Intro to Climate and Sustainability

Sustainability and colonialism

Misha Velthuis

m.velthuis@uva.nl

Mon 4 Nov 2024

Last time: what is captitalism?

Why are people in favour of capitalism?

Capitalism: freedom for workers and consumers

Capitalism: elites fight over market share

Capitalism: systemic imperative to increase productivity

Historical materialism

Ecomodernists: the state can change the landscape

If we only internalize the externalities…

Why are people against capitalism?

Because we are rolling towards the abyss

and we won't be able to stop

Capitalism is not just minimizing cost

it's also maximizing exploitation

Violent pursuit of cheap labour and cheap resources

Colonialism

Neocolonialism

In an international playing field, where states depend on capitalists, and capitalists depend on state, the pursuit of capital accumulation dictates international politics.

Added on Mon 4 Nov: Use the violence of the state to strengthen your own bargaining positions, weaken those of your competitor.

Those who play this game in a smart way get to set the terms. Those who fail are taken out.

On the left:

Dutch East India Company (ultimate confluence of state and capital) and the massacre of Banda. Wiki.
2800 people killed to attain monopsony of nutmeg.
Explanation of painging by Wim Manehutu: Japanese mercenaries were hired to do the killing

Jan Pieterszoon Coen is still all around:

On the Beurs van Berlage
De Coentunnel
Statue in Hoorn

Location of Banda:

View Larger Map

Mother of all collective action problems

Individual pursuit:

Capitalist…

… tries to maintain or expand market share, to draw in as much surplus as possible.
… cannot afford to fall behind (otherwise you would lose everything)

Worker …

… tries to get most value out of wage by buying as much good quality products as possible.
… does not want to "fall behind"

Collective outcome:

After some point, extra production/consumption does not add happiness

While the environment is deteriorating

Why these pictures?

Picture 1:

We are stuck in a rat race. A hamster wheel. The system is forcing everyone to keep running. Those who stop running disappear.

Picture 2:

In a way, this is like an arms' race (another classical example of a collective action problem). When your enemy buys more powerful weapons, you need to also buy more powerful weapons, and in the end you are both less safe than before (you end up in the collectively suboptimal Nash equilibrium).

The outcome:

Perpetual growth,
interspersed with crises

Growth

Capitalism makes the cost go down.

Capital (the machine) needs to run at capacity.

Constant need for new demand. New forms of dissatisfaction.

Constant need for new markets.

(And then, apart from that, there is the world of finance).

crises of profitability

Changed a bit on Mon 4 Nov: When there is little prospect for profit, e.g. because ...

… workers organize and manage to increase wages (higher costs)
… mass movement forces governments to enforce strict environmental regulation (higher costs)
… there are no new markets (lack of growing demand)
… people are satisfied with what they have (lack of growing demand)

… capitalists will refuse to turn their capital into productive capital, (they will try to store their value in other things, hoping to retain as much value through the crisis). Breakdown of production, mass unemployment. Crisis. Making the system healthier causes the system to break down.

Collective action problem among capitalists

People with power

have the power

to prevent people

from taking away their power

Where will the necessary

collective action emerge?

Right wing backlash in the face of credible threats of

collective action?

After the reading week

Decolonization

Open session?

The monsters underneath capitalism:

Colonialism,

extractivism

and the modern divide.

Dangers of anti-capitalism

Degrowth

Proposals?

Sources of hope?

The monsters underneath capitalism

Colonialism-Extractivism

Remember: ideas are both product and cause

Remember: certain ideas fit certain interests

Who benefits from the idea that …

… ethical behaviour is self-defeating?

… people are ultimately self-interested *ssholes?

… it does not matter that much if the allocation is just, as long as the allocation happens?

… the only choice we have is full collectivization or full privatization

What ideas justify this?

Hickel and Klein

The modern mindset

What truly acts?

Human

Nature

Man

Woman

Colonizer

Colonized

Sounds familiar?

Providing comfort to those with power

Marxists: this is simply capitalism
rolling down the cost landscape

Extractivism

Francis Bacon

If the modern-day extractive economy has a patron saint, the honor should probably go to Francis Bacon. The English philosopher, scientist, and statesman is credited with convincing Britain’s elites to abandon, once and for all, pagan notions of the earth as a life- giving mother figure to whom we owe respect and reverence (and more than a little fear) and accept the role as her dungeon master. “For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings,” Bacon wrote in De Augmentis Scientiarum in 1623, “and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again.… Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his sole object.” (Not surprisingly, feminist scholars have filled volumes analyzing the ex–Lord Chancellor’s metaphor choices.)

Nauru