The geology of the ruling class?

Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg made a good and important point in their essay ‘The geology of mankind?’: the exploitation and consumption of material resources of the Earth is highly uneven across social classes and nations. As they say, ‘intra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the current ecological crisis’; ‘uneven distribution is a condition for the very existence of modern, fossil-fuel technology’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014), so that the species-being reference of the term Anthropocene should be considered inadequate. I agree with the point regarding inequality; it was an extremely important contribution to the Anthropocene debate. However, I would like to respectfully discuss the implied notion of control that is embedded in their reasoning.

Malm and Hornborg argue that the new energy system that initiated the sociogenic emissions of global warming ‘could only be installed by the owners of the means of production’; ‘capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation stone for the fossil economy’ and ‘the privilege of instigating new rounds [of energy technologies] appears to have stayed with the class ruling commodity production’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014) (emphases added). ¹ It appears that the disturbance of the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth was a subjective choice of the bourgeoisie. In this respect, Malm and Hornborg remain attached to the perspective of conscious control (nöosphere) proposed by Paul Crutzen (2002).

However, on closer inspection, this is not the case. When the owners of the means of production started using coal-powered steam instead of water energy during the Industrial Revolution, they simply wanted to increase their profits through the exploitation of cheap labor in cities, which was much more difficult in the faraway and depopulated vicinity of waterfalls. It was a ‘blind’ process elusive of the economic ‘invisible hand’: as new mills of the expanding textile industry should get installed farther and farther from urban centers, where labor power was scarcer and therefore more expensive, alternative technology became economically more advantageous: coal-powered steam was mobile, not tied to the proximity of waterfalls, and therefore allowed the exploitation of cheaper labor in cities (Malm, 2013). In the same way, the synthesis of fertilizers through the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen (the Haber-Bosch process) had no intention to disturb the nitrogen cycle or to cause the eutrophication of natural water bodies, but was rather the outcome of a blind dynamics of proletarianization and cheap food, because cheap food is a prerequisite for cheap labor and therefore capital accumulation (Moore, 2010). The same is true for ocean acidification, aerosol loading in the atmosphere, and so on: controlling (or even disturbing) the global material cycles of the Earth was never an intention of the ruling class.

What emerges here is the notion that the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ is controlled neither by humanity (antropo) nor by a part of humanity (the ruling class), but is much more a situation increasingly out of control and a product of unconsciousness and objectification. ‘They do not know it, but they do it’, that is what Marx said about social relations mediated by commodities (Marx, nd). The most fundamental concept for a critical understanding of the Anthropocene is not inequality – after all, inequality is not in itself incompatible with ‘stewardship’ – but rather fetishism (Cunha, 2015). Fetishism, as conceptualized by Karl Marx, is the social process in which social relations are objectified and inverted: ‘the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite’ (Marx, 1990: 175), because ‘the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself’ (Marx, 1990: 253). The accumulation of capital through the exploitation of abstract labor for its own sake constitutes the ‘automatic subject’, ‘self-valorizing value’ (Marx, 1990: 255). The bourgeoisie, though favored in distribution of resources with the exploitation of labor, does not control the form of this social interchange (Jappe, 2003; Postone, 1993).

Before analyzing Malm and Hornborg’s interpretation of fetishism (a discussion that might admittedly be harsh for non-Marxists), let me explain why this is crucially important for the debate about the Anthropocene. There are two levels in which the Anthropocene narrative should be challenged from a socio-critical perspective. On the one hand, the inequality of distribution of Earth resources and the different periods of history and social forms of organization make the use of the all-equalizing term ‘antropo’ rather questionable; on the other, the irrationality of the whole social process, in which even with all knowledge of the dangerous consequences of sociogenic activities in their current form, very little is changed as this knowledge gets better and deeper and precious time (and cumulative emissions) go on. In fact, there are only signs that the disrupting global change is gaining momentum (Stephen et al., 2015) – recently the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke the 400 ppm mark for the first time since it was first measured, and its growth rate from 2012 to 2014 was the highest ever registered over three consecutive years (NOAA, 2015), in spite of all the alerts that have been made by the scientific community for decades.

The first level was very well addressed by Malm and Hornborg. I think, though, that the second level should be more explored. It addresses the somewhat diffuse feeling of the scientific community that there is something deeply irrational in the (absence of) attitude of governments and societies in general, considering the dangers involved. Some scientists expressed this concern regarding the irrationality of societal reaction to the problem: ‘liberate the science from the economics, finance, and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable’ (Anderson and Bows, 2012); ‘geoengineering is like a heroin addict finding a new way of cheating his children out of money’ (Kintisch, 2010: 57); ‘irrational rejection of well-established science’ (Mann, 2014); ‘we have to stop constantly ignoring the things that are truly harmful to our society’ (Elger and Schwägerl, 2011). The concept of fetishism allows a structural explanation of this irrationality that avoids simply assigning it to subjective ‘(class) domination’ (in a more Marxist tone) or ‘greed’ (in more common-sense language). Contrary to liberal economic thinkers, who invariably depict capitalism as the ultimate rational system – as shown by the expression ‘optimal allocation of resources’, which in the era of the disruption of global material cycles should be seen as clearly misleading – Marx explicitly theorized capitalism as fetishistic or irrational. ²

Malm and Hornborg do refer to the fetishistic character of the social process (though not mentioning it explicitly), quoting Marx: ‘certain social relations appear as the natural properties of things’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014). However, they do so with an interpretation that fetishism is merely a mental illusion or mystification, a ‘false consciousness’ that, once removed, would unveil the ‘real’ relations of exploitation. This becomes clear when they immediately afterwards criticize the mistake of taking the ability to manipulate fire as the trigger of the Anthropocene – a critique of a false historical narrative that does not advance to a critique of the immanent form of social relations itself. Hence, they refer to the ‘vested interests of business-as-usual’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014). But what vested interests? Who does not know what fossil-fuel companies want? Exxonmobil CEO said it bluntly in an interview: ‘my philosophy is to make money’ (CBS News, 2013). This is fetishism: capital accumulation as an end in itself, abstracting from every social or ecological consideration.

The Marxian concept of fetishism, therefore, is not to be reduced to ‘false consciousness’ or ‘vested interests’, though they are part of it. For Marx, ‘to the producers … the social relations between their private labors appear as what they are, i.e. as material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (Marx, 1990: 166); ‘commodity fetishism … is not located in our minds, in the way we (misperceive) reality, but in our social reality itself’ (Žižek, 2010: 190). But in Malm and Hornborg’s interpretation it is, on the contrary, the autonomous movement of capital that is the illusion, behind which the subjective will of a ruling class (‘vested interests’) could be unveiled. In a proper reading of fetishism, it is the subjective will that is reduced to mere appearance in a social process that is quasi-independent of the subjects involved (Kurz, 1993; Postone 1993). ³ The Anthropocene is certainly not the ‘geology of mankind’, as correctly claimed by Malm and Hornborg, but neither is it the ‘geology of the ruling class’. Capitalists execute functions that are beyond their conscious control. ⁴ Rather, it is a ‘domination without subject’ (Kurz, 1993), a ‘geology without geologists’ or a ‘geology of capital’, a blind and uncontrolled process of material exchange analogous to the ‘invisible hand’ regarding the exchange of commodities (Cunha, 2015) – and that makes it a problem much more difficult to overcome than if it were merely a question of subjective power and false consciousness. The fact that now ‘they know very well what they are doing, yet they are doing it’ (Žižek, 1994: 8) confirms that fetishism is not merely a mental illusion. ⁵ As already said, the concept of fetishism is a powerful tool to explain the uncontrollable and irrational character of the social (lack of) reactions to the global environmental (catastrophic) change.

In spite of all that, the ‘Anthropocene’ embeds a promise. It has been suggested that the development and integration of Earth System science, mathematical modeling and telecommunications would allow the constitution of a ‘world subject’, that would solve the climate problem and the general question of stewardship of the Earth System with the deployment of geocybernetics (Schellnhuber, 1999; Schellnhuber and Kropp, 1998). ⁶ But, as formulated by the young Marx, alienated labor tears from humanity its ‘world subject’ or, in his words, ‘species-being’ (Marx, 1992: 322–334). ⁷ The ‘world subject’ cannot emerge in a society permeated by class relations and fetishism and therefore characterized by fragmentation and unconscious social activity. That is why the question of fetishism is more than a scholarly theoretical discussion, but is also of utmost political importance: if we accept Marx’s critique, only the liberation of human activity (from capital accumulation as an end in itself) would then be the realization of the ‘world subject’ or species-becoming and the actuality of the ‘Anthropocene’. ⁸ Of course (and here I agree with Malm and Hornborg again) this would imply an antagonism with the bourgeoisie, because it disposes of the means of production that should be transformed and used differently in order to change the course of the material fluxes of the Earth System. But for this qualitative change, it is necessary to recognize the alienated form of social activity, and not only its more favored agents.