Capitalist Social Formation vs. OUR PLANET!

David Harvey: 00:00

Welcome to the Anti-Capitalist Chronicles. In the second of my presentations on the nature of Capital hosted by politics in Motion, my main topic, this new week, will be the relationship between the mode of production of capital, and the context of its social formation.

00:53

In my first session, I talked very much about how we might approach the analysis of a capitalist mode of production from the standpoint of emancipated laborer. Now I focused in that talk very much upon what I call the mode of production, which is what Marx calls the inner structure of capitalist society. And but he used another term, and I'm going to actually clearly distinguish between the mode of production and the social formation. Now, a very curious thing about reading Marx is he very rarely uses the term capitalism. In fact, I can't find him using it anywhere, but he does talk about capital as a mode of production. And he also, at various points, talks about the social formation, which is, if you like, the contextual conditions within which a mode of production operates. The sort of analogy I use here is that a mode of production is a bit like the engine of of capitalism and it is the driving engine of ca of, of the mode of production, which Marks is primarily concerned to pull apart and, and understand.

02:24

But he recognizes strongly that there is a significance of the social formation, and that the social formation, which exists around the mode of production, is of great significance. And therefore, we need to do an analysis of the relationship between the social formation and the mode of production. Now, again, I'll use an analogy here. Let us suppose that we want to write a book about human health. Well, one of the things we would do is we would talk about the human body and all the internal problems of the human body, much in the way that I talked last time, talking and saying, well, the blood circulates from the heart, the oxygen through the lungs, the energy through the gastro and zoology kind of system, and that, that, that, therefore, you could look at the human body and the he health of the human body from the standpoint of all of those different circulatory processes.

03:21

But everybody knows that that circulate, that that human body exists in a certain environment, and the environmental conditions are terribly important for what happens to the human body. For example, if there is a, a mass unemployment and misery around, and everybody starts taking opioids and people start dying of opioid overdoses and so on we have a contextual condition, which is a social condition, which is terribly important in defining what human health is about. We may also find as exists in certain cases that capital is actually creating cancerous environments. And so there is, in, in Louisiana for example, there's somewhere called cancer Alley, which is where all of the petrochemical industrial activities occur, and the contaminants in the air lead to all kinds of environmental kind of problems. And there's a question of environmental injustices going on in around.

04:23

So, so that if, if we were interested in looking at human morbidity and all the rest of it, we would have to say, well, we have to look at conditions in society in general the pollutants in the atmosphere, the the contamination of food supplies the results of, of tornadoes from human contribution to human to, to, to global warming, things of that kind. So there, there are contextual conditions, and in this way, Marx actually does set up separation between the social formation, which is talking about the contextual conditions within which the mode of production operates. So if there is a crisis in the mode of production, it can either be because there's something internally wrong with the human body or because some violation has occurred in terms of external circumstances that contaminate, say the food supply, that or, or, or few food qualities such that there are suddenly enormous concentrations of stomach cancers and esophagus, campers, cancers, and so on, which can clearly be traced to environmental degradations.

05:44

So what are we primarily talking about here? And within my own analysis what I do is to say, well, there are two major areas of concern. First, the relation to the environment and, and the environment. We might want to distinguish between natural environment, that is the conditions which are prevailing no matter, no matter what human beings have done. And then there's the built environment, which is, and, and which is the physical transformational of the landscape that has been done through human labor. And you look at what capital has done, you fly over the United States and you see all of the agribusiness fields, and, and you fly over and you see the cities, and you see all this kind of thing. And you kinda say, this is not a natural environment in the sense that it was there all the time.

06:38

And that therefore we're dealing with the, the, the creation of, of what mark sometimes called a second nature, which is that environment which is reorganized according to human or what human beings have done to it. And there's a long history of this, of course, because the clearing of the fields and the clearing of the forest, the building of the, of the boulders and Netherlands, and the, the drainage and all the rest of it, this has been going on for, for three, 400 years now. And these massive transformations that have occurred are then created different context in which capital accumulation can occur. And what we find, of course, is that a lot of capital is now put to investment in the built environment a built environment for production, the built environment for consumption consumption, both in terms of active consumption, but also the creation of built environments for contemplation and beauty and all, all, all the rest of it.

07:40

So that there, there is therefore the building of places, the building of, of, of, of spatial relations and, and, and so on. So these are contextual conditions within which a capitalist mode of production operates. And, and the context contextual conditions can at a certain point create difficulties for the capitalist mode of production. For example if we start to find that you know, contextual condition like global warming, which is produced by through capital accumulation and through accumulation of capital over time and increasing massive output and product and all the rest of it. And we end up with global warming. And global warming then creates you know, hurricanes and it creates wildfires and in floods and tornadoes and all the rest of it. And so we see an increasing risk of environmental damage, which is coming out of what, what the capitalist mode of production has created.

08:45

So there's a relationship then between what's going on in the capitalist mode of production, where we, we find that Marx will say, capitalist mode of production is about accumulation for accumulation sake, production for production's sake. That is, it's about the constant increase of mass production. And mass production means mass consumption, and that means more stresses in the environment, so that we're gonna find the degradation of the environment, the, the, the species habitats disappear. We find that there are various tipping points in, in environmental degradation, so that productive soils suddenly become unproductive because they have been mined soil mine through aggressive kind of agricultural practices. So for instance, in the, her history of the cotton industry and the cotton production in the United States, initially when the cotton industry set up, it was with very little in the way of artificial fertilizers and all the rest of it.

09:49

And so the soil was just used again and again until the soil degradation became such that soil erosion and, and, and degradation occurred. And so the cotton industry moved further westwoods. So we actually see historically cotton grow moving westwoods in the United States because of of this sort of degradation of the environment. And then at a certain point, people said, well, you know, we can't continue this way, so therefore we have to re rechange the nature of the, of the agricultural practices, introduce artificial fertilizers and so on. But artificial fertilizers end up polluting waters and creating algae and waters. And so we get, we get a whole set of relationships with through the environment, which are, which are highly, highly significant in terms of both human health and human capacities and powers at the same time as they at a certain point create situations in which once something is exhausted you will find that that exhaustion will lead to a certain crisis of capital.

11:03

For example in this 19th century there was a great deal of concern about agricultural productivity and fertility. And it was understood that maybe one of the major sources that could cont could, could deal with that was the production of guano, guano being the deposits made by birds in caves and so on. So, gu guano from Peru and, and so on suddenly gets spread over the fields all in Europe. But at a certain point, all the guano disappears. So at that point, we start to find artificial fertilizers come in. And so, so, so, so what I'm talking about here is an evolving relationship between what is happening in the capitalist mode of, or what is happening in the capitalist social formation and the capitalist social formation is not simply about what it is that capital makes.

12:02

It's about also, there are naturally occurring things. Now, the degree to which for instance viruses and so on like covid are simply a, a, a a mutation in nature which occurs without any sort of input of human, of human activity. Many people, I think it would doubt that now would say, well, some of the mutations which occur and become significant become significant because human activity has actually put together environmental conditions under which new mutants and new virals configurations are likely to come about because, and, and that's a very good reason why many of the things that have come about in the last few years have come from, from East Asia, from from China in particular. And it has a lot to do with the intensity of environmental transformation that has occurred in China. And it is quite possible that we would say that the, the, the creation of an event like c Ovid 19 is I think not, it just did not occur outside of the sphere of, of a certain amount of human influence in terms of how and when it occurred.

13:27

Now, having said that, I don't want to make it seem like everything that occurs occurs because of something that human beings do, but human beings are active agents in, in, in, in, in the environment. And to the degree they're active agents, they play their role. And that role may be problematic in certain ways, as we clearly see in the case of global, global warming. So the social formation then is one in which we have to look at the conditions under which capital accumulation can work. 'cause Now we're finding capital accumulation has to work in a context where the social form conditions of the social formation, which are largely determined by the expansion of capital accumulation, that these conditions create dangers and difficulties for the continuation of of capital accumulation. So we have all of that where we are not, which is going on.

14:25

And so we've got a, a transformation of the social formation by, by impulses coming from the, from the, the mode of production. But at the same time, the mode of production is, is being hindered or, or aided by certain transformations in the social formation in general in terms of the actual environmental conditions. Now, in the second area of concerns, human populations, that is capital tends to take for granted the fact that there's a labor a labor supply out there. And it takes for granted the fact that that labor supply is, is adequate to the expansion of capital. And that that, that, that one of the first things we notice, and one of the things that Marx makes much of in the granda is that the expansion of of the population is a necessary condition for the increasing supply of labor, which is a necessary condition for the increasing mass of output and increasing accumulation of capital.

15:30

Now that means that you have to look at the whole kind of nature of human populations as a sort of resource upon which capital relies in order to you know, accumulate wealth and power through, through through production. So this, this, in, in exactly the same way that we see, we talk about this in the environment, we find that capital actually affects, of course, social reproduction. If, for example, capital decides that it doesn't want to pay anything in taxes, and therefore it doesn't want to actually educate the by labor force and spend money on healthcare and decent living conditions and so on, if, if capital kind of decides, you know, that it wants to minimize its tax burden and all the rest of it then we find that the conditions of social reproduction are seriously affected.

16:27

And the qualities of labor supply go down and down and down to the point where it becomes almost unusable from the standpoint of capital. And some of that went on during the 19th century in particular, that capital didn't really care about what was the living conditions of the, of the mass of the workers. All they cared about was that they turn up to work the next day, and if they didn't turn up work the next day because they were sick, somebody else would come in and take their place. And if they died early and life and their life expectancy was only 35 years old, capital didn't care as long as there was a huge surplus of labor out there in rural areas that could be sort of proletarian. So the capital is actually feeding off if you like the human resources, but that at a certain point, we also find that capital starts to feed off the knowledge of those those populations.

17:24

Those artisans had skills capital started to use those skills to make things so that when capitalists came up and decided, you know, when certain capitalists came up and decided they were gonna make steam engines, they found some laborers who knew how to, who make those things. So, so at, at this point suddenly capital County says, I, I actually, we need a, a skilled labor force, so therefore they start to put money into education and, and, and education of the workforce and, and education and skills. And so, you know, trade schools and and, and technical schools and all those kinds of things and training facilities and so on start to become very, very significant. So again, the demands from within the mode of production on the human population become significant at the same time as the, what the human population, what's happening with the human population becomes also significant.

18:21

And even in terms of, you know, of their labor qualities, but also in terms of the consumer demands. And here too capital at a certain point has to, if it's gonna have mass production, it has to have mass consumption. It has to induce the working class and workers to actually consume, and it has to pay the workers enough to make sure that they consume the kinds of mass products that exist there. And again there are all sorts of things that go on here in terms of cultures of consumption, cultures of of speed up of turnover time in terms of you know, fashion industry and so on, that you, you change your clothing every year, and you change this all the time. So you get, you get, again, a, a a lot of relations, which go on between the capitalist mode of production, which is the inner structure of what a capitalist society is about and what is going on in the social formation, which is a very, very, very broad kind of set of issues including of course, the whole kind of fact that you know, workers want, want some autonomy in terms of their own lifestyle.

19:29

They have, may want autonomy in terms of their religious beliefs, in terms of their cultural habits and so on. So that we find, again, a very complicated relationship between the social formation and between the mode of production. And in the same way that I wouldn't want to sort of try to speculate on the, the nature of, of human health without recognizing the relationship between what's going on inside of individual bodies and what's going on in the society at large. So I would want to say that at a certain point, it's very vital that we understand closely the relationship between the, so the mode of production, which Marx is, is, is what is primarily concerned with and what is going on in the social formation in terms of both the, the environment, environmental conditions, and also the social and cultural history.

20:21

And the fact that capital has a big impact upon the nature of culture. And that culture has a big impact on capital, and that capital exploits culture and that culture exploits capital. And so there's a, there, there's a much bigger issue here. And, and within the social formation, of course, we find the whole kind of question of the na the different nature of cultural histories and the, the, the long lasting consequences. A lot of that history, I think the whole question of, for example, the, the, the, the effect of slavery on black populations in the Atlantic economy. And all that happened then still is terribly important in terms of exactly how things have worked out in the United States and in North America and in Latin America as well. So that, again, there is a long history to be looked at there.

21:13

So I wanted to make very clear that when I start to talk about the mode of production, I'm isolating the mode of production from the its context in the social formation. But at the end of the day, I need to take into account a lot of what the social formation is about. Marx does this brilliantly on occasion and, and, and has all sorts of insights onto the relation on the relationship between the two. But I wanna make clear that in terms of my own analysis, I'm, I'm really following marks in trying to distinguish between what is a mode of production about and what is a social formation about, and that at the end of the day, we need to put the two together. Again, I use an analogy here, you know, that it's a bit like if, if, if capitalism is like one big ocean liner, one of those big, you know, kind of cruise ships then down in, down in the engine room, there is a, there is a there is a mode of mode of of, of propulsion and which is like the mode of production, the sorts of things that are going on, on the different floors and different classes up above are happening.

22:25

But if the mode of production doesn't work, then we are in real trouble. At the same time, the way the mode of production works has very, very, very clear implications for the way the social formation evolves. And to some degree, it exaggerates some of the, the differentiations that exist within the social formation and uses those differentiations as, as part of mobilizing its actual political power. And that, again, is gonna be some, be something that is gonna be very much part of my consideration.