global cooperation.
Sachs is certainly not the only person to take on the either global poverty or environmentalism; both have become the central causes of global Leftism[iii]. For many of the conservative or neo-liberal commentators, this dualism either is not of our concern – environmental degradation being a myth and global poverty not ‘our’ problem – or does not require specific concern because the market will naturally come to the party. While we shall return to these ideologies in passing, they are not the specific concern of this thesis. There are two reasons for overlooking these approaches.
Firstly, this thesis operates under the assumption both that climate change is occurring and that global hunger and suffering are the concern of all humanity, not least because of our active implication in this implicit trauma. We shall not, however, seek to engage in a discussion of either of these assumptions; they simply form the background of this debate. If the identification of the occurrence of climate change is a grand scientific cock-up and humanity is content to live in a world in which the richest 20% account for 80% of global consumption and 80% of the world’s population exists on less than US$10 a day, then much of this debate is useless. We should unburden ourselves from these tiresome grievances and head down to the pub. It is the wager of this thesis that this is not the case.
Secondly, we will not actively engage in debate with neo-liberal ideologues because they embody the worst of capitalism. They are an actually existing straw man. Instead, we shall invoke Sachs because he contains the best of capitalist thinking. He cogently identifies the fundamental concern of humanity in the 21st century; climate change, the material deprivations of the poor and the impossible gap which separates them and embodies the best available response from within the logic of capital.
Sachs is fundamentally correct in asserting that our current trajectory is unsustainable. As he states, ‘A world of untrammelled market forces and competing nation-states offers no automatic solutions’ (ibid: 6). Instead we must go outside of the market through governmental and trans-governmental incentives and cooperation. These measures act only as a supplement to the market. Sachs essentially acknowledges that not only is the market environmentally unsustainable in its current state, but does nothing for those excluded from the development ladder (ibid: 32). What he does not rule out, however, is that once the distortions to the market are straightened out, the market will assert the forms of justice that Sachs desires.
Sachs does not reject the market, only its failures. In a typical liberal stance, Sachs suggests that what is required for the efficient operation of the market is some trans-market measures, such as improving technology, infrastructure and education in the third world (ibid: 42). The market will do the rest. What Sachs has not been able to acknowledge is that today, there is no workable outside to market forces. As we have seen from climate change negotiations, proposing limits to carbon production becomes politically unsustainable as the market begins to react to these restrictions. Capital flight is very real. Sachs’ naivety in this regard is stunning. It appears that global cooperation motivated only by a sense of the good will occur because the subject will come to accept the rationality of Sachs’ economic and political science.
While Sachs does well to identify in some detail the alarming state of the world economy, his solution is laughably naive. He appears to have a strong grasp of the intricacies of the natural environment, but he has a very limited, deterministic, conception of human behaviour. Not only does Sachs overly rely on the positivism of scientific research and statistics – a point to which we shall soon return – but his work proceeds through a substantial bracketing of the political nature of human behaviour. Ethics are for administrators and morality the preordained domain of the market, with its self-evident release of political autonomy and freedom from material want. That the market creates and determines what is wanted is beside the point.
Two points are particularly symptomatic in regards to the bracketing of the difficulties inherent in human behaviour. Sachs boasts that his Earth Institute brings together; ‘physical scientists, ecologists, engineers, economists, political scientists, management experts, public health specialists and medical doctors’ (ibid: 15, emphasis added). It is clear from this list that the institute has already decided on its epistemological and ontological horizon; one gets the feeling that a philosopher would be shot upon entry to the Earth Institute. History it seems has been a false struggle of appearances to unveil the unquestionable sovereign Good of liberal capitalism and the economic subject.
Moreover, Sachs states that ‘reality’ has undergone such a change over the past 200 years that those of the humanities have not been able to keep up with contemporary social conditions. In a statement that embodies, more than anything, Sachs frustration with the human conditions, he states that because changes in reality ‘our social philosophies…consistently lag behind present realities[C1] ’. No wonder they have not received an invitation to the institute; philosophers theorists and political types have yet to even receive the message – the Truth has finally arrived and Sachs holds it. As such the solutions to that which plaques humanity are straight forward. Now that Sachs has identified the problems – population growth, extreme poverty and climate change – what is required is a global acknowledgement of this Truth and the rational deployment of new technologies. In order to do so, a new approach to global problem solving based upon cooperation and new forms of trans-national governance is required.
It is this measure that is the exception to the set; the others being climate change, population growth and extreme poverty. It is the element that constitutes the grouping – without accomplishing this goal, all others prove impossible – yet it is the point around which Sachs’ programme fails. He suggests that today, now that the problem and the scientific response is clear, all that is required is greater ‘political will’ and a new era of peace, prosperity and global cooperation can begin. As Sachs states; ‘The main problem, I shall suggest time and time again, is not the absence of reasonable and low-cost solutions, but the difficulty of implementing global cooperation to put those solutions in place’(ibid: 12).
Sachs relies on the reformulation of global cooperation in order to remain optimistic in the face of such a damaging conception of planetary affairs. It is, in psychoanalytic terms, a fetish. Sachs supplements his fetish for global cooperation with another; technology. In terms of technology, the ‘reasonable and low-cost solutions’ Sachs proposes are a wholly insufficient response to the goals set in the Millennium Project. Sachs’ blind reliance upon technology is part of a larger trend, the scientific hegemony of global problem solving. Science itself has a role to play in both the reduction of poverty and in managing environment change, but it does not consider the structuration of its own understanding. This has led to a situation where the status of global politics is considered as either moral or scientific, never human. Both social theory and politics are foreclosed from the debate – with the result that not only do we not look outside of current understanding for solutions, but human behaviour is implicitly considered to be fundamentally malleable. However, as Terry Eagleton has asserted, mountains have proved much easier to move than social structures (2003: 50).
Technology as Messiah
Nonetheless, the central tenet of the mainstream Green movement – embodied in Sachs work – is that improvements in energy and resource efficiency, both in terms of production and consumption, will be sufficient to halt global climate change. It is technological change that is behind international agreements such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and similar international agreements. Sachs considers that the global economy is able to mediate against the contradiction between economic growth and environmental collapse by the use of technology. Based on this assumption, one-off increases in resource efficiency produce the change required to hold-off environmental collapse. Efficiency increases, however, only ever take the edge off increases in overall economic output. Sachs himself illustrates this point in regards to electricity efficiency, stating that given global economic output is predicted to rise six fold in the years to 2050, even a doubling of efficiency would lead to a tripling of electricity use (2008: 98).
The reliance upon technology discounts what is known as ‘Jevons paradox’. Jevons argued that; ‘ increased efficiency in using a natural resource such as coal, only resulted in increased demand for the resource, not a reduction in demand’ (Foster, 2000: 4). Thus technological developments which increase efficiency tend to decrease price, with a resulting increase in demand. John Bellamy Foster gives increases in automobile efficiency as an example of Jevons paradox in action. Increases in efficiency in the automobile industry in the United States in the 1970s did not reduce the amount of fuel consumed, as the number of vehicles on the road doubled (ibid:5).
This ‘law’ is of course a certainty only according to the logic of neoclassical economics. It needs to be viewed critically and does not apply uniformly. In particular, government mandated efficiency standards tend to increase costs, thus not increasing demand and consumption. Nonetheless, it is worth considering that technology is not a total solution. It may expand the range of resources available but cannot do so infinitely. Moreover technological innovation does not automatically reduce resource consumption. In fairness to Sachs, he acknowledges that the market does not automatically encourage the development and use of technologies that induce sustainability. Nonetheless, he still holds that technology is a vital cog in sustainability.
Perhaps the over-riding point is that capitalism is not an efficient system for the use of resources, as it is assumed to be by its ideologues. Capitalism is based not on production to service human ‘needs’ but rather continuous accumulation and growth; the drive of capital is profit for the sake only of profit itself. In this manner the central environmental concern in regards to capitalism should not be technology and efficiency, but a reduction in the general level of production and consumption (ibid: 11). Because capitalism is constituted by its own self-revolution and growth; any reduction in economic output sends capital into crisis, further restricting the ‘trickle down’ to those beyond the development ladder.
Thus while the Green demand is a step in the right direction – certainly Western levels of consumption must be reduced in order to halt global environmental collapse and allow the masses to come out of poverty – this move would be disastrous for the hungry populations of the world within the limitations imposed by capitalism. Despite the locally based poverty reduction efforts of trans-governmental agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, genuine resolution of poverty can only result within the capitalist ‘development ladder’. That is, for the world’s poorest citizens to bring their standard of living out of extreme poverty, the wealthiest would have had to experience equally large, or larger, economic growth. Reductions in poverty, without wide-ranging economic change, would not result in reductions in inequality. Rather, inequality is widely acknowledged as a necessary element of the efficient operation of capitalism. Inequality may be reduced – such as through locally orientated poverty reduction efforts – but it will remain in substantial form. The logical result of this inequality is that in order to reduce the suffering of the worlds poorest the global economy has to growth substantially. Neither Sachs, nor any other apologist for capitalism is calling for a reduction in inequality – the ‘ladder’ metaphor remains dominant – bringing people out of poverty requires a mass ‘rising of the tide’, to suggest an unfortunate alternative metaphor.
For this reason, demands from Green discourse and in particular the ‘Affluenza’ movement (see Galbraith, 1958; Hamilton, 2003) to reduce levels of consumption – such as ‘buy nothing day’ – are ill-conceived. What these demands ignore is that reductions in western consumption will necessarily lead to decreases in economic growth. Within the capitalist matrix, these reductions can only lead to further punishment for the poor. The ultimate consequence of a reduction of western demand for consumer items is the reduction in the production of these items in the Third World, a decrease which results in unemployment and further suffering for the hungry masses.
Here lies the fundamental material contradiction of capitalism and Sachs’ approach. The environmental capacity of the Earth simply cannot support the scale of development required to induce a substantial reduction in poverty, even with a significant increase in technological efficiency. Indeed, even without any efforts to reduce poverty, economic growth in the global West is unsustainable[iv]. The latest WWF report suggests in 2005 the global ecological footprint (the biological capacity required for the material reproduction of society) was 30% higher than supply. The United States footprint-per-capita was four times that of that global supply. Likewise, ‘clean, green’ New Zealand’s footprint was approximately three times that currently sustainable, suggesting that if all the citizens of the world lived like New Zealanders – a nation apparently in immediate need of economic growth – another three planets would be required (WWF, 2008: 14-15). Clearly these ecological footprints cannot be sustainable, nor allowed to expand. Increasingly open battles for resources are being witnessed on a global scale and ultimately, in the competition for scarce resources, it is the rich and powerful who will win.
This operation is compounded by the second ‘sustainability’ factor preventing the emancipation of the world’s hungry; the exponential growth of the world’s population. A recent United Nations Population report (2007) predicts the world’s population will increase 37% to 9.2 Billion by 2050, 85% of which growth will reside in regions currently classified as ‘less developed’. These population pressures bring back the ghost of Thomas Malthus, once banished by the hope of technology. Malthus’ argued that population pressures on resources were the primary cause of hunger; with various ‘positive checks’ alleviating the pressure (Ross, 1998). Writing in 1798, his motive here was political; the defence of private property in the face of the French revolution (ibid: 8). Malthus considered there to be no point in social welfare, as the increased demand for food would only increase the misery of the poor. Indeed, Ross (ibid: 22) quotes Malthus as stating;
‘ a man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on who he has just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is[v]‘.
Malthus considered poverty to be a natural occurrence, created because population growth was higher than food production; gains in productivity would be eroded by population growth (Sachs, 2008:78). What Malthus did not consider, however, was increases in technological efficiency which produced more food per head of population, and restrictions on population growth primarily through contraception. For many, this debate was decided by the progress made by the Green Revolution in the 1970s. For this reason, Sachs, whilst acknowledging the return of Malthus’ presence, ultimately reject his work because of these inadequacies. Yet, as the possibility of the total exploitation of global resources becomes a possibility and yet global population rates continue to increase, now is not a time to forget Malthus’ warning, although we may do well to reject his conservative politics. Indeed, these politics – once dismissed by the light of modernism – may also return in the case of quasi-apocalyptic collapse.
It is this contradiction between the economic growth required to alleviate poverty and the demands of the planet which is disavowed in mainstream environmental discourse[vi]. Sachs believes he can do so, but only on the basis of his fetishes, technology – which has just been examined – and global cooperation, otherwise known as ‘political will’. It is to this point that we shall now turn.
Global Cooperation as Political Will
The lack of ‘political will’ Sachs laments is a symptom of the impossibility of achieving a globally sustainable world without a radical systematic change. Sachs envisages a world in which global cooperation is dominant, rather than the vested interests of nation states. The reformation of sovereignty includes a renewing of the relationship between private business, civil society and elected governments. Crucially, Sachs believes governments – often through international agreements – can make sustainability more profitable (Sachs, 2008: 51-52).
What he has been unable to acknowledge is that new forms of global cooperation have been emerging; the nation state is not the sole source of governance or authority. The changing nature of capitalist sovereignty is reflected in the movement from a disciplinary society to a society of control, where power is directly bio-power, internalised into the body as the whole of social life comes to be administered in what is known as the ‘panoptican affect’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000; 23-24). Instead of a single entity controlling power, sovereignty is rather constructed via the processes of capitalism. Whilst we can acknowledge an influential structure of governing organisations, including the United Nations, the Bretton Woods financial instruments, regional trade organisations and agreements and the easily forgotten nation-state itself (as well as more local forms of sovereignty within the state), the dominant form of sovereignty is what Hardt Negri label ‘ether’ (2000; 346); the reproduction of shared social life (in the name of profit) by immaterial labour through cooperation and communication.
Governmental organisations certainly exist, but their role is one of control, not guarantee; they provide the administrative support for the deployment of the institutions of the biopolitical society that is Empire. Governments have become little more than instruments for the measurement of the flows of commodities and population they are charged with administrating in the name of capital (HN, 2000; 31). Beyond the representatives of government, the institutions of our bio-political society include the vast array of monitoring devices evident in our societies, from the ubiquitous surveillance cameras, online ‘research’ and the more Orwellian ‘anti-terrorism’ acts passed in the post 9/11 world. More pertinently for HN, the biopolitics of Empire are produced and reproduced by the immaterial labour which dominates postmodern capitalism. These industries, characterised by communication and cooperation implicitly reproduce the sovereignty of Empire through the production, and control of knowledge and ideas. The imposition of this power goes by unnoticed, serving as it does at our pleasure, but for their profit.
Sachs considers none of these developments; neither does he come to question why new forms of sovereignty and global cooperation have not developed in the name of sustainability. He has not done so because his work features no conception of capitalism or the notion of political economy. Capitalism is simply conceived as economies; any non-capitalist form is considered a distortion of the Truth of capitalism. Socialist economics is like non-contact wrestling; it simply misses the point[C2] . If Sachs did stop to critically consider the structure of capitalism, he might be able to see that poverty has been a constitute feature of global capitalism, rather than a contingent aberration caused by the faulty application of market forces. If we consider a Marxist approach – an approach not available to Sachs who misreads Marxism[vii] to the extent that ‘reading’ appears far-fetched[viii] – we can productivity consider that the hungry of the world are not just a step away from the development ladder, but rather constitutive of the ladder itself; a surplus population, the poorest of the poor are those who maintain what apologists label the global ‘development ladder’ by anchoring the wage labour system.
Against Sachs reliance on development ladder, the primary cause of global hunger can be best explained in terms of the Marxist conception of class exploitation – that is, the initial structure of the wage labour system. For Marx, exploitation occurs because of the structural relationship between capital and labour, embodied in the wage-labour system. This structure can only operate under the conditions of an excessive over-supply of workers. That is, capitalism operates as a system of private property where the vast majority are not able to own any. Those without property – without the means to materially reproduce their own conditions of living – are forced to sell their labour power (Wood, 2004: 246). As Eagleton (2003:42) reminds us, the pre-Marxist conception of the proletariat was those who were too poor to own property, so served the state by way of producing children to add to the labour force. The proletariat are ‘those who have nothing to give but their bodies’. Indeed, the worker generally benefits more from employment that the capitalist. The only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited (Robinson in Munck, 2000: 142).Where the worker risks starvation, and ultimately death, without income the capitalist is set to lose only a small amount of profit and can easily replace the worker (Wood, 2004: 135-136).
It is worth considering, however, the current capitalist dynamic that is creating a ‘third-world’ underclass within developed western countries, particularly nations that have installed neo-liberal economic policies[ix]. Such a dynamic has been explored in detail in developing countries. Here the economies of Brazil, China and India are developing rapidly, but this development is subject to substantial income inequality (Guanghua, 2008; Heshmatic, 2007). While this inequality was already stark, particularly in Brazil and India, differences are becoming more noticeable, such that there can be described the development of a ‘China A’ that is the subject of capitalist reforms, and China B, which is largely suffering for those reforms.
Such an analysis has generally been approached with western disdain, predominately framed in terms of ‘human-rights’ violations or a failure of welfare systems or development assistance. However, the same trend of increasing inequality can also be observed in many of the wealthiest nations. The United States is the strongest such example. Here poverty, particularly if measured in terms of health and education standards rather than consumed calories, is reaching Third World levels. The United States is currently ranked 34th in terms of infant mortality and a 30-year life expectancy gap exists between the richest and poorest states (Burd-Sharps, Lewis, & Borges Martins, 2008). In these nations the underclass, as an excess of workers, is strictly not required because of minimum wage laws and the exportation of the manufacturing industries to lower wage economies. Nonetheless, it worth noting that capitalism requires a surplus of labour, whether in fully ‘developed’ economies or those on the lower rungs of the ladder.
What is most notable, however, has been the displacement of surplus labour. Globally the working class has been subject to a large geographical shift whereby 80% of what could be regarded as the Marxian Proletariat now exists outside of Western nations (Davis, 2006: 13). As a corollary, Western multi-nationals have moved their production operations to countries whose labour force had previously been regarded as outside of the capitalist economy, relocating in search of reduced costs, lower wages and more relaxed labour laws. This move has produced an ideological split within capitalism. Much has been made of the move to a different stage of capitalism, from and industrial to a post-industrial society, characterised by branding, consumerism and finance capital. Conversely, the working class has not disappeared; it has been displaced outside of the Western gaze.
From this analysis we can then see that inequality is not an innocent consequence of the capitalist empire, but in a large degree an active creation of that empire. This can be identified as in the ongoing process of ‘primitive accumulation’ that continues to (re)establish the wage-labour system. Primitive accumulation is Marx’s answer as to the existance of the wage labour system; why workers come to have nothing to trade but their labour power (Perelman, 2003: 121).
Three stages of primitive accumulation in the name of capitalist subsumption can be identified. The first stage, colonisation, emerged with the beginning of capitalism[x]. Here the empires of the Old World were able to stretch their margins, inheriting not only land and labour, but new markets and trade routes. The colonisation dynamic operated across the empire and within the colonised nation; indigenous populations being deposed on their lands – by means fair and foul – and subjugated into a mere labour force. In many cases this involved active segregation, denial of property and a lack of access into urban areas. Such dynamics, admittedly more complicated than are constructed here, produced widespread inequality and suffering that would be more ‘successfully’ exploited in the second expansion of capitalism.[xi]
This second expansion occurred via the ‘soft’ colonisation of the Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and the World Bank. Although established soon after the Second World War, these institutions only turned their interest to the Third World in the mid-late 1970s[xii]. During this time World Bank ‘urban lending’ increased from US$10 million in 1972 to US$2 billion in 1988 (Davis, 2006: 70). The results of these Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) have been mixed in the extreme. Some regions have experienced remarkable economic growth, growth which has brought millions out of poverty. At the same time, however, even within these high-growth nations, inequality and suffering has become more extreme. India, for example, one of the shinning lights of the SAPs, achieved 6% growth throughout the 1990s, yet the poor are experiencing arguably the worst conditions since independence, with 56 million new paupers of the streets (ibid: 171).
Equally SAPs have failed the poor in entire nations, or even the entire continent of Africa. The central focus of the structural adjustments is the application of neo-liberal economic principles throughout the world, following the doctrine that what brings wealth in one economy will logically do so in another. As a result of the application of these principles, the poorest nations – in order to receive development loans – were forced to open up their economies to the free-market and drastically reduce the government spending that the poor so relied on. Equally, trade markets were opened up, forcing once heavily subsidised economies to compete on the open market, both domestically and internationally. As a result many structurally adjusted nations experienced mass unemployment, followed by re-employment as the labour force for Western multinationals, often at a much reduced rate. Equally, agriculture was restructured into more ‘cost-effective’ units, forcing many excess rural workers into urban areas in search for work. Perhaps the most damaging effect of the SAPs, however, was the debt inherited by future generations, a debt which led, for example, Ghana to decrease its health and education budgets by 80% from 1975 to 1983 (Davis, 2006: 141-142).
The third stage of the exportation of capitalism is a natural extension of the second; the reign of the multi-national company. These companies have spread like a virus throughout the world, exploiting what they can and dumping the rest on the back of the previously reported SAPs. Much of this dynamic is standard capitalism; the exploitation of the poor, class struggle and the expansion of markets. This expansion often occurs with the aid of SAPs which have created the crisis into which capital is quick to step into and profit from. Recently, however, Naomi Klein (2007) has indicated the emergence of a trend towards the active implication of capital in the production of disasters. Where capital once profited from naturally occurring disasters, these disasters are now actively pursued as profit opportunities. The quintessential example here is the Iraq war. Here contractors, consultants and lobbyists enthusiastically promoted the war, which resulted in unprecedented private security and reconstruction contracts being offered (without competitive tender) to American companies.
In effect, the second generation of the exportation of capitalism – colonisation having already brought a massively vulnerable population into the global economy – operated as a living museum for Victorian-era capitalism. Sweatshops and child labour and the excluded masses did not disappear, they were transferred to the Third World. Unfortunately, however, no further exportation of the capitalist workforce is possible – the proletariat or perhaps the lumpenproletariat, buck stops in these urban slums. Capitalism requires both a subjugated workforce and an excluded reserve army of labour in order to function and there is nowhere else for them to go, except further away from the Western eye.
Given the previously noted predicted increases in the urban poor, this tragic dynamic becomes even grimmer. The planet is becoming dominated by urban slums, outside of the developed mind. Contrary to Sachs’ contention that it is only when agricultural surpluses are high that urban populations develop (2008:26), these slums are, in the terms of Mike Davis a ‘surplus-humanity’; built not from economic opportunity but rather a lack of it. Perhaps the most edifying image of which is the ‘City of the Dead’, the slum dwellers who have made their home within the tomes of Cairo. This surplus population, what Manual Castells has labelled the ‘fourth world[MU3] ’, has developed with the mass urbanisation of the poor, which has been, unlike previous urbanisations, decoupled from industrialisation. Instead, in a condition in which the CIA reports that a full 1/3 of the world’s workforce was unemployed in the 1990s, a massive informal economy has developed that does not create jobs, but rather subdivides existing opportunities. Such a competitive environment robs the poor of the community bonds that often hold together the poor, creating Darwinesque competition that threatens to devolve into a Hobbessian hell.
The urban poor are the symptomatic pivot point between western capitalism and the global hungry. This analysis, however, does not only apply to urban poor. Increasingly we can see how subsistence farmers previous considered outside of capitalism are being subsumed into the global system both through the increasingly infertility of their farms caused by global warming and neo-liberal restructuring of these farms into ‘cash-crop’ producers. This restructuring, largely part of the SAP noted earlier, occurred in the name of reducing poverty by stepping on the global development ladder has further integrated the rural poor in the global economy. This movement has made these farmers subject to the effects of western agricultural subsidies and has resulted in larger scale farming based on the centralisation of property previously considered to be communal. Most importantly it has turned the farm into the factory[xiii], turning farming into what Jameson (2004: 48) calls ‘mere industrial field-work in agribusiness’
The consequence of the failure of the restructuring of the farming system and resulting rural-urban income disparities has seen an extraordinary increase in migration to urban centres, an occurrence which Žižek labels ‘perhaps the most important geo-political event of our times’ (Žižek, 2008: 424). There is increasingly empirical evidence of this ‘waste’ of humanity, particularly in the build-up of urban slums in Third World cities such as Dhaka, Jakarta, Lagos or Rio de Janeiro, as portrayed in Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s masterpiece, City of God (Cidade de Deus). Mike Davis has suggested that in 2004, for the first time, the urban population of the world will outnumber the rural, creating a huge urban proletariat (Davis, 2004). David Harvey has also noted the increasing urbanisation of capitalism and the processes of dispossession and enclosure (Harvey, 1985a, 1985b).
For the capitalist wage-labour system to operate, an excess of workers must exist, such that the threat of losing one’s job remains; without the existence of a minimum wage, wages prices are driven down by the excess of willing workers. It is these excess workers – the hungry – at the sharp end of capitalism who are the true motor of capitalism. It is this surplus labour that Sachs simply cannot acknowledge. Given that Sachs considers capitalism to be the true form of economics, an acknowledgement of poverty as necessary contradicts the impetus of his entire project. Therefore, because of this analysis of the horrors of surplus labour and the contradictions of Sachs’ approach to sustainability, we must strongly reject his analysis. As well meaning as it is, it holds no hope for the future of humanity.
If only Sachs were right, then we could finally end this miserable pursuit of thinking and start doing. He embodies the deep tragedy of our time. Sachs is able to identify a massively disturbing problematic facing humanity, one that simultaneously questions our status as ‘good’ animals and the very prospect of the continuation of life on Earth. Conversely, the epistemological confines of Sachs analytic-scientific approach, along with the historical grip of capitalism, mean that his response to the problematic is simply inadequate. What holds these two points together – the horror of the material breakdown of global society and the inane nature of Sachs’ solutions – is his fetish for technology and a (pragmatic) revolution in global governance and cooperation.
Politics beyond Politicians
What Sachs’ conceptual fetishes foreclose is the element of politics. He brings together economy in terms of his first three goals and politics in the last, but is constitutively unable to bring the two together into a critical conception of political economy. For Sachs everything must change except the horizon under which these problems have been generated, primarily because Sachs is unable to conceive of the existence of any horizon, an act which would require an acknowledgement of history.
Against Sachs, this thesis argues that today what is required is a return to politics and theory, a return to history and a fundamental questioning of the horizon of global capitalism. This call does not arise abstractly, but rather from situation in which we find ourselves. We do not require theory simply for the sake of theory[xiv], but because our current conception of the material contradictions facing humanity are inadequate. We simply have no way of responding within the current horizon.
Yet, Sachs’ work should not simply be dismissed. Certainly his use of science to exemplify the problems facing humanity in the 21st century is first-class. This thesis has begun with his work not because it embodies the worst of the apologists for capitalism, but the best. The ends to which his works moves are noble in the strongest sense of the term. If there is to be any sense of justice, of humans as ‘good’ animals, we need a globally sustainable society in which the evils of material deprivation are no longer prevalent. This may not be a utopian society, but it does require a utopian demand for change.
It is this that Sachs is unable to conceive. Yes, we might agree with several of his solutions. Global mechanisms of co-operation are certainly to be encouraged – although we need to consider the manner in which capitalism is generating new forms of sovereignty and governance quite divorced from the material problematic that concerns Sachs – as is the development of infrastructure and educational capabilities in the poorer regions of the world. Undoubtedly, for the global economy to operate sustainably within the limitations of the planet, new forms of technology are required if large portions of humanity are going to rise out of the most extreme poverty. We should not stop recycling because it is not the ultimate cure, although we would do well to understand the ideological side effects of this behaviour[xv]. Moreover, reductions in population growth are perhaps the most straight forward solution to this problematic.
Nonetheless, as I have outlined throughout this section, Sachs’ approach is fatally flawed. The solutions he proposes have not occurred because they are simply impossible within the limitations of capitalism. Ultimately, what Sachs forecloses is the element of politics in any sense of the economy. Sachs, like so many American theorists, is of the pragmatic variety. As Eagleton suggests, however, today it is ‘hard nosed pragmatists who are the dewy-eyed dreams, not the wild-haired leftists. They are really just sentimentalists of the status quo’ (Eagleton, 2003: 180).
In this thesis, I intend to bring back the proper dimension of political economy, not in the sense of any alternative empirical proposal. There will be no more statistics in this text. Rather, as a return to the political I will seek to return to theory and the struggle of history. What we need now is not a rush to activity, frantically attempting to save the hand that holds us down, but rather a fundamental reconsideration of our horizon and the opportunities for radical action within it. In this thesis I seek to identify a new way of thinking about these problems through a turn to theory. This diagnosis, in turn, will generate the possibilities of different responses quite opposed to those suggested by Sachs. It is, in a sense, the return the repressed; the return of political economy.
The Return of History
Today, what is required is a restoration of the dimension of history. It is to de-naturalise capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. The reign of capitalism has created a circumstance in which the majority of the world are materially deprived, yet the planet itself is being put under increasing pressure because of global over-consumption. Despite the increasingly apparent material contractions of global capitalism, as well as the breakdown of scarcity through the digitalisation of intellectual private property and the destabilising of existing forms of political authority – the political Left remains impotent. At best it offers a softening of the injustices of capitalism. If ‘What is to be done?’ was the proto-typical Leftist question, at least for those able to bear the presence of Lenin, today those who cannot are reduced to asking ‘How can we help?’
The Left appears to have no response to the contradictions of capitalist political economy primarily because it has lost sight of either political economy or the economy in general. As a response to the rejection of Marxism and determinism, the[C4] Left has been split – in terms of academia, politics and ideology – between either a non-political economy in which the reform of administrated devices which are assumed to be neutral – Sachs being the primary embodiment of this position[xvi] – or a withdrawal from economy altogether, characterised by postmodernity. At best this later form remains within the realm of politics as is the case in some of the more critical forms of late modernity. At worse the withdrawal from the economy leads only to cultural studies, a discipline allergic to any sense of critical judgement. Postmodernity may display a sense of ethics, but it is far divorced from the feeble demands of the hungry.
It is as if without Marxism, neither politics nor economy can no longer be held together at the same time; there exists an impossible element whose absent presence prevents a fusion[xvii]. Both late modernism and postmodernity have pushed our critical understanding of epistemology and being, but have lost any attachment to actually existing political conditions. It is difficult to critique something that does not exist. Unfortunately, reality is all too real for those bodies which do not matter. In essence, capitalism has ceased to exist for both the Left and the Right, the latter who are quite happy with this occurrence. At this very least Marxism comes to question what it is we mean by capitalism and political economy, a question that currently appears as meaningless as questioning the meaning of the sky; only the seriously deluded or philosophical would bother to engage in such navel gazing. It is much better to simply get on with doing.
The entire political horizon appears to have lost a sense of history. The Left may have chuckled at Fukuyama’s rather naive announcement that history was over – American neo-conservatives seem to have a knack for these kinds of premature announcements; witness George Bush’s Top Gun themed ‘Mission Accomplished’ event in 2003 – but it has permeated throughout the political spectrum. Yet there is something rather historical about all of this; as Eagleton reminds us; ‘to declared the death of history is itself an historical act with material consequences, and is thus as self-refuting as announcing one’s own demise’ (2009: 276).
What is required then is a return to history and political economy. The most apparent alternative form of political economy throughout history has been Marxism. Indeed, almost every form of Leftist politics is a response to the Marxist problematic, even though the distance is becoming increasingly apparent. Moreover, the economic rebuttal of Sachs thus far presented here is of a wholly Marxist persuasion. Marxism, however, no longer functions as an effective alternative force against the hegemony of capitalism, either in terms of economic critique or especially political formations, despite its apparently ubiquitous influence. The wilting of the Marxist influence has left capitalism as the only viable form of political economy. Through the critique of the essentialist leanings of traditional Marxism, the Left has withdrawn from the economic altogether, as if the only way one could conceive of economic analysis was through an essentialist lens. Moreover, without the political essentialism that characterised the Marxism project, the idea of Left emancipatory politics has become redundant. Nonetheless, as Munck (2000:142) suggests, ‘even though traditional communism has failed, the conditions that gave rise to it still exist and its task in seeking a more just and equitable world is only just beginning’.
This thesis is ultimately a response to the material problematic attributed to Sachs at the beginning of this introductory chapter. Whilst other projects, such as Sharpe’s, are directed as considering Žižek’s work as a theoretical problem – in Sharpe’s case, as a response to the problematic of Western Marxism and critical theory[xviii] – this thesis remains anchored by material concerns. Nonetheless, it is a theoretical thesis; the material deprivations and contradictions currently facing humanity are evidence of a theoretical failure but more importantly, what is required today in our epistemological deadlock is a return to theory. Marxism provides the theoretical base, but in facing up to the theoretical and political failures that have led to its conspicuous absence from the global scene, Marxism has lost much of the efficacy than had allowed it to be such a powerful beacon of hope again the capitalist empire.
This loss has come through a turn to culture, rather than economy, as an explanatory force. Ultimately it led to the primacy of the signifier and the postmodern turn. This turn – which started out as an innocent attempt to rethink Marxism and ended up with the politics of Warhol – meant that both the essentialism of the Marxist class narrative, along with its offer of emancipation were no longer viable. Lessons were learned, but the focus on particularly is embarrassingly inappropriate in an era of ‘Star Wars’, mass famine and Rodeo drive. Dadaism has little say about the hungry, except as a perverse object of art.
What has been required is a restoration of the critical and emanicipatory edge of Marxist theory, along with the rethinking of the notion of universality. Of the post-Marxist era, it has been psychoanalysis which has most powerfully come to the party and Žižek the most productive of these theorists. As has been noted, however, adopting Žižek’s work against global capitalism and the discourse of the Millennium Goals is not a straightforward decision. Žižek embodies many of the difficulties associated with both Marxism and postmodernity. More salient, however, is his avoidance of the positivism associated with the likes of Sachs and his refusal to implicitly accept the horizon provided by capitalism and liberal democracy. Instead, at a time in which humanity is plagued by horrific problems to which capitalism has no response, Žižek’s work provides the most appropriate means to respond to Sachs’ problematic
The question of this thesis therefore, can be represented as ‘After the turn to language, in what way can Marxist theory response to the material deprivations and contradictions which are symptomatic of global capitalism?’ In attempting to respond to this question, we shall primarily consider the work of Žižek as a post-Marxist, discussing the role of psychoanalysis in the political through an understanding of Lacanian ethics and its translation in political practice. As such, psychoanalysis shall be analysed as a form of politics, giving consideration to the possibilities of Leftist political practice in the 21st century.
This task begins with a reconsideration of the losses and gains in Marxism after the signifier. Chapter One argues that the move which began with a consideration of culture as a supplement to the determinism of Marx’s conception of the economy has ended with a brand of postmodernity which has lost its critical and emancipatory drive. The critique of essentialism and the universality of the grand narrative has been necessary, but has robbed Marxism of its ability to respond to the problematic staged by Sachs. Conversely, towards the end of the 20th century, new thinking emerged around the prospect of an anti-foundationalist politics which was not reduced to the particular. This form of political practice has become embodied by the psychoanalytic Marxism of Slavoj Žižek. Against the administrative rationality of Sachs and the cultural particularism of postmodernity, Žižek stands as a symptomatic point. His restoration of the Marxism horizon allows for a disturbing and productive critique of capitalism, yet Žižek is both unable and unwilling to propose an alternative vision for shared social life. This difficulty embodies the contradictions of psychoanalysis as a political practice, particularly in terms of its relationship with Marxist theory and practice.
In Chapter Two, we shall consider how these contradictions have emerged through a discussion of the foundations of Lacanian psychoanalysis; the dialectics of lack and excess in terms of the Real and jouissance. The purpose of this Chapter is to consider the manner in which Lacanian psychoanalysis has produced a response to the turn to language and the challenge of postmodernity. It ends with a discussion of the confluence between psychoanalysis and Marxism in the homology Lacan identified between surplus-jouissance and surplus-value. Such a homology reveals the how Lacanian theory constructs the inadequacies of the traditional Marxist approach to politics.
Following the overt rejection of Marxist essentialism, in Chapter Three we commence an exploration into the psychoanalytic approach to the politics. This exploration begins with a critique of psychoanalysis and ethics, from Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents through the changes in Lacan’s conception of an ethical approach. Through this journey, which includes a discussion of Alenka Zupančič’s re-reading of the Kantian categorical imperative, we come to suggest that psychoanalytic ethics falls prey to many of the dilemmas of the practice of postmodern politics, offering little hope for the hungry and in apparent contradiction with the positivist vision of Marxist communism.
Like Marxism, however, psychoanalysis cannot simply be dismissed. In Chapter Four we shall further examine the possibilities of psychoanalytic practice through a discussion of the relationship between (psychoanalytic) ethics and politics. This Chapter moves through the work of Laclau and Stavrakakis on radical democracy, rejecting their work on the basis that it is not only a mis-reading of Lacanian theory, but also over-privileges the democracy and ethics. Ultimately psychoanalytic politics in this form does not provide a cogent response to Sachs’ problematic because it does not produce a theory of capitalism. Instead we posit that capitalism operates as a form of meta-hegemony, determining in advance the political battles again which Laclau’s notion of hegemony is set. Because of this dominance, any possible political activity within the horizon of capitalism can only reproduce that horizon. Instead, to respond to Sachs’ problematic, what is required is a fundamental rethinking and disruption of this horizon. Politics does not become about competing vision, but on undermining the underlying vision through the eruption of its own internal contradictions. In order to do so we turn to Zizek
The critique of radical democracy in Chapter Four is framed from a Zizekian perspective. Chapter Four considers the manner in which Žižek has approach politics, in particular his work on Marxism. In Chapter Five we shall consider the various political positions that have emerged through Žižek’s work not as a chronological development, but rather as a number of strategic positions, each with the potential to destabilising existing ideological formations. Critically considering each of these strategies – including the Act, identification with the symptom, traversal of the fantasy, subtractive politics and the practice of concrete universality – in terms of a response to Sachs problematic, it is the practice of concrete universality which proves the most fertile. This strategy – as part of Žižek’s re-reading of universality – is best able to identify and mobilise the disavowed foundations around which global capitalism is founded. Most notably, it is able to restore the dimension of political and class struggle.
The practice of concrete universality, however, remains a negative position, one that is limited to critique. Chapter Six considers whether such a critique provides a more productive response to the dilemmas of the hungry than that proposed by Sachs. In doing so, it questions whether Žižek’s work is limited to this position or allows both the affection identification necessary in the productive and act of radical change, as well as its constitution after the fall. This discussion is framed in terms of the possibilities of formulating a Utopian demand. Although the positivist-fantasmatic sense of utopia is immediately rejected, this Chapter consider utopia to be at the heart of both Lacanian and Marxist practice. Through a discussion of Jameson’s Marxism and work of utopianism, Žižek’s notion of the communist hypothesis, combined with the practice of concrete universality in class struggle appears the most productive in the face of the dominance of capitalism. Most importantly it appears to be a feasible and industrious response to Sachs’ problematic.
The question remains, however, whether the Communist Hypothesis can remain confluent with the ethics of psychoanalysis. If the ontological horizon posited by the latter is acknowledge, then this hypothesis – at least in the manner in which it is articulated by Badiou – potentially evokes the theoretical pitfalls that caused the failure and rethinking of Marxism. Chapter Six, therefore, engages in a discussion of the future of psychoanalytic politics after capitalism.
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[i] Unsurprisingly, little progress has been made towards these goals REFERENCE
[ii] Sachs is not alone in using the ‘I-PAT’ equation as a device to consider the multiple factors determining environmental degradation.
[iii] Both global poverty and environmental concern have only become strongly identifiable causes after the second World War, the latter becoming marginally hegemonic in the last decades of the Twentieth Century.
[iv] Even considering the current global recession
[v] We can note that Malthus work – and much of that of his time – does not fit under the wager that constitutes this thesis; that we should be concerned with the plight of the hungry.
[vi] It has been acknowledged elsewhere, but often without a radical critique of capitalism (INVESTIGATE FURTHER)
[vii] To quote Sachs; ‘Note that the focus on technological improvements is starkly different from the failed Marxist notion that the rich are rich because they successfully exploit the poor. If the rich get rich only because the poor get exploited, then world income would be roughly constant, and all of the economic action would be about the distribution of a given level of economic output. That, indeed, is what Marx had in mind” (2008:206).
[viii] Indeed, Sachs appears entirely reluctant to evoke Marx’s name. He describes Charles Dickens and Friedrich Engels as having best represented the harshness of the first century of industrialisation (Sachs, 2008: 4).
[ix] Neo-liberalism has often become the target of otherwise anti-capitalist critique. Certainly, other, more socially democratic forms of capitalism may domestically mediate more effectively against some of the more damaging elements of capitalism. In terms of global issues, however, such as the hungry or climate change, there is little difference between modalities of capitalism.
[x] The beginning of capitalism is a disputable construct, as Michael Perelman (2003) suggests. REFERENCE. For those who conceive of capitalism as a natural expression of human instinct, evidence of capitalism can be witnessed in the animal kingdom. Others conceive of forms of slavery and feudalism as a precursor to capitalism. For Marx, however, capitalism proper began with the process of primitive accumulation that occurred with imperial colonisation
[xi] This early stage of primitive accumulation is an excellent supplement to Jared Diamond’s explanation of global inequality. Diamond, particularly in his text Guns, Germs and Steel (REFERENCE) asserts that geographical inequality can be largely attributed to the global distribution of resources. What Diamond excludes is history itself, particularly in the form of class struggle. His is a pre-history with historical actors.
[xii] At the same time the ‘Green Revolution’ brought technological advances to the third world. Whilst this was ideologically conceived as a means of creating more food, the ultimate result was the creation of a global food system, situating food as a global commodity and securing a food supply for the United States (Ross, 1998:139).
[xiii] Hardt and Negri (2000:281) note this move. They consider that in the modernisation of the global economy, not only did agriculture decline quantatively, but agriculture itself was industrialised. They consider the same effect in the ‘postmodernisation-informatisation of the economy; agriculture itself has become more reliant upon information and technology
[xiv] Although, as Ernesto Laclau argues, a fundamental questioning of the foundations of society is the site of political freedom. Certainly theory has a value in and of itself, but that is not the specific scope of this project
[xv] We might, for example, conceive recycling as the ultimate capitalist fantasty, an attempt to reintegrate its own remainder
[xvi] Despite the current critique of Sachs as the final apologist for capitalism, he still remains at the forefront of (centre) left discourse.
[xvii] As we shall see latter, Zizek labels this impossibility ‘class struggle’
[xviii] This thesis considers Žižek much more as a Marxist theorist than a critical theorist. Sharpe includes Žižek in the latter category because of his work on the analysis of culture. Sharpe classifies Žižek as having inherited the Frankfurt school tradition, specifically the analysis of capitalism as a cultural form in response to the failure of Marxist political practice. Although, having taken onboard the lessons of the turn to language, we must be very suspicious of economic essentialism, this should not persuade us to ignore economy and class struggle, or see it as just another element of culure. Thus whilst cultural analysis is a valuable part of Žižek’s work – most prominently in his ideological critique and work on political enjoyment – this is specifically not the manner in which I shall be using his work.
[C1]reference
[C2]Better metaphor?
[MU3]Find reference
[C4]Make reference to the existence of an irrelevant, radical, political economy
